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A PERSONAL MATTER  A
Personal Matter by Kenzaburo Oe is one of two Japanese books I
checked out after I read Kokoro. This story is about a man named Bird
who is the father to a newborn baby who has a major birth defect. The
story is about the father's reaction and dealing (or not dealing)
with the issue. To be honest, about thirty pages into the story, I
hated the main character and wanted to put the book down immediately.
It depressed me so much that I didn't even want to pick up another book.
For some inexplicable reason, I decided to stick with it and I am glad I did. While this book was much more modern than Kokoro, it also was character based and full of ideas, morals and issues surrounding making difficult and immoral decisions. The book finally redeemed itself to me in its final pages and at the end I felt better about reading it.  FEVERISHLY WORKING I've been in a slight technical slump lately. There were many things I hated about my investment bank job in New York: middle-management was full of incompetent managers who found a way to make your life miserable. There were many 120-hour weeks. I ate dinner at work at least three out of five nights. Often more. The users weren't all the sweetest people you've ever met and technology is a male field and combining that with the male-world of finance made the place a real joy. (There's a specific incident with one of my managers and a photo of a woman and a horse that is somehow etched into my brain permanently.) Of course not everything was terrible. The pay was relatively good but more importantly, the people I worked with were very competent. Some of them were downright brilliant. I gained more practical knowledge in one year of working with some of these people then I did in my four years at Carnegie Mellon. Some of my coworkers inspired me and made me a better coder. And I miss that. I miss it a lot. In my current job I have more responsibility in some ways and I do a wider variety of technology. I never had to administer servers on Wall Street, they had other people to do that. And to boot machines, and to configure files and compile unix programs (even though I did download, compile, and install the latest version of emacs on every machine I've ever used; this girl cannot live without emacs.) While I enjoy learning about the intricacies of freeBSD and ini files as much as the next gal, my main love is programming. And PHP just doesn't cut it for me. It was fun for the first few weeks while it was still relatively novel. I liked the cleanness of Smarty and how it let me separate stuff so I didn't have to fill my PHP code with html crap etc. However, two years into it, my fascination with PHP is long gone and I need something else. I've coded a bunch of Python a while back for fun and I am hoping to get back into it if only to preserve my sanity. Actually, my point was that I haven't been feeling very technically challenged lately so Jake's been encouraging me to create a project for myself that would be fun. After months of his badgering me, I finally broke down and came up with an idea I liked. I've spent the last week coding night and day and even though it didn't make me a fantastic coder, I've learned some new stuff I didn't know and I have a new website/domain now. I am hoping to roll it out for pre-alpha testing in a week or so. If you're interested in photography, writing, knitting or scrapbooking (any of them) and would like to be one of my guinea pigs, drop me a line: karen at karenika dot com. Only if you're going to play along tho and feel free to pass it on. That's why I haven't been writing the past week. All my free time has been 100% consumed by this. To be honest, it felt great to be consumed by anything (other than David who's my favorite thing to be consumed by of course) and even if the site is a bust, I loved working on it. College was probably the last time I felt like staying up and working on one of my own projects as much as I did this past week. Jake was right after all. What a shocker. CLOUD ATLAS  After the mistake with The
Cloud Atlas, I put the correct book on hold at the library and picked
it up last week. Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell came
highly recommended by several members of AskMe. I made an effort to
spend my week with it and so read large chunks of it at a time. The
book has six stories. The first halves of five stories are told in
the first part, then the sixth story, and then each story is finished
going in the reverse order. The first story takes place on a ship
around 1850s and it's the journal of a notary traveling in the
Pacific. This was the hardest story for me to get through. I had a
hard time with the language and the character. It got a bit better
towards the end of the first half but I knew the book would get
better so I kept going.
The second story takes place in 1930's and it's about a musician exchanging letters with a scientist friend of his while he works with a maestro. I enjoyed this story very much and found it easy to read with entertaining characters. The third story is about a newspaper journalist who discovers a plot to a corporate coverup that could cause a disaster and it involves the scientist from the second story. The fourth story is about a book publisher who gets signed into a retirement institution against his will. The fifth one is a sci-fi story about a cloned human who is part of a scientific project. And the final story takes place in post-apocalyptic Hawaii. I wasn't crazy about the last story either but loved the other four. Each story briefly mentions the previous one and there are tones of reincarnation and strong moral lessons in each story. The writing is forced in some parts but great in others. Overall, I found it to be a fascinating book and I want to read more of his work. Here's what one reviewer says about the book, "Here is not only the academic pessimism of Marx, Hobbes and Nietzsche but also the frightening portents of Aldous Huxley and the linguistic daring of Anthony Burgess. Here, too, are Melville's maritime tableaux, the mordant satire of Kingsley Amis and, in the voice of Robert Frobisher -- Mitchell's most poignant and fully realized character -- the unmistakable ghost of Paul Bowles. Here is a veritable film festival of unembarrassed cinematic references and inspirations, from "Soylent Green" to "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" to "The Graduate" to the postwar comedies of England's Ealing Studios. Here is an obviously sincere affection for the oft-maligned genres of mystery, science fiction and fantasy." YOU ARE NOT A STRANGER HERE  My second short story collection of the
year was another AskMe recommendation. You
Are Not A Stranger Here by Adam Haslett is a fantastic, fantastic
collection of magnificently well-written stories. This author is a
fantastic, published writer and a law student at Yale. A major
loser :). Each story involves some aspect of sorrow, depression,
sadness, disappointment, family, friendship. The stories are simple
and elegant. The characters are very relatable and memorable, even in
the short space of a little story. I got attached to each and every
one of them.
After Kissing in Manhattan and this book, I might have to start reading more short story collections. Either these two are major exceptions, or I am finally beginning to gain the maturity to enjoy short stories. Either way, I am delighted to have discovered Haslett. ENJOYING GLADWELL I am not a particularly big sports fan. Actually, I can go so far as to say I am not a sports fan in any way. I get incredibly frustrated watching football because I have a really hard time following the actual ball since it's so small compared to the players and the field. Last time I watched basketball I must have been fourteen. I have never ever watched hockey as far as I can remember. Golf is boring to me in concept let alone on TV. The only game I might be into is baseball and only in very rare cases. So it might make little sense that Jake emailed me this article by an ESPN writer. Until you realize that he's "talking" with Malcolm Gladwell. Probably my favorite non-fiction writer of all time. I find Gladwell's writing to be consistently thought-provoking. His topics are always interesting to me. His writing is plain, unpretentious and flows beautifully. An amazingly rare accomplishment for a non-fiction writer in my albeit narrow experience. Despite the fact that most of the sports talk completely went over my head, I found some real gems in this article. Here are a few I wanted to share. As for your (very kind) question about my
writing, I'm not sure I can answer that either, except to say that I
really love writing, in a totally uncomplicated way. When I was in
high school, I ran track and in the beginning I thought of training
as a kind of necessary evil on the way to racing. But then, the more
I ran, the more I realized that what I loved was running, and it
didn't much matter to me whether it came in the training form or the
racing form. I feel the same way about writing. I'm happy writing
anywhere and under any circumstances and in fact I'm now to the point
where I'm suspicious of people who don't love what they do in the
same way. I was watching golf, before Christmas, and the announcer
said of Phil Mickelson that the tournament was the first time he'd
picked up a golf club in five weeks. Assuming that's true, isn't that
profoundly weird? How can you be one of the top two or three golfers
of your generation and go five weeks without doing the thing you
love? Did Mickelson also not have sex with his wife for five weeks?
Did he give up chocolate for five weeks? Is this some weird golfer's
version of Lent that I'm unaware of? They say that Wayne Gretzky, as
a 2-year-old, would cry when the Saturday night hockey game on TV was
over, because it seemed to him at that age unbearably sad that
something he loved so much had to come to end, and I've always
thought that was the simplest explanation for why Gretzky was
Gretzky. And surely it's the explanation as well for why Mickelson
will never be Tiger Woods.
and a few lines down, Simmons replies with: On Mickelson and Sports Lent, I remember
watching one of those 20/20-Dateline-type pieces about him once, and
he was adamant about remaining a family man, taking breaks from golf
and never letting the sport consume him ... and I remember thinking
to myself, "Right now Tiger is watching this and thinking, 'I got
him. Cross Phil off the list. This guy will never pass me.'" The
great ones aren't just great, they enjoy what they're doing --
I find this to be completely true. If you love what you do and do it constantly, you are bound to master it eventually. And if you truly love it, can you stop doing it, even for a moment? Many writers carry little notebooks with them and take notes constantly. Photographers never leave the house without at least one camera. Musicians practice night and day. People are often surprised at the overnight success of a now famous person, but in most cases there is a multi-year effort behind the success. I can completely understand taking a break from something to recharge and relax. However, if you want to be really really fantastic at something, I think the trick is to love it obsessively. Then, it consumes you. That's sort of why I constantly have the breadth vs depth argument with myself. If you want to do everything and are unwilling to choose one over the others, it's impossible for all your interests to consume you. You have a limited amount of time and energy and you have to make choices. Thus, it shall be that I am never going to get the opportunity to master anything until I give up on some things. This is actually a question I'm obsessed with:
Why don't people work hard when it's in their best interest to do so?
Why does Eddy Curry come to camp every year overweight?
The (short) answer is that it's really risky to work hard, because then if you fail you can no longer say that you failed because you didn't work hard. It's a form of self-protection. I swear that's why Mickelson has that almost absurdly calm demeanor. If he loses, he can always say: Well, I could have practiced more, and maybe next year I will and I'll win then. When Tiger loses, what does he tell himself? He worked as hard as he possibly could. He prepared like no one else in the game and he still lost. That has to be devastating, and dealing with that kind of conclusion takes a very special and rare kind of resilience. Most of the psychological research on this is focused on why some kids don't study for tests -- which is a much more serious version of the same problem. If you get drunk the night before an exam instead of studying and you fail, then the problem is that you got drunk. If you do study and you fail, the problem is that you're stupid -- and stupid, for a student, is a death sentence. The point is that it is far more psychologically dangerous and difficult to prepare for a task than not to prepare. People think that Tiger is tougher than Mickelson because he works harder. Wrong: Tiger is tougher than Mickelson and because of that he works harder. This is something I've often discussed with Jake since he hates taking exams so much and makes sure not to study for them. I am never sure if he's genuinely having problems studying of he's just not trying hard enough because he's scared that if he gives it all he has and still fails, he'll have to admit he couldn't achieve despite trying as hard as possible. I work very hard not to regret my past. I tend to get hung up on the past as is so I try regularly to make sure my decisions are as sound as they can be at the time I make them. I also give the things I do all I have. I want to be able to look back and say that there was nothing more I could have done. I used every single ounce of ability, power, and strength in my body and soul to make something happen. If, then, it still doesn't happen, it's time to move on and realize it wasn't meant to be. That's not to say that I have followed my own advice all the time. A few years ago, I applied to Stanford Business School. My intention was to do a joint Education and Business degree and to get accepted, you had to apply to the business school first. I have always hated business school but I know Stanford is the bast and I loved the idea of this particular program. I applied to it at the same time I applied to Teach For America. I knew that if I got into both I would choose TFA. Most people might think that's stupid but TFA was what I wanted to do at the time. I figured if I couldn't get in and could get in to Stanford, I'd study Education Policy and hope to start some kind of education non-profit after I graduated. I knew TFA would get me first-hand experience and that's more useful than any education in most cases. (and in the end it turned out to be invaluable). I had taken my GMATs four and a half years before I applied and since they are good for five years, I just used those scores. I asked for recommendations from my boss and a co-worker. I really did work hard on the essays. Overall, it's not fair to say that I didn't try but I am sure I could have tried harder to perfect my application. I am not sure if it was on purpose or sheer neglect. I knew the acceptance rate was very low and chances were that I wouldn't get in. And when I didn't get in, I kept telling myself I didn't want to get in anyway. I hadn't even bothered to retake my GMATs. It was obvious that Stanford wasn't my first choice. Which is all bullshit. I didn't get in and that's that. If I didn't try to make my application as strong as it could have been, that's sheer stupidity on my part. Why waste time writing essays, bothering to fill out an application, and taking other people's time to write recommendations if I wasn't dying to get in? I was completely retarded to not give it my best effort. And if this was my best effort, I should admit that I wasn't good enough to get in. To not try my hardest just to have some excuse to use when I don't succeed is really setting myself up for failure. Life's too short to live like that. There's a famous experiment done by a wonderful
psychologist at Columbia University named Dan Goldstein. He goes to a
class of American college students and asks them which city they
think is bigger -- San Antonio or San Diego. The students are
divided. Then he goes to an equivalent class of German college
students and asks the same question. This time the class votes
overwhelmingly for San Diego. The right answer? San Diego. So the
Germans are smarter, at least on this question, than the American
kids. But that's not because they know more about American geography.
It's because they know less. They've never heard of San Antonio. But
they've heard of San Diego and using only that rule of thumb, they
figure San Diego must be bigger. The American students know way more.
They know all about San Antonio. They know it's in Texas and that
Texas is booming. They know it has a pro basketball team, so it must
be a pretty big market. Some of them may have been in San Antonio and
taken forever to drive from one side of town to another -- and that,
and a thousand other stray facts about Texas and San Antonio, have
the effect of muddling their judgment and preventing them from
getting the right answer.
This comment reminded me of The Wisdom of Crowds. Sometimes it's hard be objective when you know the subject too well. It's hard to not make assumptions and to not overcomplicate the situation. I guess the trick is to know when you're in that kind of situation and to seek the help of people who are less involved for those particular situation. All interesting points, all gathered from a sports article that I wouldn't have even seen had Jake not sent it to me. Shows you that an interesting person like Gladwell is worth reading regardless of the context. THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA  I first read Philip Roth last year when I
read The Human Stain and enjoyed it very much. I liked the writing. I
liked the story. I liked the pace. Since then, I made two separate
attempts to read him, both of which failed. Both of the other books I
tried were too "dirty-old-man" for me. When The
Plot Against America came out, I knew I wanted to read it.
Especially since it was political and there were many reviews that
equated it to the current administration. I asked for the book and
received it as a Christmas gift in 2004. It sat on my shelf for a
year and I knew I would never pick it up unless I forced myself so I
asked my reading group if they were interested in reading it.
Everyone agreed so we picked it and I finally got around to reading it.
The book is a what if story about Lindbergh winning the 1940 presidency instead of FDR, written from the perspective of a Jewish family living in New York. The main character is a little boy named Philip Roth. It was very well written and a relatively quick read. For people, like me, who don't know a lot about the correct political history of the time, it's a bit confusing to keep track of what really happened and what's made up. I am usually determined to avoid any form of fiction or non-fiction that is set during the second World War but I knew this book would be worthwhile. And it was. It was also very disturbing and there was an engulfing sense of fear and panic throughout the entire novel, making me thankful for the thousandth time that I wasn't alive during that particular time in history even though this particular story was fictional. As much as I despise the current administration, I would have to say that the horrific tale of the book is not nearly as parallel to the current times as the media made it out to be. If it really were, I do think we'd see thousands flocking to Canada weekly. May it never ever get to be an issue. GETTING CLEVER  Well the
little boy is getting more mischievous by the hour. He now likes to
open drawers that he cannot even see into. He pulls the handle,
reaches into the drawer and just picks an item at random. Whatever
comes his way. He then dutifully brings it to me to show his new
finding.
He is completely obsessed with screwing and unscrewing water bottles. He cannot unscrew them all the way though and once he closes them, he comes to me and whines and whines until I open it back up. Same for the little bowls we feed him from. He can close them but cannot open them. Every day, he finds a new item for me to open so he can close it. Today, during music class, he was very upset that the little bells on a shaker wouldn't come off. He kept brining it to me, thinking I could do it for him. I tried to explain to him that they just don't come off but he wasn't very pleased with my answer. He has also made the correlation between the water bottles we drink from and his sippy cup. If he can't find his cup and he's thirsty, he finds and empty or full water bottle somewhere in the house and brings it to me. I then find his cup and he, happily, drinks in big gulps. Who says babies can't communicate? He has started to sign the sign for milk, but tends to do it at random times, not necessarily correlating with nursing. He does, however, come over throughout the day and try to lift my shirt up so he can have some milk. Getting too clever, David. After several months of no more teeth, one little one left of the middle bottom one is now peeking out. Maybe there's more to come soon. He's completely mastered walking and even walks sideways now. He also has mastered picking up an object by just bending down a bit. He eats at least one meal a day completely on his own (veggie burger + turkey meatballs + peas or some other vegetable and fruits). He's gotten pickier about the food and likes to bang his body back and forth in the seat if I don't listen to him. Mother always wins in the end though and David learns that veggies have to be finished before he can have his grapes. He loves, loves, LOVES grapes and blueberries. And bread. I never give him bread at home so he follows people around for bread whenever we go out. Throughout the day, he comes over to my desk and puts his head on my lap. Just to say he loves me. Still as smiley as ever and funny and sweet. Takes all his toys and comes to sit by my desk to play. I love you, little boy. OTHER PEOPLE'S EYES My first job out of college was at a major investment bank in New York City. I worked at this place for several years. I spent three months in London and six months in Tokyo. I had over six different managers in that time. When I decided to move departments a few years into my job, I had decided that choosing the right manager was important to my happiness at work. What I realized a few months later was that my manager wasn't just important, he was crucial to the success of my career. The manager I worked for in London was wonderful. He liked me and thought highly of me and encouraged me constantly. He had me work with intelligent people and I learned a lot working for him. He's the sole reason I was willing to live apart from Jake for six months to take a position in Tokyo. The manager I worked with before him in New York was totally the opposite and always yelled at me, never made positive remarks about my work and constantly complained. The situation got so bad that I was dreading going to work each and every day. I figured the manager in London (and then Tokyo) was as good as it got. Until I moved to another department at the bank. When I moved back from Tokyo, I was ready to be done with the company but at my manager's request, decided to look around internally before I quit. I met with several departments, all of whom were only willing to hire me for menial jobs since I had decided to work three days a week. One department, however, seemed to have an interesting project and they really wanted me on board. The head of the department, let's call him Carl, met with me and asked me when I'd be willing to start. The original offer was to support and fix a specific piece of software that was honestly built wrong and broken all over the place. After a few weeks and many meetings, I was suddenly put in charge of rewriting the software altogether. I spent the following two years or so, managing a team of six in London, Tokyo and New York and working only three days a week. What's amazing about this isn't that I was a phenomenal worker. I hadn't really changed all that much from the previous year and my skills hadn't improved that drastically. But my manager had. Carl believed in me and he told me so daily. Even though he was a Managing Director, he met with me several times a week and congratulated me regularly. He brought me along to meetings with partners and other important people. He asked my opinion in public and in private. He made sure I got all the credit for all my work. He gave me all the resources I asked for and was there to answer all my questions. He truly supported me in every way. More significantly, he believed in me. Everyone thought working three days a week would be a career suicide but he put me in charge of a project and he promoted me to Vice President. Carl made me believe in myself. He made me feel like I was capable of doing all that he was asking me to do. And, amazingly, I became capable. I rose to his expectations. I became the person he saw me as. A few years ago a friend told me to be careful about statements I made out loud. She said that if I constantly complain about being fat, people start thinking I am fat even if they didn't previously think so. I believe in the power of saying something to make it happen. Carl believed in me, he supported it and I rose to his expectations. If I say something out loud often enough, other people believe it and start treating me as such and then I become that thing. Obviously, this happens all the time in abuse cases. Someone tells you you're trash often enough, you start believing it. Soon you forget what your personal thoughts were and you just see yourself through other people's eyes. That can cause a lot of damage depending on the people around you. It can also help you become a better person. It can help you have faith in yourself. It can help you become the person you have the potential to be. The person you already are. It's all about whose eyes you get see yourself through. THE CLOUD ATLAS  The
Cloud Atlas by Liam Callanan was a mistake. The AskMe
recommendation was Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell but I didn't make
the distinction in the title until long after I'd started reading the
novel. Since I was already over 100 pages into the novel and enjoying
it, I decided to keep reading despite the confusion. The Cloud Atlas
is about a bomb diffuser in the army during second world war who is
sent to Alaska to dismantle the bombs the Japanese sent to the United
States inside air balloons. These balloons, of which there were over
nine thousand, fell all over Alaska and West Coast of Northern United
States. The balloons were rigged with explosives and are one of the
best kept secrets of the war. A completely fictional story based on a
true-world event.
The three main characters are all interesting, each a bit too extreme in their flaws. But I got attached to the main character and to the story in general. I cared about what happened and enjoyed reading it from the first page to the very last. Especially since I had no idea about the balloons and was quite amazed it was a true story. THE SOLACE OF LEAVING EARLY  The
Solace of Leaving Early by Haven Kimmel was recommended to me by
my good friend Michelle. Probably one of the most beautiful books
I've read in my life. It's a story about a woman who drops out of her
doctoral program and goes back to her hometown and a minister in the
same hometown, both of whom are dealing with their own personal
problems and who are put in a situation where they have to take care
of two little orphaned girls.
It's so touching and so very emotional to read. It's really beautifully written and the characters are three dimensional and flawed and honest. There's a lot of color in the book and great descriptions of the children's reaction to the terrible tragedy and the adults' differing ways of treating the children. It's really a phenomenal read. I haven't read Kimmel's more famous book, A Girl Named Zippy, but I think I will have to after this. DEAD FLOWER  KOKORO  Another AskMe recommendation was Kokoro by Natsume Soseki. As far as I
can remember, I've never read Japanese fiction so this was my first.
And what an inspiring beginning. I loved this book pretty much from
the very first page. My preference is usually character-based books
and Kokoro was nothing but. I loved the simplicity of the language,
could relate to the main character almost immediately. Cared about
him, about his story, about his feelings towards his mentor. I
enjoyed how non-contrived the story felt to me. Even though I was
wondering what made the sensei who he was, it wasn't crucial to me.
It wasn't like a mystery, it was like an unraveling of a personality.
I swallowed the book in a day and thought about it for quite some
time afterwards.
I liked it so much that I decided I wanted to read more Japanese books. My impression was that they were more about people and their thoughts, their morals, their ideas as opposed to actual events in their world. Maybe I am way off but I wanted to find out, so I went through the recommendations and put two of the other Japanese books on hold and encouraged my reading group to pick yet a third one as our book of the month for June. AMY AND ISABELLE  The second book I read this year is Amy and Isabelle by Elizabeth Strout,
another AskMe recommendation. A quiet, beautiful story about a single
mother and her teenage daughter who has a relationship with her
teacher. It proves my disturbing thoughts about how little parents
actually know about their own children and where they are and what
they're doing at any moment in time. Disturbing at times, frustrating
at others, this novel rang relatively true to me. I enjoyed the
writing style even though I thought the book was a little slow but
still enjoyed reading it. I really am not looking forward to David's
teenage years. And while I am sort of glad not to have a girl for
that reason, I know boys can be their own bag full of troubles and
worries.
PICTURES OF THE YEAR The photographs at pictures of the year are phenomenal. Some truly inspiring work. KISSING IN MANHATTAN As I mentioned before, 2005 wasn't the best year for books, for me. Determined to do better this year, I posted on AskMe to ask for recommendations of people's favorite books. I got a lot of answers and got started reading them one by one. This year, I hope to post about each of the books as I read them. So to catch up, I'll write about the ten I've read so far in the next few days.  First up, is Kissing in Manhattan by David Schickler. I have never been a big fan of
short story collections so I am not even sure why I picked this out
to be my first book of the year. Maybe it's because the MeFi reader
said it was the book that got her out of her 2005 book-slump.
Whatever prompted me, I am really glad I decided to read it. Kissing
in Manhattan is fantastic. It's not the kind of book I would have
picked up in a million years. Each of the short stories is about a
different tenant who lives in a fictional building in Manhattan. The
stories, while different, sort of weave through each other in that
the same characters pop up in different stories and you sort of find
out some more about them through another tenant's story. It's very
well-written, sort of weird stories but good imagery, great character
development and very visual. I thought about the characters and the
stories well after I'd finished the book, which, for me, is a sign of
a great read. What a wonderful way to start the year.
BEAUTIFUL BOY  SEVERAL LIFETIMES A friend of mine asked me about my favorite movie the other day. Anyone who's a movie-snob would cringe at some of my favorites and probably think I am an uncultured, cheesy-movie-liking idiot. But I don't care much for movie-snobs (or any other snobs for that matter) so I don't really care what they think. Anyhow, my favorite movie of all time is still the same as it was when I applied to college 14 years ago. My favorite movie of all time is still Dead Poets Society. While I was very lucky to not have parents like the ones in the movie and wouldn't nearly qualify my life as oppressed and predetermined as those students, the message of sucking the marrow of life resonated strongly with me then and still does today. There are so many things I like to do and so many things I yearn to learn. So many things I wish I could do like design and play an instrument and draw well and write well and be more creative and artistic. I feel like the amount of things I want to do/learn/be would easily cover several lifetimes. I don't know how to figure out which path to take. There are many aspects of my life that I love and wouldn't give up. I love being married. I love that I've shared so much of my life with Jake and that we have all these memories that we can unleash like a treasure chest. I love reminiscing with him. I love being a mom. I love the joy and wonder David has brought into my life. The little moments where he does something completely unexpected, the minutes after he wakes up from a nap all flushed, the hours we spend bonding while I nurse him. I wouldn't give those up for anything. I love reading. I dedicate several hours of my week to reading books and those hours are some of my most cherished. My little escape into the minds and worlds of others. My opportunity to experience life in a different way. That's something else I am not willing to give up. Those are my core three that need to be in my life. There are many other time- consuming activities I like that I'd rather not stop doing like: photography, writing this site, scrapbooking my son's memories, taking classes with/for David, etc. But then there are others. Hours wasted having petty arguments around office politics. Hours wasted trying to configure some kind of installation or a piece of code that's missing a stupid parenthesis or semicolon (yey for python). Hours killed with being in a bad mood or stuck in traffic or running stupid errands or having a fight. I know it's impossible to dispose of all of these. And maybe I am just itching because it's time to try something new. I think that my main problem is that I feel insatiable. I feel like picking one thing is not going to satisfy me since I still have to give up picking something else. I had told myself that if Jake did well enough for us to live on his salary, I'd go back to school. Maybe get a PhD in Child Psychology. Maybe get one in Computer Science. Or maybe I'd do a collection of Masters degrees. One for math, one for computer science, one of english, one for statistics. One for design. One for psychology. Art history. Linguistics. Photography. Several individual languages. I really can go on for quite some time. Now, I'm thinking maybe I should just take classes. I don't know if that's even possible. I don't know that the schools I'd want to attend offer the option of just taking classes. But I suppose theoretically if I had enough money, I could convince them to let me. I wonder if that would quench my thirst. Make me feel like I was finally sucking the marrow of life. Make me feel like I was actually living several lifetimes in one. SEA DRAGON  GENETIC AMALGAMATION Anyone who's seen David and Jake quickly exclaims that David is an exact replica and then proceeds to ask whether I'm sure I'm the mom. David really does look exactly like Jake and given that Jake was the cutest baby ever, I have no complaints. As he continues to grow, I am curious which one of our non-physical genes ended up in the little boy. He's one of the happiest kids I've ever seen. All you have to do to get him to laugh is to laugh in his general vicinity and he breaks into a guffaw. If you follow behind him as he walks around the house, he quickly falls in to a game of chase and starts giggling. Loudly. The joyous and constantly amused personality trait is definitely inherited from Jake as well. I was a very quiet child with lots of sticking to my mom's skirt and crying. Lest you think he hasn't got any of my genes, I was sitting at my table a few days ago when I could no longer see or hear David. My work area is open to the living room and I can often see him playing. When he goes out of sight, I can still hear the conversation between him and the toys. If he disappears for over a minute, I generally call him and he comes back to the living room or kitchen (which is also fully visible from my work area) and laughs at me. On this occasion, he had been completely out of my sight for a minute or two and I couldn't hear him talk at all. I yelled for him and he didn't come back. Worried, I leapt from my chair and ran towards the bedroom thinking he was eating some crazy bathroom stuff he pulled out of the drawers. On my way through the living room, I spotted him right by the bookcases, quietly reading his book (well, maybe not reading but looking through). He looked up at me with a quizzical expression and went back to his reading. That he got from me. ONE WHOLE FINGER Almost a month ago, David turned one. While it was relatively uneventful for him, despite the birthday party we threw on his honor, it was a rather huge deal for me. I always knew I wanted to have children but I never really felt ready to have them. When Jake and I decided to start trying, it was mostly because we knew we both wanted kids and we knew it might be a bad idea to wait much longer in case we had problems. It all happened very quickly and next thing we knew we were actually pregnant. Not that I am complaining but it was sooner than we expected, that's all. I spent the first few months of my pregnancy worrying about the well being of the baby and throwing up. Once I started feeling better, I concentrated fully on worrying about the baby's well-being. I worried about it so much that I barely had enough energy left to worry about the birth. David did me two favors and came out relatively quickly and quite perfect-looking. I spent the last year also worrying. What did I know about being a mother? Was I feeding him enough? Was I eating right? Was he warm enough? Was he too warm? David was and is a perfect child. He eats like a champ, he now sleeps like a champ, he walks around like he's been doing it all his life and he laughs more than I've ever seen anyone laugh. There are no words for the amount of joy he has brought into our lives. Even though it's almost a whole month late, congrats of turning a whole finger, my son, I am so proud of you. TWEAKING I forgot how much time it takes to tweak this site. I've spent the better part of a Sunday updating my scripts and that's no fun. Back To Original So I am trying to find a way to allow me to post more frequently and I have decided to go back to the very original weblog look which means everything gets dumped to the main page regardless of its category. No special section for photos or david. If you don't like the topic of a post, feel free to skip it. |
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