Rhymes with Diva

So we have this daughter, who's gaining personality, coordination and size by the week (day-to-day it's a little harder to notice changes, with one notable exception I'll describe later).

Eva's devotion to the lens of a camera is known to anyone familiar with our family. I got an annoying sample of it yesterday, when I was trying to get some candid photos of her attempts to crawl. Kate had left Eva on the bed and gone to do some chores, so I stayed by to keep an eye on her. Right away Eva did what she constantly does now when on her stomach: planted her hands and knees, lifted herself off the bedspread, rocked herself back and forth a few times, then rose up on her toes, only to collapse on her face with a muffled exclamation.

Babies are cute in general, of course, and as an even stricter rule, parents are hopelessly drunk with their own baby's cuteness. A parent, however responsible and law-abiding, would still find something cute even in his or her child dropping a lit match and starting a housefire. If obsession with your own baby's adorableness is nothing more than an evolutionary psychological instinct, then it's overpoweringly strong.

So of course, I dote over simple and foolish things. Like how she seems to enjoy giving up on her attempt to crawl, and launches herself onto the bed with a cry, even before her face touches the coverlet. It's becoming a game to her, I think, where she just gives up and says the baby equivalent of "Bah!" while taking a dive onto the bed. She never faceplants on the floor. Kate and I both believe this is deliberate.

I wanted to get some action photos yesterday of her, rocking back and forth, up on her toes, and facefirst on the bedspread, but Eva wouldn't let me. As soon as she saw the camera, her rear end was safely down on the bed, her hands were splayed before her and her head was raised high, what I call her boardroom pose. Then the aggravating kid would smile. She wouldn't let me take a candid photo.

If I hid the camera, waited for her to rock up onto her knees again, and then nipped the camera out and quickly took a picture, by the time the stupid digital camera had beeped and actually taken the shot, Eva was back in her pose. She was too quick for the machine. Maybe next time I'll have to hit the button while the camera's still hidden, and then bring it out only at the very last second, and take my chances that I've aimed it somewhat correctly. But that might not work either, since she can hear it, and she also gets suspicious. Once she'd seen me do the hide-and-seek routine a few times, she was much less prone to get to work crawling.

It's a little distressing sometimes to see her stalled out at the same point, for nearly a week now: up on hands and knees, or even hands and feet, but unable to make her legs move independently, and start the crawling motion. It's a big change, and I have trouble with simple motions sometimes too, as anyone who's seen me try to do a dolphin kick would know (two of my minor life's ambitions are to do a triathlon and to learn the butterfly). At times I see Eva with her legs straight together, and wonder if she doesn't have any coordination in her legs. (Run-of-the-mill paranoid parental thinking. I'm getting used to it.) She'll be crawling very soon.

But it's fascinating to see how slowly, bit by painstaking bit, babies gain abilities. From being a mostly inert bean seven months ago, Eva is now on the verge of zipping all over the condo, and turning the place upside down. I missed two months last fall while up in Alaska, but by December, Eva was able to raise her head for a few seconds at a time. Soon she had the arm and shoulder strength to heave her upper body off the floor, hold her head vertically, and survey the area--her boardroom pose. For a while, that was all she could do, but she kept gaining stamina.

And size. She started out pretty middling for a newborn--19", 6 lbs 11 oz--then lost 4 ounces (within normal loss range for the first week), and then ba-BOOM! Since early October, she's outgrown her home bouncy chair, her infant carseat, and clothing meant for 1-year-olds. She's big enough now to tip over her Bumbo seat, which you might call a modifed beanbag chair for infants. It's a kind of soft, semi-resistant foam cockpit seat which holds the baby in an upright position, but isn't rigid and hard like straight plastic. They're one of those handy little inventions that make you momentarily grateful for the sprawling commercialism of our modern world. Eva loves to lean waaayyyyy over while in the Bumbo and stretch to reach things a few feet away, and she's capsized it at least once. Not for much longer can she use the little Bumbo. She's also about to outgrow our little chest-mounted baby carrier. The straps are as loose as they'll go and still it's kind of tight around the little girl's ribcage.

Just watch. Eva will be taller than I am. And we'll probably have a midget son.

So Eva's been stuck at the verge of crawling for a little over a week now, and after five or ten minutes of trying to move, she starts to cry. But once she figures it out...and it won't be long until she does.

Communication has been similar. Eva began gooing and aaahh-ing four or five months ago, and she still makes lots of odd sounds. But now there's some articulation in the sounds, with consonants appearing with the vowels, and syllables repeated several times. At times, these syllables don't sound random: they feel articulated, more like directed remarks. She often looks the listener in the eye now when speaking, with her high, almost whisper-soft voice.

Now for that sudden change I alluded to in the opening paragraph. Last weekend we drove up to Maine to visit Kate's family. We spent a few nights, as usual, at her mother's house (where I generally come down with a serious case of satisfied drowsiness). We also visited her sister Cori's house, where the kids rule: three daughters ranging from two and a half to eight years old, and a newborn son 12 days older than Eva. Needless to say there's plenty of noise and action there, and babies like Eva and her cousin Daniel are frequently confronted with small girls a few years older, who want to manage them somehow. Sit the baby up, or lie it down, or bring it a toy, or carry it to the toy. (There's never anything quite as disruptive as an overly solicitous family member.)

Now, Daniel's used to this kind of treatment, and he takes it all pretty stoically. The kid's pretty happy, in general, and very rarely emits a cry. He's kind of the baby version of the friendly family dog that the kids can maul, and will just lie there and never seem to get upset. But Eva...well, she's a little more sensitive.

Eva is easily confused and frightened by lots of noise and action around her, and tends to start crying. Living with Kate and me--and though I have my boisterous moments, I tend to be pretty quiet most of the time--Eva's learned to live in a quiet environment, and she doesn't try to fill the silence up all that often. Surround her with lots of activity, and she's suddenly disoriented.

After that visit, we dropped by Kate's father's home, quiet like our own. And then Eva came to life. In her tiny, quiet way, but still, to her parents who know her best, the change was sudden and immense.

After an initial crying spell--she'd been drowsing in the car on the ride over--she quieted down, sat up, and began talking. Nonstop, just looking me, Kate, Kate's father and his wife Jean in the eye, repeating "da-da-da-da-da-". Eva's eyes were wide open and smiling like her mouth, and she kept talking.

This wasn't like the indistinct little howls she'd been making into space for months. She was directing a few specific sounds to people she was paying attention to.

Eva has begun to talk.

Kate expressed some playful jealousy that Eva was saying "da-da" before "ma-ma", but I'm still not sure what the word means to Eva, if anything at all. What I can say is that, when she looks at me and says "da-da", well, I fall in love with my own kid all over again.

Makes sense, I'm an orally expressive kind of guy, that this is what would get me in my own kid. And it has.

Eva hasn't reprised her hour-long stream of babble since then, but does at moments. Like today, when I loaded her into the chest carrier for a little walk outside in the mist to see the swans (but Eva was more fascinated with the passing cars). Once we got away from the road and it was quieter, she treated me to several more bursts of remarks, all kinds of sounds. But her speech has more the character of syllables now, not just floating vowels. Whatever ideas might be in her head to express, her voice is slowly gaining the ability to enunciate them.

Not long ago, this afternoon, she looked at the cat lazing on my desk and said, "doi". Jasper then looked up at me and walked away. I get the feeling I'll be referring to the cat as "doi" from now on. I'm an impressionable fool. How could I not?

At the Movies

This winter, with money being tight (though we sprang for a cinema film tonight--more on that later), Kate and I have watched lots of movies at home. Partly due to her sister Cori's inspired Christmas gift of a Netflix membership (which we've extended), and partly due to getting to know our local Blockbuster.

One of the things I really enjoy about Kate: she despises chick flicks as much as I do. Corny, tearjerking, they-were-just-meant-for-each-other sapfests are a drain on my life force, and apparently on Kate's too. Our love of Kill Bill and similar blood-themed oeuvres is on record and known to anyone who talks to us. So we've seen lots of pulpy, darkly comic, bullet-ridden flicks since I came home from the dusty frozen northwest (and Alaska is dusty. On a windy fall day you can see the dust clouds rising above the mountains. The air is tinged brown). Eva doesn't seem to mind them much either, though in general, she doesn't like noise. So we keep the volume down when things get loud, but she definitely pays attention for at least part of the film.

One of this week's Blockbusters was Slap Shot, the 1977 Paul Newman masterpiece about a minor league hockey team, the Chiefs, based in western Pennsylvania. I'd read so many things about the Hanson brothers that I knew someday I'd have to see it. I was finally motivated to pick it by reading a blurb in the news somewhere that the present-day Chiefs, the real Pennsylvania minor-league hockey team on which the film was based, have been sold and are moving. The film depicts their final (fictitious, this being 33 years ago) season, as the iron indsutry was in decline in that part of the world, and the city steel mill was closing, dooming the local economy.

Paul Newman is the player/coach, an old-timer who's not so hot on the bench either. He learns that the team is going to fold and starts cooking up ideas to save it--i.e., convince the owner to sell it.

Enter the Hanson brothers--hired on because they're three wild thugs who assault all opponents on the ice. And, presto! The Chiefs start winning, start energizing crowds, and the team rallies around their three new thick-as-bricks emotional leaders.

The film is a wistful comedy, with a realistic and not lovey-dovey ending, which makes it even more enjoyable. And the characters are capable of some skullduggery, not all of it necessarily good-natured. I haven't seen many Newman films--the Sting (sort of, though the video tape was all warped and messed up), Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid, and the Life & Times of Judge Roy Bean. Newman's at his best when he plays an impish hero. His blue eyes twinkle with mischief or maybe worse, and he winds up acting nobly in spite of the majority of his instincts.

One of the things which makes Cassidy & Sundance such a legendary film is the chemistry between Newman and Redford. Just like Newman, I need to get to know Redford's films much better. Last fall in Alaska I happened to see Three Days of the Condor, and was pretty much awestruck at how he could hold a screen. From what I've seen of his characters, they tend to be more serious than comic. But there's comedy in him, particularly in how he fences verbally with Cassidy, or whoever else he's on-screen with.

Newman was paired with Tom Cruise in the Color of Money, and that was bad casting. Cruise isn't much of an actor. He's intense, and back when he was dancing to Bob Seger in his underwear he was considered hot, but he's not much for nuance or comedy. (Talentless actors usually wind up in action flicks, if they survive at all. It's no mystery Tom's now putting out nothing but action flicks where all he has to do is show intensity.) A far better pairing dramatically for Newman, to bring a script alive, to make scenes sparkle with humor? Brad Pitt.

Pitt, like Newman, is an actor with some depth but whose true talent is comedy. In a role like the stoner in True Romance, you might almost think he didn't need to act at all--the director just told him to toke up, gave him one or two lines to remember, and planted him on a couch. He apparently created his own accent for Snatch. The accent wasn't nearly as weird the second time around, and of course his mother dies during the film, but otherwise, Brad's gypsy character was the same bouncy, smarter-than-he-looks-but-not-by-much throughout. Even in Ocean's Eleven, where Brad's character is much more sophisticated, he has an it's-only-life attitude which gives the movie its spring.

It's just too damn bad he wasn't teamed up with Newman at some point for a movie about gambling. He's pretty much the same age as the lout Cruise. It should've happened. Maybe the chemistry wouldn't have been as good as it was between Newman and Redford, since Redford's greater seriousness was probably a better counterpoint to the devilish Newman--but I think the movie world should've had the chance to find out.

Back to Newman. My favorite scene in Slap Shot, I can't describe in detail because this is a family-friendly blog. But Reggie Dunlop, Newman's player-coach character, has an edge over the opponents' goalie, Hanrahan. In the game's critical last moments, a tie late in the third period, Reggie unleashes a series of taunts that drive Hanrahan berserk and cause him to desert the goal--allowing the game-winning score--and attack Reggie. Newman's joyful delivery of the taunts--especially the first--is exquisite.

So, tonight, for something completely different: a computer-animated flick about monsters. Specifically, dragons: How to Train your Dragon. What drew me to this one was the distinctly catlike look and demeanor of the main dragon, this not-so-big black thing with green feline eyes. Since I'm buds with my own cat Jasper, I figured I should see this one. So we decided to splurge on tickets and even tried to bring Eva along.

A note on that. The volume at times plainly bothered her, so we brought her out of the cinema during the biggest action sequences. And she got tired and ornery, so it's now clear: if we go see any more movies, we need a babysitter. Little infant Eva made it through Fantastic Mr. Fox last fall, but now, no way. She's much too young to engage in a film, and old enough to cause a disturbance. (Though this didn't stop her from spitting happily all over me, grabbing my 3D glasses and trying to suck on them when I brought her out at one point.) So, no more babies in theaters.

The film, being for kids (and really for kids--not over-the-kids'-heads-and-really-for-adult-fans like Fox was), had a very warmhearted, everyone-is-happy ending. But that didn't spoil the plot. The film's gimmick--making the dragons seem like genuine, idiosyncratic, responsive living beings--worked. Just like Finding Nemo was mostly about the variety and vivdness of the marine world, and Wag the Dog was about the creative principle in action, this movie was about dragons as living, sensitive beings. The plot in each of those is kind of secondary. In this case, Ye Standarde Olde Redemption Plotte fit nicely, the visuals (if you see this flick, see it in 3D!) were spectacular, and the dragons were even more fun than I'd been expecting.

So, the Sutherland family's review (Kate and I discussed it on the way home): two thumbs up, a third thumb soaking wet from saliva.

Goulash

So it' April 1st, happy fools day, blah blah, whatever.

I did get an e-mail from my sister Julie this morning, describing an alarm clock that went off at 3:20 AM, spices in the medicine cabinet, and the old classic, switching the salt & sugar. I pulled that one on my parents once, and I didn't really get much of a reaction, just a wry thanks from my mother. Still, it makes me glad---even though she's still just a baby--that we have a daughter, not sons. (I should add that that I do want a son as well, so we'll likely be getting this form of treatment ourselves, at least once or twice, at some point down the road.) Of course, in true sisterly style, Julie's note ended with health advice, since she'd read my post about health care and my blurb about my guts. Ah, sisters. Never too busy for the occasional dollop of advice.

Rhode Island has just emerged from a historic rainfall--nearly 16 inches in two days, and over 20 for the month of March--and is still recovering from even more historic flooding. Route 95, the main interstate thoroughfare, has been closed for over a day. President Obama declared Rhode Island to be in a state of emergency and dispatched FEMA. There are pictures all over the internet--from news sites to Facebook--showing parking lots flooded up to the windows of cars. The Warwick Mall was submerged under three feet of water, as was a Toyota dealership not far from here. The damage is easily counted in many millions of dollars. North Kingstown isn't a valley, and is close enough to Narragansett Bay that the rivers drain with reasonable efficiency, but one local road was underwater. Annaquatucket Road, which follows the (normally tiny) Annaquatucket River through the woods, was still closed last night. The river discharges into a lagoon right alongside this condominium, and features a large pond, impounded by the causeway supporting Route 1A. Thanks to the main road, and the small drainage culvert, the pond overtopped and covered Annaquatucket Road. I went wet-wheeling through it Monday night before it was closed, and was momentarily worried that I'd lose traction, land in a ditch and total the car. At least that didn't happen.

So Rhode Island is still drying out, and will be for several days. Many have lost their homes. It's possible that some businesses won't recover. This was a hurricane without the wind, and in fact, rainier than many hurricanes. Some of the worst hurricanes in history have overwhelmed areas more with rainfall than wind: Galveston in 1900, Camille in 1969, Andrew in 1992, Mitch in 1998. The rainstorm just past wasn't nearly as intense as those monsters--16" in two days, as opposed to 24" in one--but it was no ordinary April shower.

Now Julie's advice had to do with stress management, which is a smart approach. There aren't many people I know--and I'd have to think--who don't have a degree of stress in their lives. Stress is a human instinct, like all of our other mental conditions. Stress motivates us to do stuff. The brain can also become hyperanxious, and have what you might call a mental allergic reaction to things that are comparatively minor. It's a warming from our brain, often by means of physical symptoms. I've felt plenty of it in the last year over finances and employment. Then, sometimes I get wigged out because the Celts can't find a decent backup power forward (or, some nights, a starter). Stress is a complicated phenomenon I couldn't pretend to explain fully. And Julie's sisterly concern that I might need help managing mine is welcome...I've never tried accupuncture. I'm game, though we can't even afford our weekly jaunt to Starbucks right now. So we'll see. For all the idiotic right-wing cries of the end of freedom as we know it, Obama's health care reform isn't nearly socialistic enough to get me accupuncture right now. So I'll just rely on the usual methods: Kate, Eva, Jasper, a little gym and singing time, and making plans.

Since I've been a kid, I've loved to draw maps and come up with groups and organizations that did stuff. Every Thanksgiving, Uncle Jack, Aunt Pam and our cousins Jessica and Evan would come over. For several years running, Jessica and I would set up a little office in the basement with card tables and foldable chairs. I'd ransack a filing cabinet down there for neat-looking documents and forms (all from Dad's past business dealings, mostly Able Shipwrights, which he'd been required by law to keep for 7 years...since he never complained, I'm supposing those 7 years had expired). And Jessica and I would set up our business: International Bank Branch, or IBB. (So named because Dad was VP of a local bank branch at the time, I guess. I won't bother to defend my childhood ideas, any more than I will my current ideas. Either you're on board or you're not.) And we'd shuttle family members through, making loans, taking deposits, all the things bankers do...right?


And of course, aside from Thanksgiving, there were all the obligatory secret spy maps with hideouts and headquarters and weapons of various types. Just things I liked to do.

So I think it's no great mystery that I've settled on cartography--mapmaking--as a major element of my career, and also that I'm getting a bit entrepreneurial about it. I'm making plans to establish a non-profit group to scientifically investigate coastal and offshore archeological sites in the Near East. Now that I'm deeply into writing the business plan, I'm discovering whole new pools of enthusiasm in myself I'd forgotten all about. For on top of being a sales pitch and best estimate as to expected performance, a business plan is a questionnaire for the entrepreneur, an opportunity to explain his or her goals, methods and expectations. I'm having lots of fun with it.

So that's one thing, but of course it doesn't pay the bills--and wouldn't for quite some time, anyway--but it keeps me smiling through the other mundane issues which spring from having only a part-time job, but full-time expenses. Kate, who might never post another entry again, has just started her sign language instruction business. It's really not my tale to tell, so I won't go into details, but she's basically a franchise owner for the Signing Time instruction company. Kate is younger--in some cases, by a couple of decades--than the women she's working with and advising. In those cases where these women have advanced degrees, Kate, who has yet to finish college, has to overcome quite a bit of trepidation. And there are plenty of times when she can hide turmoil behind a quiet face. I've gotten much better at divining the turmoil, but Kate can be anxious at all times of day. She's told me about the anxieties of starting her own business, while not feeling fully qualified, and I can identify. I think that we're both somewhat in the same position--entrepreneurs with ideas, also being aware of holes in our knowledge--is a great common point of experience. Kate sets about managing a staff of teachers older and in some cases more lettered than she is, and I set about looking to raise a hundred grand or two to fund my Indiana Jones jones.

Hey, at least I've got the jacket and the hat! No whip or gun, though. But I do want to learn karate.

Kate has said many times that she'll feel wistful once Eva's no longer a baby, but graduates to toddlerhood. She cherishes Eva's helplessness (and before long will probably start hankering for a replacement baby, so I'd better go full-time soon, huh?). It's a thrill watching the little girl gain the ability to express herself and do things. She's gotten noticeably stronger, and when you're holding her and not looking out, she can grab a lip and pull pretty hard, or nail you in the eye with an inadvertent fist. She regularly beats on Kate while nursing. She just flails away with her free arm while sucking contentedly.

Another trend is vocalizing. She's got a larger vocabulary, so to speak, of whines, yelps, cries and coos, and one I love especially: a good, old-fashioned "ppphhhbbbtttphbbbtpphhttbb!". Only Eva's are particularly wet and sloppy, and will leave a trail of dribble down her chin. Maybe I shouldn't be encouraging her in this, since she now does that more than almost anything else. She's my daughter, she already passes enough gas for 3. Perhaps I shouldn't encourage her in even more socially indecorous behavior. It used to be that if I made that sound back to her, she'd stop and stare at me if I'd just dropped an F-bomb (only she doesn't stare that way when I really do drop an actual F-bomb...but, moving along). Now, she smiles and says "pphhhbbtttbbphhbt!" back. It started out as more of an expression of frustration, when she wanted something or felt confined in her chair (since we still strap her into her bouncy chair at home). But now it's become more of her running stream-of-consciousness commentary. Kate will bring her downstairs in the morning, and Eva is spitting away happily. I don't really care. It still makes me laugh, so I won't be trying to make her stop any time soon.

(Kate I'm sure thanks me for this.)

But more exciting is the progress Eva is making toward crawling. Several times now we've seen her in the company of other babies. With the exception of her cousin Daniel (son of Kate's sister Cori), who's just indescribably huge, Eva dwarfs every other infant she's around. (Truth be told, she's longer than Daniel, but that kid is built like a defensive lineman.) Eva is larger than almost all of the 1-year-olds, but is still immobile, and relatively oblivious to her surroundings. It's a bit painful to watch her sitting there like a lump, while smaller babies crawl and walk all around her, pursuing toys or even paying attention to her, and she grows scared and frustrated and begins to cry (especially if one of them stumbles across one of her feet). Even at this very early stage of life, when none of the kids can really do much, I have to remind myself repeatedly that she's generally younger than the other kids. In time she'll have the strength and muscle control to move around and play with other children. But not yet.

She's nearly crawling, though, and as friends balefully tell us, our lives will be (even more) over once she starts. Right now, Kate puts her on a rug or on the bed, and places a toy in front of her a foot or two away, and challenges Eva to go get it. Eva's staring straight at the toy, plainly wants it, and starts pumping her legs a bit, but moves nowhere. After a while her arms get tired from holding her upper body off the floor and she collapses facefirst. Eva might lie there for a moment or two, or turn her head to the side and look a us piteously, before trying again. She can't quite get her hips off the floor and her knees under her yet, but she's coming closer. Her latest acrobatic feat is to coil both legs up and then kick them both at once, launching herself a few inches forward onto her face. She's getting there.

Just like Kate and me.

Reform

Generally I avoid political topics while posting on our family blog, just like I avoid sports. By and large they're not germane to our daily family life (even though Kate shows signs of becoming a bigger Celtics fan than I am--however sadly that she'll never be able to appreciate fully just how much Kevin Garnett changed this team in 2007. But I digress). But Kate has seen me become, at times, a compulsive reader of political news over the past four months, and be at times short of temper or even lose sleep over the dominant political issue of 2009-2010: reform of American health care. Now, on the night of the House of Representatives' vote to approve the Senate reform bill, I think it's an opportune moment to give my opinion.

I've had my first bouts of ongoing health issues over the past three years, first with a series of cellulitis infections in my leg, which have come and go but never been eradicated. My latest, though mild, outbreak was about three weeks ago. Somewhat more seriously, over the past 18 months I've had some digestive problems which rise from the level of inconvenience to sometimes embarrassment. Mom and Dad both having died from cancer, that class of disease is never far from my mind, but I'm less worried now about that--in 18 months I'd expect more serious symptoms to emerge if I had cancer--than just having some chronic annoyance that will be a constant drain on our family economy.

My problems have been quite mild compared to many folks' around the country. And of course, last year, while Kate was pregnant with Eva, the fact that she was initially single permitted her to receive free care from Rhode Island, even after we married. I believe we pay taxes for civic benefits like that, and I'll always be grateful--foolish though the concept may be concerning a state agency--for the coverage my wife and child-to-be received. As Eva squirms and spits and whines at this instant six feet away from me, with Kate doing everything her ingenuity can devise to quiet the little girl down, ever more reasons for that gratitude are welling up freshly in me.

Though I live a mostly quiet life, and tend to be conservative in my behavior, I'm liberal enough to think of health care in our country as a right. We're one of the most industrialized nations on earth, and the leading economy. We have enough surplus wealth to divert some to taking care of our own. Over the long-term life of a society, I think health care, education and conservation of the environment are the three most important tasks toward preserving and improving society. I won't make the foolish claim that armed forces aren't necessary--they are--but the more resources we divert to them, the less we have for the basic elements of life itself. The military's product--"readiness", in the form of being prepared to fight on a moment's notice--is only occasionally of real use. The rest of the time, "readiness", the effective threat of violence, does nothing but maintain the status quo. In a world full of aggressors (including the US), status quo isn't necessarily bad. But while political status quo is merely maintained, billions of people are still busy leading their lives.

I think a rich nation like the United States has the responsibility to invest in its own population, in order to foster the nation's growth as a whole. Our very Constitution has become a model for almost every government which has followed. The American system of public education--however flawed and now in parts decaying--was a previously unheard-of innovation in the 1800's. Public education laid the foundation for this country's worldwide, amazing display of talent and ingenuity throughout the 19th, 20th and into the 21st century. Public education is nothing more than the public option in educational form. Private schools, at all levels, did and continue to thrive, for those who choose to pay more. The Constitution says nothing about the federal government's right or duty to educate its citizens, but it has become an accepted part of our society that access to basic learning is a fundamental civic good.

I feel that basic public health is no different. In order to promote the welfare of its citizens and of the country as a whole, the federal government has an obligation to guarantee basic health services for every American citizen. There are a whole range of ways to make this actuality. Some (admittedly far smaller) countries, like the Netherlands and Switzerland, have private insurance companies strictly regulated by the central government--much like how our FAA closely monitors private airlines. Others, like France, Canada and England (and, oddly enough, Costa Rica, where Rush Limbaugh said he'd go for care from now on) have nationally-run health plans. We do too--Medicare. I think the passionate reaction over the last nine months of people currently on Medicare, to the prospect of that program being changed or closed down, is fine testimony to its effectiveness and popularity.

I favor a public option in health care. In markets, such as Louisiana where I worked for part of a year and where there is only one dominant health care provider, a federal option would provide some meaningful competition to the private plan. Lack of competition happens to be the exact rallying cry of those opposed to reform. In most markets now, there is no competition. Health care is mostly a set of local or regional monopolies.

Politically (and from my distant, ill-informed vantage point, I lay much of the onus on Obama), a strong public option wasn't viable. The bill we have doesn't do enough to control costs, and is still unduly restrictive on abortion.

A quick tangent on abortion. I believe in a woman's right to choose. For my own part, I could never choose to abort my own child, or ask a woman to do so. When Kate first told me last year that she was pregnant, the thought of aborting the little life that would become Eva never seriously occurred to me. Of course I knew it was a possibility, but not one I would consider. Kate was of identical mind. The fact that we both emphatically chose life for our child, doesn't change my feeling that a woman, at least early in her pregnancy, should have the right to choose whether to carry to term or not. If a woman feels she's not mature enough, or willing, or lacks resources, to raise a child, I do think the more humane course of action is to give her the legal option to abort. The efforts of some lawmakers to kill the entire reform bill unless the right to choose were further limited, disgusted me.

My list of complaints with the bill as it is, is long. There is still no meaningful competition to most private providers. I'm not even sure if the anti-trust exemption for insurance companies--freeing them from much federal oversight--is done away with or not. Much of the subsidy for lower-income plans is borne by the middle class, already disproportionately burdened after the 2003 tax cuts.

But the bill will do three things for the independent (i.e., non-Medicare, non-employer-based) insurance market, which represent a tremendous improvement over the system we know now: first, it will prohibit insurers from denying care to anyone with pre-existing conditions (as Kate's pregnancy was considered--and even my Louisiana Blue Cross would have denied her), and it will prohibit lifetime caps on benefits (helpful to those who actually get very sick, like my mother did); second, it requires everyone to buy insurance (the only way to broaden the risk pool); and third, subsidizes the cost for those who don't have much money.

Those three elements alone constitute tremendous reform. If we can add in effective cost control at some future point in time, and then spread the cost of the subsidies more equitably through society, then I think we'll have a mature, modern health care system.

As it is, I salute the vote being taken right now to reform American health care. I do believe in the better-off among us contributing to help take care of those at a disadvantage. (And though Kate and I have received some help ourselves, on the whole, I consider us to be among the better-off.) I think our country took a large step forward tonight with this vote.

To those who say that Barack Obama's receiving the Nobel Peace Prize was merely affirmative action, I repeat the thought: Barack Obama's being elected President of the United States alone was worthy of a Nobel Peace prize. Consider the legacy of hatred and racism this country has transmitted through the generations since slavery. Consider the horrendous inequality in opportunity, rights and overall treatment between races through the past and still now. Consider the viciousness of the attacks, past and present, upon Obama. Still, by the force of his words and personality, Obama persauded a majority of Americans to vote for him.

Certainly Obama has shown himself to be more centrist than many of his campaign promises. He has also shown the inexperience his critics accused him of. But just as surely, he has engineered a historic change in the American state. Will we eliminate world hunger by 2015, as he promised last year? I doubt it. Will he face continuing opposition to the remainder of his to-do list, including a number of issues dear to progressives like me: climate change legislation; Wall Street reform; immigration reform; and correcting the Supreme Court's handover of the electoral process to corporate interests? Of course. Will I always be happy with Obama's own actions and words, to say nothing of the actual results? Of course not.

But the fact that a half-black man became President, and that same man helped extend basic health care to millions who lacked it, is cause in my heart for tremendous pride in my country. Not to mention, I'll be sleeping a bit easier at nights, with the health of a wife and daughter to care about.

Hope has become somewhat of a dirty word among many in the past year, too charged politically and racially to have a glad meaning. But I will use the words glad, and proud. The United States constitutionally enshrines conservative and progressive elements. The system is conservative enough to make the preservation of the state, and the society surrounding it, possible. The system also provides means for progressive change, that the state may change to more accurately fit its society, as society itself changes, through time. Occasionally, a major progressive change overcomes conservative resistance, and the state is changed irrevocably. Emancipation was one such change. Enfranchisement of women, another. The New Deal, yet another. Enactment of civil rights, still another. And today, March 22--the vote is final as I type this--nearly universal health care is the law of the United States.

So yes, I'm proud of my country, and I'm glad that I live here.

Ditz

Cold nor'easter today, wind whipping leafless branches and rain slapping everything. The bassess and tenors of the RI Civic Chorale, which I'm a tenor in, had a sectional rehearsal this morning because, well, we suck.

Not totally, of course. But a number of guys have serious problems pronouncing foreign languages, and we're doing one piece each in two of the more difficult languages to sing, German and French. German's difficult because the consonants are so percussive, and you need to keep the percussion right on your teeth and lips in order to be intelligible at all. With words like "knabe" and "gnade" and "noch jetzt", tongue-twisters start to seem easy. And even some of the softer sounds, the blends, can be tricky. "-ig" sounds like "ich", but isn't as far back in the mouth as "-och". Even if you know the correct pronunciation it's hard to keep them all straight sometimes, especially when you're more concerned with rhythm, phrasing or (we're amateurs, after all) notes.

And French...it's in some ways the opposite of German. The consonants are in some cases ignored, or lightly flipped over, in an unstoppable flowing stream of constantly changing vowels. When the delicate timing involved in a dipthong becomes tiresome, it can sometimes start to run together and seems like there's only one vowel in the language: "-eugh". As for the double-vowels, take the word for sleep, "sommeil", pronounced "sohm-MAY". The "may" syllable requires some attention. It's not a single vowel sound--there are at least two, and more if you really want to color it. But at a minimum, you've got "ehhh-ee", with the "ee" barely appearing at the end before you move on. English has many diphthongs like that, but French is bursting with them. Then, there are three different accents for the letter "e", and even without accents, a few different ways to pronounce it. Many wrestle that letter and lose every time they sing it.

So we had some pronunciation issues to work on today. I deeply love the German and French pieces--Nun danket alle Gott by Johann Pachelbel, and Cantique de Jean Racine by Gabriel Faure'--and they happen to be fairly easy, with no extremely fast runs, and pretty much squarely in the middle of my range. So far as I'm able, I can float through them and enjoy the ride. So this morning was a big confidence-booster for me, two hours spent on the pieces I'm most confident with, and I felt pretty studly because I could nail the pronunciation.

Now, our concert is next Saturday night, and I've still got to, ahem, get a little more familiar with Mozart's Sparrow Mass in the next six days, but I will. I'm not the best musician among the tenors, or the most highly-trained voice, but I am the loudest, so I feel a certain responsibility.

On the way home I picked up fixings for sushi tonight (we finished the first bottle of soy! Hurrah) as well as two rental DVD's: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (got to introduce Kate to young Eastwood and spaghetti Westerns--she thought I'd made the term up) and Amadeus.

I can't speak of Mozart of Beethoven as my favorite musicians when I'm hardly familiar enough with their work to discuss it at all. I've performed Mozart's requiem perhaps ten times, and several of his masses and other pieces (I sing Ave Verum to Eva many evenings), but the man wrote over 600 pieces of music, and I've sampled only a small fraction of that--30 or 40, maybe. Just a taste. The requiem does set my imagination afire like almost no other (only Beethoven's) music can.

The opening chords are so modest, grand and dreadful, and they grow with such grace and ghostly foreboding that I feel surrounded in a shroud of music already, within the first ten seconds. The thrills, dread, despair, hope and at times violent emotion within a soul anticipating death are like the facets of the jewel that is his requiem mass. Flash ahead in the post a bit--we watched Amadeus tonight--and the latter half of the film is occupied with Mozart's composition of this requiem, his last piece. He got barely halfway through it, according to tradition, dictating the Lacrimosa from his deatbhed, at 35. Purportedly his student, Franz Sussmayr, finished it (the last movement being largely a quote of the first, and the intervening five (from Lacrimosa up to Lux Aeterna, the finale) being Sussmayr's. Say history and myth what they may, the Lacrimosa is the beating, crying, screaming heart of the mass. The music feels so infinitely heavy that I can't even imagine a person creating it. It's of the sort of grandeur that simply exists, without beginning.

This requiem will be peformed not far from where we live, next Sunday, the day after the Chorale's concert. Kate's willing to go (and we'll bring Eva, of course). We could be in for a community theater-quality performance, with accurate chords and cutoffs few and far between, but I think it's worth checking out. And if it's Kate's first time listening to the piece in its entirety, or at least listening to it live, then some occasional errors will be forgivable.

(The only Beethoven piece I'm comparably familiar with is the Ninth, but that's worth an essay--er, post--of its own, so I won't degrade it with a tangent here.)

So, Beethoven and Mozart, two lordly figures whom I would have studied madly and obsessively had I chosen a life in music.

I wasn't sure I wanted to see something as heavy as Amadeus--of course, much of Mozart's life was colorful and brilliant, but it comes to a tragic end, and he was surrounded by treachery of those who wanted to squelch or control his talent--so part of me leaned toward Good, Bad and Ugly. I threw the decision over to Kate and she chose Amadeus. Sigh--this would be a much harder film to watch, but then, I'll have tonight and tomorrow to consider it, and recover.

We made our dinner (and another family movie. Osbournes, we're gaining on you!...), placed it in front of the TV, and got ready for the show. Kate pulled out the disc and looked at both sides. "Side B," she mentioned, "wide-screen edition. Side A, wide-screen...crap! Well, I guess it doesn't matter what version we have now."

I looked at the video box, and it seemed to me that one side was the movie, the other side extra features. So dropped the disc in the tray, loaded it, and we started watching. The first scene showed a long, shadowy tunnel, with a man walking past. Then, the same man walking down a street. Soon, we saw a haggard Mozart working in his salon, when a sharp rap came at the door. There stood a tall figure in a black robe, with a black two-faced mask. Mozart recoiled in terror, and the figure demanded he write a requiem, "For one who didn't receive it but deserves it," without naming the patron.

The story carried on from there, with Mozart composing the requiem and some other operas by turn, as his fortunes and health both failed. He died in the night as rival composer Antonio Salieri pushed him to keep composing the death mass, meanwhile taking it down in dictation. (In the movie, his plan was to claim authorship. He's not a nice guy, at all, in this film.)

It ended rather abruptly, we thought, since we'd had some trouble identifying whether Salieri was in fact the man in the mask (he was), and being very surprised when it was revealed that Salieri was, in later years, in an insane asylum. Besides, we'd both remembered distinctly a scene where a young Wolfgang played a harpsichord, while being held upside down. We didn't both miss the scene...was it in the Beethoven movie? Kate wondered. But I hadn't seen the Beethoven movie...

Enter Wikipedia. Salieri's life showed him to not necessarily have been so insanely jealous of Mozart, and that his scheme to murder Mozart was very likely a complete fiction. The film also vastly understates his actual inflence on the musical world, but it's true that where Mozart is a household name, Salieri is now known only to those who study music, or are familiar with Mozart.

We both grew suspicious that the film should be longer, especially when Kate saw "Running time: 180 mins." on the box, and we'd been watching for not even an hour and a half. So she flipped the disc over, hit play...and the movie began.

Teehee.

I can't honestly call it her mistake, because if I'd known any better, I'd've said something ninety minutes earlier when we started watching the movie from the middle. Still, knowing the resolution made the treachery of the film's major characters somewhat easier to digest as it happened, though it was painful to compare the later state of Mozart's house with its magnificence earlier in the movie.

Salieri is an effective narrator, a musician sensitive to Mozart's music but jealous of his own comparative incompetence. The film goes so far as to make him reject God, for God's having rejected Salieri's prayer to be an immortal of music. "To give me the desire to celebrate God in music, and then to strike me mute...why?" A bit melodramatic, but a good narrative tool. It keeps the story in human terms, from being too fawning at moments and vicious at others. When the fawning over Mozart's musical triumphs would be greatest, Salieri's envy crescendoes as a counterpoint. When Mozart descends into loutishness, the pulsing rhythm is Salieri's confusion and awe that the source of sublimity can be so impish.

But like his music, Salieri himself in the film can be forgotten. There's only Mozart's music, always charming, sometimes chilling.

Sick Baby

Now before you readers go all ape-crap on me and start worrying about the baby, or why I'd blog about her sickness, I'll say up front that Eva doesn't seem to be very sick at all. The baseline indicators of health--like I was told once about my cat, oddly enough--are, (1) is she eating and pooping, and (2) is she sleeping well? The answers to both are yes, and always have been. (That girl's plumbing is about as robust as it could be.) But Eva's come down with a cough and wheezing recently, which has sent Kate and me through some minor emotional contortions.

A silent anxiety sinks its talons into the shoulders of parents of a baby with breathing trouble. Is this cough and wheezing a simple cold? Is there a major infection, which is starting slowly and even good doctors would likely miss at first glance? Is this a chronic condition? Will our baby survive her first year? How can someone so small, gentle and delicate, mount any kind of fight against a virulent disease?

Breathing affects everything. I've had more experience of that in the last year than I ever wanted, with bronchitis becoming asthma, which still limits my ability to exercise and sing (I'm up to 12 minutes on the treadmill at 6 mph, and I can make it through a chorus rehearsal with only 2 or 3 shortness-of-breath fits, whoohoo! Tomorrow I try basketball again. Will I last more than 15 minutes? Unlikely, but we'll find out). If you have any doubts or curiosity as to the importance of a thing, look to other cultures to see how prevalently it's mentioned. This is a good rule in art, and you'll discover the universality of human concern with our origin as a species, with death, with birth and sex--especially, male fascination with and fear of female sexuality and reproductive powers (and the resulting obsession with tightly controlling both). But that's off-topic to my post.

My point now is, the Indian yoga which Kate practices, emphasizes first and last, the breath. Breath is acknowledged as life itself, and control of the breath leads to control of the mind, body, and all things.

So when the baby's breath is messed up, we get worried. Every breath Eva draws is precious to us, and when those breaths are difficult for her, they're difficult for us too. On those mornings, or even other times of day, when she seems particularly hard asleep, I'll lean closer and inspect her chest for motion. In the morning, since she's due to get up soon anyway, I might stroke her head to see if she stirs. So far she always has, but it's a thought I don't like dwelling on--a life as small and gentle as hers, could so easily and gently slip away. Eva's grasp on life at times seems no more firm than her hold on any toy we might place in her hands--a toy which she lightly drops as she looks elsewhere.

I treat life in myself, and in the other adults I know, as an assumption. Whether people I've known for many years, or folks like Kate's family I've gotten to know only in the last fifteen months or so, everyone's existence is more or less synonymous with my own. And I've seen death. My own parents', of course. Dad's was shocking in its quickness--brain cancer, and it was like an ambush--and Mom's was slower, more inexorable. I mourned Mom more as she died than I did Dad, but I was also more exhausted by the end. And in taking care of her for her last year, I got to know many of her and Dad's friends, most of an age to be of increasingly failing health themselves.

And two were struck that same year as Mom died, 2005. As fine a lady as ever lived, Nancy Starrett, who provided invaluable help to me all winter by watching Mom as I went out to do errands (and go to the gym, of course!)--she was dying of breast cancer at the time, and knew it, but said nothing of it. I'd known that she'd had it once before, but it had seemingly gone away. And the most hideous irony of all is that, I believed of Nancy, the very thing people believed of both my parents: she's happy, strong, and spirited--she'll beat it. If anyone can, she will.

She didn't. When I found out about her death, five months after my own mother's, it hurt worse than when Mom died. The surprise, the broken faith, and the building anger and despair made me start to feel a little savage. Then two months later, her lifelong husband John (and one of my father's very closest friends) died of a broken heart. I began feeling like I was going a little crazy, like I had no emotional bearings any more. I watched my mother slowly die, and devoted all my effort to preparing myself for it. But these two family friends, gone without warning, started breaking my control over my emotions. That's as far as I'll take that story for now, except to say that, at least as far as my career is concerned, I'm still feeling the repercussions.

But Eva...a baby whose mind is still developing, who can barely communicate at all, who's innocent of everything except the simplest needs and feelings...the world wouldn't notice the passing of so small a life. I, and Kate, would feel it for the rest of ours, of course. She's a very smiley baby, and I take it as a compliment when people observe how happy she is. Above all else I want her to learn happiness from me. Love too, of course, but that permeates the happiness.

So when this little baby girl, this beautiful little bundle of hope and possibility, seems to have some trouble surviving, her mother and I can think of almost nothing else.

Parenting is, like everything else in life, a learning process. Sicknesses come and go, some more serious than others. We'll be dealing with the emotional ups-and-downs of this one, and hopefully others, in years to come. Not to mention all the other practical issues, like the occasional car accident or broken bone or mishap of some other nature. And through it all, parents (not to mention children) develop a sense of balance, a sense of recognition as to what clues are telltales of more important things, and what are trivial.

But my bride and I are new at this. Our balance isn't so good yet. Kate in particular is a hard-core worrier, prone to terrifying herself with YouTube videos of sick kids when she suspects some illness in her baby. (Now I like to go for some comic effect by writing that Kate terrifies herself. Obviously, she's intelligent about it, and is listening for points of similarity to Eva's issues, and she can readily recognize the differences. But she's gone hunting on the web several times to study up on baby coughs. And one of her hunts succeeded in scaring me into a sleepless night. Thanks, babe.)

So a few weeks ago, Eva turned up with what at first seemed a very dainty, "excuse-me-but-I-require-your-attention" cough. Kind of an "eheh" noise, a baby clearing her throat. But soon it seemed to me that her lungs couldn't cough with too much more force--they're the size of my thumb, after all, so they can't push much air--and I took more notice. Kate did likewise, and soon it seemed that she was coughing constantly.

That led to the first frantic online search for whooping cough sounds, and my sleepless night (thanks again, darling). And what we heard was partly reassuring, partly not: Eva's cough wasn't so bad, but we'd heard the whooping-style wheeze more than once. (Besides, we'd already heard about the eating-pooping-sleeping thing, and she still had no trouble with any of those.) But we were now worried.

Despite being on half budget, we sprang for a basic vaporizer to put in Eva's room, to help moisturize the air she breathes at night. (Kate puzzled over the seemingly paradoxical advice we got, to both moisten the air and dry out Eva's mucous passages with a pediatric antihistamine. So we held off from the drug.)

At first, there was improvement, but a week later the cough returned, and in the last few days, the wheeze has become prominent when she's reclining or lying down. This was enough to scare both of us, and send me into the kind of thoughts I described above. We wangled an appointment with Eva's doctor today, and brought her in for an emergency checkup.

Of course these folks are used to dealing with terrified parents, and the whole staff--all women--are superbly gentle and reassuring in their demeanor. So right away I felt more comfortable once we were in the examination room, and with the physican's assistant (we couldn't see the doctor on such short notice). After the standard preliminary observations, the PA spent several minutes listening to Eva's front and back with a stethoscope, and gave me the most reassuring assessment of the day: "Her lungs sound perfectly clear. There's no wheezing or rasping." The wheezing, she judged, was more in the throat, likely the result of post-nasal drip, itself likely due to an allergy. And she recommended the vaporizer and antihistamine.

So Kate was back to her paradox: moisten 'er up and dry 'er out. But hearing the advice again, and from a pro, after a full checkup (including booster shots! Awright), was the best outcome I could've hoped for. And Kate was immensely reassured. She went from stiff and fearful in her demeanor, to relaxed and willing to smile again.

I don't like it when my little bengal is scared.

Eva's upstairs now enjoying her evening nap, and placidity reigns in the Sutherland home.

Now it's time for me to git cracking again on that Hebrew...

Shalom am tov!

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.