blog

I'm supposed to pick up Tai in 20 minutes so that sets a firm timeline for writing this, which is good.

It's been difficult for me to figure out how I'm supposed to write on this blog -- is it supposed to be about baby related stuff, is it supposed to be about how life has changed now that I know we're going to be parents, is it just supposed to be stream of consciousness and we can look back at this one day and be like "that's what we were like while you were in the womb."

I went with my parents to the flight museum on Saturday and there were 3 distinct lines of thought that came to me that seem worthy of writing about. The first thing that came to my mind was just that you can do so many more things when you know that they are actually possible. After I had thought about this for a while, I realized it didn't have anything to do with having a baby, and then my mind started trying to project it onto the parenting experience, then I thought "ok, I'm just being completely artificial. I already knew what I wanted to say, but if I'm going to blog about it, it should be about the baby, so I decided to make it about the baby." But really it was just a thought. So I'll just say a couple more things about it to elucidate what I was thinking about, and then not come back to it. Basically, (we were at the flight museum), there was a rapid burst of innovation in the field of building airplanes around 1910-1915. That makes you think "well if you can do all that in 5 years -- how come nothing happened in all the years that came before". Well, in short the answer is that people had to fight doubt, or for that matter doubters who would laugh at the guy building his "flying machine". Once the world knew a flying machine existed, it wasn't so crazy to be someone working on making ANOTHER flying machine. Because you knew failure was not inevitable.

Obviously that can be applied to parenting, but if I do it, it's completely an artificial effort. So I'll move on for now.

The third thing I thought about (skipping the second) was how my dad remarked "hey that keyboard has a built in credit card swiper". I thought that was just about the stupidest thing possible. Why would you like a keyboard more because it had a credit card swiper? In general what's the benefit of attaching a coffee grinder to an alarm clock, etc etc. Then I realized they already made fun of this on the PC vs Mac commercials (think John Hodgman with a web cam taped to his head). Moving on.

The second thought was the one thing that was actually relevant to this blog. (yikes, 14 minutes) I realized that it will be a very, very very long time before this child has the ability to look at me and Tai from an external perspective. Everything that we do, is going to be "the way things are" in this child's mind, probably up into high school if not college. That is just a really weird thought to me. At first I thought, "this is what the baby will think forever". Then I realized that I look at my parents and I definitely understand intuitively that this is NOT just "the way things are". It's the way they are, based on their life experiences and upbringing. Eventually, our baby will realize that about us. But it's just amazing to me to think that all of my eccentricities are just going to be something that the baby takes for granted probably up until like 2030.

Wow.