That Old Feeling

No real reason for the image, except that I enjoy Samurai Jack, and it's another cartoon I've gotten Kate to like too. Nothing like Metalocalypse last year, though, which was one of those unlooked-for grand slams that come along every now & then in a really good relationship. You know, where something you just offhandedly do or show to the other person, winds up utterly captivating them.

In the fall of 2008 I'd come to like, quite a bit, that blockily animated show about the impssibly successful group of very stupid death metal musicians in the band Dethklok. It's a good-natured show, with good-natured characters (with minor but important--in terms of screen time versus impact--exceptions). These good-natured characters, the guys in the band, inhabit a frequently dark and grotesque, but always privileged, world. They've got the long hair, drab clothes and aggressive expressions of heavy metallers, but underneath all that bark is very little bite. In fact, the guys are basically Care Bears.

But the show is predicated on murder. There's lots of careless, carefree death in this cartoon--horrendous, accidental, burning-torsos-severed-limbs-and-impalements-type death. The guys indirectly cause most of it, and are generally unconcerned, but that's where their stupidity and privilege factor in. Besides, it's all about their music--looking for what's dark and brutal in life. So the show is basically a combination of Blue Man Group, death metal, and death.

How was I to know that Kate would fall in love with the show almost instantly? I've kind of stalled out on the Pup & Ben series, though I'm on the verge of that vague part where we had several dates in a short span of time and our recollections would start to markedly differ (part of the reason I hesitate)--but on one night, I brought Kate over to my place to listen to a bunch of music (I introduced her to my favorite--Eva Cassidy--and then introduced her to one of her now-favorites, Dougie MacLean).

It was getting late, and we'd listened to enough music for a while, so I fired up a Metalocalypse episode. I think it was Girlfriendklok, where Nathan (the lead singer) has become abjectly whipped by a coldhearted girlfriend and is now neglecting the band. So the boys decide to do a little shock therapy on him. At one point, they shock him electrically, while he's tied to a chair, and the animation of Nathan's hair flared in all directions at once, his head bouncing back and forth, and his "wrrbbb-bb-lll--gghh--bbll--aghh--bbbrr--gghll--aahhgh!" voicevoer left me helpless with laughter. (Yes, you'd need to see it to imagine it well. But as physical humor goes, I found it pretty entertaining.)

Kate laughed hard too.

So she was hooked. She proceeded to buy me both seasons' DVDs, which we've since watched many times. Many times.

(For the record, we're both highly disappointed in Season 3, the supposed conclusion (there are genuinely evil characters out to demolish the band, and events are coming to a head). We both assume the creators know what they're doing, since they did put out seasons 1 & 2, after all, but there's no death. The feeling's gone. Murder, and with it the comedy, is missing. In its place is a bad sitcom, with the characters getting steadily angrier at each other and learning very trite lessons about themselves. The show has traded brutalness--comic dysfunction--for emotional brutality. It's missing its zazz. They have half a season to get it back.)

Which brings us to Samurai Jack. I'm not sure where he'd rank on the list of Kate's favorite characters--surely Dr. Gregory House or Kwai Chang Caine would be #1 and the other a close second, but whether Jackie's moved ahead of the boys (based on four strong seasons as opposed to just two), I couldn't say.

But to lay the premise of the show, I'll let one of the main characters speak his own words:

"Long ago in a distant land, I, Aku, the shape-shifting Master of Darkness, unleashed an unspeakable evil! But a foolish samurai warrior wielding a magic sword stepped forth to oppose me. Before the final blow was struck, I tore open a portal in time and flung him into the future, where my evil is law! Now the fool seeks to return the the past, and undo the future that is Aku!"

It's not hard to tell, in the top image, which is Jack and which is Aku. And for your trivia lovers out there, aku is the Japanese word for evil.

The show has garnered many awards for its overall quality--drawing, soundtrack, writing. The landscapes are consistently magnificent--drawn in many different styles, depending on the setting--the dialog is minimal and clever, and the music is a graceful fusion of traditional Japanse kodo drumming and techno (with other elements added depending on the episode). Jack's character itself is exposed by many different lights, some illustrating basic (if caricatured) concepts of the samurai mentality, and most highly comic for the outlandish circumstances this very traditional, cliched character finds himself in. The future is a mixture of technology, magic, heavy industry and still-surviving pockets of nature--with the occasional dose of reverence for (always slightly ridiculous) traditional mythology.

It's something Kate can enjoy, primarily for the propriety and courage of its main character.

We've been watching lots of DVDs the past few months, since our going-out budget is gone for the time being. Now that I'm back to part-time--the second job was more of a contract appointment, and that specific contract has been fulfilled--we're once again out of the frying pan and back into the fire. (If not for the wireless bandwidth she and I are stealing from an unsuspecting neighbor, we'd be almost completely out of internet touch these days.)

So I'm back to having an upset stomach most of the time and staring anxiously at the wooden ceiling planks overhead at night, wondering how many months we can ignore half our bills and slowly fall behind on the rest. It's hard to think of myself as any kind of success--it's hard to think much of any future beyond the next billing cycle--in this state of affairs.

Preparing to work at Ashkelon, and start drawing together knowledge and resources to begin surveying there and start my cultural oceanography career in earnest, seems like empty bravado, more to trick myself than anything else. Confidence is hard to come by.

It's great, for herself and a nice lift for me too, that Kate's gotten involved with a sign language learning service, Signing Time. They market the Baby Signing Time products, like the videos which Eva's already seen many times (and still enjoys...like us & Metalocalypse. : ) I don't want to tell Kate's story for her, if she ever blogs again, but I will say that having the chance to use her signing again, and develop herself into an educator (since she's a born teacher), as well as going through the anxious process of becoming an entrepreneur, is all fantastic for her.

She never quite believed my assurances--and granted, I'm hardly an authority on ASL--that she'd knock their socks off. Just from Kate's own descriptions of her experiences signing and working with the deaf, and her descriptions of how she related to students and teachers last summer, I'd've been shocked if she didn't do well. Kate's empathy and instinct to communicate are too strong not to shine through any means. So I could make an educated guess that she'd knock their socks off--and she did. But to say more would be to intrude too far into her story.

So it's great having Kate feeling newly empowered, enthusiastic about what she's going to be doing, thinking tactically and strategically about her career--not to mention, helping out the family finances. One-income families are a rarity these days, and when I can't even find a full-time job, the results are bad.

Not to harp on money. It's a necessary part of life, if you engage with modern society. The problems we face are mostly of my own creation (due to things I've bought), regardless of the job market. After surviving for one full year with spotty income, my confidence has grown about being able to go on surviving like this, but a quiet sense of futility, in my abilities now and in my hopes for the future, likewise grows. Will it be possible to attact enough money to build a foundation for cultural oceanography work? Will we hold on to this condo, let alone buy a larger home on a plot of land? Is the middle-class life in this country headed for extinction?

Gloomy questions, the kind of uncertainty that's been haunting my brain for nearly two years.

So we have more quality family time at home, watching movies (thanks again for the Netflix, Cori!) and old DVD's of mine that I think Kate will enjoy. (I don't see her going for animes like Cowboy Bebop or Neon Genesis Evangelion--flashy, futuristic stories about characters isolated from one another within their own minds, but with sweet action sequences.) Even sprung for Season 2 of Kung Fu, though the simple shaolin warrior does get slightly tiresome at times. He's sort of like Samurai Jack, minus the magic sword and preposterous plots, plus more complete character development. It gets a little dry. I require a certain amount of silliness and hard action.

So here we are--hanging on, enjoying our life together even though my nerves are often strained. And that's what I like least--that this perpetual anxiety and fearful reserve might settle into my character and become a lifelong trait. That's why I need to keep working on things for the future--like Ashkelon. Like building the business plan for my laboratory. A little bit of bravado isn't a bad thing.

Soy = Teriyake?

This was one of those days. In a few ways, not all. Work was normal enough (though I had to learn a few mapping operations on the fly, something I find embarrassing, even though I didn't bill myself as an expert. But running somewhat scared to start off a job is probably a good thing). No weather or traffic hangups, the car ran normally, I didn't fart during a meeting or anything.

The trouble started when I got home. Maybe it was an omen for how smoothly my evening would go, when I didn't see the 4Runner in the parking lot out front, so I assumed Kate was out shopping, or possibly at the gym, and reacted with almost unpleasant surprise when I saw her at my desk (having organized and rearranged it while I was gone).

"Um...where's the Toyota?"

"What?" she replied, echoing my slight stress.

"It's not out front."

Well, I checked out front a minute later, and there it was, but on the other side of the parking lot, not near where Kate ordinarily likes to park (close to the building so it's not so far to carry the baby seat). She hadn't been out at all today, so she hadn't moved the car from where we parked it Sunday evening, when lots of other folks had already taken better spots. Oopsie on my part.

Monday's her yoga day, and I've taken to going to the gym solo, though it means I get to lug the baby along, and I'm limited to one hour total before I need to pick her up from child care. (And going to the Y between 5:30 and 6 means I'll be doing plenty of lugging, since the parking lot is pretty near full. Bringing Eva in and out is a decent addition to a workout itself.)

Only tonight, I'd neglected to take a whiff from my daily asthma inhaler (got a mild form of it while working last year in Louisiana), so after just 7 minutes of running my ribs were aching and I was losing breath. So I bagged out of the cardio and went to do some squats. Bad idea...my lungs felt down to about 3/4 capacity, and I was starting to feel lightheaded and nauseous. So I called it a night, coughed my way through a brief hot-tub soak, and went to pick up the little girl.

She was scrambling and crying again tonight, not having burst her diaper like last time, but still pretty unhappy. A bit of singing calmed her down, but once I stopped, she picked right back up for me. Eh, live with it, she usually shuts up in the car, so I toted her back out to the Toyota, and true to form, she was asleep within minutes.

Though she did show a glimpse of that childrens' cunning. She was quiet as I carried her--as she almost always is while in motion--but once I'd snapped the seat into place inside the car, she exploded again. A kiss on the forehead did nothing. Eh, whatever again, I shut the door.

She went silent immediately.

I opened up the door on the other side to deposit the diaper bag and my duffel on the seat, and she looked over at me, and started crying again. I spoke her name but she wasn't impressed and went on sobbing. So I closed the door and she quieted down again.

I opened the driver's door and got in, and the little creature started sniffling again.

Kate and I have noted the buildup in her alarm level these days, from merely conversational to asking insistently for attention, then becoming frustrated and gaining volume, followed by manufacturing a cry. Then might follow a full-out cry, or else she'll give up and quiet back down for a little bit. This time, once the car got moving, she quieted down. By the time I reached the supermarket (free coffee!), she was fast asleep. Punched herself out again.

My plan to Kate had been teriyaki chicken. We've been desperate to get away from the plain, baked-chicken-or-pork routine we'd been in since last summer, and a bit of Japanese stir fry seemed one good way to do it. Only I pulled the kind of move only a husband can at the grocery store...and I consider myself a reasonably intelligent grocery shopper.

See, in the Asian section, the cheap (La Choy, baby!) sauce bottles are on the bottom shelf, and the soy sauce bottles look identical--same size, shape, color and lettering--to the teriyaki sauce. Except, of course, that the soy sauce bottles say soy sauce, and the teriyaki bottles say teriyaki. You'd think this would still be an easy distinction to make, despite the slightly heightened degree of difficulty.

And we also have two big bottles of soy sauce in the fridge, thanks to my forgetting, last time we had sushi, if we had any soy at all. So now we have too much.

Got the stuff for dinner--chicken, broccoli, and sauce--and went home. Kate would be gone until slightly after 8, so I had to care for Eva and get dinner going. I was doing alright with the baby until I decided to give her some formula in a bottle, since she'd have gone nearly three hours since her last feeding.

But we haven't bottle-fed Eva since probably October...she was less than happy to see the bottle, and started crying almost as soon as I tried to use it. Then began the cycle of calm-the-baby-down, talk-and-sing-to-her, then-try-again, which only made things worse. Which made me tense and start to get angrier...I tried squeezing a little bit from the bottle into her mouth, so that in spite of herself she'd get just a little bit (smart, Dad, really smart). She loved that, of course, and started crying even harder. By the time Kate got home Eva was screaming as loudly as she ever has and I handed her off less than ten seconds after Kate had walked in the door.

My excuse was making dinner, but I was about to discover something.

I'd marinated the meat, and simmered the broccoli in water, and had the whole thing frying up nicely on the stove, and went to the fridge to add just a bit of sauce...and found three big bottles of soy sauce. Not two bottles of soy and one of teriyaki...just three bottles of soy.

Most of the time I consider myself intelligent, and then I go do something like that.

Kate enjoyed the stir fry for being different, and she did finish all of hers. But different is what you get when you screw something up. Different is putting orange juice on your cereal. Different is putting a sausage patty on the grill instead of a hamburger. Different is putting jelly on your baloney.

So yeah, dinner was different. At least Kate finished hers.

Big! Fat! Post!

Been so long. Been sooooo long. Obviously you readers have been in tortured anticipation of the next droppings of diamonds and gold to come from the nearly limitless extent of my brain...well, maybe not. But it is fun to pretend.

Ever seen the movie "Pursuit of Happyness", with Will Smith? It's based on a true story (every story is ultimately based on a true story, and let's not get into a discussion of truth just now--but this movie hews pretty closely to the biography of a man who's still living), of a working fellow out in San Fran who wanted to become a stockbroker, but getting an opportunity and qualifying for the business proved more difficult and traumatic than he'd ever have expected, since he was broke and without income for several months during the process. It's a well-done film, not without its departures from the facts of the living man's life, but the central sequence of aspiration, tribulation and redemption are the same.

In the movie, at moments, Will Smith narrates his own character's life, announcing chapters to the movie by saying, "This part of my life is called..." followed by various things such as, "riding the bus", "running", and "being stupid". One chapter, which he names "paying taxes", features the IRS attaching his bank account and draining it due to unpaid income tax. That's what forces him and his son onto the street, so it leads to some of the most heartbreaking events in the movie, but the chapter title is so plain that it's comic. And, of course, the concluding chapter he calls "happyness" (and as for why the "y" insted of "i", watch the movie).

Anyway, to sum up the last two months of my life or so, since my last post, I'd call it, "getting busy again". Not that I'm exhausted or overworked--I get decent sleep, and I'm working 45-50 hours a week, which is light compared to any entrepreneur--but with two different part-time jobs, it certainly feels pretty jostled at times. One job is with the Navy--I'm contracted through a private company--and another is with a local environmental consulting firm. Both are interesting, science-based jobs. One, the Navy job, dropped more or less out of the sky while I was working in Alaska last fall. I was riding back from Homer to Palmer--Dave Musgrave was driving because I was passed out in the back seat of the truck after a sleepless, asthma-ridden night and an 0530 reveille to load the equipment back on the truck--and I got a call from the contractor (somehow--while in the middle of the Kenai Mountains), and so the process began. The other job came through my advisor, Dr. B, who referred me to an old student of his who was looking for a geoscience intern. So now I'm working again, slightly more than full-time. And that's a great change, and we're now almost back to breaking even. That's a big victory, even though from day to day, my greatest stress is still the various shortfalls we still experience.

I'm not going to turn this into a political or economic rant, but I will say this much: it's outrageous and it should be criminal that the very banks, and the people who run them, which nearly ruined the American--and world--economy a year ago, were not only saved by taxpayer dollars and now reward themselves for their success, but punish people like Kate and me with 30% interest rates for missing a payment--when I was employed only 20 of 52 weeks last year! These people are not the friends of working Americans. And that's as far as I'll go because I don't want this to become an angry post, or an angry diary in general.

So we're pulling ourselves back up again, and I'm working some long days and weekends. That's fine with me--it's a satisfying feeling that I'm taking care of my family--but I do get ornery at times. And I blew off going into the office today, even though there were some outstanding tasks, because it just felt like a good time to have a family day, especially when we lost last Sunday to my six hours at the office.

Nor will this post become a simple record of hours worked. The point is, this is the chapter of my life I'm in: getting busy again. Though two things I've laid aside while resuming paid work: completing my dissertation, and developing my long-term interests. I'll need to summon more energy and discipline to do both, but hey, it's about time I start expecting a lot from myself. Every field I've ever pursued, I sometimes think is a mistake, not my real talent or interest...mothers being always and excessively complimentary, my own mother would tell me I was too talented, with too many interests. I had too much to sort out. Yeah, maybe, mom...but it might also be laziness. I got out of physics because I hated math, got into geology...now that I've done geology for a few years, I find myself warming back up to math. Not to mention, I love ancient history more than either of those. Hence the coastal archeology...I want to study the environment and artifacts of ancient seafarers. But it does require my finishing this research project on Narragansett Bay first.

Now while I've resumed work, and now set about resuming serious schoolwork, little Eva continues to grow and to show more personality every day. It still feels like a gift every time she looks at me and smiles, even when I'm grinning at her or goofing off by doing some silly dance or something. She smiles a lot but not always, and sometimes, like today at our weekly family date at Starbucks, I make her cry. Or at least start to. See, Kate's the one who deals with Eva best. Kate does 95% of the work with her, including changes, feeding (of course), putting to bed, and general attending-to and fussing over. (I need to step in sometimes and squelch some of Kate's fussing, though. The poor little girl doesn't need her zits popped at four months.) So Kate's got all kinds of cute little games she plays with her daughter, and Eva really responds.

The baby girl's discovered the thing called her voice. She's generally quiet, and still sleeps a good 7-9 hours a night straight through--takes after her mom that way--and is pretty docile all around. But one visit to a neighbor's condo last week, including meeting that neighbor's six-month-old, motormouth girl, has changed Eva forever. She now talks to everything. Which is to say, sometimes, nothing at all, too. She'll babble or murmur (often just sort of singing a vowel for several seconds, like "eeeeeeeeuuuuuuuuhhhh", or "ooooooooooo"), either at a toy, or a picture nearby, or at a person. Like me for a good 20 minutes tonight, or at passersby at the Starbucks. She's becoming a real talker.

But the loud outbursts come when Kate's playing with her. The latest favorite is when Kate is sitting, holding Eva upright under the armpits and lifting the baby off of her knees into the air. The baby girl flexes her legs as soon as she's in the air and she yelps as she rises, and then smiles and laughs as Kate brings her back down, laughing with her. Eva will yelp and laugh for minutes on end as Kate keeps lifting her up.

So this afternoon, while Kate was getting something from the car, I tried the same thing. Held Eva around her sides, lifted her off my knees with a "whoooop!" noise, and smiled at her. No response. Silence, and a blank face. I kept trying. Finally, her lower lip began to curl and her eyes to squint closed, and she was on the verge of crying. Way to go, Dad. Make your baby cry. Again. (She doesn't like loud noises, and, well...I can get loud from time to time. It's never deliberate, but yeah, I do spook her into tears every now and then.) She didn't actually cry this afternoon (at least, not due to my lame attempt at the leaping game), but she was about to.


But the afternoon was all about her. See, Eva's huge. She's over the 95th percentile for length and weight for babies this age--at not quite five months, she's wearing 12-month baby clothes. She doesn't have the muscle strength or control of one-year-olds, of course, but she's got the size. She just learned how to roll over on her own last week, so she does that constantly now. It's kind of cute when she traps herself on her stomach, and gets too tired to prop herself up any more, so she just collapses face-down on whatever she's lying on and starts to complain. And then Kate or I will roll her back over, and the process will start again.


But she's nearly too big for her little bouncy chair that she's spent most of her waking hours in while here at home, and she's getting close to outgrowing her carseat, too. The carseat we can use for several more months, but Kate and I wanted to price out likely replacements, and also scope out bouncy seats--not the chaise-lounge type bouncer she reclines in now, but the cockpit type that allows the baby to sit upright and play with toys on all sides. So we did that. We do need to have some basic hardware for the baby to use (coming fairly soon, too, will be a high chair), and even while we're barely getting along as now, we need to spare some money for the little girl. I don't complain about that.


But going into a store, and seeing things I'd like--whether for me, or for Kate, or for Eva--but which I know I can't afford, puts me in a terrible mood. So today was informative, but my patience was fraying badly before long and I was struggling not to take it out on my wife (who didn't deserve any of the hostility I was feeling). That's been a frequent dynamic of the past several months: frustration, anger and shame at not being able to pay our bills, stokes me to the point of being ready to lash out at the woman who's working along with me to get through this.

So I decided that a bit of therapeutic shopping would be good: rob peter (in this case, the creditor financing the Z) to pay paul (whoever we bought some baby hardware from). Kate and I agreed that the bouncy cockpit would be necessary, since she was almost too big for the bouncy lounge, and we both want her to exercise her legs before walking. So we went to several different stores, did our price comparisons, and came up with what we both agreed was a spectacular bargain: 33 bucks for what's definitely not the fanciest seat we saw, but a useful piece of plastic to tease her through the 4 or 5 months before she starts walking.

Like parents before Christmas, we spent the rest of the afternoon, which included our Starbucks date, anticipating our daughter's reaction to her new toy. And her reaction? You can see it in the pictures:

There's no feeling of success quite like pleasing a child.

Granted, the baby girl (I've got my nickname for her: Rocky, because she often sleeps with her arms raised over her head as if in triumph) can't quite hold herself up straight for very long, so Kate stuffed a towel around her in the cockpit seat to keep her sort of erect. And she still wound up slumping forward after about ten minutes or so. But Eva was very interested in a few of the doodads on the console. And she only discovered one or two of the doodads...so I think this little device has got some future to it with this little girl.

In short, as the Japanese would say, Hoomurun!

So anyway, that was our afternoon: dirt-cheap, bargain-basement therapeutic shopping for our baby. And then a big slurping cup of coffee, while I dug into some of the fluid dynamics I'm dying to start learning again. And then home for dinner (homemade Hawaiian pizza! Awright) and a movie, Apocalypto.

I'm no Mel Gibson fan. I don't respect militant fundamentalists, of any religion. But the man put together a spectacular, compelling film. It was Kate's recommendation, and I wasn't sure I wanted to sit through something so heavy on a Sunday night, but I'm glad we did. The film was visceral, sleek and visually captivating all at the same time. Subtle, no. Enthralling, yes.

Okay, this post is pretty much a box of popcorn, each piece a different flavor. (Probably not the best analogy since I hate popcorn.) I had no overarching vision for the post when I sat down, and this is the kind of thing I wind up with when I do that. (Somewhat like at school--on two occasions, I've had professors hand papers back to me and say, "I had no idea what grade to give this. You made some interesting points, but what was it about?" Suffice it to say, I wasn't really enthusiastic about either of those classes.) Anyhow, this is a mishmash post. Too big and rambling to be any one thing.

So I'll close with a typical complaint of men whose homes have been invaded by a female: she's changing everything around. I started it, by clearing out my storage locker (to save the monthly fee), and setting us into a round of clearing out and reorganizing closets. Now, also since I got booted from my former office to make room for the nursery, Kate's finishing the job. The downstairs living/dining room, now become living room/dining room/office, doesn't resemble its former self. While I'm at work, she craftily moves furniture around. So this is what we have now (and there's still a lot of clutter, because not all of the storage locker stuff has been stowed away...and there are a few spare boxes lying around too):

I'll admit, Kate's good at it, and I don't mind the changes...but one man's pad, this place ain't no more. For good.