Mykala and I have little to nothing left in our tanks — it’s been one week since we closed on our first place, and we have been working almost literally every free moment to freshen it up in preparation for this Saturday’s move. We’re talking 14, 16, 18 hour days here.
That’s us last night, 45 minutes away from finishing putting in the wood floor with Mykala’s dad. It was a very satisfying project, because we had worked and worked and worked on the prep to get to this point. One of the major prep projects was getting the painting done before the floor and the room you see is actually vaulted up about 16 feet, which makes for an atrociously difficult room to paint. So the space has been transformed, we have removed and patched 40 (FORTY) anchor bolts from the walls, and painted most of the first floor. There’s a big snowstorm tonight, then bitterly cold weather on the way, so we get to try out that fireplace soon.
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the enormous efforts of our parents to get us going on this house. We would not have been able to do any of this without their assistance: planning, ladders, painting, cutting, cleaning, tearing up tile, cleaning, pulling carpet, drilling, cleaning, rolling out second and third coats, feeding us, locking in floors, and onwards and upwards.
We closed on our townhouse this past Thursday the 13th. Since then, we’ve been doing 14 hour days getting the place ready to move in. We’re in the middle of painting rooms right now, and we’ll be laying floor hopefully later this week, too. I almost don’t have the energy to keep my head up, so I’ll stop typing before it crashes into the keyboard. Looking forward to posting pictures of the new place after we move on the 22nd!
Today we found out that you are our baby. We love you already. Your mama went to the doctor’s office and they took your first picture. You are very small right now, just the length of a grain of rice — a “basmati grain of rice,” your mom said. I hope that someday you might read what I am writing and it might give you some insight into that mysterious time when your parents were young and not even five years into their marriage. We love one another so so much, and we want you to be in our family.
So, we don’t know what to do now. We can’t really tell anyone yet, because you have to keep being healthy through your mom’s first trimester. For the same reason, we can’t really buy your crib or stroller or any of your baby stuff. Our hopes are so high, but we’re scared of what could happen yet. I got done doing a root canal today, immediately called your mom, and found out about you. And already, I am worrying. Will you keep growing? Will you be healthy? Happy? I want so much for you already, and I’ve only known of you for twelve hours.
It is a fairly cold and snowy day, but the early sunset didn’t really get to me, I was thinking about you so much. I came right home to be with your mom. She’s happy and scared in turn. We looked at your picture today. Read about labor, read about pregnancy, talked with one another about what type of house we want to find before you are born. Talked about everything. That’s the way your parents are, but I suppose you already know that. You are due right around July 22, 2014. I think that makes you the high school class of 2032. Holy cow, that doesn’t even sound like a real year. I’m going to go sleep and dream about being a dad. I’ll write soon.
Love,
Your Dad
4 December, 2013
Dear baby,
Tonight is your first snowstorm. I hope and pray you will see hundreds more. Your mom and I are sitting on the couch and thinking about how to name you. We’re trying to find a house for you. Trying to decide what this all will look like. I’m excited.
Love,
Your Dad
8 December, 2013
Dear baby,
We told your mom’s parents and sister about you today! You are the biggest news in our lives. We don’t know what to do right now other than worry about you… but we’re quick learners, we’ll figure out what to do soon. Please keep growing up safely, you are making your mom nauseated right now.
Love,
Your Dad
9 December, 2013
Dear baby,
We put up stockings today. There are so many changes on the horizon, that these Christmas moments feel like they should be extra-savored. We have no idea what next Christmas will look like, and all the unknowns kind of pile up. I guess that’s how life is, but sometimes you want to know something for sure. I want to know you are going to be happy and healthy and of course I can not. We live in the tension between knowing and finding out.
Love,
Your Dad
16 December, 2013
Dear baby,
Tonight we took you to Romano’s Macaroni Grill and you mostly let your mom eat food without interrupting her with morning sickness. She feels pretty awful most of the time right now, but she told me that you just grew tastebuds today. So, now you have tastebuds and the world will never be the same to you. Or to us. We love you, and right now in 2013 we want the exact same things for you that we do as you are reading these words sometime in the future: to be happy, to be healthy, and to be loved. We can’t tell, but we hope you are healthy right now. You sure are loved.
Love,
Your Dad
25 December, 2013
Merry 0th Christmas baby!
You had your zero-th Christmas today. Your Mom got a very nice warm zipped sweater that will keep both her and you warm.
I wonder what you will look like, baby. I wonder what it will be like the first time you say a word, or laugh, or when you fall asleep with your mom and dad.
There’s a bunch of junk out there about raising kids, so we’re trying to learn the right way to do a few things, and we’ll trust ourselves with the rest. After all, your mom is really good at doing the right thing.
Love,
Your Dad
02 January, 2014
Happy Birthyear, baby!
I heard your heart beat for the first time today. Your mom and I went into the clinic for our big 11 week appointment, and we talked about all the lab tests and blood draws and numbers that we needed to in order to make sure you were growing up healthy. We’re trying not to be parents who worry about everything, just parents who worry about the right things and leave the rest up to the universe.
Keep baking in there!
Love,
Your Dad
04 February, 2014
Dear baby,
You are the size of an avocado today. We have one of those in our house! I held one the other day… it is not very big. You need to grow more, baby. So, you probably noticed I stopped writing for a little while. Well, here’s the deal: your mom and I have been very very VERY busy. You see, we talked about it and realized that where we are living is lovely and fine (ask me to tell you about our wonderful landlady Mary Alice Kopf someday), but it is not safe for a baby. The oven makes carbon monoxide (and delicious food when your mom is cooking, though we usually use the toaster oven), the windows leak cold air, the water doesn’t drain right, the electrical outlets bulge from the walls, the doors don’t shut, the ice dam has created a thick coating of ice over the sidewalk, and there is no air conditioning. You deserve better than that!
So, we are moving. Your mom and I have found your first home, a cozy little townhouse in Woodbury. We had been shopping for months and months and months but it was only when we found that you were on the way that everything crystallized and we narrowed the endless options and possibilities down to something we could find, purchase, and move into before we met you. So, here we are. We are doing it all for you, little one.
(And a little for us, because we’re slightly tired of all the things going wrong in our current place.)
I began to realize that coming face to face with my own
mortality, in a sense, had changed both nothing and
everything. Before my cancer was diagnosed, I knew that
someday I would die, but I didn’t know when. After the
diagnosis, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn’t
know when. But now I knew it acutely. The problem wasn’t
really a scientific one. The fact of death is unsettling.
Yet there is no other way to live.
Lots of wisdom here, considering the doctor authoring the piece is only 36. I particularly liked this one: “Getting too deep into statistics is like trying to quench a thirst with salty water.” I have to keep that in mind when trying to give patients a meaningful statistical number. More often than not, I simply say it might work out and it might not, we will see, and you know where to find me in either situation.
In 1999, I was exploring this new, amazing thing: the world wide web. I wasn’t an active participant in any social areas like Slashdot nor was I a gamer. Instead, I mostly kept to myself, fascinated as I was with how this world wide web thing worked. You see, growing up, if my toys had any screws on them, I would inevitably find the appropriate tiny screwdriver and open them up. I was consistently disappointed that there was little for me to do other than replace the plastic cover I had removed.
But the web was different: on every page I visited, I could read the code that made it happen. There was so much to do and try and explore! All over the phone lines via a dial-up connection. Images crawled into view, and a (these days quite tiny) 68 megabyte trial download of Paint Shop Pro (a long-defunct Photoshop competitor) required me to leave the computer connected and downloading overnight.
So I spent hours coding, recoding, and trying to find a website hosting provider, generally relying on free hosts, lacking as I did the ability to pay for a real one. (I always envied Justin, since he had a real, legitimate web host long before I even met him.) I liked to listen to music while I worked, but I started out listening to the worst approximation of music, lacking all richness, musicality… like instead of seeing your favorite movie, you’re handed a black and white stick-figure flip book approximating the plot. Horrid. This ersatz music was mostly a result of size limitations — computers had tiny tiny hard drives and it took forever to download high quality sounds. There had to be something that produced good-sounding songs without giant file sizes, right? Well, this was the web, so I could spend a little time looking.
Then I heard my first MP3. I can not describe to you what this was like, in a house with few CDs, none of which were my own, to be able to download songs I liked and listen to them in amazing, visceral, high fidelity! I don’t recall the song I first listened to, but I vividly recall my brain asking what black magic is this? To this day, the song Porcelain by Moby brings me right back to those long summer days of youth, where everything was new and fresh and the phone lines brought beautiful music to me.
Moby initially disliked the track, criticizing his
production as “mushy” and his vocals as “really weak”. He
had dismissed “Porcelain” as “average” and later recalled
that he “couldn’t imagine anyone else wanting to listen to
it” – however, he was eventually talked into including it
on Play.
This is a song that charted worldwide, one that critics really liked, a song you could argue helped make Moby famous—and he hated it so much he did not even want to include it on the album. I’ve always been that way with my own work, be it on websites or logotypes or music—I really do not see it is anything special and I am sure nobody would want to look at/listen to/experience it voluntarily. “Useful only to me as an example of where I learned what not to do” is how the monologue in my head goes. I continue to be not surprised but shocked, bowled over when someone says they heard my (now old and needing a successor) piano album and liked it.
We may be our toughest critics, but as gatekeepers I wonder if we could be a little more permissive.
It’s bitterly cold, the kind of cold that elicits pain the minute the wind hits your skin, and we got some delicious Indian takeout for Mykala’s birthday. We’re sitting at home surrounded by gifts from people who love my wife, and this is precisely the type of moment from which you want to build your life. Happy Birthday, my love.
We’re thinking about moving houses soon. It’s been a great run at our little duplex spot here on Warwick in Minneapolis, but we moved here out of necessity back when I was in school. Five very short years later and we’ve outgrown the space. I’ll have quite a bit to say about it when we actually move, I really enjoyed my Cretin retrospective, and I think I’ll enjoy writing a Warwick one, too.
About a week back, I helped decorate the tree at my parents house. It is the same tree my family has had since 1991, and it is aging pretty well. I did notice it was shorter and a little more see-through than I recall — yet I still love to look at a Christmas tree on these long winter nights. It has to look a very certain way, though. I’m extremely particular about the type of lights: I can see the 60Hz flicker of LEDs (if you can’t see the flicker, try looking at them out of the corner of your eye) so I’m a staunch supporter of incandescent lights, the bigger the better. The fact that I notice, dwell on, respond to, take pride in getting these details right, things like color temperature, replacement bulbs, wattages, things that seem insignificant to most — I used to think that was a part of me to minimize, to downplay, to somehow outgrow.
But I love that stuff. I love the details.
Dentistry is a job that rewards extreme attention to detail: just ask anyone who casts gold about getting stone expansion right. Or any dentist who has bonded with a 5th generation system and not paid enough attention to dentinal moisture. I delight in mounting casts and checking their articulation with shimstock — I love thinking through how to build in negative error into restorations, I love how you can refine a tooth prep with different grits of diamonds. I love this stuff. The other day I popped on a rubber dam, preparing to do a quadrant of restorations, and I realized that I was in my happy place. How lucky I am!
So the turning point in accepting my detail-dwelling was reading the essay Hypercritical by John Siracusa, a famously particular software developer and technology writer:
But my scrutiny was not limited to my own artwork or the
products of multinational conglomerates. Oh no, it
extended to everything I encountered. This pasta is
slightly over-cooked. The top of that door frame is not
level. Some paint from that wall got onto the ceiling.
Text displayed in 9-point Monaco exhibits a recurring
one-pixel spacing anomaly in this operating system. Ahem.
…
But much worse than that, it means that everything you
ever create appears to you as an accumulation of defeats.
“Here’s where I gave up trying to get that part right and
moved on to the next part.” Because at every turn, it’s
apparent to you exactly how poorly executed your
work-in-progress is, and how far short it will inevitably
fall when completed. But surrender you must, at each step
of the process, because the alternative is to never
complete anything—or to never start at all.
Sircausa was describing exactly my life — and yet I had never ever ever had anyone at all to talk with this about, and suddenly here was somebody articulating my own personality back to me, more eloquently than I was able. So, he goes on to point out the value of this critical eye, and of course he’s right. The dearth of those so honed in on details makes them rare and their contributions valuable — as long as they figure out a way not to drive everyone around them insane.
