Hey Ess,

It was your first snow today. You aren’t really at that point where you can go outside and romp in it, but your mom told you all about it. I think you sense the way the light bounces around outside is different these days, and I think it means something to your growing consciousness.

We miss you when you nap, and linger over your every coo when you are awake. When you are sad, so are we, and when you laugh, we laugh along, with tears mixed in.

Sorry I had to go to work today; sometimes moms and dads have to be gone, but it is never for long and it is never without a good reason. We’ll always be there.

Love,
Dad

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I’ve been reading a bit about zoning lately, this article is a neat summation of one of my concerns about suburbs in the United States: stupid zoning laws. Author “simval84” writes a blog called “Urban kchoze”, here’s a post about Japanese zoning:

Japanese do not impose one or two exclusive uses for every zone. They tend to view things more as the maximum nuisance level to tolerate in each zone, but every use that is considered to be less of a nuisance is still allowed. So low-nuisance uses are allowed essentially everywhere. That means that almost all Japanese zones allow mixed use developments, which is far from true in North American zoning.

With the kind of zoning we have here, when new homes are built, there will never be a neighborhood pizza place. You’ll never be able to walk from the ball field to an ice cream parlor. During a snowstorm, you won’t be able to trudge through the drifts to the local café, chat with your neighbors about the storm, warm up, and have a cup of coffee. When you are retired and can no longer drive, you won’t be able to meet your friends for brunch on a Tuesday in the summer. Why?

Because everything is specifically zoned to be too damn far away from everything else!

Even simply lacing the borders of housing developments with mixed use properties would be an improvement, but the closest I’ve seen is strip malls on the outskirts of developments at the intersections of huge roads. Anyhow, more from simval84 at his comments page on The Guardian.

Update: here’s more, pulling it all together in a big picture:

…minimum lot sizes mean that each lot would be very big, so there is little advantage of building a smaller house as you can’t leverage the smaller size of buildings to increase density. House building costs are also not proportional to square feet, the cost of a marginal square foot is much lower than the average cost per square foot.

As to highways and land prices, I think you must consider the impact of car-oriented “urbanism” and very high highway coverage. Let’s suppose a city with a strong center with jobs and stores located there. People who want to go live in the city will tolerate living maybe 15-20 minutes from downtown. Now, if you only have residential streets, as cars travel on average about 20-25 mph on them (including stops and lights), that would mean that the lands available for development would be lands located within 5 or 6 miles of the downtown area, so maybe 80-100 square miles.

Now add 60 mph highways through the area. Suddenly, the land situated at 6 miles from downtown is not at 15-20 minutes from downtown, but at 6 minutes from it. People will tolerate living much farther away, up to 15-20 miles away from downtown. That’s 700 to 1200 square miles of lands close enough to downtown for people to settle on. Proximity is measured in minutes, not in miles.

The result of that is that land prices collapse because there’s so much land that is at an acceptable distance from downtown. Since land is cheap, there is no pressure to build smaller houses. People can build spatially inefficient houses that are cheap to build as they are mostly empty spaces.

If you go see Europe on the other hand, most highways circumvent urban areas, they do not penetrate them. So the distance people are willing to live away from downtown is much shorter. People tend to concentrate closer to the main cities. For instance, most Paris suburbs just stop 20 miles away from the city center (they have highways, they just stop a few miles from downtown). The city of Newman, an Atlanta suburb, is 40 miles away from downtown Atlanta.

It means that land prices will be much more expensive, creating an incentive to use less land per housing unit, ie more density.

So in the US, where highways cover most of metropolitan areas, land will be very cheap, and thus it allows for people to build bigger houses for the same price.

Finally, the low-density car-oriented public realm will likely be extremely poor. Therefore, most people will spend almost their entire lives inside their homes, as there is little point to going outside. So you need an expansive and rich private realm in order to compensate and to avoid cabin fever.

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Hi Essie,

Most of yesterday and into last night you were uncomfortable. We could tell that you wanted to be your smiley, playful, charming self but something was going on in your stomach-region that was hurting. You’d start to smile and play and then suddenly it was clear that something inside was interrupting your agenda. During one of the sunny spots where you were smiling a big wide-open grin that you’ve figured out just in the last few days, your mom was making raspberry sounds with her tongue at you, and then: you laughed! It was unmistakable, so lovely, and we both teared up.

You still aren’t feeling very well, and your mom is taking care of you at home, but that little ray of sunshine helped us all through.

Love,
Dad

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Today, I was sitting in the corner of our kitchen on top of the countertops, nestled into the area where the toaster oven is, while Mykala made apple-and-cheese sandwiches at the stove. I looked at the results of painting and decorating this home over the past six months, the way the early fall light warmed the walls, and the breeze of a perfectly clear 61° day cooled off the space. Esmé slept peacefully in her carrier, tired after a three mile walk with her mom and dad. There were no television or radio noises, just the gentle rush of breezes through screens and the staccato sounds of kids playing down the street. It was a perfect moment, the closeness of family, the esthetics of the surroundings, and the peace of a respite from the exigencies of daily, young-professional, indebted life.

An extraordinary, above-average moment such as this is, by definition, out of the ordinary. Moments like it are connected by the rest of life, and I remain frustrated that I have trouble finding peace during those “rest of life” times. “Life is what happens when you’re making plans” popped into my head as I sat in my perch in the corner of the kitchen.

My good friend Nils’ father Garry passed away this past March 3rd, and I think of Garry all the time. It may be because this new home of ours is less than a mile from where he lived and Nils grew up, but I think it is because the potency of my feelings about Garry’s death surprised me. I guess my life has pivoted. Behind me are memories: where funerals were always grandparents two generations away, folks who had lived very long lives and seen multiple generations grow and live and love. Before me is the future, a new stage of life, one where the generation of my parents, sometimes of my peers, passes away too soon. Funerals where you think not of what the recently passed saw, but rather what they missed. It is disheartening that meditating on loss and death is the quickest way to perspective on one’s current moment, the quickest way to convince one’s short-sighted poorly-prioritzing brain to ENJOY WHAT IS IN FRONT OF YOU, YOU MORON.

Garry would have loved today.

I’m sure that you too, dear reader, know of someone who passed away too soon. Might I suggest that our task is to remember mortality and loss in a useful way: to let this perspective color our attitude, guide our way, without darkening the days of our journey.

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“Let’s talk about margins” by Craig Mod:

On the other hand, cheap, rough paper with a beautifully set textblock hanging just so on the page makes those in the know, smile (and those who don’t, feel welcome). It says: We may not have had the money to print on better paper, but man, we give a shit. Giving a shit does not require capital, simply attention and humility and diligence. Giving a shit is the best feeling you can imbue craft with.

Via Gruber.

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I’ve taken 14,086 pictures with my camera since I purchased it nine years ago, and I’ve found something wrong with every single one. I do not have the brain that goes “oooh I love that one that I took… let’s blow it up!” I have the brain that goes “I wish the light had been from the right instead of the left” or “I wish I had shot higher resolution” or “the dust on the sensor is really noticeable there” or “that flower is past its prime”. This type of analysis is exhausting and difficult to shut off. Take that brain and have it paint a room and you produce a very dissatisfied person at the end of the project: seeing only the flaws and, for whatever reason, lamenting the inexpert hand that produced them. I do not know why I expect perfection when I am beginning to learn these things.

So then there’s my job: there I want and expect myself to be perfect. All the time. And by definition, that can’t always happen. That’s really difficult, because my sense of accomplishment and progress gets tied up with work, so I take it really personally when things don’t turn out perfect. Mykala reminds me that I have only been at this for a little over two years, and it takes a long time to get these things right. I had lunch with an area orthodontist and he said something quite helpful: “After a few decades, you get better because you’ve made all the mistakes there are to make and learned how to avoid them.”

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I am reading the conclusions in Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century (It is rather unreasonable to try to wade through the 300 pages separating my progress in the book and the conclusions, given our two week old! So, I skipped to the end…). Here are some interesting quotes:

Social mobility:

Throughout most of the twentieth century, however, and still today, the available data suggest that social mobility has been and remains lower in the United States than in Europe. (p.484)

Education:

In other words, parents’ income has become an almost perfect predictor of university access. (p.485)

To be sure, university fees are much lower in Europe if one leaves Britain aside. In other countries, including Sweden and other Nordic countries, Germany, France, Italy, and Spain, tuition fees are relatively low (less than 500 euros). (p.485)

Stepping out of my quotation parade here—that means undergraduate educations are 12 times more expense on average in the United States than in Europe.

Social programs:

Finally, income support outlays (i.e. welfare) are even smaller (less than 1 percent of national income), almost insignificant when measured against total government spending.
…
Welfare benefits are questioned not only in Europe but also in the United States (where the unemployed black single mother is often singled out for criticism by opponents of the US “welfare state”). In both cases, the sums involved are in fact only a very small part of state social spending. (p.479)

Income inequality:

Tax revenues in rich countries:

Taxes:

[In the US] In 1942 the Victory Tax Act raised the top rate to 88 percent, and in 1944 it went up again to 94 percent, due to various surtaxes. The top rate then stabilized at around 90 percent until the mid-1960s, but then it fell to 70 percent in the early 1980s. All told, over the period from 1932-1980, nearly half a century, the top federal income tax rate in the United States averaged 81 percent.

It is important to note that no continental European country has ever imposed such high rates (except in exceptional circumstances, for a few years at most, and never for as long as half a century).

Particularly fascinating is that it is not theoretical that government created the middle class in the United States after World War II (see the income inequality chart above):

Concretely, the two phenomena are perfectly correlated: the countries with the largest decreases in their top tax rates are also the countries where the top earners’ share of national income has increased the most (especially when it comes to the remuneration of executives of large firms). (p.509)

As Piketty points out, the above is not explained by the theory of marginal productivity:

A more realistic explanation is that lower top income tax rates, especially in the United States and Britain, where top rates fell dramatically, totally transformed the way executive salaries are determined. (p.509)

And lets throw out trickle down theory while we are at it:

… there is no statistically significant relationship between the decrease in top marginal tax rates and the rate of productivity growth in the developed countries since 1980. (p.510)

Loving this:

According to our estimates, the optimal top tax rate in the developed countries is probably above 80 percent.
…
The evidence suggests that a rate on the order of 80 percent on incomes over $500,000 or $1 million a year not only would not reduce the growth of the US economy but would in fact distribute the fruits of growth more widely while imposing reasonable limits on economically useless (or even harmful) behavior.
…
A rate of 80 percent applied to incomes above $500,000 or $1 million a year would not bring the government much in the way of revenue, because it would quickly fulfill its objective: to drastically reduce remuneration at this level but without reducing the productivity of the US economy, so that pay would rise at lower levels. In order for the government to obtain the revenues it sorely need to develop the meager US social state and invest more in health and education (while reducing the federal deficit), taxes would also have to be raised on incomes lower in the distribution (for example, by imposing rates of 50 or 60 percent on incomes above $200,000). Such a social and fiscal policy is well within reach of the United States. (p.513)

But Piketty’s definitive solution is not based on marginal tax rates but rather on a “global tax on capital.” He spends the book explaining, illustrating, and providing evidence to show that r > g where r is return on capital and g is growth of income and output. That is “Once constituted, capital reproduces itself faster than output increases. The past devours the future.” (p.571).

Not “a” solution but the solution:

The right solution is a progressive annual tax on capital. This will make it possible to avoid an endless inegalitarian spiral while preserving competition and incentives for new instances of primitive accumulation. For example, I earlier discussed the possibility of a capital tax schedule with rates of 0.1 of 0.5 percent on fortunes under 1 million euros, 1 percent on fortunes between 1 and 4 million euros, 2 percent between 5 and 10 million euros, and as high as 5 or 10 percent for fortunes of several hundred million or several billion euros. This would contain the unlimited growth of global inequality of wealth, which is currently increasing at a rate that cannot be sustained in the long run and that ought to worry even the most fervent champions of the self-regulated market. (p.572)

Extraordinarily illuminating. I look forward to revisiting it in the future, when I’ve more time to ponder details and better understand what Piketty is saying.

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I went to bed on Tuesday evening, expecting to head to work the following morning, a little disappointed that our baby girl’s due date, July 22, had come and gone without a hint of her arrival. But instead of sleep, I felt Mykala’s gentle nudge and heard her voice just a few hours later at 3am: “My contractions started, I think.” She sounded so calm that it took me the better part of an hour to fully wake up and realize that this is The Big Show. We began timing duration and interval of contractions, and true to my computer geekery, I created a new text document in BBEdit that I would later save as labor.txt, here’s a snippet:

6:20am:
1:47    44s
1:45    23s
1:55    39s
1:34    38s
2:50    54s
2:08    51s

Only when, three hours later, I sent a text to work that read “Mykala is in labor” instead of “We think Mykala may be in labor” or “These probably aren’t Braxton-Hicks contractions, but I have never done this before so what is going on?!” that it finally, truly sunk in. I’m sure Mykala would’ve benefited from this mindset from me three hours earlier, but better late than never, I hope. So I put on my scrubs, Mykala came downstairs, I began my simple responsibility of record-keeping and she the impossible task of enduring each contraction.

In our discussions leading up to labor, both Mykala and I agreed that we should wait as long as possible to go in to the hospital. “Well, first babies aren’t born in cars,” I remember repeating a few times. We discussed the hospital business model of turnover and out-patient rhythms, the tendency of modern medicine to intervene or suggest intervention right when mom-to-be is most tired and liable to make a decision she may regret, and that we expected Mykala’s birth plan to necessitate flexibility. But I have to tell you, it was difficult for Mykala to wait it out at home. While it was more comfortable for her to labor in familiar comfort without the interruptions of shift changes or new personalities or blood pressure tests, it was impossible for us to know whether she was dilating. All she knew was pain, nothing of progress.

I know it was fourteen hours later only because I have a bright pink Post-It note that has one little black line written on it: “5:05.” That was the time we reached room 2526 at St. Joseph’s Hospital. “Has your water broken? Have you had any bloody discharge?” We answered in the negative to both of these questions, and felt like the veracity of Mykala’s pain was being called into question in the dearth of external signs of labor. “We’ll go ahead and do an exam and get you on the monitor to see where you are at.” Mykala was laboring hard, breathing through contractions that were steadily coming 110 seconds apart and lasting for 60 seconds, and we waited to find out if it was time to go home or time to stay.

Hearing “She’s dilated, six to seven centimeters” brought such a deep sense of relief, like driving through a dark night to an unknown destination and seeing the correct road sign illuminated by your headlights. Smiling through my tears (I cried far more than Mykala during the entire labor), I told her how happy and proud I was of her. We weren’t going to wallow at something like “three centimeters” for hours! The next validation came when the cause of Mykala’s intense pain was located: baby was occiput posterior (i.e. face up, OP, sunny-side up, not facing the correct direction!) and this was causing searing back labor. Other women who have had back labor (OP) and then delivered a normal (OA) baby have said that they really didn’t even care about labor the second time. Nurse staff wondered why they were so calm and the simple answer was: “Because it hurts so much less than last time!” A note:

The anterior (OA) baby can more easily tuck his or her chin. The posterior baby’s back is extended straight, even arched, along the mother’s spine. Having the baby’s back extended often pushes the baby’s chin up. Posterior babies more often have an extended neck.

This is what makes the posterior baby’s head seem larger than the same baby when baby’s in the anterior position. Because the top of the head enters (or tries to enter) the pelvis first baby seems much bigger to the mother’s measurements.

According to Mykala’s birth plan, she wished to manage her pain without pharmaceutical intervention, and the nurses were great in not saying “do you think you need an epidural?” To see the love of my life in front of me, truly truly hurting, saying she couldn’t do this, left me struggling to come up with words or phrases that would impart support in the absence of being able to understand the depth of her pain. Thankfully, I had read that after delivery, women place reassuring physical presence way above the words uttered by their labor partner, so I tried to avoid saying anything dumb and focused instead on simply being there. Unfortunately, between 1am and 2am the next morning (23 hours in), I was flagging. Actually, let’s not be subtle: I was worthless! Falling asleep on Mykala, stumbling around the room, not helping much at all. Mykala’s mom luckily had come in an hour or so before and I was amazed at her energy, giving counter pressure to contractions, sitting with Mykala at the tub, making sure she was going to make it.

Some IV fluids and then later some Pitocin (just a little) to clear a cervical lip, and Mykala was on the home stretch. No pain medications, none, the entire time. We could just see the top of baby’s head, two leads for internal fetal heart rate monitoring coming off of it, when I was astounded to hear that they were just then going to have Dr. Grande come in! Apparently he lives ten minutes from the hospital, and during his long OB/GYN career had done this once or twice, and had gotten this down to a science. So he came in, Mykala did some absolutely superhuman pushing (I just… I have absolutely no idea how she did it), and little Esmé Johanna Micek was born at 4:28am on July 24, 2014, head 14 inches in circumference, length 21.5 inches, 8 pounds 1 ounce of perfect little baby. As she emerged and was held aloft by her feet by Dr. Grande, the very first thing I noticed were her beautiful eyes, closed right then in the existentially charged gap between emerging into the world for the first time and taking her first breath. Seeing her placed on Mykala’s chest for some immediate skin to skin time, waves of tears did not wash over me as I thought they would, just a bit of peace finally, a long exhale for Esmé and for her tough-as-nails mom.

—

Staying in a hospital is a weird mix of hotel and something very different. Mykala and I would sit there, baby would nap, I would nap, Mykala would stay awake, and it had the sense of just being a hotel room where we were planning what to do on vacation that afternoon. We had a private bathroom, TV, and a nice view out the windows, (inexpensive) room service, and regularly scheduled room cleanings. But doctors and nurses and lactation consultants and nursing assistants had to visit to do all the tests and checks required of a new mom and baby. The one time Mykala fell asleep, I was so happy and tip-toeing around and then boom she was awake as we greeted another new face. We left as soon as we could, which took an excruciating nine hours between our request to be discharged actually leaving.

The feeling of significance, leaving as first-time parents from the hospital, was blunted by sleep deprivation bleariness, and made all the more difficult by an extremely rough first night at home as baby would not latch to drink mom’s milk. The next day we sorted it out, and had much better success starting to find a rhythm of feedings, burpings, and changings that would work.

The significance of it is now slowly sinking in. We are proud and totally exhausted parents. And now, this journal has a very important new tag: Esmé. It will be filled with love.

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Dear baby,

You’re the size of a small watermelon now. Where did the time go? It feels like we were just finding out about you, or moving, or painting your room, or assembling your crib, buying your mattress, picking out your diapers, installing your car seat. Get this: pretty soon I’ll be addressing these to you by your name instead of the generic “baby”. You used to be the size of a grain of basmati rice and now you’re huge!

I played some music for you last night (we make sure to play songs with bass in them so you can hear them through your swimming pool in mom), and you were movin’ and groovin’ pretty well. I hope you get your mom’s coordination and proprioception.

Anyway, you could safely be born any time now, and I’ve been trying to explain to you that you are the one who triggers labor. If it is getting too cramped in there, you get to decide to come on out and see us.

See you soon.

Love,
Dad

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(More here.)

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