Mizblog

I’ve realized that becoming a father has caused real changes in me.

• I’m much more security-conscious
• I’m willing to sacrifice sleep in order to have time to myself
• I’m more worried about death

I’ve been sick for a few days now. Nothing serious, just some congestion. Well, a lot of congestion. In fact, I’m a snot factory. A booger explosion. Keep clear.

I had a nap yesterday afternoon, and while waking up from that sleep I had not so much a dream but a fear. I was afraid of being dead. Writing it down now makes it seem so trivial, but I felt a deep fear of never having access to memories or sensations again. What else is life but memory and sensation?

Oh yes: anticipation, plans, and goals. These seem to be important components of life, or at least of staying alive and being successful as a reproducing organism and/or a member of a society. We have goals relating to whatever our function is, we make plans to achieve those goals, and we try to anticipate the consequences of our actions in order to formulate the steps of our plans. Unless of course we’re stupid, in which case we take steps that aren’t likely to take us to our goals.

There’s a popular saying that insanity is defined as expecting different results from the same repeated action. I have a problem with this, and not just at the superficial level where there are hidden variables or probability waves or whatever that can really cause different results from repeated actions. My problem is that this isn’t what I think of as insanity – it’s more like stupidity. More generally, stupidity is choosing actions that are not likely to bring about the achievement of your goals, whatever those might really be.

Addiction is a sort of hard-wired stupidity. We get locked into a feedback loop with our rewards system. Normally, we assess our progress with our emotions. When we’re doing well, we feel good. When things are going poorly, we become angry, depressed, sad, frustrated, etc. Ideally, these negative feelings should motivate us to make changes and adapt to our new environment. Unfortunately, there are ways to suppress them and bring about positive emotions without making progressive changes. Drugs are a prime example. Use a drug and you feel good. Now the system that normally works to guide you to your goals has been sabotaged, and now your goal is to keep tricking it for as long as possible. Other things can do this as well, and they’re all things associated with addiction. Eating, drinking, sex, gambling, masturbation, etc. All of them are ways of managing feelings, but they all have potential negative consequences. When you get into the negative consequences but you maintain the behaviors anyway, that’s when the addiction becomes apparent.

At the end of last week, I became very depressed. It was awful. I felt useless. Other people seemed to be easily doing harder things than what I was struggling and failing to do for weeks on end. Also, working at a University can really make me feel old and washed up sometimes. So much youth! That part of life has passed me by, never to return. I mourned its loss.

I got a sunburn last Saturday. We drove up to Santa Barbara to visit my aunt and a small handful of assorted cousins. My mother rode up with my wife and daughter, and we had a nice conversation. She’s still disappointed that she didn’t brainwash me properly to accept her religion as the ONLY TRUE religion, but at least she’s happy that I try to be a good person.

We went swimming that afternoon, and apparently my sunscreen washed off enough of my untanned bits (usually shielded by a t-shirt) that I turned lobster color on my shoulders and upper arms. Other than that, it was a satisfying trip. Saranya loved throwing things into the pool. My mom spent hours telling about her family and things she remembered as she was growing up. Having been raised at least 1500 miles away from most of my relatives, it’s kind of odd to realize that I had a great uncle who owned a brothel and a saloon. It also seems apparent that my mother’s mother was forced to marry down in social standing after she was found to be pregnant. Oops.

On the trip back I found out that my brother Matt was diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome, which explains some of the obsessive-compulsive behavior, social awkwardness, and lack of empathy. Brains are funny things.

By Tuesday, however, I was very happy and confident again. There was no good reason for it. I’m still overweight. I’m still struggling with my programming. The housing market is still out of my financial reach despite years of diligent saving and investing. But hell, as long as I don’t think about that stuff I feel fine. I just need distraction or (even better) delusion and I feel great. Isn’t that awful? I think that’s why almost nobody can deal directly with reality. We all have our distractions and fantasies and delusions and optimistic beliefs because just taking reality as it comes makes us feel too awful.

So now I guess it just turned Thursday. My sunburn has been itching all day. It’s been a marginally productive week so far, and on top of that we’ve got a large looming license deal in the works. It probably won’t be big enough for me to retire on, but for sure it will give us a boost to grow the company into something a bit more effective. I might even be able to buy a new home for my growing family. That should distract me for a while.

My daughter is really getting on my nerves.

She woke me up this morning. 3 hours after I went to sleep, I woke up to find her pouring cold water on my ass. I jumped and yelled at her, and she dove onto the pillow and pretended to be asleep.

20 minutes later, when I was trying to get back to sleep, she tried to kill me. Luckily, her head landed on my jaw and not my temple. She had been standing on the bed and let herself fall backward to land flat on her back on the bed. Unfortunately for me, my jaw was where her skull landed. The bleeding from my mouth has stopped now but it’s swollen and throbbing.

I’m again getting over a cold. This is my 7th illness this year! It’s really frustrating and crippling.

Saranya is still a clown. She’s figured out how to turn on the TV and likes to turn the volume up but then she panics and runs away when it gets too loud. Her dancing is getting a little bit more sophisticated. She jumps and waves her hands around now too. I bought new guitar picks but haven’t been playing much. I found my sunglasses in the video camera bag, along with a pen and a wooden spoon. I hope she’s over the habit of taking a big mouthful of milk and letting it run down her front and into the carpet. The whole living room smells like spoiled milk and I think we’re going to have to shampoo the carpet to get rid of it.

I can’t type anymore.

I’m getting over a cold. It seems that every time Saranya brings something home from daycare, it infects and sickens me.

Maybe it’s the illness, but I’m developing a new perspective on things. My apartment is cluttered and tainted by spilled milk, my laundry is (mostly) soiled and worn out, I eat the same kinds of things every day that I ate the previous day. I spend my free time reading, playing games, or hanging out with my family. We occasionally have a freakout and have to leave the apartment to get some change of scenery. One of our ongoing goals is to protect the world from the inconvenience of our child until she’s developed and trained enough to do this for herself.

Saranya is quite a clown. She likes to wear a bucket on her head while she plays. She’s getting interested in books, which she sits and “reads” in the dark. She sometimes walks around with a rubber band hanging out of her mouth and wiggling. She’s figured out how to turn off the TV but not how to turn it on. She can put a video tape into the VCR. She still really likes bouncing. She makes funny babble noises, and talks to me in the same “monster” voice that I use when I play with her. She likes taking things and putting them in or behind other things. I think she may have thrown away my sunglasses. All my guitar picks are gone. She makes me show her my hand when I’m playing guitar, to make sure I don’t have a pick. If I do have one, she has to take it and put it somewhere hidden. I used to know her hiding spots but not anymore. Maybe I’ll find a pick this evening…

I didn’t realize I’d gotten so busy! Having a child is very taxing. It takes a lot of time and energy and attention to take care of the baby and make sure she’s doing okay. Saranya is doing okay. She’s starting to take her first tentative steps, and she babbles like a loon, sometimes making herself laugh in the process. It’s pretty funny when it happens, so it makes everybody else laugh too.

Work has been heating up this year too. I’ve made my first web deliverable PLM for an experiment, and we’ve collected data. I’m now working on two more. Trying to get out of the Windows-only trap. It’s been challenging, but I’m learning a lot and the rewards are potentially great.

I’m still playing World of Warcraft. I’ve also gotten myself a bicycle and I’m starting to learn to use one again. The crippling pain in my feet is almost gone, and my back feels healthy and not as delicate as it used to. I’m starting to lose weight after gaining so much while recovering from my injuries. Things are improving after a long downward spiral.

It’s Monday again. I haven’t written here much lately because I’ve been pretty distracted.

I’m developing a new program at work using Flash and PHP. This is surprising because I barely know how to do anything in both of these realms, and yet I’m planning to rebuild my application framework using these two technologies by the end of next month.

It’s been getting colder. Not compared with other parts of the world maybe, but sub-70F feels cold to me and I don’t like it. I prefer 90F or more, to be honest. More chaos.

Saranya is getting easier to manage and also cuter.

It’s Tuesday again. Maintenance day. Yesterday Joel installed and configured phpBugTracker on our lab server. This involved hours and hours of puzzling over why Apache wasn’t responding to changes in its config file (answer: there were two versions of apache installed and guess which one wasn’t running), wondering why php pages were being served raw and unprocessed (answer: php wasn’t installed), struggling to get phpBugTracker to connect to the database (surprisingly, MySQL wasn’t installed either) and a long list of more trivial disconnections and missing dependencies. At the end of the day, it turned out that several hours of hacks and soft links and reinstalls could have been replaced by three config file adjustments. That’s computers for you.

It’s been getting colder. Seems like I write more blog entries during times like this. The dropping temperature seems to put me in a morose, contemplative mood. Watching the world begin to die.

My daughter is fussing in the next room. My wife just walked out of that room and went back in with a tool of some kind. My sense of self preservation is keeping me from inquiring further.

It’s time to get back into writing a regular blog.

Saranya is getting bigger and better developed. This morning she rolled over onto her tummy (with a little help) and held her upper body off the ground by resting on her elbows! Before today she’d just lie on her face with her arms lying limp at her sides, and she’d kick her feet and arch her back to lift her head off the ground a bit. This was a big step for her.

Work is going pretty well. Today I finally converted my main coding project from VC6 to VC8 and got it to work! I’m finally using a modern compiler again.

We’re about to get a new contract with a major corporation. I’m not supposed to talk about the details, but it’s going to keep us quite busy for some time. Mainly me, since I’m doing all the programming. I’m going to need a new computer system soon though, since VC8 doesn’t run on my old work computer (Win2k). I’d better get shopping.

Having a baby is hard. I don’t just mean giving birth to the baby, I mean keeping the baby alive and comfortable and quiet and happy. It’s not easy work. First off, babies need lots of attention. They sleep a lot, but not necessarily for long periods of time. They have no patience whatsoever, and no empathy or sympathy. But what they lack in maturity they make up for in volume. To all you prospective parents out there, I have this advice: get used to the sound of a baby crying – it’s going to be with you every day of your life for quite a while.

I guess I should get over the generalities and get down to the particulars, huh? Saranya (my daughter) is going to be 3 months old this Friday, and she’s already as big as an average 5 month old baby. She’s a giant! But she sure is cute. Here’s a picture of her at 6 weeks of age: