The ways we are

I don't normally write about this sort of thing, but there's little else for me to do while the software is building.  I've done the walking trips about the office. Nothing to see. I've sat in front of the browser and hit 'Refresh' more times than is necessary, desperately waiting for e-mail, like waiting for the phone to ring - nothing.

I was in the bathroom earlier today, on the crapper doing my business. I don't know how many people would be willing to admit to this, but I like to look through the gaps in the stall doors at what's happening outside. It's a reverse form of the popular Japanese and German practice of bathroom voyeurism.

After doing my thing and cleaning up, I opened the stall door and went to wash my hands.  In the mirror I couldn't help but notice two men stood up in front of the urinals. Normally I wouldn't take any notice of this beyond a glance. Something struck me. No, not one of their fists. The contrast of two men, about equal height, both working for the same company.

Jay was wearing an older pair of jeans, torn badly just below the right rear pocket, an abused white corporate tee-shirt tucked tactlessly into his jeans. He was wearing a thin belt. Richard wore a newer, at least cleaner, pair of jeans. He wore a checked shirt tucked into his pants. He wore a slim, elegant black belt. Jay's hair is thick and wiry, a little to long. Richard has 'manager hair', which is to say its dirty blond, thick and straight. It falls just shy of the base of his neck and down in front of his eyes. He must have to brush it aside to see.

What struck me in particular was the way each approached the problem of urination. How should one stand? Where do ones hands go? One hand or two? Jay was using one hand, the other placed on his front left hip. His head leaned forward, and his legs only slightly spread. Richard, however, had one hand placed squarely on his hip in an authoritarian pose, legs spread and firmly planted. After Jay was done and at the lavatory, Richard moved both hands to behind his back and locked his thumbs under his belt and, I suppose, just let 'it' ('it' being his penis) hang in mid-air and continue to do it's work.

What would make a man do that? What air of confidence is required over your penis control to risk it flopping about and sopping you with yellow? Who knows. Perhaps it's a reaction of his status as director or VP of engineering. Jay, some developer. I guess where we arrive is a reflection of how we go.

... and the fellow said, "jump!"

Looking outside my window as the day draws towards its close, I can see the trees in the yard across the street standing nightly, unmoving, as the world about them changes. Just farther down the street, and around the corner to the left, is an existing home scheduled to be torn down and replaced with four anaemic "executive townhouses" which amount to little more than row-homes with expensive trimmings. It perplexes me to consider the type of person who would spend upwards of $700 000 to purchase one of these, when they might get a nice little piece of property in the downtown for a similar price. The individual lots will not be at traditional right-angles to the road in order to square-peg-round-hole all four in to place, the effect of which will no doubt appear to have been intended by an epileptic in the midst of a fit, the drawings snatched away from her to be rushed downtown to the city ordinance office where it will be crudely rubber-stamped by a kick-back pocketing peon of no worthwhile description; and what shall happen to those large red maples that adorn the lawn? Naturally they will be removed to serve the cause of progress, and be replaced with wheedling saplings whose tenuous futures will depend on just how harsh a winter we encounter as they do one careful waterings. I am no less guilty than the parties-to-be, as I too have purchased a house built on the ghost of an older. To be sure, I feel marginally less guilty because I don't know what this lot used to look like. Perhaps it was a dump. Perhaps the old fellow who lived here last had let it go so that the shrubbery was ant-eaten and decrepitly leaning heavily to one side, while the rats and raccoons scurried about underneath the lifted up wainscoting; this is a rather fanciful, and certainly false view. What is more likely is that the entire lot was well maintained and let to grow as wild as neighbourly appropriate.

I have temporarily lost the aim of my argument. What I meant to say is that those trees have no idea what is in store for them. It may confidently be said that few biological forms have any idea what is in store for them, for they have little ability to foresee the future, though they doubtless have memory. The thick nimbostratus clouds plod sadly across the sky, as though on their way to some unpleasant, but ineluctable rendezvous. They radiate melancholy like the sun radiates promise, and lend a deranged yellow tint to everything they catch in their umbra. The trees do not appreciate this sense of foreboding, like palpable gloom reaching out ever farther for something to take hold of, yet, ever over-reaching. To go over one must go under. To surmount ones challenges, one must submit to their demands. One cannot forever subvert the dictates of cause and effect, of action and reaction, of consumption and consequence; riding a motorcycle with your mouth open is bound to choke you on flies, and ignoring the consequences of your actions, failing to predict the outcome of your choices, is tantamount to running around blindly at the rim of the Grand Canyon while some German screams, "now ... jamp!"

I cannot count the hours lost to mindless activity, nor the hours lost to mindful activity. What proof have we that any one thing, or other, has benefited or maligned us in some way that might not have been just as effectively achieved through other means? Chance is an unavoidable fact of living, nay, of existence, whether biological or mineral, so long as it is nominally existential. People "of faith" don't have to worry about chance because the dice are loaded, and they're as sure of the hand throwing them, as they are of their own existence. Chance. We make plans for futures that may never come. We take thousands of probable outcomes and boil them down to either the most desirable, or the most feared, and from their we have our lot cast based on intention and circumstance. We sit and watch the numbers of the stock market wax and wane like a drunken moon, and still con ourselves into certain belief that we are equal to the challenge of predicting them, that we are, in effect, masters of some fate: ours, their's, the poor fellow in the cubicle over there. Stick man drawings are no less meaningful than full detail anatomical ones, so long as the purpose and perspective is right. I wish I could learn to take nothing for granted, to enjoy what graces chance and life have seen fit to drop from their tables, like brushed-off scraps of after-dinner waste. I wish I could find the wonder again in a grain of sand, all of those basic atomic particles swarming around in probabilistic ways, with an in-built cloaking device that no amount of human cunning can ever penetrate. I want to walk on open air with the confidence of an idiot. I want very much, not to expect less of, but to gladly accept what people can offer me, to be less judging and more uplifting. I want, in essence, to be that queer mix of existentialist and spiritualist that very few have achieved, but to whom we owe much to the elevation of a, otherwise, base expectation of man's abilities.

The sky has grown dark as the earth has completed another diurnal phase. The trees stand as silent and unknowing as ever, and I pause to reflect and calm myself down a little. Too much expectation is like too much good wine: it feels good, but it can leave you with a paralysing hangover.

Far far away

How people can find the time to update their blogs daily, or even bi-weekly, is a mystery to me. Though I sit in front of a computer all day, and some times throughout the evening, I rarely find the opportunity to do much more than work, watch the stock market do it's best imitation of Son of Beast, and look at the myriad of items on my To Do list that seem never to get done. Maybe I've got unreasonable, and unsustainable, intentions regarding blogs. Maybe they are not largely more than a location to vent to the world, have short reminisces, and try to attain that 15 minutes of fame Andy Warhol quipped about. Still, others take their blogs seriously, consciously making the effort to update them with quality, meaningful, and well thought out musings and recollections. Others use them as a public forum for sharing views on topics dear to them such as crime prevention, poverty awareness, and conspiracy theorizing.

I am, as I stated in my opening blog, using it for the purpose of recording the past-present and as a means to keep sharp my writing skills.

...

Even now, I have had to stop for the past 15 minutes in order to move e-mail around. My God! I am "moving" e-mail from one folder to another. This is the devil's work.

...

and a 4 hour pause. This is exactly why my entries are as widely spaced as galaxies in the Universe.

Panic! Fear! Run for the goddamn hills my son and don't look back. No matter how good or blameless you are, you'll never be safe from the bastards who try to run you down. No matter how careful, conscientious or prepared you are, you cannot escape for ever the dreadful sound of trampling hooves, the cold breath upon your neck, or the sound of the Scythe as it snips off the tips of the hairs that stand erect on your head. No matter how hard you try, no matter how strenuously you endeavour to remain on the side of the good there are no guarantees that your number will not come up.

What began months ago as referring to the Boober as "skinny" quickly devolved into a frantic search for the cause of this skinniness. At first we attributed his slight frame to the result of having suffered several concurrent (if not at times, overlapping) colds over the winter months. In a day-care setting, either home or factory-farm, it is impossible to guard against ever becoming ill. Nothing short of seclusion or an N95 mask can truly guard against the possibility of picking up some ailment, and by God, we are not the type of people to worry ourselves over a few air-born bugs. We are, by way of fact, the type of people that will allow our 10 month-old to sample the ash-dirt mix in public campgrounds. His pediatrician, however, thought there might be something more ominous behind his extravagant weight loss, and because we have such great faith in his pediatrician, we too began to wonder at how he was transformed from a child comfortably at the 75th percentile for weight, to one nudging just barely above the 25th. I'd like to say that I've long held to the belief that his weight suffered the harsh effects or chronic winter illness, but not being an expert of anything practical, could not gainsay the good doctor with any argument more poignant than "because!"

No one likes to hear that their child might be ill in some chronic and permanent way. It is still worse to discover that one of those ailments might be Cystic Fibrosis. How did we get from some as-to-yet unexplained weight loss to CF? In the murky world of early childhood development not all bowel movements are created equal. The line which separates healthy bowel movements for those of questionable frequency is so slight: 1 - 2 is normal, and 3 - 4 is not normal. We long gave up the practice of tracking the number and types of Rowan's poops. Once we'd gotten past the very early stages of newborn stomach flora development we thought no more of checking. We'd always wondered, awed, at how alternately large, small, wet, dry, amorphous, rabbit-like, his poops appeared, but we attributed it to nothing more than a continually developing digestive system. We also supposed that, based on his diet, there would simply be very meal-specific appearances to his output - it appeared to be no different than when an adult consumes a large number of boiled beets. We examined his behaviour, his physical growth (other than weight), his ability to manoeuvre dexterously, and his cognitive development, and decided that if weight was the only X-factor in an otherwise supreme growth effort, then how could it be possible something was wrong?

Fear comes in many forms. We never expected it to come in the form of feces. The first test result we received regarded the percentage of fat in his poop. A high percentage of fat (anything above 5%) indicates a fat absorption problem. While the idea that you could eat a whole pound of fat, but not have it sashay its way to your hips sounds like to type of affliction with which anyone would love to be cursed. Yet you must understand that there are several, crucial, vitamins that are fat soluble, and only enter the blood-stream carried by fat; a person who poorly absorbs fat, will also be prey to poor absorption of vitamins, and this would have deleterious affects on growth. In an adult who has already developed, this is, perhaps less of a concern, but for an infant, who is still on a steep growth ramp, this is very troubling. Rowan's first fat globule poop test returned 20% fat, which is 4 times the safe amount. The nurse who called to tell us we might want to re-test his poop was uncomfortable - you could hear in her voice a kind of sad worry that she was delivering terrible, fatal, news. You could just hear whispered the words, "Cystic Fibrosis", each time she paused to find an alternate word, but we knew already what they were testing for, and each time she hesitated, I filled in the gap mentally. What a strange thing to be afraid to say the already-known, as if to say it would be to make it manifest, when in reality, all the testing in world would not change the outcome - either you are afflicted with a disease, or not. Being wholly ignorant of that bus bearing down on you won't change the outcome one way or the other. Still, we humans tend to be very superstitious, especially when it comes to tender moments of sympathy and sorrow, so to say it would have been to violate that understanding, that silence that itself screams. I acted as if I noticed nothing, and perhaps she believed me.

We since had the test re-done and it came back negative. Our boy, it seems, has very average poop. There's been no time in his short life that I've praying for complete mediocrity, but this was it. The lab to which we took the first sample ought to have rejected it because it was stale poop. Only poop that is no more than 4 hours old is fresh enough for this test, and our poop sample was over a day old, most of it in the warm ambient air of the house.  Why did they accept it? I can't say. Perhaps they are just not educated on this one thing. Whatever the reason, it caused us great stress and worry for a week while we gathered a second sample and waited for the results.

We are now (mostly) free and clear, but what does that really mean? We move, as elsewhere in life, from moment to moment, and crisis to crisis, where happiness and misery are interwoven in such terribly complex and beautiful patterns. It's better than being alone ...

The Things I Never Knew ...

Having two children is, so far as I can tell at this early stage, not so much different from having one. With Bronson being a measly 11 days old it ought to be difficult to judge, but it will be many months before he requires any more anxious attention than he does now. Unlike Rowan, he cannot get about to do such things as stick forks in outlets, leap off of upturned waste-paper baskets, chew twigs of dubious lineage, eat chocolate eggs still covered in foil, or pull down cups full of hot tea. Bronson is still in that phase whereby the greatest worry is that he might sit in his poop too long and irritate his bum-bum - something that, while unpleasant, is not likely to send my heart into bursts of arrhythmia.

Being a parent, so far as my little experience has taught me, is 10 parts patience, 5 parts planning, 10 parts ignorance and 50 parts providence. What I have learned about myself is that I am not as patient as I always flattered myself to be, and for that I am a little disappointed. It seems a life-time of doing it "my way" has poorly prepared me to do it "another way", which is to say that I like my floors to be clean, whereas Rowan likes to decorate the floor with bits of his dinner, which the dogs like to alternately lick and grind in to the tile. I have learned that poop, while not always cute, is also not always not so cute. What you would never do for anyone else, you will do for your children, and you will do so with zombie-like acceptance: stoic yet slightly ecstatic. Stoicism is an important philosophy adopt as a parent because not everything that your child does, or that happens to your child, can be dealt with passionately. There are times when a distanced approach is called for because detachment allows you to assess the issues clinically and combat them in the same way. Too much passion, ill placed, is like fighting in a wild rage: when you hit something you may do it terrifically, but that presumes that you will actually hit something, and that something you hit will be the right thing. When the outcome of something serious hinges, not only on your confronting it, but with how you confront it, clarity of mind is far more effective than pitch of passion. This, of course, does not preclude passion, but insists on its use in only certain circumstances. As with so much else, knowing where to judiciously apply force is more important than applying that force.

I never knew that having a child would be like grafting your younger self to another creature. While I want each son to grow in his way, I also want to be certain that he grows in a way congruent with my view of the world. This is not the same as saying that I want my children to be a facsimile of the person I would have liked to be, but to suggest that I would like them to embody the principles which I now hold dear, in an attempt to better the world as I see it ought to be bettered. I am happy for them to go off and manifest their own destinies so long as more than a vestige of my ethics is cured into the foundation of their drives and desires. They will be a reflection of the person I've been as much as a reflection of the people they are, for you cannot escape your history any more than you can escape your genetics. We are all bound, as by a string, to the past as surely as the waves lapping upon the shore are bound to the ripples that preceded them out in the deepest oceans. Cause-and-effect dominate, not only our physics, but our philosophy, and our philosophy, whether conscious or unconscious, dominates our realities; no choice is truly random, but influenced by a host of phenomena, and our perceptions of those phenomena, based on the teachings in our youth, and those teachings are imparted to us partly by our parents, partly by our peers, partly by the acquaintances with whom we brush elbows, and partly by the random mechanics of the world. It is the totality of everything which unconsciously fuels our great engines of perception, thought, and action.

The Tinkle Bot Arrives ...

"Tinkle Bot" is the name of my second son. To be fair, it's not what my wife and I Christened him, or what we will Christen him when he's Christened, but when the time comes - and it will - he will be officially known as Bronson Jack Daniel Bejjani. Unlike his older brother, Bronson has this uncanny ability to either maneuver his wee-wee outside the protective barrier of his diaper, or to simply overwhelm its holding capacity by repeatedly peeing voluminous quantities until the figurative dyke bursts and soaks into his jammies or day-clothes, hence "Tinkle Bot". A "Bot" or "Robot" is a purpose built machine designed to do one thing, and to do it well; that's Bronson!