Reflections on Life:

A Real Place

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 01:22:03 GMT

I'm sitting on a balcony sweating in the humid heat of an Amazon evening. In a building across the street, the local band is playing selections from "Star Wars" and "Aladdin", sounding every bit like we must have in High School. It's now 10:00, and the children have gone to bed, while people watching small TVs outdoors tune into telenovelas.

There is only one road to this town, and it's impassable most of the year. I flew in this afternoon on a Boeing 737, but most of the residents can afford only to buy a ticket on a boat that takes more than two days to travel to the next big city--sleeping is done on hammocks because the nights are simply too warm for a cabin.

Santarem, during the dry season, is a remote tourist attraction because of white sand river beaches. But now, with the water 30 feet above that point, the beaches are underwater and the tourists are absent--myself excluded I suppose. There is a riverwalk, well more of a nicely paved floodwall, where dozens of young couples sit on benches and kids play on swings at night to escape the heat of the day. Night comes early here, actually, as it does in much of the tropics. Restaurants don't begin to fill up until well after 8:00 PM.

Before then, the streets are filled with people working, albeit more slowly. Motorcyclists carrying everything swerve in and out of cars driving too fast on streets too narrow. Vendors selling random assortments of things line a couple of squares in the city. No one shouts, no one pushes.

I can feel a palpable desire from nearly everyone to improve their situation. People try to make money virtually any way they can. Some of that money will go toward symbols of wealth: cell phones, dvd players, nice shoes. But most of these people will never know wealth, the kind that means they don't need to worry about money. Poverty and prosperity are next door neighbors in Brazil, and everyone builds a wall around their own lot, so that what they do have remains theirs. Only the poorest, those in the favelas, cannot afford walls.

The language is foreign to me, the food tastes different, the beds are less comfortable, and the spaces narrower. More is different than the same--in fact, nearly everything is a little bit different. I'm sure that's true of international travel, but I've not yet had the chance to do much.

What isn't different, though, are the people. Children play like children, adolescents swim incessantly, teenagers blare loud music, young people sit at bars drinking and flirting, men and women work all day, old women watch their grandchildren and groups of old men sit and laugh at jokes.

But then, the fact that I actually get to see this--that life occurs in public view--is almost entirely foreign to me. In the midwest, life happens indoors, or occasionally in massive soccer complexes. If we are outdoors, we are mostly alone or in very small groups. Life is private. We are embarrassed to share our problems, and unwilling to let others witness our embarrassments.

That seems strange from this balcony, actually. Living our lives indoors is like buying individually wrapped "fun sized" Skittles. Kids can share one with everyone on their next play date! Here, people would want nothing more than to scoop deep into the bulk food barrel and watch the rainbow flow into their bags by the pound. Life happens here. Not some focus-grouped, mass-marketed, anti-bacterial, climate-controlled version, but rather something more chaotic and far more real.

A Major Milestone

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 16:35:11 GMT

Though I haven't written any new articles for Damninteresting.com lately, pretty much since Lydia came along, actually, I have been actively involved with the site. Over the last six months or so the writers that contribute to the site have been preparing a manuscript for submission to Workman publishing. And this isn't just some shoot-for-the-stars type submissions, we have a substantial advance and everything!

The book will be coming out in Spring 2009, and my contribution is about 1/20th of the total material--not very much, but still enough to be officially in print! Some of the material is new, other parts were from articles I'd previously written.

We just turned in the complete manuscript to the publisher last night/this morning. From there, we still have a lot of work to do. We'll undoubtedly have more edits, plus we have to create artwork/hire artists for the book's many hundreds of images.

I'm not entirely positive what format the book will be, but at about 300 pages of written material plus graphics, it will most likely be a large-format hardback initially.

If this book is successful, which would be at least 10s of thousands of copies sold I'm guessing, we'll soon have a follow-on ready for which I would contribute substantially more material. That's not terribly unlikely, given that the site has 30,000+ regular readers.

Ah well, that's for the future. Today, I have to focus on getting another manuscript finished: my thesis.

Bourgeois Environmentalist?

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 14:24:07 GMT

I have finally found a solution to commuting to work without my car.

If you recall, last summer I tried the bus for about a month. It worked, sort of. The commute was at least 45 minutes each way, with a transfer in between. That meant it was hard to relax, and almost impossible to work.

Then, early this summer I tried biking in to work. It took about 35 minutes for the actual ride, and I arrived at work sweaty and exhausted. That was okay, because I just stopped at the IM and showered. But the ride home, oh the ride home. That was not fun. I found the flattest possible route, and it still nearly killed me by the end. After weeks and weeks, I'm sure that I could have improved and commuted perhaps 3 times a week. But, since the one-way distance is 7.5 miles, I'm not sure I'd ever get in the condition to ride 60 miles per week.

I had given up for a while, and just committed myself in principle to eventually moving close to my job so only one of us has to drive to work. Then, Cheryl and I stopped over at my Dad's house two weekends ago, and I was reminded that he has an electric bike. This bike is really cool, because the battery/motor doesn't actually move the bike on its own, it simply adds to whatever force you are applying. The best way to explain the effect is that the bike moves as if you are in a high gear, but rides as easily as if you are in a low gear.

Luckily for me in this instance, my Dad averages nearly as much time in China on business as he does at home, so the bike was not being utilized to its potential at his house. I asked him if I could borrow it and he readily agreed.

Yesterday, I tried it out, and it was fantastic. I got to work in just over 30 minutes feeling as if I'd had a nice workout--but I was still able to climb the stairs to the third floor (really, once I actually had to take the elevator after riding my normal bike). Then, the ride home was equally easy. See, the bike provides the most help during acceleration or while going up hills, and then does very little on straightaways. So, the hardest parts of the commute are made much easier.

I figured that the hardest test would be if I could actually comfortably ride to work the next day. The bike actually has two settings "On" and "Eco". "Eco" provides less assistance than "On". Yesterday, I'd ridden in with "Eco" and today, I switched it to "On". It was almost too easy, actually.

I must totally look like someone from a third world country (if you ignore the battery pack, that is), because I modified a plastic milk crate to fit on the rear-tire rack. I stuffed my coffee, lunch, and backpack (with a laptop, not so third world, I guess) in there.

Today, a guy in a truck labeled "Anderson Electric" came up to me, rolled down the window and said "Electric bike, eh?"

"Yup" I affirmed.

"Sweet!" the guy said.

I thought it was funny that an electrician would find my electric bike cool. Maybe he's just a big fan of electricity in general.

So finally, I may have found a solution to not needing a car for my commute. If this continues to work well, it may even be possible to go down to 1 car--I'd just have to ride the bus in the wintertime. But for some reason, I feel not so "green".

Yesterday when I got to work, I told my office mate, Dush, about it. He laughed and told me he'd just heard on the BBC something about an electric bike and had thought "That must be an American invention!" He's Sri Lankan.

Okay, there are literally millions of people worldwide, maybe even more, that have equally long commutes to work on their bikes. Have you seen the pictures of what the Chinese manage to carry on theirs? But, one must not be judged by the standards of others, but rather his peers. After all, we cannot necessarily condemn our historical predecessors for their racist attitudes when they were raised awash in such mistaken ideas.

Judged by the standards of my peers, my (Dad's) electric bike uses way less energy than my car, I get a really decent workout every day, and I stay connected to the world around me because I'm not encased in a metric ton of steel, glass, and plastic. So, bourgeois or not, I'm taking the first real steps to break my reliance on a second automobile. And that, I think, is forest green.

A Few Words About My Grandparents

Sat, 23 Aug 2008 01:15:33 GMT

As I mentioned in my previous post, I spoke a few words about my Grandparents Kendall on Saturday. Here are the remarks I prepared beforehand. I didn't give them exactly as written, mostly I just wrote these down to get an idea of what I wanted to say. Nevertheless, what I said was actually fairly close to this.

I'd like to remark about the number of us here tonight. In ninth grade, I had just learned in math about the principle of exponential growth--and I had an interest in powerpoint. Curious one evening, I decided to take on an extracurricular math exercise: I wanted to calculate when the population of Kendall descendants would overtake the population of the rest of the world. So, I looked up a number of world population growth, wrote down a few pages of calculations, and whipped up a quick presentation.

I showed this presentation to Grandma and Grandpa one evening, and I'll never forget how hard they laughed when I paged through the slides. It turns out that, if all of Grandma and Grandpa's children had as many children as they (which, by the way, you've all failed miserably at) there would be more Kendall descendants than the rest of the world population in about 2400. The best part of it, though, is that we would overtake the world population at about 4 trillion. I tried to find that presentation for tonight, but it's somewhere tucked away on a floppy disk I think.

There are many, many things that I could say about Grandma and Grandpa, but I think tonight I'd like to talk about work. As everyone knows, Grandpa's list of chores is truly never-ending, and I think maybe the real reason he had so many children is so that he has a never-ending supply of below minimum wage labor. I think that nearly every one of us has been recruited to work at Grandma and Grandpa's house, and were always paid, of course. I clearly remember being paid 5 bucks for a whole day's work.

But I really can't complain, because Grandma almost always had cookies ready for us, or candy, or hot chocolate--and later coffee. And lunch was never just a sandwich like at home. It was a sandwich, maybe, but also cottage cheese, pickles, chips, salad, pop, and ice cream for desert. And then Grandma would apologize that she hadn't made us a real meal that day. And often after lunch we could take a nap. All in all, the conditions weren't too rough.

Grandpa used work as a way to teach us all something. He used it to teach us lessons that modern society and media just doesn't stress any more. The value of a doing a job right, not simply quickly. The importance of being on time. And of course, the fact that a board could be crookeder than a dog's hind leg, or alternatively flatter than piss on a plate. And, instead of rain coming down in buckets, it would rain like a cow peeing. I guess growing up in the depression, buckets were hard to come by...and for some reason piss was on plates.

Seriously though, there was one lesson that I'll never forget. During the summer that Tom and I worked on the addition, we had a bit of a tendency to get there a few minutes late. 7 am is rather early, after all. We would often pull in at 7:05, 7:10, and even 7:15. Not too long into the summer, though, Grandpa greeted us curtly, a said "If you can get here at 7:15, you can get here at 7:00". I took that to mean a lot more than simply the value of punctuality. To me it meant that if you really need to get something done, there's no reason to do it partway--do it completely and be proud of it when you're done.

A Truly Wonderful Weekend

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 16:19:23 GMT

Growing up in a family of generally high-achievers, it can be hard sometimes to distinguish yourself. Cara, my sister, never had that problem--mostly because she made succeeding at things seem effortless. Academically, Cara got the best grades in school. She was a good athlete, and always a tenacious performer. She landed great roles on stage, and seemed to absorb the roles as if they had been written by her for her. And on top of all of her outward successes, she has a fantastic sense of humor and warmth that make her a truly wonderful person.

This weekend, she got married. Her new husband, Travis, is everything that an older brother could want for his sister: he's steadfast and reliable, honest and genuine, but he's more than that too. He's passionate, artistic, and imaginative--all in a manly way, of course. Mostly, though, they bring each other deep happiness.

The Pre-Wedding Party

Friday, they threw a pre-wedding party in Ann Arbor for about 40 of her friends and some family. Cheryl, Lydia, and I arrived at about 8:05, or 5 minutes past Lydia's bedtime. Despite nearly getting bounced because the bar was 21 and over past 9:00, we left at 11:30, with Lydia still going strong. We had great food, excellent craft-brewed beer, and some lively conversation. For most of the night, I just followed Lydia around from one small escapade to another, delighted the whole time by her sheer joy at getting to explore such a different environment. When we finally left, Lydia had fallen asleep within seconds of being buckled in, and slept all the way to the hotel.

Saturday morning, we had a very tasty breakfast in our hotel where Lydia ate nearly as much as I did. I was concerned, though, because she'd only slept for about 8 hours, much short of her usual 12. Our day ahead was jam-packed with wedding preparations. Cheryl got a manicure and pedicure while I tried to get our rambunctious little lady to take a nap.

The Birthday Roast

Saturday evening we took a break from the weekend of wedding festivities to throw a reverse-double-surprise 50th/80th birthday party for my Aunt Ann (50) and Grandparents Kendall (80). Some months back, Mom had the idea of having a Roast for our grandparents. During the roast, we would tell stories about them that were both humorous and touching, and try to tell them some of the things that we all felt.

As a bit of background, my grandparents had seven children, all of whom have had at least 1 grandchild. So, we had more than 40 people at the party, all immediate family. We rented out a room at a local restaurant and arrived at 6:00. Cheryl had prepared a 10-minute slideshow of family photos dating back to the 1940s, and one of my Dad's cousins brought a wireless microphone system for people to use for their speeches.

After a delicious meal, and cake and presents for Aunt Ann, my Dad announced the 80th birthday surprise, of which my grandparents were completely unaware. After the slideshow, which they absolutely loved, Mom stood up and said a few words. She told a couple of stories from when she and Dad were courting (as they did back in those days), and then made her best attempt at telling Grandma and Grandpa how much they have meant to her--but choked up and had a hard time getting the words out. I think they knew what she meant.

Then, for the next two hours, from youngest to oldest, at least 20 grandchildren, children, and children-in-law stood up, came to the front, and offered something about Grandma and Grandpa. Most people told funny stories in combination with more serious ones. I can't describe how much laughter there was that evening, and how truly wonderful it was to see my grandparents respond to each of the speakers.

At the end of the night, which most of us had managed to get through without crying thanks to humor, my Grandpa turned to my Grandma and said something like this:

"You all have said a lot about me, but I just wanted to say that I would be nothing without this woman. As you all know, I had a tough childhood, and was a troubled teenager. The good things I've done as an adult have been because you are my moral compass. Every day I went to work, you provided me with a hot meal at night, and raise seven wonderful children."

He said more than that, but I don't remember the words exactly because nearly everyone--including myself--was fighting back tears at that point. Grandpa had choked up, something that I have never personally seen him do, which caught us all by surprise. The sincerity in his voice is what I'll remember the most, though. I have never heard words so honestly spoken.

The Wedding Day

My sister's wedding ceremony and reception were being held at my Grandparents' home. Their home, a log cabin, was built primarily by my parents and my Grandpa--with lots of help from other family and friends. Then, twenty years later, my brother and I, along with my cousin Erin, built a new log addition to the house to handle our now much larger family gatherings.

To say that the house has memories is a vast understatement. Despite being built after most of the kids were grown and off to school, nearly all of them lived there at some point. I even lived there for a summer while my parents built our house on the river. I spent some of my most defining childhood days working with Grandpa, as did all of his grandchildren who lived nearby.

The ceremony would held on their front porch, after walking down a wooden boardwalk that I had helped build when I was much younger, and had helped to re-build just last year. They would take their vows in the shade of a tree that I remember decorating most Christmases, until it grew too tall. That tree stood within 30 feet of the burial places of my two childhood dogs, TC and Penny. That very porch offered me countless hours of shade under a hot summer sun during construction of the addition. Their reception tent was set up in a hollow that until last year held the pool that I learned to swim in, behind the small outbuilding we lived in for four months in 1988. The caterers set up in front of a woodshed that once housed the logs for their wood-burning furnace. Many, many cords of which I had helped split.

I could go on, and on, but I can't really capture how much it meant to me for Cara to have her wedding there, to imbue a whole new set of shining memories into the soil of that place. The wedding was beautiful, and Cara looked so happy. The smile on her face when she said "I do" is still infectious when I think about it. The catering was delicious and the weather was fantastic.

The wedding started at 2:00, and we left at almost 10:00. I spent much of the day chasing Lydia around. She was in her element, with 100 people to greet, and little cousins (once removed) to play with. When her energy started to lag near 6:00, she had most of my ice cream and caught a serious second wind. But, after three days of partying in a row, she conked out 6 minutes after we left. Not only was Lydia fantastic and happy for all three of those days, she made our time there more fun. I was so happy to have her with us.

For Cara, Travis, and her friends, the party definitely did not end then. They were all camping out under and around the reception tent. They had a fire in the firepit, and game of washers (involving throwing large metal washers, creative name isn't it?) going strong, along with music and a resupply of beer after the first keg ran out. You know how the farewell party in Fellowship of the Ring was portrayed? That was a lot like Cara's wedding, just without the wizard, and the hobbit feet.

The next morning, Cara and Travis came over to my Mom's house to open gifts. We lazily went about the day, and took a trip to Bilbo's pizza for lunch. Finally, facing the prospect of heading home, we decided to stop by Dad's place on the lake for a few hours. It's on the windward side of a jewel of a lake, which positively sparkles in the afternoons. Lydia, Dad, and I played in the water a bit, and Cheryl, Lydia, and I took a short trip in the neighbor's paddle boat. Mostly though, we just relaxed and enjoyed the peaceful surroundings. Eventually, after not coming up with a good enough excuse to stay for the remainder of the week, we got in the car and headed home, Lydia sleeping softly the entire way.

Response to Tragedy

Thu, 15 May 2008 15:54:15 GMT

In the past two weeks, there have been two tremendous tragedies--Cyclone Nargis and the Sichuan Earthquake. My response to both has been very different. Cyclone Nargis has so-far killed in excess of 100,000 people, making it one of the deadliest of all times. Yet I feel detached, and mostly anger if anything. Anger at the incompetence and corruption of Burma's military junta. But from the moment the Sichuan Earthquake was announced--at 5AM when my radio woke me up, it has affected me very deeply.

At first, until I could pull up the maps from USGS, I was worried for my Dad. At first, it was "Earthquake in China", but then, it became clear that an earthquake in Sichuan Province would have affected him little. I knew that he was in Hong Kong or thereabouts, more than 1000 km away. So, and especially after he called the next morning, I relaxed.

But, that same morning, I heard something on the radio. NPR's All Things Considered hosts Melissa Block and Robert Siegel were in Sichuan province, in the City of Chengdu, preparing for a weeklong series featuring the region to air next week. Melissa Block was in the middle of an interview when the earthquake struck. The audio recording is online here. That recording made the earthquake suddenly seem real to me.

And then, later that day, Melissa arrived at a middle school in Dujiangyan that had collapsed--when buildings around it stood unscathed. Her report that day was grief-stricken and anxious, yet hopeful, and reflected the mood of crowd of hundreds of parents and grandparents that watched as rescuers attempted to save their children. Listening to that report, I immediately pictured a 12-year old Lydia in that school. I couldn't help it. She was with me in the backseat in the parking lot at Family Video when I heard that story. I had to hug her and feel the warmth of life in her to assure myself that everything was okay.

But really, everything is not okay. The Sichuan earthquake has taken an indiscriminate toll on the Chinese population. But, because of lax enforcement of building codes during boom-times, children have been killed disproportionately.

Lydia is our only child so far. But, the children that died in that middle school by the hundreds were the only children of all of those parents. Two parents to every child. Four grandparents. Eight great-grandparents. Family trees in China are sharp-peaked inverted pyramids, tapering down to a single child. A single fragile human life represents the hopes for the future of so very many there.

Some, of course, could have another child. But others, many others, have lost their connection with the continuity of human existence irrevocably. It's one thing to make that choice deliberately. It's quite another to have made the opposite--to have created another life and invested so very, very much in that precious being--only to have your child taken away.

Melissa and Robert's reports have continued to shed light on this tragedy in a way I've never heard, but then maybe I'm really just listening for the first time. If you have some time, listen to this story as Melissa follows a couple who are frantically trying to get an excavator to their apartment to search for their 2-year old son and his grandparents. The story takes place over most of a day, and you can hear the vicious tide of emotion in Melissa's reports as the day goes on. And then, at the end, well I think you can guess. Their son is found, dead, in the arms of his grandfather--his Ye Ye--while his grandmother--his Nai Nai--clung to her husband's back.

Fear of Loss

Fri, 09 May 2008 16:38:36 GMT

Since we decided some weeks ago that we would probably move, either to Colorado (if that job is offered) or to Florida, my outlook on life has darkened considerably. While I'm excited for the new opportunities offered by those places, I am afraid of losing so much more. In the last couple of days, I've found myself suffering through vivid day dreams of getting calls in the night delivering terrible news, and worse.

I guess this stems first from the realization that, if I only come home 1-2 times per year, then I have probably no more than 10-15 more opportunities (once I move away) to see my grandparents again. This year, three out of four of my grandparents are turning 80, and there's too high a chance they won't be here at 90.

My grandparents are all tremendously important to me, but my Grandpa Kendall has been one of the most important people in my life. I feel like he is the person most like me on this planet, the one that understands who I am, and who I want to be.

It has been very hard to go from seeing him at least every few weeks to seeing him about 4-5 times per year as I do now. Especially in recent years, this has meant that I see him so infrequently that I can tell he's getting older. I am very, very afraid that if I leave in August, the next few times I come home will make that change seem more rapid. And with it, the distance that I am from my family will seem to grow ever greater.

I am extremely lucky, I know, to have experienced so few losses during my 27 years. With few, but still tragic, exceptions most of my closest family members are still alive and currently healthy. Perhaps because of that, I feel completely ill-prepared to handle the loss of a close family member.

My Grandpa Kendall told me, on the day that Aunt Sally died, that "the very fact that our grief for lost loved-ones is so intense means that we were given a wonderful gift by them in life." Our love for them is what makes their death so difficult to bear. But in remembering how comforting those words were to me on that day, I'm struck by how completely inadequate they would seem facing the loss of the very man who spoke them.

Without encouraging such thoughts, I've begun to imagine the loss of my family members when saying goodbye to them after visits. It seemed very unusual to me, but was not unnerving until Sunday when Cheryl and Lydia drove to Flint for Cheryl's cousin's wedding shower.

I stayed home to clean the house and work, and waved goodbye to them--blowing Lydia kisses and smushing my face up against the glass as she left. Within minutes, I was near tears from horrible visions involving car accidents that I nearly called Cheryl and asked her to come back and pick me up so at least I could be with them.

Several times this week, I've almost cried when seeing pictures of sick children in the news. On Tuesday I looked at a set of pictures from after we bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and have since become mildly paranoid about nuclear war. Today I clicked on a story that seemed completely innocent, but turned out to be about how a woman lost her bright, happy, wonderful 7-month old to bacterial meningitis and then experienced terrible grief afterward.

That was what prompted me to write this entry, actually. It appears that I have an acute fear of loss, and I think that it's being aggravated by knowing that I may soon be moving 1000 miles away. Is this my mind trying to tell me that I'm making a terrible mistake by leaving? Or is this just a phase, something perhaps natural for people my age that are facing their first experiences with mortality?

A Real Vacation

Mon, 14 Apr 2008 16:25:42 GMT

Cheryl, Lydia and I spent all of last week in Florida visiting her parents at their condo south of Tampa Bay. They live about 5 minutes' drive from the beach, and the weather was 85, sunny, and relatively low humidity every day of our visit. We had a wonderful time on our trip, if you'd like to read about and see some of the things we did, visit Lydia's journal.

All week long, as I sat on the beach, sipped drinks by the pool, or even as I helped build a deck for my father-in-law, I thought about Gainesville vs. East Lansing. If I were not to be offered the Colorado School of Mines faculty position, which postdoc would I take? Over the past two months, Cheryl and I have discussed the ins and outs of the decision from nearly every angle. But, now having visited Florida twice in two months, I have a much better perspective on what living there would actually be like.

It would be like starting over.

Not only would we leave behind all of our remaining local friendships, nearly all of our family, and all of the professional contacts we've established over the last 9 years in East Lansing. We'd leave behind the place we both know: Michigan.

All of the local knowledge that we'd obtained would become stale and obsolete. Our familiarity with weather and temperature patterns would be lost. Our understanding of the local flora and fauna, and their behaviors, would be largely useless. No longer would the sound of August cicadas stir such deep and meaningful memories of the past. Instead, that sound, and the sound and sights of geese flying south in their V's, would become itself a memory.

I would lose my knowledge of the geography and geology of my home. I wouldn't know where to go in the state on a long weekend. I wouldn't know where people were from when they told me about the small town they grew up in. I wouldn't know the best way to get to a city across the state using old US highways. I couldn't look at a hill and tell you anything about why it was there, and how long ago it was formed. I couldn't see a tree and tell you something about what kind of soil it sits on.

Moving to Florida would leave me only three things of great importance: my wife, daughter, and the knowledge I bring with me. (Of course, my cats are important, but not in the same way, and neither are any of my possessions). With only those three things, can we somehow achieve a future that is more meaningful and better than the one that we might create here in Michigan?

In Florida, there are new opportunities for us. It's a chance for both of us to mature professionally. It's a chance for us to explore a new place, and discover our new environment along with our daughter. We can learn the backroads, discover the weekend vacation spots, and pull up Google Maps on our iPhones when we talk to the locals. In a few years, the weather and temperature patterns would seem normal. The trees with their spanish moss drapery would become our native flora. Best of all, perhaps, without winter we can enjoy our new place all year long.

Perhaps starting over wouldn't be that bad. It's not as if we'd truly be leaving Michigan behind. I suspect we'd come for long visits at least once a year. And of course, we can always make new friends, and still keep in touch with the ones we leave behind. As long as I am starting over with Cheryl and Lydia, I have a feeling that anywhere we choose to go will become our home just as completely as Michigan is to me right now.

A Difficult Decision

Tue, 25 Mar 2008 01:39:34 GMT

Since I wrote a few entries back about job prospects, there has been only one major development. In November of last year, my advisor and I submitted a grant to fund a two-year postdoc position. The position was in some ways an extension of what I'm working on already, but involved some new and very significant research areas. We found out a few weeks ago that our proposal had been funded! Absent the offer from the University of Florida, which is a very generous one, this would have been wonderful news. It still is, I suppose, but now it presents a distinct conundrum.

If there were a distinct advantage in either place that somehow trumped the other, the decision would be simple. Since I have yet to hear back about any faculty position interviews, I have to assume that I will not be receiving any offers there. As it is, however, there are tradeoffs personally, professionally, and otherwise.

When facing a tough decision, advice is always welcome. So far, I've received advice from both of my potential postdoc advisors, numerous faculty, other students, both sets of parents, grandparents, and friends. Everyone has something to offer: a unique insight on the decision. But, when it comes to summarizing their thoughts, each offered a predictable response. Their recommendation was colored by their relationship with us, and their stake in the decision.

I've had a small amount of education, formal and otherwise, in the art of decision making. Faced with dozens of independent parameters, the decision maker must list them and apply weights to each item. If individual list items are capable of "trumping" others, then tiered-weighting systems should be employed to further improve the system. At each step, the decision to weight each item must be made independently of ones' initial inclination. Once complete, the degree to which each possibility satisfies the weighted criteria is determined, the weighted scores are calculated and a winner is declared! Ah, the beauty of objectivity.

The critical failing in all such systems is that the winner is nearly always the one initially favored. The weighting step is so heavily influenced by prior judgement that faced with an identical list--as have the many offerers of advice--no objective weighting could be determined. Nor, in this case, could Cheryl or I achieve the same set.

Even if such a system were both elegant and infallible, a life-altering decision is not one to be decided objectively. Subjective experience is the ultimate arbiter of our longterm happiness. We have each our independently-decided emotionally-influenced decision. Unfortunately, we decided differently. We've talked about our respective feelings, recognized our respective points, and failed to come to any sort of mutual conclusion.

For Cheryl and I, this is a new thing. We have been in accord on almost everything so far. To start, we liked each other; she agreed to marry me, then our wedding planning went flawlessly (and I actually had opinions), my grad school decision and Cheryl's teacher-education decision were mutually condoned, and Lydia has been the shining joy in our lives for almost a year now.

I don't know how this will be resolved, but I fear that serious misgivings will arise whatever decision is made. Maybe what's more important here is not the mere fact there there may be misgivings, but rather how those are dealt with. Whatever we choose, our lifestyle will require some rather dramatic changes if those are to be addressed. Neither of us is happy with everything about our lives.

Indeed, I've found that in talking about whether to go to Florida or stay here in Michigan, we are really talking more about our own failures to lead our lives together the way we want to. Of course, that only complicates matters because not only are we talking about a job and a move, we are talking about careers, working hours, spousal roles, number and timing of children, long-term ambitions, and deeper desires. There was a time some years ago when we both agreed on these issues, but that was before we had truly faced them.

Now everything is so very much different, and we are finding that in order to make this decision, we need to rediscover each other. And of course, we have to do it all after Lydia's bedtime.

Progress on Our New Year's Resolution

Thu, 20 Mar 2008 15:42:19 GMT

This year, I made a New Year's resolution, actually Cheryl and I made it together. I've never made one before, not seriously at least, but I have made many--less ceremonious--resolutions in the past. There was that time back in 7th grade when I resolved to quit being such a jerk. And in 8th grade I resolved to quit lying so much when I tell stories. On the heels of those early successes come this: Cheryl and I resolved to consume less this year--much less.

I won't lie to you (see?), we've had some help in this year's resolution. We're really quite poor this year. Poor maybe not like a starving refugee is poor, more like how someone sealed in a time capsule for decades realizes when they come out of hibernation that they should have invested their savings rather than stuffing it under their mattress (damn you inflation!).

But, lack of money doesn't explain everything. For my birthday this year I asked for nothing. Specifically, I asked that people give me nothing. And it worked! Well, I got some summer clothes that I really truly needed from my parents and parents-in-law. I guess I didn't need them like a starving refugee needs clothes, more like how someone sealed in a time capsule for a decade needs clothes when they come out of hibernation.

Seriously, though, our resolution goes beyond that, too. We actually turn lights off now. We've turned the heat a degree-or-two lower for much of the winter. We take our recycling to a place 30 minutes away once a month that happily takes nearly everything we can collect. I haven't bought a book since Christmas, and we even stopped buying TV shows and music from iTunes. But wait, what's the waste there? Without those extra things in our lives, we get to spend more time with each other, and with Lydia (it helps that Bravo has a lineup of reality TV shows: Project Runway, America's Top Model, and Top Chef, that Cheryl really enjoys that come for free through our cheap cable).

In honor of World Water Day on March 22nd, I'd also like to say that I cut my shower times in half. I used to take 16 minute showers during which I would also shave. Now, I shave first--3 minutes shaved (haha). I stopped using hair conditioner, separate face wash and scrub because I don't really need them-- 3 minutes saved. And then, I just decided to take less time reveling in the hot water--2 minutes more. I still take relatively luxurious showers, I just use less water and less stuff, only natural soap and shampoo (which will be natural when our petrochemically-derived massive bottle runs out).

Oh, and I took what I thought was the most radical step of all. I stopped using commercial deodorant/antipersperant. I'd read for quite some time that baking soda works great. So, I tried it. A small dash of baking soda plus a drop or two of water is the best deodorant I've ever used. And it's practically free. I haven't had a single problem with it in almost three months.

Fundamentally, though, these are all just surface manifestations of deeper changes. I have been trying to reshape my mind around this core concept:

Most of the time, most of us just buy extra stuff to replace the loss of real substantive human interactions forced by our busy modern lifestyles.

Few of us get together with friends and family and haul along all of the crap we have in our everyday lives. I've even stopped bringing reading materials like books because frankly I'd rather talk to people I don't get to see nearly enough. I thought this idea was really well captured in a comic referred to me by one of my absolute favorite bloggers, No Impact Man.

Cartoon by Eric Lewis, courtesy of Cartoon Bank.

So Little Time to Cut Back

Sat, 08 Mar 2008 20:47:58 GMT

Since September when Cheryl went back to work, our basic daily routine has consisted of bringing Lydia to day care between 8:30 and 9:30 and then picking her up again at 6:00 or so. We then go home, play a while, eat, take a bath, and then get her to bed at 8:00. Back during the summer, we were having trouble getting Lydia to fall asleep before 11:00 or 12:00 at night, and I daydreamed romantic visions of kicking back at 8:30 with a glass of Pinot watching last night's Daily Show.

But, when we actually achieved that 8:00 bedtime, it turned out that we still had at least an hour's worth of work around the house, so it was almost 10:00 before any kicking back could occur. And then, it's just too late for a glass of wine, and over 14 hours of continuous activity meant little energy for laughing at the comedy that is politics. In place of my romantic vision has come a somewhat gritty reality of exhausting days and too-short nights.

Last week, my boss asked me if I'd like to work an extra 10 hours each week, and get paid for the time. Money is a little tight right now, so I told him that I really would. But then, when Cheryl and I talked about it, I realized that I don't have two extra hours each day to give to work. For that to happen, I'd need to sleep less and ask Cheryl to do more than her fair share of the chores about the house--and I'd see Lydia less. Suddenly, a little extra debt seems like a better idea (that's predicated on the fact that I will soon be earning much more money as a postdoc than I am as a grad student).

Since deciding not to work the extra hours, I've started to look at how I spend my time during the day. I'm at work about 9 hours each day, and generally eat at my desk. Heck, I thought, I can reclaim almost an hour a day and still satisfy my patriotic duty of working a 40-hour week! But then, why stop there? I'm paid on fellowship this semester. Why not just work 7 hours a day?

The simple negative answer seems to be that I have way too much to do. I have papers to write, a thesis to put together, and a million little pieces of commitments I've made to people over the years that need to be swept into a coherent pile of fulfillments. Those two extra hours a day could mean the difference between an extra paper or two being written before I leave my current program. And those extra papers, combined with equivalent extra papers from my postdoc or early academic career will determine some future tenure decision.

But the more I think about it, and the more I read elsewhere about how people work, I might not need to make that tradeoff. You see, it turns out that to work 9 hours a day and still have time to properly raise my wonderful daughter, I've had to cut out nearly every other thing in my life. I don't exercise, I don't get enough sleep, and I don't get to have any hobbies.

The lack of time has started to strain my relationship with Cheryl, because when time is so precious, stupid little things like whether or not someone writes down that we need to pick up flour from the grocery store seem important. "I was just at the store and didn't know that we needed it! Now I have to go back!" Never mind that Meijer is literally 2 minutes away.

To put it mildly, I'm stressed, and not in particularly peak condition to deal with that stress--mentally or physically. This week, that stress came to a full boil.

Lydia had a small rash on Monday, which meant that I had to leave work early to take care of her, and that I had to work only half of a day on Tuesday as well. Then, Wednesday she was actually sick. So, I only got in about 25 hours of work this week. This was HUGELY frustrating to me on those three days. You would think that, given so little time then at work that I would have worked my tail off. But I couldn't. I got almost nothing done this past week. I was so stressed out by everything, including uncertainty about when and where my next job will be, that I couldn't work.

Divvying 45 hours of lost time between the remaining weeks between now and August, that means that I wasted the equivalent of 2 hours a week or so--almost 30 minutes per day! Good lord! I can't have that time back, and there's no bank of it to tap, no reserves to further deplete.

Now, this is obviously an extreme case of stress-induced lack of productivity, but I have no doubt that the chronic form of it has cost me well in excess of 2 hours a day for the duration of this semester already--and things don't look easier anytime soon. So, maybe I need to try something different. Maybe I need to take those couple of hours that I'll normally just waste and go swim or play racquetball for an hour. I should leave early and pick up Lydia at around 5:30 just to grab some extra time with her. And then, maybe half an hour of extra sleep each night will help ease the situation.

We'll see how this goes, but right now I am saying that this is where I draw the line. If I can't get done what I need to do in 35 hours each week, then chances are I'm trying to do too much. Because, at least for now, I can't do even 40 and still balance the things in life that are truly important to me: my health, my marriage, and fatherhood. Furthermore, I think that I will actually accomplish MORE by working less, and achieve greater satisfaction from my work by doing so.

Next week begins a new grand experiment.

Job Applications, Interviews, and Visits

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 03:22:43 GMT

Back in October, I noticed a job posting at the University of New Mexico. It advertised a faculty position that seemed written for me. But more importantly, the person heading up the search committee for the position had been a professor at MSU for a number of years who had always thought highly of me. Up until this point, I hadn't really thought too much about what I would do after I graduate, probably because the idea of graduating still seemed far off. But, I decided that I would apply for the position.

Then, at the end of October while visiting Denver at the annual Geological Society of America conference, I found out that Colorado School of Mines was also looking for a professor in my research area. Importantly there, too, the person heading up the search was a good acquaintance. Having two opportunities like that made me think that perhaps even more were out there, so I started looking harder.

I found literally dozens of advertised jobs all across the US for tenure-track faculty in hydrology (the study of the water, literally). I decided to apply for five: University of New Mexico, Colorado School of Mines, University of New Hampshire, Stanford (a long shot, that one), and Michigan State (in a different department). I could have applied for more, but I narrowed my criteria to jobs that I'd be happy having. I figure that if I don't get one this year, then I can take a postdoc position, burnish my credentials, and then try again in a couple of years with a much better chance.

Interview with MSU

Within a week or so of applying to MSU's Biosystems and Ag Engineering department, I got a call that they were interested in having me come interview at the end of January. The whole interview process takes about two days, and consists of breakfast, meetings, a 1-hr seminar, lunch, dinner, meetings, and coffee. Also, the meetings include both department faculty as well of lots of administrators and deans. It was an exciting two days, and I had a great visit.

The department is currently in a growth phase after a series of retirements over the last five years. It doesn't meet every requirement I might have, but then again it has plenty of potential and offers room for real growth. Perhaps the best part about the position is that it's at MSU, a school that I love, where I have dozens of established relationships with faculty in six or seven departments across campus. Here I could seamlessly transition (as seamlessly as moving from being a graduate student to a professor) to a new environment, and continue existing research projects with little interruption.

The search committee told me that they were trying to make their decision by the end of February. Well, the end of February has passed. And though I'm not worried quite yet, I'd certainly like to hear from them.

Rejection

I thought that my best chance of landing an interview (outside of MSU) would be UNM. As the weeks wore on in January, I found myself obsessively checking their website to see if they'd posted their list of candidate seminars for the position. Finally, a couple of weeks ago, I got the rejection letter. They said they'd had several "unusually qualified" candidates. I Googled the candidates chosen for interviews, one of which coincidentally or not, was a former MS student of my advisor whom I know very well (I went wine tasting with him in December of '06 in Sonoma Valley), and saw that they were indeed a well-qualified lot.

My bitter disappointment only slightly assuaged by this fact, I moved by anxiety on to the next two applications I'd sent out CSM and UNH (I'd given up Stanford long hence). Prior to hearing back from UNM, I told Cheryl that I'd given up on all of my applications; if I heard something, great, but if not, no big deal. Two days after that, no joke, I found out that CSM wanted to see my letters of recommendation (most schools only ask for a list of references upon application), and UNH said the same a few days later. This buoyed my spirits tremendously until the UNM rejection brought them right back down. Now, I'm still waiting. Both schools are starting to bring candidates in a couple of weeks from now. So if I don't hear soon, it's probably not going to be good news.

A Postdoc Opportunity

Amidst all of the faculty position application activity, I decided to apply for just one postdoctoral position. A postdoc, as it's called, is typically a 1-2 year research-only position undertaken immediately after obtaining one's doctorate--hence the name. The one I applied to was at the University of Florida, and the position seemed perfect for me.

At the beginning of February, I had a phone interview with them, and they seemed very interested. They wanted to me to come for a visit at the end of the month. So, they flew me down last week, from Tuesday through Friday. On Wednesday and and Thursday I went to a two-day symposium on water resource issues in Florida. The symposium was great, there were 450 people there from universities, private industry, and government. I got to spend 3+ days in Florida weather, and got an excellent view of the people in the department.

Prior to leaving, I was informed that they would probably make me an offer! I'm very excited about the position, even though it's not a permanent one. I still don't know if I could accept a postdoc position over a faculty position, but there may be real reasons for doing so. I should know very soon though, within the next couple of weeks. If I don't get interviews at UNH or CSM, and if MSU isn't interested in me, than we'll be headed to Florida. If MSU makes me an offer, I'll have a hard decision to make. And, if UNH or CSM want to interview me it might be another month at least before we figure everything out.

The Good Days

Sun, 20 Jan 2008 03:07:06 GMT

Sometime a few weeks ago it dawned on me that nearly every single night consisted of the same basic routine. I arrive home shortly after Cheryl and Lydia, and greet them both to big smiles (mostly Lydia there) and occasional giggles (still mostly Lydia). We laugh, play, eat, dance, splash, read, crawl, bounce, and generally have a great time for a couple of hours until its Lydia's bedtime.

Then, every other night I get to hold Lydia in my arms feeding her a bedtime bottle until she drifts off to sleep. Slowly, when she's done drinking, I wrap my arms around her, stand up and walk over to her crib. As I hold her there for just a moment, studying her peaceful sleeping face, I get a glimpse of the infinite. An incomprehensible wave of caring sweeps over us, a threatens to wash away all else. Then, I set her gently into her crib, pull her afghan up over her, and kiss her on the forehead.

Sometimes in life, wonderful moments and small joys oft repeated can become almost ordinary, commonplace. But it has been nearly nine months, and I still look forward to going home each night to laughter and love. As I walk to my car each evening in the cold dark of winter, I know that just fifteen minutes away there is a warm house with my wonderful wife and amazing daughter. Most nights, when I arrive I lock the doors behind me, sealing out the wind and the chill of the night air. The air inside soon fills with the smells of dinner preparation and the sounds of a small child's first babbled attempts at speech. He who first asked "What is the meaning of life" must not have known this: love, family, life, and home can provide a fountain which needs no replenishment.

But outside that door, past where the warm fenestral glow gives way to the pale of moonlight, dwell some who must thirst for a drink from such a fountain. Out there, the winter's dark must seem so much colder. Denied for some reason the simple joys that warm the soul they are left with so little else. To them home is not synonymous with shelter, family not simply to whom they are related, and love may at best be just a dim memory of earlier youth.

Nearly two years ago I left work to drive downtown to buy my cousin Duane a bus ticket. He did not live in Lansing, had no means of getting back to Kalamazoo where he was supposed to be staying, and had spent a very bad night with someone of bad intentions. I didn't know him well then, but in talking to him I saw two people. One was bright, articulate, and friendly--especially considering the circumstances. The other I didn't so much hear as sense. You see, someone as outwardly capable as Duane shouldn't have been in the place he was just before I picked him up.

Last year it seemed Duane's troubles had caught up with him. He wound up in a hospital for weeks. Much of that time he spent in an induced coma being rocked back and forth held upside down by a mechanical bed so that his lungs wouldn't fill with fluid and drown him. My Mom visited him a lot during that time, he happened to be in Kalamazoo then. When he finally woke up she got to see that encouraging side of Duane, too.

Maybe it was the strength he exhibited by not showing his pain. That he could seem so outwardly unaffected by the storm that was so obviously raging within perhaps prevented him from finding the help he needed. I wish I could say more, or talk to him about some of those things. Even though I'm a relative stranger, I'm still part of his family and can offer him something very few others can.

But now I'll never get the chance. Duane died last night from a drug overdose. He was 18.

On Working Weekends

Sun, 23 Sep 2007 19:25:54 GMT

One habit that I picked up in college was working on weekends, specifically Saturday morning and much of Sunday. This made very good sense at the time; weekdays were filled with socializing, soccer, study, and work. Accommodating both my desires and other demands upon my time meant working during the weekends.

Now all of eight years after forming this habit, it has become vestigial. I continue to think on Thursday and Friday at work that I could do some part of my work Saturday or Sunday. So, I go home with these plans, agonize it all Saturday morning, and then drag my feet Sunday until I can rationalize not doing it. Usually this rationalization is accompanied by some mild anger about working all damned week and then being expected (by whom, I'm not exactly sure, no one is demanding anything) to work weekends.

Nevertheless, every single weekend I come home with the same plan. And this is nothing new, it didn't just arrive with Lydia. Friday Anthony has been lying to Weekend Anthony now for a long time. Oh sure, occasionally I'll make it in to the lab and kill a few tasks. But those are the few clearings in a forest of excuses.

As part of today's rationalization, I'm deciding that the weekend work plan is dead. Not only do I have the usual mild anger, but today also determination not to go through this game every weekend in the future. I'm going to use the rest of today, guilt free, as I usually end up doing anyway. Today there are chores to do, small and large building projects to move forward on, bills to pay, babies to play with, and all of the other myriad weekend activities that have become important since leaving college.

A few years ago, I visited The Ohio State University's Astronomy department while trying to decide on my PhD track. It was an impressive environment, with dozens of top-flight professors and scads of motivated graduate students. My undergraduate advisor in astronomy at MSU, who had been at OSU's program for 20+ years, spoke glowingly of the department there. Part of his high praise was that the academic environment was so lively that on Sundays you could go in and find nearly as many doors open as during the week.

That single comment almost exclusively made my mind up for me about Astro @ OSU. No thanks. Why, I thought, should I have to work all week long (admittedly on something I really enjoy) and then feel obligated to come in Sunday to keep up with the Dr. Joneses down the hall?

The average work week of professors here in Geology at MSU is about 50 hours. Subtract this from just 80 waking hours during the five-day work week and that leaves 30 free hours. But, don't forget to subtract the mornings' ablutions: 25. And then, there's the daily commute, leaving only 20 hours at home. Then, when you get home, make dinner, take care of daily chores and clean up, there are fewer than 10 free hours remaining during the work week.

I don't know about the rest of the world, but I want more than 10 free hours per week total. Call me crazy, but I'd like to have as much free time as time spent at work. After all, free time is when I do what life is really all about. Sure, work is very important to me (I'm lucky in that regard), but so are many, many other things. I'm resigned to the fact, for now at least, that I will be working 50 or so hours per week. Maybe someday I can really cut back, but not at least for another decade or so most likely. I'm not going to get 50 free hours each week, but I'd like to get as close as possible.

Musings on Pets and Children

Mon, 10 Sep 2007 17:55:31 GMT

This weekend we visited Nick and Katie, our friends that live in the Howell area. They were very excited about the prospect of getting a new puppy sometime in the next year or so. An online quiz, ala Match.com for pets, informed them that four different Terrier breeds would best suit their needs for manageability, friendliness, and low maintenance.

My sister and her fiancee, having recently moved in together in the St. Louis area, are also planning on getting a dog sometime relatively soon. My brother and his wife already have two wonderful little Beagles. Likewise but with a lone Yorkie, have Cheryl's cousin and her husband. And the list goes on, making the incidence of married/coupled friends and family with pets nearly universal. Indeed, the complementary list is actually much shorter.

Until four months ago, Cheryl and I fell into the category of childless and married with pets. If you have been reading this for a while, you'll know how joyous the arrival of our first little kitten was two years ago. Shortly thereafter, I posted a before-and-after plot of my happiness showing a step-function increase to a new mean (in other words, my baseline happiness was higher with Isabella than without).

Our cats were then extremely important to us, and slept with us most nights. Their company was truly appreciated, and I sometimes even brought Isabella to work with me on days when the labs were largely empty.

It wasn't just our cats either. My Mom's dog, Phoebe, is so well loved by our family that she often seems more sibling than pet. Her intelligence, charm, and amazing intuition endear her to just about everyone she meets. For a very long time after moving out I missed her actively, and even after getting our cats that didn't change much.

Something did change the day we came home with Lydia, though. Our cats, while still loved, no longer mean the same thing to me. Before, I felt as if I was caring for a pair of furry little children.I feel now that I am providing a home and sustenance for a pair of dear friends. And now, I feel as if Phoebe is a member of my extended family, loved but not inseparably so. I would very much miss her if she were to pass away, but the fact that she is at my Mom's house happily living her life satisfies me until our next visit.

Pets once partially filled a need that I no longer have. And what's more, that need is now filled so completely and perfectly that I don't miss the role that pets once played in my life.

When I look back at that old relationship, it's clear to me that I was infantilizing and anthropomorphizing our pets. I came up with scads of ridiculous nicknames in what now seems to have been a futile effort to exercise my nascent parental instinct. We took pictures of each new box Isabella wedged herself in or new splaying of limbs Lena managed to find comfortable. Viewed in reverse order, those pictures provided me the chance to relive earlier days. When, for instance, during Isabella's kittenhood she would fall asleep curled against my shoulder and I would remain still so as not to wake her.

Now, I do all of those things and more with Lydia. But differently: now it feels right. Every night, when I give Lydia her bedtime bottle I burp her over my shoulder when she's done. She almost always drifts off to sleep while drinking her bottle, wakes briefly when I stand up, and then falls asleep again seconds after resting her head on my shoulder. Standing there in the comforting darkness, with her warm little body up against my own...every night that moment feels like the pinnacle of fulfillment.

For a while now, I've thought and wrote that happiness is the ultimate goal in life. Because all things important, intellectual or emotional, spiritual or secular, tangible or otherwise, ultimately affect how happy we all are. Now it seems the word happiness itself is too limited. The word "fulfillment" is closer to the true meaning of that ultimate goal.

Pursuing happiness alone is like watching a solo performance Handel's Messiah in front of a closed curtain. Standing there on the stage under spotlight, that soloist is the focus of the entire audience; her beautiful voice fills the room. The illusion thus created obscures and distracts from the otherwise unavoidable fact that behind her is an enormous curtain, drawn tight against the stage behind.

The moment Lydia arrived was for me the dropping of that curtain, her first cry the sudden and thunderous accompaniment of that soloist by the rest of the choir. The mass of astonishment and awe the entire crowd would feel at this wondrous new auditory development tried to force its way through me at that instant. The result was an experience so affecting, monumental, and incomprehensible that I have been searching for words to describe it for almost five months.

Now I understand, fulfillment is achieved not simply by one beautiful voice, but through the entire choir: sopranos, altos, baritones, basses, even the organ. There are moments in Hallelujah from Messiah, many of them in fact, where not all voices are singing in harmony. Rather, dissonance and subsequent resolution drive much of the piece. There are also moments where a single part of the choir carries the theme while the others fall silent. Viewed in isolation, those moments are incomplete and imperfect, but as a whole they create what has stood for more than 250 years as good fraction of mankind's best attempt at expressing its joy over the birth of their Saviour.

At times, dissonance seems the order of the day, and raising a child seems to me an unhappy enterprise. But every night, the resolution of that dissonance comes when her head rests on my shoulder and her soft breathing fills my left ear in consonance with the evening quiet. At other times, I am at work for much of the day, very often alone in my labors. But when I return home, the smiles I get from her and from Cheryl wash away that feeble loneliness, replacing it with something better than even its opposite. Together those experiences, both challenging and rewarding, pedestrian and sublime, are much more than simply their sum.

Cheryl and I didn't plan to a child right now, so by extension we didn't plan to have Lydia. We envisioned a few more years of nothing but the pursuit of happiness. We wanted to see the world a bit and experience it minimally encumbered, before tying ourselves down. All of this either accompanied by, or related to, our furry little faux children.

Our karaoke choir.

August Cicadas

Tue, 28 Aug 2007 03:30:11 GMT

For as long as I can remember, the drone of August cicadas has meant the return of another year of school. Few sounds evoke such a strong emotional response for me, perhaps because returning to school has always been such an important event. But through the years, the import of this annual occurrence has changed.

In my elementary years, returning to school meant returning to a place where I could really shine. School was for me then a place to show off, both in classes and on the playground. In addition to getting good grades, I was good at sports, soccer, basketball, football, and held for a time the blue ribbon in the 100 meter dash for the entire school district of Three Rivers, Michigan. Those summer cicadas meant an end to days that had peaked in excitement at least a month earlier. The return to school was exciting and eagerly anticipated.

Somewhere on the way to middle school, those August sounds changed in their meaning. After a failed stint at sixth-grade football, and seventh-grade basketball, and a loss of the 100 meter dash title to some very talented late-bloomers, athletics lost a little of their luster. Three Rivers middle school forced their students into cliques by way of a choice: band or gym. For both sixth and seventh grade I chose gym, until finally realizing that all of my friends were in band, and I no longer enjoyed the thought of sweaty wrestling with much stronger and stinkier young men.

This evolution was accompanied by a new summertime obsession: reading. I had read books before, but never like that. At the pinnacle of my prowess in the summer after seventh grade, I tackled Les Miserables, a 1400+ page book, in just under two weeks. Reading was not, however, the obsession of the more popular groups in school. Along with my absence from major sports teams, my reading habit and growing interest in computers (combined with a nasally and late-dropping vocal timbre) brought near-daily ridicule from certain individuals. Going to school became more than a bit of drudgery. Why then, not just stay home and read--I was certain I learned more from that anyway.

The summer cicadas then began to represent the end of my freedom and the resumption of something entirely less pleasant. At home I could pretend I was everything: rich, and in possession of unrivaled magical powers and a pet acid-spewing black dragon. Did I mention that I was in to fantasy books? At school, I had to avoid certain hallways, and constantly imagine new retorts to deflect the same tired-but-painful verbal assaults.

High school was entirely different. We had moved to a new district, Vicksburg, MI. The social dynamics there were not unlike Three Rivers, but I had a grand new opportunity. I could choose for myself a new persona. So I did. One night I made a crucial choice. While rereading Robert Jordan's The Shadow Rising for probably the third time, my roommates at bandcamp (trust me, band was not totally uncool) urged me to come downstairs and hang out with everyone instead of reading. Much inclined not to, my new friend Matt Becker practically insisted, and I obliged him. From that moment, I wasn't a nerdy bookish victim at school. I chose that I would be someone different, and I became that person. I'm not that my Three Rivers friends would have been my friends in Vicksburg. But I was happy there.

There was, however, one great problem with this arrangement. For three years I don't remember ever hearing the cicadas. I was so wrapped up in myself and my social life that I can't say that I took time to listen to them. Sure, I did camping and canoeing with family, but those tended to be earlier in the summer. There were other things I didn't take time for, either. My aunt Sally passed away after a month-long coma, and I had only managed to find time to visit her once. To my profound regret, I don't remember much outside of my social life from those years.

But, like all things out of balance, who I was began to disagree with who I had become. I began to spend more time reading, and found a new obsession in Space. I told my friends that I would become a billionaire by mining asteroids. The summer before my senior year I heard the cicadas, and remember them vividly. I listened to them for hours on the porch swing while reading and enjoying the surpassing beauty of my mother's garden. That August, the cicadas meant the return to a persona and a lifestyle that I didn't then realize was greatly limiting to me.

My senior year was a dark one. When all was said and done, little remained of who I had spent four years being. That summer I listened to the cicadas in anxious and uncertain anticipating of the beginning of college. The cicadas sounded like worry to me that year.

Freed from the decision I had made four years earlier, I became in my first few weeks at MSU the person that I wanted to be. I made great friends, and met Cheryl, a wonderful woman who loved me for who I truly was. From then on, the cicadas haven't meant loneliness or doubt, anxiety or even excitement. They have sounded less mournful or alarmed. Their incessant drone seems to have become somehow sweeter. The tone has taken on a surprising melodiousness despite considerable discordance. At the end of months spent with family and Cheryl, the cicadas sounded like the sunset of the last day of vacation (not entirely by metaphor, we often vacationed in August).

I've been listening to them over the last two weeks, whenever I get a chance to slow down for a minute. This year, the integrated emotional significance of the cicadas song seems to bring along a feeling of its own. Buried deep down there is excitement, muted by anxiety and reluctance, tempered by regret but stoked with anticipation. Closer to the surface bubble the richer emotions of love and fulfillment, thickened with bittersweet endings.

So many years have come and gone where the cicadas song has taken on a new meaning, why this year has that not happened even though I am (for the 20th consecutive year) returning to school? Why instead do I hear the songs of long past, stripped only of their context but not of their emotional attachments?

Lydia's arrival has become the demarcation in my life between the then and the now. Everything that happened before, all the chapters and sections of the story were suddenly bound between two covers, glued onto a spine and thrown onto the shelf as Anthony, Volume I. In creating that Volume, I have ventured more deeply and thoroughly into my memories than ever before. I now actively recall my past because it seems the only guide to what I might expect with Lydia in the years to come.

What I've found is much more fragmentary and moth-eaten than I had assumed I possessed. Remaining is more the impression of what was once there than the memory itself, accompanied by a suite of sounds, smells, and sights linked together in unpredictable ways. The predictable August drone of the cicadas is a breadcrumb trail back not to the comfort of my home, but deep into the sometimes dark and wild forest of my memories.

Grand Experiments, and Happiness

Sat, 11 Aug 2007 17:05:49 GMT

More Grand Experiments

You may remember a couple of entries back that I wrote about my "grand experiment" of riding the bus to work. Since then, I've put that experiment on hold largely because of a detour in the route that cause me to miss connections several times, meaning my ride to work was 1.25 hours instead of 0.25 in my car. Nevertheless, I plan on riding the bus at least a couple of days to work once the detour is over. Overall, the experiment was a success, though not an unqualified one.

Last year, I read a book by Eric Brende called "Better Off" (and wrote about it on anthonares.net). Better Off is about Brende and his wife living with an Amish-esque community for 18 months as a grand life experiment. Could he, a self-described techno-luster, live without technology and its trappings for that long? Turned out he could, and he was much happier for it. You see, the Amish don't reject technology, per-se, they reject technology that serves to distance individuals from their families and communities. Why replace a community act of threshing grain with the solo act of driving a mechanical combine? Sure, it increases productivity, but it turns your neighbors into strangers. The book's lessons weren't "copy me and you will be happy", for me they weren't even "reject unnecessary technology and you will be happy", but rather, reject things that you believe will only serve to distance you from your family, friends, and community.

A few months back, I came across another grand experiment; this time on the internets. Colin Beavan, a New Yorker through-and-through, convinced his wife to lead a "no impact" lifestyle. For him this means no electricity (from the grid), no purchases of new things (only used), minimal wasting of trash, washing clothes in the bathtub, composting in the closet of his apartment, and so on. He's chronicling his experiences on his blog. Colin's experiment is based on a bunch of premises about man's interaction with the environment that I don't really fully subscribe to. But it doesn't matter, I don't plan to repeat Colin's experiment. I can, nevertheless, learn lessons from him.

One of the deepest messages his blog has conveyed to me is this simple experience: Colin's two-year old daughter turning to him and saying "I am so happy right now, daddy." He's written about her saying this a couple of times, and you can bet that she wouldn't be saying that to him if they were watching TV. She said that to him while playing at the playground, and while Colin was plucking out "Puff the Magic Dragon" on a borrowed guitar. My impression of his writings aren't that Colin is some amazing prophet, rather simply that here is a family doing something radical and discovering a nugget of genuine truth. By rejecting so many of the trappings of a modern techno-centric lifestyle, they've found entertainment in human interaction.

What Makes Us Happy

We are on this planet 6.5 billion individuals. That is, we all (at least in Western society) tend to believe that we are somehow unique, or different, or special. We all use those differences to justify ignoring the lessons that others have already learned. This is one of the central messages of Daniel Gilbert's "Stumbling on Happiness". It turns out that we all are fundamentally incapable of judging for ourselves what will make us happy. Anecdote 1: Arranged marriages are more successful and just as loving as marriages for love. Anecdote 2: if you've ever dated someone that your family in friends knew was wrong for you (as I did in my much younger days), it inevitably turned out they were right. Gilbert's conclusion is that the surest path to happiness is to find people who's thinking and circumstances are similar to your own, and then listen to them about what will make you happy.

It turns out that the phrase "only I know what will make me happy" is quite wrong. If it weren't, that means all those millions who are chasing affluence and recognition would be deeply satisfied with life. But, as a rule, they aren't. We all fall into the trap of thinking that that next promotion, that new job, the bigger house, the new car, or whatever material goal we can envision, will finally make us happier. We look at our current circumstances, find something that irks us about our car, house, job, or lack of funds, and convince ourselves that correcting that flaw will correct our unhappiness.

If I ask myself what would make me truly happy with my current circumstances, I answer: spending time with Cheryl and Lydia working no more than 40 hours per week, working out or playing sports at least three times a week, seeing my friends and family regularly, continuing to have success in my research, my family staying in good overall health, having time to for deep inquiry, and living in the condo that we have so lovingly molded to ourselves.

But, if I ask myself what makes me unhappy, the list is different, its: lack of extra money to spend, Cheryl not having a full-time job, not having enough time to get my research done, and the frustration of constant impending deadlines at work.

The list of what makes me unhappy SHOULD simply be a list comparing my current circumstances to what would make me truly happy. But it isn't, they are different. The crucial point is this: I would venture that most of us take our list of unhappinesses and turn them into a set of goals that we believe achieving will then give us happiness. If that were true, I would end up spending more time at work to fend off deadlines and get more research done, I would try to make more money perhaps by getting a "real" job, and I would constantly push Cheryl about finding a full-time job. That, right there, is a recipe for failing to achieve nearly every goal on my happiness list.

The Two Themes Meet

So here's where the lessons from the grand experiments and Gilbert's work fuse into a deeper understanding: by listening and reading about the experiences of others and what brought them genuine happiness, I can make a list of what will truly make me happy. From that list, and not from the list of what makes me unhappy, I then develop goals and a plan to achieve them. This seems like such a small difference in concept, but the difference in result is everything.

If I actually achieved everything on my happiness goal list and found myself still unhappy with something, then I revisit my list and start again. But, if I did it the other way, and knock off items on the unhappiness list, I would find new items constantly popping up. I would be constantly and eternally pursuing an ever changing set of goals, to my ultimate failure.

The happiness list is nearly unchanging; it's timeless. My list is very similar to yours, and ours to our parents, grandparents, and ancestors time immemorial. It is a list about which the world's greatest works of literature are written, and to which millenia of philosophical inquiry have been devoted. Maybe the greatest challenge about it all is simply telling the two lists apart, and then making the effort to set the right goals.

What this means for me is that I am amazingly seemingly undeservedly in possession of virtually everything on my happiness list. I can't say why I've been so lucky to be in this situation, but I know that my choices could easily lose it all. Here I am at 26, and all I desire to achieve is to maintain the status quo, plus a few games of racquetball every week? How can that be, shouldn't I be in the process of working towards some greater goal? Shouldn't Progress be what drives me out of bed too early each morning and keeps my eyes open late into the night?

This isn't where I thought I would be. It's not what I thought I would be doing. And I had no idea that I would be so close to my goals so very early in life. And now, because I see it that way, I can make the right decisions.

There Goes July!

Tue, 31 Jul 2007 02:42:14 GMT

Three weekends ago, Cheryl and I spent a couple of hours watching a show called "Property Ladder" on TLC about buying homes and reselling them for profit after fixing them up, flipping is the popular term. Realtors call it rehabbing. Three days ago, I answered a call from the center of the Hardy Dam reservoir in northern Michigan notifying me that our bid on a "new" condo had been accepted--we were soon to be the proud owners of a second unit in the Fairfield Place condominiums. Or more accurately, my parents were to be the owners.

In a wacky bit of hubristic entrepreneurialism, I wrote an email to my parents and Cheryl two weeks ago identifying a business opportunity: a condo on sale for $60,000 (we got our for $73,000, and that was cheap) soon to go up on auction could be repaired for about $8,000 and resold for around $85,000. Money was to be made, easy fast and fat. Everyone was interested, and we went to the auction last week. We were the only bidders, so we put in a ridiculously low offer, $46,200. The bank who owned the place accepted it, no negotiation, no counter-offers. We were flabbergasted.

Now, then, comes the fun part. Our schedule calls for about 5 weekends of work, perhaps as many as seven, and about 12 hours between Cheryl and I during the week. This time, we'll do it right: paint sprayers to save time, simplifying plans for finishing the basement, and all-at-once demolition and cleaning. When it's finished, every surface in the place will be scrubbed, repainted, refloored, or retextured. Then, if it sells quickly (a big if) and we liked the work, maybe we turn around and do it again. Bad times in the housing market mean foreclosures. And foreclosures in commodity housing like these condominiums means deep discounts for buyers.

Aiding our new project will be the lamentable fact that, as of right now, Cheryl is without a teaching position in the fall. I can't say either of us is surprised really, given her rather sharp limitation of only having perhaps 12-15 positions to apply for with well into the hundreds of other teachers applying for the same set. The odds were long, but there are still some opportunities that may bear fruit.

The very real upside to Cheryl not having gainful employ for the fall is that our daughter will not have to go into daycare just yet. From my perspective this is wonderful, because it turns out that my wife is a fantastic mother. Thanks in very large part to the attention and care she lavishes on our daughter, Lydia is doing amazingly well. She is big, strong, and very active. Her development is so rapid that day-to-day she gains new abilities. But best of all, Lydia is absolute sunshine all day long.

She has a huge full-face smile that greets us in the morning, and a sleepy, curled lips-around-the-bottle grin that bids us goodnight. In between she giggles, laughs, squeals, and babbles. She loves games like hanging her head upside down from one of our laps, or riding her mama's legs while Cheryl sings bizarre songs like "Ride a Cockhorse" (or "Ride a C**khorse" in the iTunes Store). That vivacious love of her parents and of life is something that I just did not expect, and I am constantly amazed by. I don't think it's something that just happens with all children. Rather I believe it is because of the environment we have in our home--but mostly because of Cheryl.

I just don't know if she would remain so happy if we put her in daycare a month from now. She's still so so young. At night she curls her legs into the fetal position when she falls asleep drinking her last bottle. She just learned how to suck her thumb to calm herself when she wakes up at night. She doesn't know how to deal with strangers yet, and turns into a very suspicious and thoughtful-looking child when new people come around. She can't even sit up unsupported, or turn herself over, let alone locomote in any real fashion. I just can't imagine trusting someone to take our vulnerable and extremely impressionable infant daughter from us for half of every work day.

So for now, she is at home with the person most qualified in her care. What happens in the next six to nine months is completely up in the air at this point. Cheryl may have a job, I may have a postdoc position. I may not have graduated, or I may be applying for tenure-track faculty positions. We may be living in our current condo, or have decided to move into the "new" one. Lydia might be at home, or at daycare, or who knows what else. And those are just the likely possibilities.

Time was I could plan ahead with precision and relative accuracy. Turns out maybe that's not for the best after all. All that planning meant delayed gratification--sacrifice today for the good of tomorrow. Two years of hand-wringing decisions on my career ended up leaving me where I started, doing something I had never considered doing for a PhD. And plans have a way of being upset, or at least dramatically upended.

Having Lydia moved me from the firm ground of apparent control of my life to the uneven seas of the unknown. Now rather than trying to find my road and avoid any detours, I just have to set my rudder and hope the currents and winds are favorable. But maybe this way has more to offer. After all, The Odyssey could never have taken place on land.

A Grand Experiment

Thu, 05 Jul 2007 23:01:34 GMT

Last Thursday I decided to do something different--I would start taking the bus to work. It's not as if I've been ignoring the bus, or alternative means of transport like my bike. It's just that they're not very convenient. The bus route requires two different bus lines, necessitating a transfer in between, and at least 35 minutes on the bus plus wait time. The bike ride requires 30 minutes or so, and, well, a bike. After biking last summer to work I left my bike locked only to itself outside my condo--that was the last time I saw it.

So, last Friday morning I got up and walked the 10 minutes to the stop. I waited for 20 minutes for the bus (because of my stupidity in reading the schedule), rode it for 25 minutes because I missed my stop. Waited 10 minutes for the transfer to the next bus, and then rode it for 20 minutes to campus, and walked 5 minutes to work. Total time: 1 hr, 30 minutes. That's 1 hour and 5 minutes longer than my total drive-plus-walk time. The first day was a bust, but it was my fault. Cheryl was picking me up in the afternoon, so I'd have to wait until Monday to try again.

Monday and Tuesday both went better, and my bus ride turns out to be between 50 minutes and 1 hour in either direction (I waited for 15 minutes for the bus on Wednesday before I realized that it was July 4th and the busses weren't running, and why the hell was I going in to work anyway?). I get to read for at least 30 minutes each way, which makes the bus time-neutral compared to driving. My experiment actually means that I have to leave home sooner, and come home a bit later than I otherwise would. But, it focuses my attention on where I am. I'm either home, or I'm at work. And the time in between allows me to transition from thinking about work to thinking about spending time with my family. So, paradoxically, I actually feel like I have more time than I did before.

But there's something else about the bus that makes it so attractive to me. Is it the humbling 5 minutes of walking on an unpaved track along Miller road to the bus stop? Is it the standing or sitting on a bench waiting for a bus in full view of the rest of the cardriving world? Is it the fact that I'm suddenly tied to a much more fixed schedule of going to and from work? Is it the practical savings of bus-riding? I calculated that, if we can get rid of the second car, we can save about $2500 dollars each year on a fully-depreciated car. A newer vehicle would mean much more savings. Plus, I drive less, which means I pollute less (though all of my driving is carbon offset anyway).

On a deeper level, I feel as if I've simplified my life somehow. I have long felt as if all of my possessions are an anchor ponderously scraping along the seabed of life, and slowing my pursuit of that which is truly important. I guess I can't quite quantify why I should feel better in giving up a convenience, but I do. I don't feel superior in any way, quite the opposite. I like my non-threateningly strange passengers on the bus. I like that I feel more connected to my community. And I like that I'm experiencing my world at "ground-level" in a humbling and re-humanizing way. It is just a decision that feels right to me in a perhaps indescribable way.

On Monday I found myself browsing urban condominiums online, thinking that moving downtown would greatly simplify my bus ride. Plus, the condominium would force us to further reduce our possessions, and put us closer to the people we want to see, and experiences we want to have. But then I stopped and thought that this impulse: to find some object or person closer to what it is we think we want, may be just the opposite of the reason I like the bus route so much. The bus route is long, and kind of humiliating, and probably will be really uncomfortable 3 seasons out of 4. But it takes what I have--my lovely home--and removes what I don't like--my stress inducing daily drive (I'm not a very calm driver)--leaving me a better, happier life. Buying a new expensive downtown condo would be cool, but would trade a new and considerable financial burden for some vision of future simplicity.

Right this very moment, I'm sitting out on my back deck surrounded by beautiful flowers and voluptuously ripening tomatoes. Sun-drenched trees cast dappled shade across the grass, an my baby daughter leis sleeping in her chair at my feet, lulled to sleep by the soft rush of breezy evening. My Sam Adams Cherry Wheat has left a ring of condensation on the glass surface of my patio table. The neighbors across the corner are just starting to eat dinner out on their deck, and a small parade of dogs and their people-friends have passed by while I've been writing this entry. The forecast warns of thunderstorms, but the sky is a brilliant blue--and the low clouds in the west promise an awesome sunset. The only thing that could make this moment brighter would be my girl, but she's off watching a movie with friends to celebrate getting a job interview for this fall.

For now, then, I'm going to continue to ride the bus. I don't know if I'll ever be able to get rid of the car entirely, but I'll try my best. But for now, I'm not too concerned about that. Instead, I think I'm going to pick up Lydia and cuddle with her, she just woke up and I've not seen her all day.

An Official Apology

Sun, 24 Jun 2007 15:51:30 GMT

Cheryl and I received an ice cream maker as a gift for our wedding now almost four years ago. Since then, it has sat collecting dust in various storage rooms and now our basement. It wasn't something we'd wanted, and didn't see a place for it in our life. As late as last week I'd thought about giving it away on the local Freecycle group.

But for some reason yesterday I had the idea of making some ice cream to bring over to Nick and Katie's. We'd picked up some Michigan strawberries, and I figured I'd make some of my Mom's homemade hot fudge to go with vanilla ice cream. So why not try making some?

Our only experience with homemade ice cream before came from Cheryl's Aunt's, which is okay, but just not delicious. Nevertheless, I thought I'd make vanilla ice cream to go with the toppings. The recipe called for 2 cups of milk, 2 of half and half, 4 of heavy cream, 1 3/4 cups of sugar, and some vanilla and salt. Nothing hard. We heated the milk, added the sugar and salt, and then dumped it in with the creams. After cooling for about 20 minutes, we put it in the ice cream maker bucket and poured 7 lbs of ice and some rock salt around the ice cream bucket and let er rip. BTW the ingredients cost about $10, and the yield is about 3/4 of a gallon.

After a little less than an hour, the cream had partially frozen, and we took out the stirrer (called a dasher), and repacked the ice cream for further hardening. That gave us a chance to try it before we went to Nick and Katie's.

Holy crap it was delicious.

It was better than anything I had ever put in my mouth, I'm pretty sure. Except maybe some creme brulee, and maybe a couple of other premier desserts. By the time we put that homemade fudge sauce and crushed Michigan strawberries on top of a couple of scoops served in a chilled martini glass, it was the best thing ever, hands down.

So here's my official apology both the the unnamed giftors of the ice cream maker, and to the maker itself for my years of neglect. You're now on the A-list, in a very secure position. Together we will soon be making chocolate, rocky road, mint chocolate chip, and of course more vanilla. We will have good times together, and make up for what was lost.

A Very Fine Week

Sat, 16 Jun 2007 01:58:44 GMT

We have had incredible weather all week long. Mid-to-high 80's, sunshine, and gorgeous evenings. The community pool has been busy at all times of the day, and everyone is in a good mood because of the weather.

Monday evening Cheryl and I ate out first meal of the year outside on the patio. We grilled some pork chops and asparagus, both rubbed with some cajun seasonings and drizzled with olive oil, and Cheryl blended us some delicious orange-banana-peach smoothies. It was getting later in the evening, the time when everything quiets down a little bit and the night sounds start to come out. That is what I love about summertime.

I took Wednesday morning off, and dusted off the golf clubs in preparation for the annual Father's Day golf outing down in Mason. For only having golfed once last year (rather dismally) I didn't do too badly. I nearly hit a guy while chipping onto the putting green, but he seemed unfazed.

I also took Thursday morning off, and went in to the dentist. MSU offers a really discounted dental "insurance" program if you go to this special clinic. The place I went was on Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd.--which should tell you everything you need to know about the quality of it. It was clean and professional, but very low budget. I had been once to the campus health center for a dental cleaning, and left it bloodied, sore, and demoralized. This, by contrast, was nearly painless thanks to some ultrasonic plaque-removing tool. And I had to laugh at the "Dr." who bumbled about the place flirting with nurses and pretending to squint at my X-rays.

Thursday night brought another fantastic meal outside. I had marinated a couple of pounds of pork tenderloin earlier in the day with some barbecue sauce, olive oil, and a splash of vinegar. Those went on one side of the grill, while some apples went on the other. I sliced and peeled four gala apples, wrapped them in aluminum foil, sprinkled them with cinnamon, and topped them with butter and a bit of water. The end result was cinnamon apples that practically fell of the fork, just shy of applesauce. We only ate about half the pork, the rest will be pulled and turned into sandwiches tomorrow.

Today, I took the afternoon off, and had a great time with Lydia. My brother and his wife were in town to visit their parents, who live on the west side of Lansing. They invited us over to swim and have some dinner. We all went over and Lydia and I swam in their pool. Lydia had gotten a cute little bathing suit from them a month or so ago, and it fit perfectly. She did okay in the water; we motorboated around for a bit, and generally splashed around until she had her fill. Cheryl captured most of it on the camera, all of the parts where Lydia seemed to be hating it anyway. Tom cooked us some burgers on the grill, and we stuck around and chatted with him for a while out on their patio. On Sunday he's going golfing with us for the first time ever. He just picked up golfing this year, presumably to bill clients while also not really working.

And now, Cheryl is baking cookies, and Lydia is sleeping in her swing, and we are going to watch an episode of the Daily Show.

There it is. A very fine week. Small things, little experiences. Just what summer is all about.

Wait!! There is one very BIG thing. My sister is getting married! She called me on Wednesday with the happy news. Her new fiance, Travis, is the kind of guy that people get disappointed about when they hear he's not coming. Our whole family feels that way, and it's great to see her with someone like that.

Drinking from the Firehose

Mon, 11 Jun 2007 03:28:21 GMT

Cheryl and I are just now catching a few short breaths seven weeks into this whole experience. In that time, Life, with a capital L, has flow at us so fast that it's all we can do to hold our ground in the gale. But, slowly I think, we have made some progress.

Lydia is growing bigger, as babies often do. She is smiling, and almost laughing, when we play little games with her. She loves to read with us (including the books sent to us by our friends), and we are both happy to oblige. We all have been getting full nights' sleep--mostly. Parents of newborns don't exaggerate when they say they are sleep deprived, but we've been lucky that the girl will sleep for 6-7 hours at a stretch most nights.

Cheryl and I just got back from a first: we went to see a movie! Oceans Thirteen. It was quite good. Our wonderful neighbors watched Lydia for us. I called them on Friday, and asked for a favor that I really was not owed. And when it came time to go to the movie--after they had served us burgers and brats for dinner--they encouraged us to go even though we had been thinking against it. Neighbors and friends like that don't come along very often. Too bad we can't convince them to take their condo off the market and stay a while longer.

That complete kindness is something neither Cheryl or I really expected. We have received so many gifts and offers of help from friends and family, and even Cheryl's students at school, that we have more thank-yous to send out than after our wedding! And after so many years of independence, we've leaned on our parents--Lydia's grandparents--and they have held us both up. This is the community I've been writing so long about. This is why we stayed here instead of going somewhere else for my graduate school.

But that progress comes on top of some really big emotional challenges for us, or at least for me. The months leading up to Lydia's birth were very exciting--very goal oriented. Cheryl's simultaneous completion of her pregnancy and her teacher training made for a stressful and busy period. I was, as always, swamped with research for some imminent deadline that had passed long ago. And when Lydia came, it should have felt like reaching the finish line, but it didn't.

Instead, Cheryl now faces the uncertainty of finding a job for the fall. I face a new "deadline" of defending my PhD thesis by December, along with some uncertainty in funding for a postdoc afterward. And we both have a tremendous new responsibility. I wish I could describe the enormity of this beautiful little burden that we have placed upon ourselves. But describing experiences requires metaphor, and metaphor requires comparative experience. This is a whole new paradigm.

It's terrifyingly exciting. Every morning I wake up and go into Lydia's room completely elated to see her. Every night I go to bed exhausted, mind racing, trying to absorb the events of the day. The hours between, mundane or novel, still feel different than all the hours before she was born.

If you have noticed a lot of emotions referenced in this entry, it's because I am emoting nearly every minute of the day. Work takes every ounce of my mental energy. Housework takes what's left of my physical strength. And for some reason I cannot seem to turn down the emotional volume of everything that happens. So, right now, for instance, I feel like I've just returned from a concert having sat all day in the sun right in front of the speakers. Every day is like this.

A few years ago, I read a book of my Dad's about Buddhism for nonbelievers. The primary message I took from that book was to unhitch your well-being from your emotions. Instead, let the emotions wash over you; experience every one, but don't let it affect your inner tranquility. I think I may need to pick that one up again.

Still Adjusting...

Fri, 04 May 2007 19:49:07 GMT

Well, we've been home for almost a week and a half now, and it's safe to say that we still don't quite have the hang of things. Last week with Cheryl's Mom in town, we thought we had a hang of things; feeding was going well, she was sleeping between 5 and 7 hours straight at night, and didn't cry too awfully much.

But, on Tuesday we went to the pediatrician for Lydia's weekly weigh-in, and she had yet to gain any weight. She was holding steady at 8 lb. 14 oz., just where she was the previous week, and 11 oz. down from her birth weight. The nurse wasn't too concerned, but she and the doctor recommended that we go from feeding every three hours to every two, even at night. And, Cheryl had to pump first then bottle-feed, so we knew how much food she was getting.

To make a long and potentially boring story short, this was not at all what we had expected, and now we had to completely change our routines yet again. By yesterday we'd gotten a hang of things pretty much, and I thought maybe I'd have a chance to make it back to work today. That was, until Lydia decided to be awake and unhappy from about 2-5 AM, and I made a run to Meijer's in there somewhere. Finally, we rolled out of bed finally at noon today!

We haven't been up earlier than 9 AM since the day we took her home, and that was not a full night's sleep. We've been heading to bed at about 10 PM, but not getting to bed until midnight for one reason or another. That means that over half of our day is spent in our bedroom or in the nursery trying to get her to sleep or eat.

On a rather promising note, one thing we've discovered holds her attention and calms her when she's upset with no other apparent reason is reading. She loves looking at the pictures and words, and I'm sure the steady rhythm of our voices is soothing as well. In fact, it seems like she gets bored at times, and interaction in the form of reading or playing with toys in front of her is what she wants. Two days ago I re-enacted a scene from the Chronicles of Narnia where Aslan creates Narnia by singing using the magnetic animals on the wall in the nursery. She was enthralled for 15 minutes by a virtuous performance including yodeling and some rather modern interpretations of that venerable classic.

Those interactions with her have been so exciting, and I can't wait for them to become richer over the coming months and years. So much about her is optimistic, in the very best way. I get to enjoy the wonderful moments "in the now" with her laying on my chest sleeping curled up like a bug--like right this moment. And I get to anticipate the days when I can talk to her and show her the world, and then learn about it all over again from her perspective.

Everything is so completely different than it was before, but I wouldn't want to go back to it for anything. I really enjoyed our life two weeks ago, but even if I could live it just the same with Lydia in it I wouldn't want to. I relish the role I am playing right now as her father, and its in that role that I feel I have room to mature and better myself. On the contrary, the twentysomething graduate student was getting a little limiting.

But for now, it's time to go dress Lydia for the day in a cute purple outfit that says "Daddy's Little Princess", and then give her the next meal.

A Newly-Foreign Land

Thu, 26 Apr 2007 15:00:51 GMT

If you haven't heard from me via email already, Cheryl had our baby last Sunday. Her name is Lydia Rose Kendall, and she is a big, healthy baby girl. You can see some pictures here if you'd like.

There are so very many things that I could say about the experience of watching our child being born, but I don't think I could express my feelings without sounding hackneyed or cliched. So, instead let me just say this: everything that everyone ever told me about how having a new baby made them feel is absolutely correct. It changes your life--in an instant. I could feel the very moment that change occurred, as if my brain had been massively and permanently rewired.

But also, all of my experience with babies and children had come, of course, from other people's children. Theirs are not mine, and their experiences will be similar in kind to my own, but different in detail. Those details are what makes it all so wonderful. Lydia is OUR perfect little wonderful angelic being. She will grow up to become a person molded by her genetic endowment and shaped by her experiences. Those experiences will be, in a very large part, ones that are moderated and guided by Cheryl and I. Thus, the person that Lydia will become is inextricably linked with who Cheryl and I are.

Both Cheryl and I had thought ourselves mentally prepared for this, given nine months of anticipation. But when the moment of birth arrived we both found ourselves in completely uncharted waters. We have not the slightest idea of how to care for this beautiful little creature, whose very existence depends on our care. We don't have a license, and our training is mostly informal and slip-shod at best. I can't believe they let us do this!

When we drove home from the hospital, Cheryl remarked how even though we've driven the stretch of Pennsylvania Ave. between our condo and the hospital more times than we would care to count, everything seemed totally foreign. And she was right. The sunlight that drenched the landscape seemed glaring and novel to our eyes that had become adjusted to the dim of of our hospital room. The buildings seemed utterly foreign and and businesses unrecognizable. The potholes in the road were not only new to me, but every one deep enough to swim in. But most of all what was different to me was Cheryl riding in the backseat next to a totally new human being that we had created.

Only two weeks to go!

Mon, 09 Apr 2007 01:54:44 GMT

Cheryl's due date is now less than 2 weeks away, on April 21st! We've got pretty much everything ready at this point, and we're both terribly excited about it. A few weeks ago we made one of those construction paper chains that kids make around Christmastime. You know, where you tear off one link each day until Christmas. Well, since we don't know the sex, or the exact date, we put pink, blue, and white on there (just to keep us guessing) and included plenty of links. Today is a blue day, which of course means absolutely nothing other than we can pretend the baby is a boy today.

On Tuesday we went to see Ben Folds in concert at the MSU Auditorium for my birthday (back in February, this was the present). We were surrounded by thousands of very enthusiastic fans, all of whom appeared too young to be out without their parents' permission. Seriously, when did Cheryl and I get so old that we were looking to find people bald spots and grey hair to comfort ourselves that we weren't entirely out of our element? Nevertheless, Ben Folds put on an excellent show as always, and even handled the pedal falling off MSU's Steinway with aplomb and showmanship.

But, the big news of the week was that I was offered and accepted a postdoctoral fellowship (postdoc) with my current advisor starting next January. I just have to graduate sometime this year, which shouldn't be too hard I guess. I just have to take my competency exams (comps), which consist of four 4-hour written exams and an oral follow up from my committee members. That should happen sometime in May or June. And of course I have to finish my research. Finally, there is the Thesis itself. My advisor's philosophy on the whole PhD thesis is that, with few exceptions very few people will ever read it, so it shouldn't be some highly polished product. Instead, it should consist of an introductory chapter, followed by chapters taken in whole or in part from publications resulting from the PhD research. So, that way I focus on the publications that will be necessary for a future job search and leave the writing until the last minute. Sounds like a great idea!

With the postdoc, and Cheryl beginning her job search, we will finally both be earning real salaries commensurate (at least partly) with our skills, training, and education. That is to say, after a total of eight additional years of training outside of our B.S. degrees, we will be earning just slightly less than those starting engineering salaries we qualified for back in 2003. Ah, the rewards of higher education. But of course, I wouldn't trade my job for anything. Actually, that's not true. There are all sorts of great jobs out there. Rather, I wouldn't trade the choices I have made for the choices that would have been required for me to get to those other great jobs.

My new appointment will last for two years, so I will be in Lansing until at least January of 2010. And then, Cheryl and our no-longer-so-little child will fly off to our new life somewhere else in our brand new hovercar that I'll have purchased on my professor's salary. After all, it'll be 2010, why the hell wouldn't there be hovercars?