Might be

If you've ever been sued by the federal government for housing discrimination ... you might be a racist.

If you've ever been quoted as saying "I think that the guy is lazy. And it’s probably not his fault, because laziness is a trait in blacks. It really is, I believe that. It’s not anything they can control." ... you might be a racist.

If you've ever taken out a full page ad to advocate for the death penalty for black teenagers accused of rape ... you might be a racist.

If you stuck to your guns on that whole thing 27 years later even after those men had been exonerated by DNA evidence and had their convictions vacated ... you might be a racist.

If you've ever insisted that an American judge of Mexican descent can't be impartial in hearing your case because you're "building a wall" ... you might be a racist.

If the Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives has ever characterized your remarks about that judge as "the textbook definition of a racist comment" ... you might be a racist.

If you think all minorities live in squalid conditions in the inner city ... you might be a racist.

If you think Black Lives Matter is a hate group ... you might be a racist.

If you've ever told rally crowds that "other communities" are trying to steal the election, and urged people to go to the polls and watch for trouble ("you all know what I'm talking about") ... you might be a racist.

If you've ever tweeted out a graphic that claims, under the heading USA Crime Statistics 2015, egregiously false stats like "Whites killed by blacks - 81% Blacks killed by blacks - 97%" ... you might be a racist.

If you won't disavow the support of David Duke, who is a white nationalist, antisemitic conspiracy theorist, Holocaust denier, and former Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan ... you might be a racist.

And if you would elect, as President of the United States of America, someone who has done all of the above ... you might be a racist, too. Or, maybe, just maybe, you're not racist ... it's just that you're white and you're not really affected by racism and don't think it's that big a deal and you're willing to give a guy a pass on all that stuff because you're more concerned with other things. But that's hardly any better.

At least there were no earthquakes

Ours is a family that thrives on routines and rituals, as this blog has demonstrated time and time again. This past week, though, was a dog’s breakfast.

Monday: the federal government was closed due to the Presidents’ Day Holiday. Said holiday is not one which my employer recognizes with automatic paid leave. In the past, many of my co-workers and I would therefore suck it up and work on Presidents’ Day, in the absence of our government colleagues. But last year the rules changed and we lowly contractor scum are no longer allowed to be in the office unless there is at least one government rep present. (Obviously no government employees are going to come in on a holiday.) I was forced to burn 8 hours of my annual leave time, but the upside was, hey, I got to stay home. The little guy, on the other hand, had to go to school, but only for a half day, as parent-teacher conferences were scheduled for the afternoons and evenings Monday and Tuesday.

And then, late in the day, it snowed.

Tuesday: everybody was home, because the schools and the federal government were closed due to inclement weather. Fortunately, when those kind of things happen I don’t have to use my annual leave, I get paid as if it were a normal day and I went to work, based on some business logic about how it’s not our fault if the weather causes regional closures and we’re not expected to be able to plan for such things.

Also, it was one my wife’s usual days off, and not that we needed it that day but even the daycare was closed, sadly due to some burst water pipes and the need for some emergency remediation.

The only slight downside was that I had scheduled an interview for a potential new job. The last time I went down this road I had two long phone interviews and two multi-headed in-person interviews, and that all came to naught, so at this point, having merely been through a single quick pre-screen on the phone, my expectations are still tempered. At any rate, the interview was supposed to be Tuesday afternoon, late enough in the day that I could slip out of work only slightly early, hopefully with no one even noticing I was gone. But the snow cancelled that plan.

Wednesday: Back to work for me, and back to work for my wife, but the public schools were still closed. Luckily, the daycare re-opened, and they were able to take the little guy for a full day along with the little ones. The industrial dryers were still running in one hallway, where the floor moulding was yet to be replaced, but overall they seemed to have done a good job setting things right after the plumbing mishaps.

My wife ended up working later than usual, but made it home eventually. (And we started watching Game of Thrones Season 4, woohoo!)

Thursday: The schools re-opened and we had just about the closest thing to a normal day, with the morning routine going more or less the way it’s supposed to, though the little guy had a little trouble getting himself in gear. In the afternoon, though, the little guy got on the wrong bus; the big yellow school bus took him to our neighborhood, despite the fact that he should have gotten on the white van to take him to daycare where I would pick him up after work. At the risk of wearing out the notion of “fortunately” in this post, we were gratified to learn that the parents of the little guy’s friend who lives two doors down noticed that neither my wife nor I were there to pick up the little guy, and they shuttled the little guy to their house and let the boys play together until I was able to commute home, pick up the little ones, and then get back to our street. No harm, no foul, just some unpleasant stress and worry for a little while there.

Friday: Today is the day that my interview was ultimately rescheduled for. But now instead of 4 pm it’s at 1 pm, which means I have to leave the office around noon and can’t really get away with just ghosting out. Also, I am of course going to show up for my interview in a suit, but it’s casual Friday here at my current gig. A complete change of outfit would be impractical, so I am wearing somewhat dressy trousers and a sweater over my shirt. A tie is hidden in my work bag and the suit jacket is under my overcoat in the micro-closet of my cubicle. I should be able to leave, stop at a restroom between my office building and the Metro, swap the sweater for the tie, and make it into D.C. by the appointed time. Exciting cloak-and-dagger stuff, I know.

Oh, and the schools are closed again today, based solely on the alarmingly low levels of molecular motion in the atmosphere. It’s also another of my wife’s days off, so everyone in my nuclear fam is keeping warm at home. I’m hoping to be back with them at my regularly scheduled home arrival time, but there were delays on the VRE this morning (signal problems, with no indication if that meant “weather-related” or not) and who knows what the evening will bring.

Other stuff happened this week, too, but in the interest of getting some things done before I have to leave, and saving some things to post about next week (so that the blog doesn’t lapse into a weeks-long torpor again) I will sign off for now.

Not a team player (part 3)

(Part 1 here and part 2 here)

People are worried that Marvel Studios getting the rights to utilize Spider-Man in the Marvel Cinematic Universe means that Spider-Man will join the Avengers in the movies, which is problematic at best for the character. They have come to this conclusion based on the fact that every MCU installment so far has been about the Avengers, either focused on the team or on individual members of the team, and every other movie announced for future development has been based around characters prominent in Avengers history in the comics. As it always has been, so it always will be, forever and ever, excelsior.

I can’t believe I have to spell this out, but … Guardians of the Galaxy?

Guardians of the Galaxy was a surprise hit because it was (in part) about a talking raccoon and an ambulatory tree and a ton of other aliens and only one Earth-man and it was based on a comic book property that few people were aware of and even fewer would claim to be gigantic fans of. It also was not tied directly into The Avengers, by which I mean the team, not the movie. Of course it was tied into the movie. The two films take place in the same universe, and with enough fuel Peter Quill could technically fly the Milano all the way from Xandar to Earth and (setting aside relativistic time dilation) bump into Captain America or the Hulk. Thanos was the big post-credits easter egg reveal for The Avengers, and Thanos got a slightly bigger part to play in Guardians of the Galaxy. No doubt the Collector, the Nova Corps, the Celestials and various other elements introduced in Guardians of the Galaxy will factor into the overall story being told through the Avengers and its sequels and the franchises of its constituent members.

But, Guardians of the Galaxy does break the mold in the sense that it’s very difficult to see Star-Lord or Drax or Groot as permanent members of the Avengers. A team-up, on the other hand, seems all but inevitable. I had a theory at one point that GotG were being set up as sacrificial lambs who would all get themselves heroically killed by Thanos to demonstrate how insanely powerful the mad Titan was before he headed for Earth, to better set up the climactic showdown between Thanos and the Avengers there. But given the way audiences fell in love with the Guardians, I think if that ever was the plan it has no doubt changed. So more likely is a story where the Guardians learn Thanos is headed for Earth, they race there to tell the population to evacuate (Peter assumes that of course Earth has developed commonplace space travel since he left as a kid) and then when they find out evacuation isn’t a possibility the Guardians join forces with the Avengers to stop Thanos together. I don’t know if that would be a GotG movie or an Avengers movie, or if Marvel Studios would just upend the paradigm yet again and not make the movie specifically part of one franchise or the other. It will be fun to find out!

I think I was talking about Spider-Man, though? Oh, right. So Star-Lord wasn’t introduced to the MCU to become an Avenger, even if his story advances the Avengers story. Therefore it’s not a foregone conclusion in my mind that Spider-Man will be introduced fated to become an Avenger, either. I am apparently in the minority in thinking this, but there it is.

Some people might say that GotG is the exception that proves the rule. The Guardians are inherently goofy, whereas Spider-Man is a mainstream superhero cut from the same cloth as Iron Man or Thor. The Guardians milieu is way off in a different solar system, so they have huge logistical hurdles to becoming Avengers, whereas Spider-Man lives in New York and could easily be part of the Earth-based team. Perhaps.

I’ve been saving these examples until this point in my argument, because I’m sneaky like that, but Marvel has announced other plans for future movies besides Ant-Man and Black Panther and Captain Marvel. Doctor Strange and Inhumans are on deck as well, and the connections between those properties and the Avengers are tenuously thin at best. The Inhumans are a secret race of people who are descended from the subjects of alien experiments on humans which resulted in enough genetic variance that exposure to a certain gas (or, in the MCU as evidenced by this season of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., a certain metal inside a certain hidden temple) gives the Inhumans superpowers and, often but not always, a weird alien appearance. Sometimes in the comics Inhumans refers not to the entire race but to the royal family of that race, who constitute the rough equivalent of a six-member superteam. One of the members of that team, Crystal, who can control the four classic elements of fire, earth, air and water and who looks basically like a normal woman, has spent time away from her family and the hidden home of the Inhuman race, and been a member of the Fantastic Four as well as an Avenger (married, briefly but long enough to produce a daughter, to Quicksilver). That is a lot of heavy lifting for a movie to pull off to wind up with a minor connection to the Avengers.

1 - Not an Avenger
2 - Also not
3 - Not him either
4 - Avenger!
5 - Nope
6 - Nope
7 - Nope

Doctor Strange is the sorcerer supreme. Was a real doctor, survived a terrible accident, turned to magic in hopes of curing his career-ending injuries, wound up realizing that using magic to fight supernatural threats to all mankind and reality as we know it was more important than saving individual lives as a surgeon. Was he ever a part of the Avengers, in the comics? Not really. Very briefly, within the past ten years or so, he had his strongest connection to the team when he was allowing them to crash at his pad (during one of those recurring storylines where the Avengers are fugitives and need to lay low) and thus was a de facto unofficial member. I could go on and on about the kind of character Doctor Strange is (basically high fantasy) and how he’s fundamentally at odds with the kind of setting the Marvel Universe is (basically sci-fi pot pourri) and how he’s not a good match with the Avengers meta-sensibilities, but instead I’ll just leave it as an undefended statement and move on. Whatever the connection between Doctor Strange and the Avengers, it’s fleeting at best.

So I think it’s a much more defensible position to say that Marvel Studios was already planning on broadening their approach, spreading out the MCU to keep doing things that directly relate to the Avengers alongside things that have little if anything to do with the Avengers. GotG is the current lone outlier, but I don’t believe it was always meant to be that. I wouldn’t want to bet real money against Ant-Man, Black Panther and Captain Marvel eventually joining the MCU Avengers, but I would stake a non-zero wager against Doctor Strange as a core member. Inhumans is now the new wildcard.

Of course, none of the above proves anything about Marvel Studios’ intentions for Spider-Man. Shoot, they only just finalized the deal a matter of days ago, I doubt they have a fully-formed plan themselves, however close they’re ultimately going to play it to their collective vests once they get it together. But taken all together, it’s the reason why I don’t accept 1) Spider-Man cameo 2) Spider-Man solo movie 3) Spider-Man as Avenger as the only logical sequence of events. It’s logical, I’m not denying that, but it’s one of several possibilities as far as I’m concerned.

I think the most likely step 3 is that Spider-Man shows up in Avengers 3 (or whatever the title/branding of the slobberknocker where the Avengers duke it out with Thanos ends up being) as part of a massive hero coalition making Earth’s last stand, along with the Guardians and the Inhumans and Doctor Strange and all the other not-directly-Avengers-affiliated characters. Because, like I keep saying, why wouldn’t Spider-Man be there, both from a consistent fictional characterization standpoint within the narrative and from a maximizing IP visibility standpoint from the producer’s real world point of view? But he can be in that movie and be part of that story without joining the Avengers. I honestly believe MCU Spider-Man joining the MCU Avengers is only slightly more likely than Spider-Man not appearing in the Thanos storyline finale at all.

Not a team player

If you follow behind-the-scenes entertainment news like I do, you might have heard over the past couple of days that Marvel Studios had worked out a deal to co-produce Spider-Man movies in the future. If you also happen to follow comics fandom the way I do, you might have then heard a lot of opinionated people freaking right the heck out over this development, and surprisingly not in a good way.

It’s a lot to unpack, especially if you are just getting up to speed and don’t know why this would be a big deal at all, good or bad, so let me try to lay it all out, starting with stuff which is basically common knowledge and then progressing into the really arcane stuff. So, Marvel Studios is basically everyone’s favorite Hollywood success story these days. They are the studio that brought us all the Iron Man movies, Captain America movies, Thor movies, the Avengers and the upcoming highly anticipated Avengers: Age of Ultron, and of course last year’s feel-good insta-classic Guardians of the Galaxy. These movies all made (or will make) humongous box office bank. They also happen to be really good, pretty consistent high quality entertainment. But the really revolutionary element to them, a minor but important thing, is that they are all part of a cohesive long-range shared universe approach to storytelling, which is generally referred to as the Marvel Cinematic Universe (to differentiate it from the Marvel Universe, which is what fans of the original source material comics call the single fictional setting in which all those printed stories take place).

It started with a post-credits easter egg in Iron Man where Samuel L. Jackson appeared as Nick Fury, established the existence of S.H.I.E.L.D. and dropped hints about something called the “Avengers Initiative”. Then Robert Downey Jr. appeared as Tony Stark in Incredible Hulk. Iron Man 2 introduced Black Widow, Thor introduced Thor but also Hawkeye, Captain America was a period piece set in World War II but included Howard Stark, Tony’s father, but all of those little riffs and references of interconnectedness were not the main point. The main point, obviously, was setting up six heroes across four different franchises who could then come together as the Avengers, in a movie of the same name that would be wall-to-wall spectacle and breakneck plot speed because it didn’t have to do the origins and backstories and exposition that the earlier movies had handled. This payed off enormously, we can assert after the fact. When Sam Jackson made his cameo in Iron Man, it probably seemed like a huge gamble that they might not even have the chance to pull the trigger on.

But it was a gamble that Marvel Studios had to take. Marvel Comics, the intellectual property goldmine from whence these characters and situations were obtained, had gone through so many financial difficulties over the decades prior to the founding of Marvel Studios that they had sold off movie development rights to various batches of characters for much-needed cash. Sony got Spider-Man. Fox got the Fantastic Four and the X-Men. And the world got a bunch of movies. The FF flicks were underwhelming, but the X-Men and Spider-Man series had some true bright spots; I’ll happily sit down and rewatch Spider-Man 2 or X-Men United any time. The point is, once Marvel Studios was up and running they couldn’t just call backsies on all of their auctioned-off characters. So they looked at who they had left, minus the team that had started the whole universe (the FF), minus their flagship character (Spider-Man), minus the beloved mutant outcasts (Wolverine and friends), and realized that the Avengers were biggest guns they had left to fire. So they went all in on that.

It worked, and now Universal wants to do a super-team based on the classic monsters like Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster and the Wolfman, with each getting their own backstory-sketching franchise and then all of them coming together Avengers-style down the road. (Or at least that was the plan before Dracula Untold was met with indifference.) And Warner Brothers (which owns the rights to basically all of the characters from Marvel’s main competitor in superheroes, DC Comics) is going to put Batman in the next Superman movie, plus Wonder Woman and Aquaman, and call it Dawn of Justice to prime the pump for a Justice League series and various supporting franchises. And rumors have circulated about solo films starring characters from the Robin Hood legends which would culminate in a Merry Men mega-blockbuster, or King Arthur’s Round Table, &c. &c. &c. Because this is what always happens when somebody tries something new and succeeds wildly: everyone else tries to replicate the success by imitating the superficial aspects of it exactly and hoping it’s just that simple.

Another thing that often/always happens is that the innovator themselves stops innovating and just keeps hammering on the same thing that worked once again and again until it’s been run into the ground. At best, they might hedge their bets a little, but they don’t suddenly blaze off in crazy new directions. So while everyone else is playing catch-up, Marvel Studios has been announcing their future plans. More Captain America and more Thor, of course, which is only to be expected since trilogies are the minimum bar to clear for successful franchises. But also Ant-Man later this summer, and Black Panther and Captain Marvel down the road. New characters mean new franchises which is good business, and people are particularly stoked (and rightly so) that Black Panther is going to star a POC superhero and Captain Marvel is going star a female superhero. Ant-Man seems like an oddball choice, but in the comics Ant-Man was a founding Avenger, and that of course is another unifying factor with Black Panther and Captain Marvel, both of whom were Avengers on-and-off as well. Assuming Downey and Evans and Hemsworth aren’t going to want to keep making superhero movies forever, and acknowledging that in the comics there’s huge amounts of turnover on superteam rosters, it's only logical to plant seeds now that would lead to an Avengers 4 or 5 some time around the turn of the decade where the Avengers will be the Falcon (introduced in CA: The Winter Soldier), Quicksilver (soon to debut in Age of Ultron), Scarlet Witch (ditto), Captain Marvel, Black Panther and Ant-Man. At a certain point it becomes a self-perpetuating system and it makes more sense to go with it than to fight it.

Which brings us to Spider-Man, a character who has not benefited from the triumphs of Marvel Studios because he’s been in Sony’s hands all this time. As I said earlier, I really like Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 2, and I don’t think the original Spider-Man is half-bad, either. (Spider-Man 3 I could take or leave, but even Raimi himself disavows that one.) Of course once the Marvel Studios era well and truly began, Sony rebooted with Amazing Spider-Man, and (stop me if you’ve heard this before) I really liked it. I liked the sequel, too, but apparently I’m in the minority there, and both of Marc Webb’s movies are generally considered critical and commercial disappointments, if not outright failures. Did the Amazing franchise miss the mark because they weren’t Marvel Studios products? Did they try to hit the same tone or feel as the Iron man and Cap and Thor movies but inevitably come up short? Did they try too hard to create an entire universe with Peter’s parents’ convoluted spy backstories and the multi-villain pile-up that was supposed to (and may still) yield a Sinister Six spin-off? Basically, if Marvel Studios could make a Spider-Man movie, would it be better?

We’re going to have the opportunity to find out now, thanks to the deal that made news this week. It doesn’t seem like too bold a prediction to guess that the next solo Spider-Man movie (which I kind of hope will be called The Spectacular Spider-Man) will make more money than Amazing Spider-Man 2, simply because at this point Marvel Studios is a trusted, dare-I-say beloved brand that gets butts in the cineplex seats just because. The box office is all but pre-ordained (unless between now and then Ant-Man or any other movies bomb hard and take some of the shine off the studio reputation) and yet terrible movies make huge box office all the time (see: the Transformers franchise, shudder shudder). Will a Marvel Studios Spider-Man movie be good, aesthetically, artistically, as blockbuster popcorn flicks go? Will it have mass crossover appeal, and if so will it be hand-in-hand with appeal to longtime fans of the Spider-Man comics, or can it only be one or the other but never both?

The obvious answer is “wait and see’ but of course that’s never stopped rampant frothing-at-the-mouth speculation before and it sure as dang isn’t going to now. But I’ve already blathered on for so long now that I reckon I will save that for another day. Just a day or two from now, honest, I’m not going to sit on this for a month (recent inactivity of this here blog acknowledged). To be continued!

Tunneling

(NOTE: I wrote this post yesterday morning, with the intention of posting it that afternoon. Then the internet connectivity in the office went kerblooie. Hence it now goes up a day late, along with this added request that all real-time readers mentally amend the references to specific days/dates accordingly.)

Last week, on Thursday evening, I picked all three kids up from daycare after work, which is a very standard-issue Thursday evening kind of thing to do. What made this particular Thursday evening noteworthy, to me, was a combination of astronomical and meteorological phenomena I observed as we were all preparing to depart. Specifically, as I was leaning through one of the back doors and helping to get the little girl situated and secured in her car seat, having already done as much for the bino in his rear-facing mid-bench humprider, while the little guy got himself buckled in on the other side, I realized that the 5:30 p.m. sky was not completely dark. Night was encroaching, but not yet fully fallen. Also, it was chilly, but not bitterly cold, not the kind of merciless lifeforce-draining cold that makes me excessively snappish with the kids to hurry up and get settled so I can stop hanging my backside out of the car door and get the engine started and the heat blowing for crying out loud. It was probably only about 37 degrees out, but it’s remarkable what five or so degrees above freezing as opposed to below will do for you.

And so, as tends to happen in moments like that, I had a moment of mindfulness acknowledging that while winter had barely begun, the days were already getting longer again, and at the very least we were not trapped in the grip of another howling polar vortex. Things were looking up, and perhaps I had reason to be optimistic. The very next day I was going to be off from work, so that I could get the little guy off to school and stay home with the little girl, while my wife took the bino off to his ear tube surgery. And that too was reason for optimism, that the seeming endless cycle of ear infections and antibiotics would be broken and a certain amount of peace and well-being might characterize all of our lives.

This of course is how a fool thinks when he presumes to think about the future.

The ear tube insertions were a by-the-book success, the bino was in and out with no complications and he did in fact sleep through the night like a champ that very night. The next day was Saturday, and the bino developed a bit of a fever, but considering all the possible side effects of anesthesia, and that he had only just rolled off the fourth consecutive course of antibiotics a few days earlier, and take your pick of other ever-present complicating factors, we didn’t think much of it. But he did not sleep well Saturday night. Nor did he rally on Sunday, as the fever spiked, so that evening my wife took him to the local urgent care facility where … the bino was diagnosed with influenza. Yes, of course, we had all three kids and ourselves vaccinated for the flu at the beginning of the season, but you may also have heard that the effectiveness rate for this year’s batch against this years active strains is so low that better-than-nothing is about the best that can be said about it. The bino’s case seems to be mild, and luckily we were able to get a prescription for Tamiflu filled that very evening and administer his first dose.

He got the requisite two doses yesterday, when I was home for the holiday. As is often the case with most kids (at least among the sample population of three in my household) the bino was more or less fine, if a tad less energetic than usual, throughout the day. But getting horizontal at bedtime merely aggravated his congestion (did I mention he has bronchitis along with/on top of the flu?) to the point where he could cough himself awake yet could not simply roll over and go back to sleep. Basically Monday night was a redux of Sunday night, except that on Sunday we tried to sleep three to a bed, bino in between my wife and myself, with mixed results of limited restfulness, and last night I decamped to the couch in the den with the bino to let my wife sleep in peace, again with non-optimal outcomes.

So this is where we find ourselves, as we often have over the past six or seven years: in pure, hindbrain survival mode, just trying to get through one day at a time. I no longer really care what color the sky is going to be as I make my way home tonight, nor can I particularly summon up a crap to give about whose Super Bowl party invitation we accept (if any) or when we might get around to visiting some of my family in the late winter/early spring or even what we’re going to have for dinner tomorrow night. I have one overriding desire, which is to go to bed and close my eyes tonight some time before 11, and not have to open my eyes again until my alarm goes off in the morning at 5. I likely will not get my wish.

My wife and I bandy about the old saw about seeing light at the end of the tunnel quite a bit. But lately I’ve come to realize that said metaphor is not really entirely apt. It implies the existence of a completed tunnel, and that at any point in time as one traverses said tunnel one can plot one’s distance from the entrance at one’s back as well as from the exit ahead. Seeing the light indicates that the exit is close, and will only continue drawing nearer as long as one keeps moving forward. That’s all well and good, and it’s a useful metaphor in a variety of situations; I just no longer think parenting is one them.

I think the tunnels of parenting are more like the ones made by a mole or an earthworm. There’s still the place where you came in, somewhere behind you. Theoretically there is, at any rate, although it’s more or less impossible to simply retrace your steps and backtrack out of the tunnel. Perhaps it’s more true to say there was an entrance, but the tunnel that far back has already collapsed in on itself. The only way through and out is to keep digging, chipping away at whatever’s in front of you at the moment. There’s no light to gauge progress against, and really no way of knowing how far away the next breakthrough really is, because a tunnel that doesn’t yet exist, by its very definition, can’t already be mapped. Every kid is different, every go-round is different, and a lightly passing phase for one sibling can be a backbreaking trail of tears for the next. You just have to keep biting those rocks right in front of your face, on and on, day after day. And when your head pops up into open air, it’s a pleasant (albeit potentially disorienting) surprise.

I don’t mean to sound like pure distilled despair, weeping and wailing about how it’s all too hard and too unfair. It is what it is. I wouldn’t give up my family for anything in the world. In some ways it’s kind of liberating to think that every day is just x amount of dirt I have to swallow, or claw my way past, or something. And the flip side is that sometimes you get through the tunnel faster than you expected. I’d been wondering idly how long it was going to be before we were really and truly down to just one kid in diapers (which would signal that the really important countdown to zero kids in diapers could maybe begin) because for a long time now we’ve been living with a toddler who, age-appropriately enough, wears diapers round the clock, and the little girl who is long-since potty-trained but needed overnight diapers. This past Saturday was movie night as usual, and I told the little girl she could get into her pajamas after bath and not worry about the diaper until right before she went to bed. But then she started drifting off during the movie and I got her to bed in a hurry (trying not to wake up the bino who’d gone down in their room earlier) and didn’t realize until morning that we’d forgotten her diaper. But she woke up dry! And after that there was no going back, by which I mean the little girl refused a diaper the following night. We worried it might have been a fluke followed by tantrum-inducing overnight accidents, but as of today it’s three nights in the clear and counting (though of course I have jinxed it by blogging about it). So yes, sometimes things just get better seemingly out of nowhere. Sometimes they don’t get better quite fast enough to suit me. But things do change, that’s the constant we can count on, and the best we can do is try to dig in the right direction, guiding the tunnel around the obstacles and towards the pockets of good stuff. And I'm trying.

(UPDATE: As predicted, I did not get my aforementioned wish last night. The bino went down early, clearly very tired, but was half-awake and screaming for attention right around the time my wife and I were trying to go to sleep. I managed to get him settled in his crib the first time, but he was at it again not much later, and transferred into our bed, where he proceeded to thrash and moan disruptively for a few hours. Then he passed out soundly enough to be transferred back to his crib, around 2:30 a.m. All of which sounds terrible but actually might have represented progress? The bino was still asleep in his own room when I left for work this morning, and that's not nothing. Tunneling blind sometimes involves zigzagging and/or going in circles. We'll give another go tonight, as we must.)

Happy returns

While Thursday around the old blogstead is usually the time when I focus on my own little ones, today I just wanted to say a bit about a baby who is not mine, but maybe the next closest thing: my Little Bro’s baby daughter. There’s been a bit of an elephant-in-the-room vibe of late (again, as with so many things, obscured by the whole Halloween thing) and I’ve been putting off saying much of anything, but now is a good time to finally get to it. (In other words, this story starts out sounding pretty dire but I assure you all up front it has a happy ending.)

My niece arrived back in July and had a reasonably uneventful first few months of life, going to the pediatrician every month or so for newborn well visits, as you do. The pattern repeated in October, which you might recall kicked off in my neck of the woods with my wife having a minor, alarming but fortunately non-disastrous cardiac episode and hospitalization. After my wife had been home again for a few days, my Little Bro called me to see how we were all doing and sound out whether or not we were still planning on roadtripping from Virginia up to New York to meet our niece over Columbus Day weekend. That segment of the conversation went a little something like this:

Me: “Oh, sure, we’re still coming, we’re looking forward to it and my wife feels 100% better. I mean, we think there’s some connection between her job and the stress she’s been under there and the coronary vasospasm, so she needs to look for a new gig, probably, but she’ll get to that. It’s a drag but what can you do, blah blah blah, it’s always some damn thing, blah blah petty discontent, blah.”

Little Bro: “Yeah, OK.” (pause) “So, um, we took our daughter to the doctor the other day and they think she might have spina bifida …”

Me: (dropping dead of mortification)

I immediately began to backpedal and volunteered to cancel/reschedule our visit, because at the time they didn’t know for sure if the baby had spina bifida (handy Wikipedia link if you don’t know what that is), although it seemed more likely than not, and they also didn’t know the extent or severity of it, although it seemed on the mild side given how happy and healthy and normal the baby had seemed the first few months of her life. Still, there were going to be second opinions and consultations and plans of action rolling along at a steady clip in the coming days, and if at any point someone had said “this infant needs surgery NOW” and that happened to be Friday of Columbus Day weekend, we didn’t want our brood (and all their floating daycare germ colonies!) to be underfoot.

As it turned out, surgery was the recommended course of action but it was put off until mid-November. So there was a month there, as I alluded to, where it was just kind of out there and often impossible not to think about, but there was nothing to be done about it except wait it out. Then the day of the surgery came and went, and with great gladness we learned that it went well and the baby pulled through like a champ. A couple of days later my whole household was roadtripping, not to New York but to Delaware, where we have extended family, very conveniently because the surgery was performed at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. And my wife and I got to visit Little Bro and Sister-in-Law and finally meet our niece, who looked amazing. All in all it was kind of like letting out a big breath I had been holding since early October.

The word from the surgeon was that he was very glad they had agreed to the operation, because things were even more complicated once they opened everything up than had been suspected. But, not so complicated that it couldn’t all be addressed, and the prognosis for my niece is now pretty good. Her recovery has been remarkably speedy, and while they had warned my Little Bro the hospital stay could be as long as 10 days, they ended up discharging the baby 72 hours after the conclusion of the surgical procedure. My brother sent out word today that the trip home had not been as bad as they’d feared, either, and they are all three now home sweet home. Good times.

I try (no guarantee about success, just the trying) to leaven most of my complaining on the blog with frequent acknowledgements of how, at the end of the day, I know I lead a pretty charmed life. Just like I may grumble about the absurdities of my job on one hand while being sincerely grateful to have a reliable means of bill-paying on the other, I get pretty cranky about losing sleep when a toddler has a mystery bug that wakes them up inconsolably at 1:30 a.m. (hey, it literally happened just last night!) BUT I do feel immensely fortunate to have never had to deal with any health crisis involving any of my children that was more serious than jaundice or an ear infection. It’s humbling to have even second-hand contact with a series of events like what my Little Bro, his wife and their daughter have been through of late.

Little Bro referred to the ultimately good outcome of the whole process as a “miracle of science” and I think that’s an incredibly apt turn of phrase. I’m thankful for all the health professionals who noticed something was up with my niece, got the diagnosis right, and did something about it to put things right. There really is no other proper response to a miracle other than gratitude, unless it’s a little extra thanks for not needing those extraordinary interventions more than we do.

Crying out for attention

Seems like an overlong time since I really devoted a lot of blog space to my children (especially as individual entities and not just a collective wonderful excuse for me to get all jazzed about Halloween) so let’s dig right in, shall we?

It’s been about three months, or a hair less, since we started the younger two in daycare, and it has had the predictable effects on the bino. Meaning he has low-grade systemic unwellness more or less constantly these days. I’m sure his immune system will figure out what’s happening and rise to the occasion any day now (and I keep reassuring my wife to that effect) but for now he rides up and down the crests and troughs, from a nose runny with clear stuff and few-to-zero other symptoms, to a nose runny with murky stuff plus a persistent chest wheeze and plus unpredictable GI irregularities plus coughing that gets worse when he’s horizontal, leading to bouts of backsliding into the ranks of the sleep-challenged.

The good news is that the bino is sufficiently sleep trained that he can, barring major external disruptions, wake up in the middle of the night and settle himself back down to sleep without the need of any parental intervention whatsoever. That is an unalloyed Positive Thing. We somehow survived all three kids going through that treacherous, nebulous phase where it was no sure thing that they could re-settle themselves, and that led to great pillow-headed debates about whether it would do more harm than good to go in and try to help the baby settle down, or if it would do more harm than good to let them keep trying themselves, possibly winding themselves up more and more. And as often as not one trip into the nursery would lead to another a half hour later and yet another an hour after that, and so on into lamentable ugliness. Being clear of all that is great.

The bad news is that the bino will sometimes wake up in the middle of the night in minor distress, which will pass in a moment, but before that moment has elapsed the bino (and this is unique among the siblings) will let out a wail expressing the depth and fury of his displeasure at his sudden wakefulness. And that in turn wakes us up with a quickness. As I said, the moment then passes, the angry yelling stops almost as fast as it began, and the bino drifts off again. But that leaves one or both parents (usually my wife) struggling to re-enter the sleep cycle, heart hammering at having been shouted awake. So while the bino can, in theory, sleep through the night, at least no longer requiring that anyone responsible for him get up out of bed way ahead of schedule, he’s still not what we would call a good sleeper. So that’s the milestone we’re looking forward to most.

Meanwhile, during daylight hours, he’s talking more and more, which still only amounts to a smattering of recognizable words, but the floodgates seem poised to open soon. And he’s listening like a champ, which is actually a much bigger challenge. We’ve grown accustomed to being able to talk openly about things only his big brother and sister can do right in front of him, as long as all we’re doing is talking, formulating plans to get the bino upstairs and in bed so that the older kids can have special privileges and whatnot. It’s not like he understands, as long as he doesn’t see the big kids heading into the den together without him or something, right? Except we seem to have passed that point already, such that last night I was talking to the big kids about how I was going to take their brother upstairs, and I would leave him in his room for a minute to run back down and get them dessert, which I didn’t want the bino to see because then he would want some and we didn’t have any toddler-friendly options. And sure enough, the big kids agreed to the plan but the bino ran away when I tried to pick him up, and pitched a fit because clearly he wanted dessert as well and he knew what was up. If we’re going to continue trying to snow the bino into thinking he’s not missing out on stuff (stuff he is indeed totally missing out on) then we are going to have to get a lot sneakier about it.

As far as my middle child … she happens to be a little bit under the weather today but by and large she has not had the system shock from breathing in daycare air that her baby brother has. Her greatest acclimation challenge has been social rather than physical, since she is by nature somewhat shy and skeptical of new things and strange people. Still, the ‘somewhat’ is still operative, and her daycare teachers have been letting us know that she has been coming out of her shell little by little. Good for her, and I’m more than happy to let her continue to do so at her own pace.

It’s a different story under our roof, of course, as it should be. Her comfort level is greatest within the natural familial boundaries, and she has no trouble standing up for herself and making her opinions known when things do not go her way at home. She’s three and a half, the perfect age for all-consuming obdurate willfulness, but what’s remarkable about her (to my wife and me, at least) is how blank that wall of will can be. With the little guy, there would be an idea and he would fixate on it and we could pivot off that, a little or a lot depending on how indulgent we were feeling and how outlandish the desire was. If he was upset about a broken toy, and it was cheap, we could offer to buy him a new one the next day, or if it was expensive, we could go into teachable moment mode and impart the importance of taking care of prized possessions and give him an avenue for earning a new toy. If he wanted to wear shorts in January, we could explain weather-appropriate clothing and remind him he didn’t really want to get sick, and give him two or three choices of warmer attire. We could work with him and meet in the middle, and most of the time he barely realized that the middle covered a lot of ground (and the parts of the middle closest to what Mommy and Daddy wanted all along were the places we were most likely to land).

Not so much with the little girl. She’ll get upset at the drop of a hat and we really won’t be sure why. So we’ll ask her directly what it is that she wants and the answer comes back: “NOTHING!” It can be a situation that seems straightforwardly binary: cooperate for your bath, and get videos, or fight us on bathing, and lose videos, which do you want? And she somehow denies the Law of the Excluded Middle and takes a third option of NOTHING. My wife and I joke that she’s a budding nihilist, but it’s really a laugh-so-you-don’t-cry kind of thing.

It’s very difficult to compromise with the idea of NOTHING. You can’t make the kid feel like they’re getting a little bit of what they want while you get a bit of what you want when they don’t want anything at all. Seriously, it may be the sleep deprivation talking, but it makes me question my grip on reality sometimes. It seems obvious that either the kid is fine with wearing the jacket I want them to wear, or they want to wear a different jacket, or they don’t want to wear a jacket at all, but they have to want one of those three things. The little guy would always eventually let himself be pinned down on some preference, which could be a starting point for negotiation. The little girl short circuits all that by claiming that she doesn’t want to wear any jacket but she also doesn’t want to not wear a jacket, she just wants NOTHING, which gets my brain all in a tizzy. Is it even possible not want something and also not not want it? Is she negating reality around us like Neo at the end of the Matrix?

Well no, not that last bit; she just weeps a lot at the unfairness of life when I make decisions for her and she fails to achieve the perfection of NOTHING. It’s a drag, but hopefully just a temporary phase. In fairness, we have very recently gotten through to her on the virtues of the sticker chart, which worked so well on her older brother. (We’re still not above bribing children to get into good habits!) The charts are working to unjam some of the loggerheads we had been stuck at; not perfectly, not yet, but progress is progress.

I do still have three kids, but the little guy, in addition to the passing references above, has always gotten a disproportionate amount of attention just by virtue of being oldest, so I will save some updates on him until tomorrow, and just let things here stand as they are.

6 Days 'Til Halloween Grab Bag

This is the last reminder about the banner contest, but you can enter right up to midnight on Halloween!

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I mentioned a month or so ago that we finally got a DVR, but I don't think I've mentioned since then how much we're enjoying it. I can tangentially tie this to Halloween by pointing out that we DVR'ed this year's broadcast of Toy Story of Terror, which my wife has never seen (still hasn't, in fact, but it's waiting there for her whenever she's ready!) But mainly the big draw at this point is that we can watch time-delayed Jeopardy and do so very efficiently in about 15 minutes per episode by fast-forwarding the commercials, the awkward contestant interviews, and really everything except the clues and responses.

On a recent episode there was a cinema question referencing the Odessa Staircase sequence and I was super-excited to be able to yell out "Battleship Potemkin!" My wife smiled sweetly at me and called me a nerd, which honestly makes me feel like I've come a long way (to specifically being a movie-nerd).

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I almost used this panel to illustrate Thursday's post:

Since I went for a more literal visual aid, I was left wondering when I might be able to work this into what's left of the countdown. Clearly I am opting for the surreal and out-of-context answer.

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See you tomorrow for the final Candy Sunday of October!

8 Days 'Til Halloween: Grandma’s coat closet

(I am cheating and back-filling a Thursday post. I spent Wednesday and Thursday of this week at home with my 6-year-old and 3-year-old, both of whom had varying symptoms which were later either lab-confirmed or professionally-suspected to be strep. They're both on antibiotics and on the mend now, but they were kept home for two days for overabundantly cautious quarantine. Wednesday they were both able to abide by the "keep still and rest here watch some movies" rules but on Thursday it was obvious they both felt fine and needed to tear around the house. Hence, I can only make batter-late-then-never blog amends here and now.)

One of the vivid memories from my youth which illustrates the general principle that kids are dumb enough to be their own worst enemies (and believe me, my childhood recollections may be spotty but those particular stripe of self-recriminations are in seemingly inexhaustible supply) is set during a visit to my grandmother (on my mother's side) who often took Little Bro and I for a week in the summer for no reason other than to give our parents a bit of a break. Grandma's house was not particularly big, nor was it located someplace cool like on a beach or near an amusement park of whathaveyou, and we never befriended any of the other local kids, if there even were any. (NB: this story references my paternal grandparents.) Grandma would make up for the lack of environmental entertainments by straight up buying us new toys to keep us occupied for the week. And one year, my brother chose a small glow-in-the-dark plastic skull filled with rubber creepy crawlies.

I couldn't say why he made that particular selection at the toy store that particular visit. It just struck him as cool and fun, I imagine. It wasn't specifically associated with any name-brand toy line, just a generic cheap novelty that my grandmother was willing to indulge him in. So into the cart and back to grandma's it went.

My grandmother's house had a large walk-in closet on the ground floor which was used mostly as a coat closet, as well as a storage place for the numerous puzzles and board games that my uncles had collected over time. It was a square room, small but still spacious enough that Little Bro and I could both step in and close the door and stand in the center without touching each other and without touching any of the coats, either. Since it was enclosed and windowless, it seemed like a good place to test out just how glowy the glowing skull really was.

So we went into the closet and closed the door turned off the light. I was the one holding the skull, doubtless having invoked some nebulous form of big brother privilege, the upside for Little Bro being that he could just stand back and appreciate the spectacle. And for some reason it got into my head that I should hold the skull up and make it nod while giving a menacing laugh, there in the pitch black depths. Which of course freaked Little Bro OUT and in no small measure freaked me out, partly because Little Bro's reaction was so immediate and terror-filled but also just in and of itself, the nodding glowing floating skull laughing at both of us, even though I was the puppet-master behind it, it still evoked some primal fear of things that could come out of the dark and get us, gloating and snickering all the while.

For a brief horrifying second Little Bro and I were both so freaked we couldn't even find and open the doorknob to get back out of the closet, but then we were back in the sunlit living room again, crisis averted. Still, the self-inflicted mental wounds had been dealt. The scars are relatively tiny today, but they're there, thanks to a dumb kid who liked a good scare a little too much.

29 Days 'Til Halloween: Fun-Scary versus Not

I've ruminated about aspects of this before, but here's a fundamental truth: there's two kinds of scary. Some terrifying things, from roller coasters to horror movies, qualify as entertainment even while they evoke the same kind of primitive fight-or-flight response to fear that is intrinsic to our evolutionary survival. They wind up as a mixed bag somewhere between unpleasant and thrilling, and I suspect that's because of their layered and regulated nature. We tell ourselves the roller coaster is perfectly safe even as it tricks our vestibular system in feeling like everything's dangerously out of control, or that the movie is all make-believe while we get emotionally wrapped up in it all the same.

But of course even the most die hard mayhem-junkie is capable of feeling genuine, uncut fear, with no upside. Nobody (or some very near-zero value) likes it when things really are out of control, and nobody gets a charge out of legitimate mortal danger, no matter how big a fan of the tropes of a given genre they may be.

I bring all this up because of course this Halloween Countdown was and is intended to be a celebration of the fun-scary kinds of scary, and no sooner did it get underway than I had to confront a decidedly not-fun situation in terms of a health scare for my wife. The good news is that she's fine now, resting at home and assured by a team of doctors that there's nothing more to worry about, though of course in an abundance of caution there will be follow-ups and plans of long-term treatment and so on. Still, it was a brutal stretch there from Wednesday afternoon until about mid-day Thursday, not knowing what was going to happen, not really able to control anything, and not knowing when (if) things were going to start getting better.

I appreciate a good haunted hospital motif, but really hadn't anticipated kicking off October by spending so much time in one. (The hospital was not actually haunted, it was in fact modern and pleasant. It's where the little guy was born, in fact. Strange to be back there and not in the maternity ward. Strange overall, really.)

So this post was late but all's well that ends well? Here's very much hoping the rest of the month is uneventful by comparison, and that all future chaos is confined to fictional formats.

Wisdom

The contract I work on is nearing its endpoint; the original agreement between the DoD and my employer was for one year of work and five follow-on option years, and we are currently in the midst of the fifth and final option year, the end of which is the last day of September (since we are on the federal fiscal year calendar). As you might imagine, this does not mean that the task at hand is nearly complete and we have a deadline to finish everything up. The government simply doesn't outsource things in perpetuity, and at intervals they force the incumbent contractors to re-compete for the privilege of continuing draining the bottomless well of work. In theory, it's possible for another contractor to come along and make a better offer which would result in the government switching from our services to our competitors' when our contract is up.

That's in theory. In practice, the better deal would have to be insanely advantageous to the bottom line, because the outgoing contractor would take so much familiarity and institutional knowledge with them, and the incoming team would be playing catch-up on a steep learning curve from day one. Although often that plays out as not so disruptive because the outgoing contractors are suddenly in danger of being laid off because they're not on a viable assignment, and the incoming team may very well recruit (poach) from the losing side, in order to retain that aforementioned wealth of intangibles, or as much of it as possible.

Back in 2009, just a few months before I started this here blog, I was already working for my current employer but on a different contract. It was a newer and shorter contract for a newly stood-up agency, and we went through a re-compete, and I felt pretty self-assured because of the logic I laid out above. Why would they ditch us when we had just gone through the process of learning the ropes, why would they throw that away and start over? I wasn't overly cocky, I did everything that was asked of me to help with the re-compete effort, but I didn't lose any sleep over it. And then we lost the re-compete, and I was benched, and I was not poached by the contractor that ended up winning the new contract. But luckily I was contacted by someone who had one opening on their contract, and that's where I've been ever since, up to and including today.

So I have seen firsthand that incumbency is not invulnerability. But, on the other hand, the situations are kind of apples and oranges. On my previous contract, we were more or less making things up as we went along, very much in keeping with how the brand spanking new agency was conducting itself. It's possible that we doubled down on things in our re-compete proposal that were actually very different from where the decision-makers had determined they wanted to go in the future, and the groundwork we had laid worked against us in the eyes of people who wanted fresh ideas and course corrections. Whereas in my current gig, it's a much more well-established (dinosaur) agency, and this is not even our first re-compete. It's my first, since I jumped on about five years ago, but it's the second or quite possibly the third for the team as a whole. I think I heard someone say we've been in place supporting these endeavors for 16 years, which is crazy but at least the kind of crazy that may work to my benefit.

At any rate, my contracting manager called a meeting this morning for the whole team to talk about what's going on with the contract, since everyone (who's paying attention) is understandably a little bit anxious to have the unresolved be resolved, one way or the other (hopefully one and not the other). And of course the first thing that our manager had to explain was that the governmental powers that be up and down the process chain are all a little behind and off-schedule, which means there's very little to report because they haven't even officially begun the re-compete process, despite the nearness of our contract's expiration date. We have been getting as ready as we can to submit our proposal in hopes of being awarded a new multi-year contract, but can only get so far without a specific set of guidelines provided by the government detailing what (if any) changes may be expected between what we have been doing and what will be required going forward. In order to take in multiple proposals, evaluate them all, and award the new contract for a seamless transition as the old contract ends, the government would probably need to already be in the take-in phase, and as I just said, they haven't even finalized the parameters that contractors should be proposing to follow and meet. So odds are there will be no new contract awarded when the old one runs out.

This is cause for a certain amount of consternation, but not outright alarm. It does not mean that work in this agency would grind to a halt as we all go home without pay (and possibly without jobs altogether) while the government figures out belatedly whom to hire on to restart the process. Once it becomes undeniably clear that the deadline would be blown, the government would negotiate a short-term (six months?) extension with my employer and life would go on as normal without a hitch. Again, it's always possible that the negotiations could implode and then we the grunts in the trenches (metaphorically speaking, all due respect to the actual soldiers whom or work supports)) really would be left in the lurch. But that's incredibly unlikely.

There's a certain logic in rooting for the government to blow the ever-shifting deadlines and be forced to grant my employer a temporary extension, because it seems natural to assume that we bolster our own chances of winning the re-compete by being gracious and accommodating about picking up the slack in a no-drama, no-fuss kind of way. Unfortunately, here in the real world, it doesn't work like that. We could get an extension and later be told "Thanks for sticking around a few extra months while we got our act together and decided we want to give the gig to your competitor. Also please document everything you've ever done so we can give it to the new guys and get them up to speed quickly." That is just the nature of the beast in this business. But, again, there's virtually nothing I, or any of my colleagues, can do about that, beyond showing up every day to execute our duties and not give the government any special reason to want us gone. Of course, this did not stop certain people at the team meeting from asking a lot of "what if" questions as if they just had to keep pushing and then my manager would bust out the crystal ball and give them definitive answers about what's going to happen down the road. But so it goes.

Love and birthdays

The love of my life is one day older today than she was yesterday, just like everyone else in this big crazy world, but she also happens to be commemorating exactly 39 years of refining the pure, undiluted awesome she was born with. We will celebrate this weekend with copious amounts of pie, both pizza and pastry varieties, because one of the extremely few-and-far-between instances of disagreement between us comes down to the great Pie versus Cake debate. But of course, for her birthday, I will happily let her have her way.

I am torn between my natural and constant desire to expound at length on the virtues of my wife especially on her big day, and the fact that I am unbearably tense and distracted at the moment because I got a text last night from Little Bro saying he and his wife were at the hospital, and she was going to be induced into labor with the expectation that the baby, their first child and my and my wife's first niece, would be born "some time" today. I have not yet gotten an update so I am basically climbing the walls with nervous anticipation.

One of the most penetrating death-laser glares I ever received from my wife was when I was recounting to some friends the story of the bambino's delivery, although really it was the story of how we settled on his name at long last the very day he arrived, and so in narrating everything from sunup to sundown that day I elided over the pains of birth for my wife with a handwaving "and then labor was, y'know, fine ..." I deserved the death-laser, I admit! But I bring up that random anecdote-of-telling-an-anecdote mostly to remind myself that most labors, however long and arduous, are in fact fine in the end. We always ask how mother and baby are doing immediately after, but there's good statistical reasoning behind assuming that it will be a pro forma question and answer. I need reminding of that at the moment. It was hard, all three times my wife and I went to the maternity ward, to banish worry about all the unlikely but frightening possible scenarios. It's proving almost equally as hard when it's my Little Bro navigating the same territory.

So, too preoccupied to blog much more today! Updates to follow, though, I'm sure.

UPDATE #1 - I just saw that my sister-in-law posted a happy birthday message on my wife's Facebook wall about an hour ago (it's 1:40 p.m. EDT) and included a happy-faced addendum about "working on" having niece and aunt share a birthday. On the one hand, good to know nothing went awry overnight. On the other hand, if my sister-in-law is still breezily social-media'ing, that baby is probably not coming any time soon.

UPDATE #2 - My wife and niece weren't meant to share a birthday after all, it seems. The wee one arrived at 3:30 a.m. this morning (Saturday). Pro forma or not, I'm happy to report mom and newborn are doing well.

How bout we trade, and you all do the dishes, and I'll go to bed early?

Recently the bambino has been extremely reluctant to go to sleep at his designated bedtime, so my wife hit upon the idea of putting him in his crib a little later, which would hopefully align better with his circadian rhythms and also make allowance for the fact that the sun is still pretty darn high in the sky at the official bino-nighty-night hour. OK, that may seem like a bit of an obvious approach, so really what I mean is that my wife's approach was innovative because rather than pushing all the kids' bedtimes farther and farther back, she envisioned giving the little guy and little girl earlier baths to buy some time for the bino, then letting the big kids play while baby brother got ready for bed, then by the time the bino was down for the night and we turned our attention back to the other two, they'd be most of the way ready for bed anyway and everything would end up at the same end point (or reasonably close enough).

(One of the slight hitches in this plan revolves around the fact that the bino and the little girl still share a bedroom. In an ideal world, the bino gets ready for bed and goes to sleep shortly after hitting the crib mattress, and then the little girl gets ready for bed next, and by the time she's ready to go to sleep we can slip her into the darkened bedroom without waking up her little brother. By pushing his bedtime back but leaving hers at the same time, the likelihood is that he'll still be awake when she's going down, so we really have no choice but to let her lie down and fall asleep in our bed in the master, and then carry her to her own bed, asleep, later in the night. But so it goes.)

We tried the new plan on an evening when my wife was home, and it basically worked. So I tried it again last night, while my wife was at work, and the results were less encouraging. The number of parents turned out to be a hugely differentiating factor. With my wife nearby, I could give the bigger kids baths and she could distract the bino, but with her out of the house, the bino just ... wanted to be where I was. Some highlights included:

- Bino, fully dressed, trying to climb in the tub with his brother
- Bino whapping his sister on the head while she was in the tub

- Bino somehow grabbing a large full cup from the tub and dumping the water all over the bathroom floor
- Bino unspooling the roll of toilet paper (full disclosure: he does this all the time, no matter how many responsible adults are in the house)

And then eventually I got the bigger kids in pajamas and started getting the bino ready for bed, and I made it through his bath and through pj's and through stories and all the way to giving him a bottle of milk before the little girl started screaming bloody murder. So I had to tell the bino I would be right back while I went and checked to see how much blood had been spilt, which of course turned out to be none, it was just a disagreement about what kind of game she and her big brother were playing together. I asked them to keep it down so I could put their brother to sleep, but by the time I got back to the bino he was all freaked out that I had abruptly left and it took an excessive amount of time and effort to get him even slightly calmed down, and the transition to the crib did not go smoothly.

Still and all, by the time my wife got home, the baby was asleep (by a matter of mere minutes, after having screamed and fussed for a quarter of an hour), and the little girl was lying down peaceably in our bed, and the little guy was climbing into his own bed. Getting there was arduous, but that descriptor seems to apply to more and more situations these days, espcially involving anything along the lines of making the kids do what we want them to do as opposed to letting them follow their own wild rumpus impulses (rumpulses?) Tonight I will try again and see if I can apply any lessons learned to the proceedings. You best believe I will be keeping the rinsing cup on the highest soap-ledge in the shower.

Virtual time travel

So I've been on Facebook for about two months now and I'm just getting to the point where I'm tentatively reaching out to people I haven't really had any contact with at all in decades. I assume this is fairly typical for everybody these days: first I friended my family, and my close friends, and my internet acquaintances, and people I went to college with, and now I've worked my way back to people I went to high school with. Which is an entirely different ball of cyber-wax.

(I skipped the part where I would have friended my current work acquaintances, because I worry slightly that my laidback interwebs persona might be somewhat at odds with our corporate policies on social media, so best not to intermingle the two worlds too much. And the gig I had prior to this one was one in which my co-workers were people I went to college with, or close friends to this day.)

By the time I graduated from college, and certainly by about the point that I had been living and working in the real world for five years or so post-college, I no longer had any real relationship to speak of, passing or otherwise, with anyone from high school or earlier. I'd like to be able to say this wasn't a conscious choice, that it was just one of those sad facets of modern life where people drift apart and life inexorably takes some of us down different paths than others, but that would be letting myself off the hook way too easily. It was a conscious choice, or at least a semi-conscious one, or at the very least a series of somewhat conscious choices that were never intended to have the cumulative effect that they did, and yet. When I look back on it now with fifteen or twenty years of perspective, here's what I can see:

1. My family moved shortly after I graduated from high school, from Jersey to Connecticut. So I had to say goodbye to the town I had lived in since fourth grade, and I did make a very conscious goodbye tour that summer. There was much "let's keep in touch" sentiment exchanged between me and my friends, but I did a lot of mental processing of a sense of ending, as well.

2. Then I started college, and I really liked it, and I immediately made a lot of new friends and kind of threw myself wholeheartedly into that world. And on college breaks I wasn't going back to my old hometown, I was either going to the town my parents had moved to, where I had very little connection beyond family, or I was visiting my new college friends in their hometowns, mostly in northern Virginia (where I would end up hanging my hat before too long)

3. My high school girlfriend and I started seeing less and less eye-to-eye as I started hanging out with different people, being exposed to new ideas and exploring new interests in college. She spent a lot of time with my best friend.

4. About halfway through my freshman year of college my parents decided to get divorced, and it was a done deal by the following summer. Despite the fact that my parents' marriage was never perfect and domestic tranquility was never a bedrock foundation of my childhood, the divorce was still a pretty huge line of demarcation in my mind, in my life, between "growing up" and "grown up". My mom moved back to the old NJ hometown, but to a much smaller house, where I never quite felt entirely at home.

5. My Little Bro started dating one of my close female friends whom I had bonded with back in middle school and stayed tight with. I was completely on board with this, as they were pretty happy together (it seemed to me) and a good match, and obviously I loved them both.

6. My high school girlfriend and I eventually broke up, which erected another huge barrier in my mind between "everything that happened before" and "everything that happened after", putting high school and such on one side and my life as it was progressing on the other.

7. Complicating things was the fact that all that time spent together led to my ex-girlfriend and my best friend getting together. And moving in together. And getting married and having kids. Granted, I'm jumping ahead a bit now, those things took years. But not that many.

8. Also, eventually, Little Bro and my friend (who was now much more in the role of "sibling's significant other" than "hang out buddy" she had once been) broke up. It was pretty rough.

9. I graduated college and was soon faced with a choice between living with one or the other parent in NJ or CT and trying to find a real job, or moving into a four-way split townhouse in northern Virginia and getting any joe job to pay the bills and the bar tab. As we all know, the latter seemed like a no-brainer move to me.

10. About two years after graduation I got married, which had two huge effects on severing ties to the past. Up to that point I had actually been keeping in contact with my ex-girlfriend, but she was extremely weird about meeting my fiancee, said and did a lot of things that seemed to be gloating over the fact that she had dated me first, and that was not cool in my book. But more to the point, that was extremely not cool in my fiancee's eyes. Then again, very little of my past was cool in my fiancee's eyes. Basically she was extremely insecure and anyone who was going to stay in my life once we were married needed to be personally vetted by her. That was at least feasible in the case of other people in the northern Virginia sphere of my life, but highly impractical for old friends from my hometown. I was a doormat back then and I let her call the shots, to my own ultimate chagrin.

11. And then three years later I was divorced and back at my mom's, but the last thing I wanted to do was reach out to anyone I had known in high school because (as anyone who's ever gotten divorced will attest) it was hard not to feel like a failure and a deserving object of scorn. I spent a year, year and a half living with my mom, working a crap job, and living in fear that any time I would show my face in public I might run into someone who hadn't seen me since I was 17 and full of promise. I felt sick to my stomach at the hypothetical thought of having to answer "So what have you been up to?" because none of it was good.

11a. I did actually hear through the grapevine that around the same time I got divorced, so did another one of my good old high school buddies. And I should have at least been able to reach out to him in solidarity or something. But I didn't. I berate myself for it to this day, but I didn't. I have no particularly good excuse except that those were rock bottom days.

12. Finally I repaired some of the damage my doomed marriage had wreaked and patched things up with just about all my northern Virginia friends, and re-relocated back there by moving in with some friends. And got a much better job and my career back on track. And bought my own place, and got together with the real love of my life, and got married, bought a bigger house, three kids, a gaggle of pets, and here we are today. But again, for a stretch there from about 1992 to 2001, whenever I reached a decision point as far as whether I should hold on to my hometown childhood connections or let go, I doubled down on the present and distanced myself from the past.

The problem, of course, with life in a small suburb, where the graduating high school class is about 90-some people, is that everybody knows everybody and it's orders of magnitude easier to bow out altogether yourself rather than try to pick and choose whom to cut out and whom to keep. I've told stories hereabouts before about me and Scud and Boomer and Kingsley; Scud was my best friend who ended up married to my ex, and Kingsley was the one who got married and divorced in the same timeframe as me and whom I felt I let down terribly by not being there for him. Boomer and I never beefed or anything, we just drifted, partly due to the nature of life and partly because I torpedoed two sides of the foursquare knot holding us together. And I had other female friends besides the one who dated my Little Bro, but they were all friends with each other too, so they tended to take my friend's side in the break-up whereas I was never going to do anything but unconditionally support my brother. And so it goes, and the geographic distance only made it easier for me to draw the lines that I did. I had friends, I wasn't sitting around miserably bored and lonely and wondering where things had gone wrong. I just didn't have any friends from before I was 18.

And lately (read: since the advent of Facebook, mostly) it has occurred to me that I'm the anomaly. Although many if not most people tend to roll their eyes with self-deprecating mortification at the mention of high school, middle school, or any other segment of their pre-adult past, many if not most people also have at least some living connection to that time outside their immediate family. Coincidentally, a lot of the people I hang out with now I met during the college years even though they never went to college, so for a while I thought they had maintained a lot of the same high school social structures through the years because they never had the opportunity to replace them with college versions. But no, that's a gross over-simplification, they've made new friends as well, and other people who went to college, including those who were right there alongside me, at least have a handful of people they go way, way back with. That includes the people who loathed high school in general, and yet I liked high school! I didn't have too terrible or traumatic a time there! I just went through a really weird stretch there immediately after high school.

But say this for Facebook: it makes renewing contact after ridiculous intervals a little less awkward. I can't imagine calling anyone on the phone after not speaking to them since the early 90's. An e-mail I might be able to manage, but there's no universal directory for looking up e-mails of people you've fallen out of touch with. Plus I'd be tempted to write looooooooong missives attempting to cram in the past twenty years all at once, and then I would never hear back from anyone because tl;dr (and also, kind of creepy). But a friend request is easy to send, and easy to respond to, and then you're just plunked right into the update feed stream along with everyone else, and you have a starting point at least to proceed from.

So yeah, that's where I am. Mostly it has been pleasant enough, sometimes better than pleasant, sometimes disappointing in terms of people not accepting a request. (Looking at you here, Boomer. Not that you can hear me.) But the strangest part is just that there's this huge twenty-year bubble between me and all these people. I try to latch onto common ground again and I'm forced to rely on extremely out of date memories. It's like I time traveled from 1992 to today and I have the constant urge to ask people if they are still really into Gorilla Biscuits or Twin Peaks or whathaveyou. Although, to be fair, we are at the point in the cycle where 90's nostalgia is probably at or near its peak, so there are outside reinforcements as well. Still disorienting, though.

Six seasons and a ...

Community is coming back!

Wait, what?

...

WAIT, WHAT?

I don't know!!!

A wee bit poxy

Last night, after the kids were in bed, my wife and I had a late dinner consisting of her homemade chili and a beer for me, wine for her. Ostensibly this was in honor of father’s day but it was a treat for both of us, especially my wife who has been making a conscious effort lately to cut out unnecessary carbs from her diet, and of course alcoholic beverages are very much in that category. But we felt that the treat last night was well-deserved because, oof, what a week last week and weekend turned out to be.

I believe at various points I’ve extolled the virtues of our current, in-home daycare arrangement for the two younger kids, a major one being that without dunking the baby in the petri dish of an infant room on the regular, he’s barely been sick at all. He’s the only one of the three offspring who’s made it to 15 months on this earth without anyone bringing up the subject of surgically inserting drainage pipes in his ears. The other edge of the sword, however, is that he hasn’t really been inoculated against the wide, wonderful world of germs. He will be, since we’re planning on putting him and his sister in a traditional daycare center come fall. And it’s a bit easier (less nerve-wracking) to deal with a sick toddler than a sick itty-bitty infant, so all well and good that we’ve delayed it this long. With the possible exception of this past week.

The little guy stayed home sick from school both Tuesday and Wednesday last week. He had a fever and was a bit off his game, but nothing too major. However, he passed it on to both siblings, and the real fun started Thursday night, when the bino refused to sleep at all between about midnight and 3:30 a.m. I had been planning on leaving work early on Friday, because the little guy had an end-of-kindergarten show at school I wanted to attend; I ended up bagging the whole day because there was no way I could get back up and start getting ready to drive in to work as of 5 a.m. We all ended up making it to the show, and then came back home, and then during dinner the bino got explosively ill. Somehow we got everything cleaned up and everyone to bed.

So our littlest was very sedate on Saturday while the other two seemed more or less fine. We cancelled some dinner plans we had made for Saturday night, and we got the bino to bed early and let the little guy and little girl stay up and watch a movie as per the Saturday night norm. We hoped things would get back to normal on Sunday but by then the little girl had a fever, and tossed up the previous night’s dinner (while sitting on my lap, naturally), then got sick again a couple of hours later, and proceeded to sleep away most of the afternoon. She seemed much better when she woke up later in the day but wasn’t enthusiastic about dinner, understandably. And of course whenever my wife or I would make reference to her being sick and how we needed to get her to do certain things (sit still to have her temperature taken, swallow bubble-gum flavored ibuprofen, &c.) as a result, she would indignantly respond “I’m not sick!” She’s a willful one.

(Incidentally, the ibuprofen was not such a hard sell once my wife flipped the script. The liquid medicine is pink and meant to be measured into and drunk from the little cuplike cap, and my wife told my daughter that it was a tiny teacup like a fairy would drink from at a party. The little girl was right on board with that.)

So, while I’ve tried to avoid delving too deep into the grody details, I rest my case that after three, four, five, six days of one kid or another being sick we felt we were due a little indulgence by Sunday night. (And did I mention that both of the dogs were messily unwell over the course of the week, too? You’d think we were keeping the chosen people of a vengeful deity as slaves the way the multifarious plagues descended on our household.) I’d like to say the good news is that things are on the upswing, but apparently the bino had a bit of a relapse this morning, so who knows. This could be another rocky week and the blog may or may not be running at full speed for the duration. Updates to follow.

Making lemons out of lemonade

Must be time to update the blog, since I haven’t posted in a couple-few days, like … hmmm … twelve? Almost two weeks since my last post, which was technically sometime before the calendar flipped months. Huh.

Well, every once in a while it’s good to let the blog sit idle for a bit, to recharge my batteries and avoid scraping the bottom of the barrel and make sure that keeping the blog up and running close to daily is something I’m still invested in, not just doing as a chore out of force of habit. Today, at least, it feels like something I want to continue plugging away at. So here I am.

It would be nice if that were the full extent of my explanation for suddenly falling silent (although that would also make this a pretty low-content post) but of course there’s a smidge more to it than that. The first few quiet days might have been covered by the anti-burnout clause, particularly the very first: Thursday is in effect My Crazy Kids day around here the vast majority of the time, and lately I haven’t had much to say on that front. Or, rather: the little guy continues to be bored and frustrated and apathetic about kindergarten, which I’ve talked about before, and the best that can be said now is that the school year is very nearly over, and that will be a relief. The bino is walking and climbing like a champ and trying to get into everything, and even becoming adept at pointing and grunting and shaking his head to communicate what he wants (or doesn’t want, the child seriously makes a NO gesture that incorporates the entire half of his body from the waist up), but he’s also at that stage where he wants a lot of things he shouldn’t have and doesn’t understand why his desires keep getting thwarted, so he yells and screams and cries in pint-sized fury on-and-off round-the-clock (also he’s teething AGAIN, canines coming in now). And the little girl is potty training, which I’ve also mentioned before when her older brother was going through it, at least mentioned in the abstract insofar as avowing that the trials and tribulations of teaching a toddler to control their bodily eliminations is not something I’m interested in blogging about, nor do I really believe anyone wants to read about.

So, frustration upon frustration, to tell it like it is, and some of it not even particularly post-friendly material at that. Plus at the same time, I recently (finally, many of my friends were quick to point out) got on Facebook. And on the one hand, the feeling of plugged-in-ness, however illusory, afforded by that outlet has lessened somewhat the compulsion to blog. I’ve probably only posted a half-dozen or so status updates in the month(ish) since I created my account, and I know at least two of them have been semi-ironic grumblings about what a collective handful my kids are. And I know I’m only human and I’m allowed to get aggravated now and then but, you know, tossing off zingers on FB and then posting longer screeds on Blogspot, that’s not how I want to bracket my mindset about my own children. So I let it lie.

Skip a Thursday, then it’s Friday and if I don’t have a really good random anecdote at the ready, that’s just as likely to be a silent day as well, as are weekends devoted to errands and housework and family obligations (happy retirement to my father-in-law!), but it was last Monday that things really went off the rails. I took the day off in order to go to yet another interview for the new gig that I’ve been working the angles on in one form or another since last fall. As we all know, days where I’m not confined to my cubicle are not always highly conducive to blogging. But I had a relatively laid-back morning, got to walk the little guy to the school bus stop and everything, and went to my afternoon interview, and thought it went well.

Then on Monday evening I got an e-mail from a small press publisher I had submitted a story to. They are putting together an anthology about superheroes and monsters, and if there is subject matter more zeroed in on my personal bailiwicks, I have a hard time imagining what that might be. So I had written a story specifically along the parameters of their call for submissions, and I was pretty pleased with how it turned out, and I had gotten some feedback from another comics/horror loving friend who helped me make it even better, and I was looking forward to seeing it in print. But Monday’s e-mail was actually of the “thanks but no thanks” variety, and that was a bit of a bummer.

Tuesday I got back to work and straightaway e-mailed the HR folks who had set up my interview the day before, and asked if they had any idea what the timeframe looked like for any decision on me. And then went about a normal day at my current gig, and headed home at the usual time, and right as I was getting off the train I got an e-mail back from HR at the prospective employer: “thanks but no thanks”. So that too was a bummer, and more than a little bit. Clearly that crap start to the week left me in no mood for trifles like the blog, and I’m just now getting over it enough (not completely, but enough) to extricate myself from the spiral of rejection shame and anger.

I was so high on the potential of both of those opportunities, and really confident that they were coming my way, so the fact that they both went as sour as possible in rapid succession was rough. Clearly, though, the lesson to be learned here is one of humility. There’s a touch of the tragicomic in all of it, and I feel a bit like a classic character brought low by his own hubris.

The small press publisher, in my initial estimation, did not have a lot going for it other than assembling an anthology that seemed custom-tailored to my interests. Their website is a bit of a mess. Their Facebook page does not have a particularly high number of Likes. They released another anthology e-book a couple weeks ago, and I checked out the listing on Amazon, and I’m pretty sure there’s a huge typo in the blurb. (Something about spreading a “hind” inside a creature’s tracks and marveling at the size, pretty sure they meant “hand”.) So basically I thought of the publisher as low-hanging fruit, a rinky-dink operation that would be thrilled to receive my dazzling prose stylings replete with deep understanding of the tropes of superheroes and supernatural beasties. And that turned out to be a demonstrably faulty assumption. And just to add another layer of ugh, the rejection e-mail was of course generic and unhelpful. If I fail at something, I like to at least know why, so that I can improve and better myself and do better in the future. But no such helpful insight was forthcoming from the publisher, so all I can do is wonder why I didn’t push their buttons.

The gig I interviewed for obviously wasn’t meant to be, and I probably could have rolled with that if it had been a standard situation where I heard about the job, applied, got an interview, went in, did the best I could, and got the brushoff. That happens to people all the time (including me) and while I harbor some delusions of being a good writer who knows a thing or two about certain geeky genres, I don’t think of myself as a superstar at my day job. And in fact, the new job was my attempt at bending the direction of my career a bit by going after something on a different track than I’ve been following. What really stung about the process and its abrupt ending was, first of all, the sheer timesink involved. As I said, it started last fall when my buddy who works at the company in question suggested I take a shot at it. He helped me rework my resume stem to stern, which was an exhausting process. Then I applied and waited beyond the limits of average human patience, finally got the right person’s attention, scheduled an interview, it got rescheduled because of snow, and then went in on a second attempt and ended up meeting with last-minute replacements because the people who were supposed to interview me had family emergencies. I thought the interview went well, although I knew there were moments along the way that weren’t optimal, again mostly having to do with the disconnect between what I want to do and feel (with not unreasonable evidence in my background) that I could do, and what I actually have deep experience in doing.

Then weeks dragged into months and I heard nothing and assumed the window had closed, only to get word via my buddy that the hiring manager liked me and wanted me on board, but thought I was underqualified for the position. But thought I might be a good fit for a different position! But that other position paid less and the hiring manager didn’t know if I would accept that. So my buddy and I talked nuts-and-bolts numbers and I sunk more time into figuring and refiguring the family budget, and I came up with my must-be-at-least salary figure. (Numerous benefits at the job I was angling for were just too insanely good to pass up, paycut notwithstanding.) And I got in touch with the manager and waited to see what the offer on the table might be. And waited. And waited. And finally heard, not from the hiring manager but from HR, that they wanted me to come in for another interview, which I happily agreed to, assuming it was kind of a formality. If the manager liked me and thought I’d be a good fit, maybe they needed to go through the process of interviewing me for this better-fitting position before getting down to brass tacks and making an offer in writing for me to consider.

Except, apparently not. I admit I’m still baffled and a little angry about the way it all inexplicably unravelled. I was honest from the very beginning of the process that I had no experience in the job title I was seeking, but lots of solid experience doing the job duties as part and parcel of other positions I had held through the years. I came with a personal recommendation from someone who already worked there and I brought my A game to the interviews in terms of personality: happy, friendly, positive, team-oriented, deeply interested in the work the company does and sincerely excited at the thought of being a part of that. And I put up with twisting in the wind for months. In the end, I was told that they didn’t think I was right for the job because they wanted someone with more direct relevant experience. And it’s not that I don’t understand what that means or why that would be the right call for them, but it should have been the right call four, five, six months ago, too. If the experience they wanted wasn’t on my resume, and didn’t come up in initial phone interviews or the first in-person interview, was it terribly likely that the deep experience would surprisingly be revealed in a second interview? I don’t understand in the slightest how I went from “manager liked me in the interview and thinks I’d be a good fit for a slightly different opening they also need to fill” to “don’t let the door hit you on the way out”. It doesn’t seem terribly likely that my buddy completely misinterpreted what his colleague said and conveyed a scenario to me with no basis in reality. But it also doesn’t seem terribly likely that I tanked the second interview so hard that it turned everything upside-down instantly. All I know is I feel strung along only to have everything reveal itself as a colossal waste of time. (Like I said, I’m still working on getting over this.)

Oh and also, just to kick sand in my ego’s face, the HR e-mail told me that it was the end of the road for me as they were going to look for other more qualified candidates. Note that it did not indicate that they had other candidates in mind, or that they didn’t have an up-or-down answer for me yet because they had other people on the line to interview so they’d be in touch. There may not be any other more qualified candidates out there, or they may find someone and make an offer but not be able to come to terms and have that candidate walk away. But they’ve already cut me loose from consideration. Basically, they would rather leave the position unfilled indefinitely, rather hire no one than hire me. Oof.

But of course, again, I had gotten kind of cocky over the course of six or eight months or so, especially in light of the mid-point revelation about doing well enough in my first interview to be in contention for a different position if I were open to it. Surely given my in with my friend, my impressively diverse resume, and my top-notch people skills, the employer and I would come to some mutually beneficial arrangement, and the fortitude of spirit I demonstrated in hanging in there since the process began last year was, if nothing else, earning me the good karma points I could cash in to make the leap. And for most of this year I’ve been disengaging at my current job, blowing things off or kicking them down the road to the day when they would no longer be my problem. I’ve been carrying on with one foot out the door, and now I need to get all ten toes back to the line here at the Big Gray. Fortunately, I didn’t burn any bridges in really overt ways, so with relative seamlessness I can go back to behaving as if I need this job, which of course I do.

OK, hopefully this post represents the absolute last of the things I needed to do to exorcise the hobgoblins that last week gave birth to. I’m trying not to feel too sorry for myself, so please don’t feel too bad for me. In the 9-to-5 grind, there are some bright sides: yes I’m bitter that I blew a vacation day on a pointless second interview, but I do still have a good amount of vacation saved up, and I have a week at the beach coming in mid-August. I don’t have to worry about juggling the awkwardness of starting a new job in late June or early July and going on vacation almost immediately after on-boarding. I don’t have to second-guess the wisdom of taking a paycut. Maybe there should have been some red flags raised by how long the multiple-interview process took and how unresponsive the hiring manager always was, maybe the new gig wouldn’t have been so dreamy after all. (Is that a silver lining or sour grapes? Is there a difference?)

And as far as my superhero monster story goes, the upside is that I can submit it elsewhere pretty painlessly. (Granted, that fact and much of the elaboration on it I’m about to undertake apply as well to taking my newly spiffy resume and applying for other jobs, but that initiative is on hold for the summer as far as I’m concerned.) I don’t even have to re-type it or even re-print it since everything’s done electronically online these days. I’ve already shot it off to two other magazines to see if either wants to buy it, plus I’ve got a completely different story submitted for consideration at yet another publisher. All of those may come to naught, but that’s not really the point, either. I’m still writing more and more stories, and that’s closer to the point. A big part of writing and trying to sell what you write is learning to deal with the unpleasantness of rejection. (My wife and I had a conversation Saturday night about the various anecdotes we’ve heard our favorite authors relate about early rejections, from James Herriot to Stephen King. It’s nice to feel as if one is in good company.) Sooner or later something will get through, whether through sheer determination or because rejections are (usually) learning opportunities for improvement.

So, that’s where I’ve been, and where I’m at, and everybody up to speed now? Yes? We good? Next couple of days I’ll get back into obsessively overthought reviews of geeky popcult ephemera, promise!