three cheers for the Internet

I'm going to share a video that makes me happy. (The audio is fine, the video may not be safe for your workplace.)

Some time ago, someone had the genius idea to make ChatRoulette, a website where you would video-chat with essentially random people. As you would expect, it has a lot of naked men up late by themselves at night.

Look at everyone's faces. This is your weekly reminder: humans are amazing and awesome.

true to life

I had a spectacular, utterly realistic dream about J the other night.

In the dream, I come home to the front door. Often they hear my bicycle or something, and J runs to the door, very excited.

"Chris is home! It's Chris!"

Then he turns around and goes into his room to read a book or play with Legos, humming and squeaking and burbling happily.

flatland

We (my entire immediate family) are visiting my brother on his farm in Minnesota. There are fewer mosquitoes than I expected, and more people: I hadn't tallied it up before, but now that we're all married with kids, if you get the whole crew together it's 11 people. We got here on Wednesday, and I'm more than a little fried, because my brother has a relatively small house. Anna and J and I are living in a very large REI tent we brought with us, but the level of cacophony and the effort of family take a big chunk out of any recharging I can do.

What's "the effort of family"? I've never written that before. As humans, we're not good at seeing the world directly, as if for the first time; instead, we form a mental image or model, composed of a little bit of what's happening now, but mostly of our past history with similar things. We especially do this with other people, where we conflate our past experience of them, our assumptions about their inner experience, and then conflate that with other people and experiences that remind us of them somehow. Then we convince ourselves that we know this person, and we're a little shocked when they deviate too far from our mental composite to which we assign their name.

Given that you and your family have known each other your whole life and have spent all that time building mental composites of each other and mistaking that for the real person, it's possible there is no group of people in the entire world less likely to see you freshly and clearly, for who you are at this moment, than your family. Love you unconditionally, I hope so. See who you are, no.

The effort of family is the constant struggle of being pulled into being who your family thinks you are, while pushing back to have them see you as you really are. Of trying to connect with each other through the fog of your shared history.

I'm also exhausted because we've done too much traveling this summer. We have been flying somewhere, with J, about every other week since the beginning of June. It is lovely to see everyone! It's time to be done.

My brother and his wife and daughter are at their friends' wedding, three farm fields to the south, and I went to chase down their marvelous dog who so wanted to join them. On the way back--someone else captured the dog--I met an uncle from the wedding, a very nice man named Frank, and we were talking about autism-spectrum kids and Buddhism. Naturally, he's a Tibetan Buddhist, because that's the sort of person visiting from Virginia that you run into, adjacent to your brother's farm in rural Minnesota.

Anna continues her unblemished streak of awesome, of course. And there's good coffee.

hello chaos, my old friend

I keep starting blog posts, and holding myself to some silly standard of coherence that means I don't finish them because I can't focus.

We spent a week on Cape Cod! Hung out with my parents, got to see my nieces. There are pictures. It was awesome. Lots of excellent parent-kid time with J.

Then Friday at work, and then we were off, kidless, to a relative's 50th anniversary party! Lots of good heavy food, many second cousins, a manmade pond with a bottom of sticky clay and water like it had a bunch of milk in it, underwater visibility about 1/2 inch. Anna recommended naming it Clear Pond.

On the drive up I spent 2 hours on my laptop in a sunny car, fixing a production issue. Many people had separate production issues, and then I came into work today and wow, chaos. Endless emails, planning, what went wrong, how do we fix things, re-prioritizing, did this customer issue get fixed yet. Wow.

Anna got sick yesterday, so I left work mid-day to go pick up J and bring him back here so Anna could take him to an appointment, then I took the train back to work, where I stayed until 8 PM.

TV was made for nights like this.

dad stuff

We just got J from his dad, so naturally he was a crabby little thing tonight, getting angry at Anna right before bed because he came out of his room during Reading Time, which is disallowed as part of our rigorous bedtime ritual, to offer her some bullshit deal about how he'd go right to sleep if he could watch Minecraft videos tomorrow. We managed to get him settled, and a little while later he opens his door to come out: also strictly forbidden. I got up and followed him back into his room.

"I'm sorry for leaving, I just thought I was going to have a bad dream, you see I was thinking about death and how everyone dies and then I was realizing that I'm closer to death..."
"It's okay. Would you like some more snuggling?"
"Yes, I would like snuggling." (He actually talks like this.)
"Would you like snuggling from me, or Mama?"
"You, since you're already here."

Proximity is a form of love, I guess. We lay there for a bit. I did my best to hold him still; his automatic stimming helps keep him awake.

"Chris, I'm not thinking about it at all. You did good. Now I promise I won't leave again unless I have to pee."

I stayed for a little while, just to make sure he settled a little--being all wound up, every so often he thinks of some joke in a book or whatever and explodes with sleep-inhibiting laughter.

But, hey! I did good.

The Garden Of Your Mind

Mister Rogers, Remixed.



Awesome.

June recap

We went to Legoland California for a few days. It's in sunny Carlsbad, CA, between Los Angeles and San Diego. I despise Southern California and have no love for amusement parks, but Legoland is far and away the least loathsome I've ever seen, and I recommend it even if you don't have kids. Stay at the Sheraton next door: there's a private entrance for the hotel, so you can just walk down the hill and skip the chaos of the main gate. (If you wait long enough, they're building a Legoland Hotel which will be properly Lego-themed.)

J got sick and we missed most of the second day of park-going. I was sad for him and Anna, but not unhappy myself to be inside instead of out in the very, very bright sun.

Last weekend we visited the in-laws outside Seattle. I get overwhelmed just walking into their house, so it was a long weekend.

I'm often pretty brain-fried at work this month. The technical scope of my team has somewhat suddenly grown far, far beyond what I can track in my head; I am forced to pull back more and more so that I hold fewer and fewer details. Luckily my team is amazing, but it's hard to keep my head in the game, especially where I actually have to do engineering work. It's extremely difficult for me to switch out of the interrupts-and-meetings mode into a think-deeply-about-things mode. The search for solutions is ongoing.

Finally, my first Father's Day. J was with his dad, but I did get this:

Look at that handwriting! This is the kid who used to melt down sobbing when he tried to write anything. A few weeks ago I complimented him on it and he gave his current response to compliments: "I know!".

He is a marvelous and kind little monkey, and it's a privilege to be a father for him.