surprise!

I got occasional arcane updates about the progress of J’s birth certificate: an email from Juvenile Court saying they sent a form to the state, a letter from the state saying they did their thing and handed it off to the next state, and then finally a letter saying the birth records have been updated! Awesome, that was like 2-3 months, instead of the year the Court told us it would take.

I ordered 3 copies of the new birth certificate, and they’re gorgeous: too: all I had growing up was notarized copies, but no, this is full color, on heavy paper. And they listed me as the father!

In an unexpected twist, the mother was "Not Stated."

The city clerk said, "It was the natural mother blank? Yeah, I think I know what happened. We have this new system for entering adoptions…". She sent replacements, and an envelope to send the bad ones back—practices you want to see in a city clerk—and now it’s all official, with both parents and everything!

So the preparations to send him off to college now also include changing his name, which would be a lot easier if we had gotten him a state ID with his deadname, but it’s his deadname, so we sort of didn’t want to, and also didn’t get around to it. Now we change the Social Security number so it matches the birth certificate, then comes the state ID, and after that pretty much everything is easy.

It’s a nice feeling. All three of us have worked really hard for this. It’s good.

self-revision.

At the end of the day, who we are is a story. We tell it to the world, to tell it how to treat us. (Whether it listens or not.) We tell it to ourselves, to remember who we were yesterday, and who we want to be tomorrow. Our sense of self is a little like cooking: no amount of skill can make up for crappy ingredients. I make a killer salt-crusted roast chicken, but not if the chicken was bought several days past due from Grocery Outlet.

Growing up, I was the nerdy, book-absorbed kid, and Tim and Ben were so profoundly gifted with their bodies, that I always felt like I was also the awkward, uncoordinated one. In the team sports that were prioritized, that was absolutely true. I was, and remain, mostly rubbish at baseball, basketball, and soccer. I’m sure I would have sucked at football. I was dropped into a gymnastics class that was unable to help me. Martial arts were off the table, because that was fighting. (Or something. It’s complicated, and I'm not 100% sure what the problem was. My life would have unfolded differently, for sure.)

It emerged that I was pretty good at tennis. In the violent, traumatic time of 7th and 8th grades, I carved out some space for myself by being good at the ersatz handball played between the two classroom buildings. (We used a racquetball and no gloves, so you needed a baseline pain tolerance.) My boarding school requires you to do some sort of sporty thing every term, so I did tennis, volleyball, softball, soccer, and weights. I was still good at tennis, and I turned out to be quite good at volleyball. (Softball and soccer were still a bit of a waste, but with nobody pretending the game is anything more than a curriculum requirement, who cares?)

For some reason, I joined the swim team as a diver. I wish I remembered why. It was appalling. Incredibly anxiety-provoking. When you dive, failure is painful. I was bad at it. Senior year, a kid broke his ankle, and I was on the varsity team. I did really poorly. I hit my head on the board at an away meet. Clearly I was gawky and uncoordinated.

Except...I'm not, actually. Even before aikido got me inhabiting my body properly, I was naturally good at a whole bunch of stuff:

• tennis
• racquetball
• handball
• volleyball
• sharp objects
• hitting people with sticks
• climbing
• not falling down cliffs

Ben and I used to have these crappy dart launchers, the kind of rubber suction-cup darts that often don't quite fit and are never really straight, and even if they were, they have the aerodynamics of a handful of wet sand. I was pretty consistently able to hit the outside of Ben's ear, from 15 feet away. I knew how the launcher worked, I knew how the shape of the dart affected its flight. Straightforward enough, but my therapist assures me it's atypical, as is being able to grab an insect out of the air. (Even if all I can do is crush it. Not flies, but mosquitos, gnats, and moths.)

Remember that time I made friends by flawlessly throwing a hatchet? I had literally never thrown a hatchet before.

(It's vastly easier and safer than throwing knives, which is why people have been opening axe-throwing franchises for parties, not knife-throwing. I think the difference is in how closely a hatchet's mass is concentrated around its axis of rotation, meaning the blade is not going as fast as a knife blade does. The mass's inertia keeps it in alignment in flight. And, finally, the blade is heavier and has a lot more energy behind it, which knives don't, which is why just getting knives to stick in a target—never mind hitting what you were aiming at—is an achievement.)

So it's not that I didn't get my share of the sporty genes, as though to compensate for getting more than my share of the bookish genes; it's just that, as happens, my growth was asymmetrical, and it took a long time to find the body stuff I'm good at. Oddly, this excludes dancing, which is so hard for me it's not fun at all. Same with video games.

And now I can read and play viola music, leaving me no wiggle room to doubt that I am, inter alia, a viola player. One of the violin challenges is knowing—feeling—where the notes are on the fingerboard.

One of the viola challenges is that the notes are in a different place from the violin.

Guess who doesn’t have a ton of trouble playing in tune on a viola.

maybe some other time.

You may have suspected that I enjoy the process of shopping for, buying, and playing musical instruments. You may not have suspected that I enjoy it so much, I get really excited about helping other people shop for and buy musical instruments. I am limited in time, space, and money, but also the right instrument for me isn’t going to be the right one for anyone else. Five years ago I could not have imagined the violins I play now, which are…not persnickety, exactly. But you have to ask them the right way.

(I’ve tried some violins in the 1800-1875 range, and they are fascinating, but not so much that I want the project of owning one. They require maintenance, like your 1953 British motorcycle that leaks and burns a quart of oil every week. Very particular maintenance.)

It’s weird to anthropomorphize instruments, or anything else, but everything we make ends up with its own set of quirks so distinctive it makes more sense to just call it "personality." This is true with sailboats: on Outward Bound we sailed as a pair of 30’ wooden boats, built by the same people to the same pattern, but my boat topped out at 6 knots, while the other boat, in the same wind, would do 7 knots. Wood is obviously organic, but in the aggregate, it’s true of the 98%-synthetic Sunfish sailboats too.

We are fortunate to have some world-class instrument sales and service shops here, which is how I got to play a $110,000 guitar yesterday. It’s a 1940 Martin D-28, which my 70s Japanese pseudo-Martin so faithfully copies. I was not interested in playing it, but an older gentleman came in and asked to try it, and we got to chatting. He said "I would love this, but I don’t quite have the cash right now," which I would not have taken at face value before living here, where there’s a Ferrari dealership across from Taquería El Camarón.

(Until fairly recently it was also a Maserati and I think McLaren dealer. Maybe the pandemic forced them to cut back.)

I gathered he has more than a few Martins at home, collectible enough that $110,000 is a price range he’s familiar with. Aside from the starting challenge of having $110,000, it’s actually really hard to spend $110,000 on an ordinary performing guitar! If an instrument isn’t famous by association—like $1 million for a vintage guitar from Keith "I Can’t Believe I’m Not Dead By Now" Richards—you’ll have to call around just to find one. A gorgeous 1888 guitar (#SE-124) by Antonio de Torres, who more or less created the guitar as we know it, is entirely playable and costs $275,000. (Higher than they seem to sell for at auction.) By contrast, if you want a $275,000 violin, I know a couple local places off the top of my head that can probably give you several to try out. It’s not quite a joke when we say you can translate guitar prices to violins by adding a zero on the end.

ANYWAY.

This 1940 Martin really does glow, but only somewhat more than my not-Martin. It is loud, easily the loudest dreadnought I’ve ever heard. I played it briefly. And it’s…fine? It’s a vintage Martin D-28. I basically already have a vintage Martin D-28. And I’m not the world’s best guitar player, so it’s likely wasted on me unless/until I really put the time in to study the guitar in the way I’ve studied the violin. And by then, I might have developed a different (and certainly less expensive) taste.

I think $110,000 will buy me 1/3 of a Ferrari, though…

how to start your weekend.

Most of San Mateo County’s operations are in the county seat, but for departments that don’t have a lot of traffic with the downtown offices—the county library system, the coroner—are up the hill in San Mateo in what I can only describe as a citadel. It’s cleverly set in terrain that offers remarkable privacy, and chunks of it are somewhat fortified, because the biggest occupant is Juvenile Court, including detention, and a variety of things that look like they’re there for the children of juvenile offenders.

When I picked a date for the hearing, they told me all adoption hearings are on Fridays, and it didn’t occur to me to wonder why until we were there, and the staff was relaxed and happy. There are signals of what a more ordinary day is like: signs like "NO HATS IN COURTROOM" and "GENTLEMEN, TUCK IN THOSE SHIRTS.’ Adoptions are obviously one of the most joy-inducing things they do, so it makes sense to just pick a day of the week where people show up for court and they’re there to make a family.

The courtroom blew my mind. There’s the usual judge…podium? pseudo-throne? pulpit?…arrangement, but when the judge entered, she brought a giant smile down to a floor-level lectern. The walls had two-foot wide emojis, lined up like shields in a medieval great hall: "To acknowledge that all emotions are valid in this room." There was a five-foot tall teddy bear, with dozens of smaller bears surrounding it.

And in a final surprise, by tradition, adoptees pick a bear to take home.

just like that.

I’ve never really looked at the child adoption procedure. In part this is because we’ve had no adoptees in the extended family until my cousin adopted her stepson. Normally at this point I would say "Right, suuuure you don’t," except that the genetic variation goes from this:

all the way down to this:

Good luck telling the guys apart on the telephone.

Adoption results in a new birth certificate, which is obvious when you think about it, since the entire purpose of a birth certificate is to legally define the parent-child relationships via the circumstances of birth. I find it weird for a bunch of reasons:

• Rewriting history is not really something my brain will do. I can usually remember what we’re supposed to say about the past (true or false), but I also remember the past.

• I’ve never been a legal parent before, and I always very carefully avoided the word "father." (And still will, really: the birth certificate will list us both as "parent." J’s word for "adult male who shows up with patience and kindness" is just "Chris.")

• A birth certificate will now attest that I had a kid a few years before I met the kid—the form said "Enter your name as of the date of the child’s birth." I remember that year very clearly, and the most I could claim was being uncle or uncle-like to a marvelous trio or two of girls.

In my world growing up, birth certificates were static, authoritative documents, not just because I come from a line of lawyers, but because our genes allow no doubt about where we came from. We look, sound, smile the same. When my grandmother died and I went back to the Rust Belt village my grandfather settled in after leaving Pittsburgh, I went into the one coffee shop, and the owner, Marit, came out from the back and said "You’re a D—, aren’t you." (My cousin tells me Marit loves telling the story as much as I do.) All but one of Generation #4 is through high school. My uncle was on the School Board for a bunch of years. His father was a judge, whose portrait is in the courthouse.

I tell a story, and I hear the more or less uniform voice the men have. I make an expression with my face, and it’s the same smile gifted to a few dozen other people on the planet. 

So in my life to date, a birth certificate is a set-in-concrete record of past events involving biological parents, the ironclad thing you use to sign up for soccer teams or get a passport. It’s wonderful that we can alter the law’s view on our relationship, but it’s also just viscerally odd.

sleepy now

We returned from an epic college road trip up to the delightful greenery of Oregon, and we will be launching J to college up there for the coming year. It's a transitional program, with a couple dozen students, where they take a couple courses to learn How To College, and spend the rest of their time learning the many skills of How To Adult, like interpersonal and life skills stuff. It was amazing to watch J show up as himself, and the program staff really love him for it, and everybody all around settling in to the idea that he will live and thrive there. It was so perfect that we decided that we don't really need to be nearby while he's there, as we've always figured we would: having us available has always been the surest way for him not to need us.

But, we also know that he's capable of amazing things without us around, especially these days, and this place will help him as needed. The student:staff ratio approaches 1:1, and each student has 5 case managers in different areas, meeting with of them through the week. Sending him off on his own feels odd, but the core parenting goal is to raise a functioning adult, so...here we are.

It's a lovely college city, and it's entirely possible J could just continue there, since the university has good programs for what interests him, and he'll have spent a year getting to know the place. Plenty of time before that decision, though.

We brought the dog, because we were driving, and Leela's been getting older (obviously) and a bit more anxious lately, and not really in a good brainspace to be separated from us for 4 days. This was the first time we traveled with her since right after we got her in 2016, and she totally nailed it. We stopped every hour or so, to switch drivers and let her have a sniff and pee on things, and as we got up to the Oregon forests, you could see her tiny, tiny inner wolf perk up at all the new sights and sounds. We stayed in a very comfy 2-bedroom at the Marriott Residence Inn, which loves dogs in addition to having full kitchens.

Happily, we'll be back.

Another One Bites The FDIC Receivership

You've probably heard about the mysterious Silicon Valley Bank disappearing into the hyper-efficient, government-backed maw of the FDIC, followed quickly by the even more mysterious Signature Bank. A decade ago, I had never heard of either one, because as a software engineer, you're probably only going to see the company's financial infrastructure if you try really hard. As it is, I'd never heard of Signature, because it was a bank for cryptocurrency nonsense, which I avoid like the plague, because it's too dazzlingly stupid I can't even get a foothold in it.

SVB had been around a long time, and you might correctly think that startups, which tend not to have things like "profits"—whatever those are—are not a terrific class of customers if you're a bank, and that's true, but not for the obvious reason that they usually disappear. Instead, the problem is that startups deposit and spend money on short timescales. SVB invested their deposits in long-term, fixed-rate assets, and then when everyone's board of directors ordered everyone to act like there was a recession, VC funding rounds dried up, and SVB's depositors started spending more of their deposits. SVB tried to get short-term liquidity to back up the deposits, depositors went to get their money out while they could, and we had a good old-fashioned bank run.

Don't be misled by venture capitalists talking about how smart they are, about "disruption" and "innovation": among themselves, they are a flock of sheep, clad in Patagonia vests.

Ultimately, since I have cleverly avoided having a job for the moment, this doesn't directly affect us. Neither SVB nor Signature were banks for human beings. I did call our finance guy about some strategy stuff, and right now we don't need to do much; but he spent the entire weekend fielding calls from his much more alarmed and high-maintenance clients. He's a friend, and has pretty well absorbed that we don't pay much attention to the stock market, because we want him to do it for us, but when things like this happen, I do call to check in.

We don't seem to be doing a 2008, which is good, as I was making my finance guy laugh thinking of the time interest rates went negative: which is to say, people were telling BNY Mellon, "I will give you $100, and I will let you keep $1 if you just guarantee I will get the other $99," which, like stagflation, is not one of those things anyone imagines to see in a lifetime.

Stay safe, healthy, and warm!