This is it

Last day of the year. I've woken with a splitting headache (not the rum but the air pressure -- I'm pretty sure). I had great plans to run this morning, but now I've eaten up most of the morning lying on the couch moaning while my wife has somehow managed to look after all children and also wash floors. I can be just as capable as her, but she does it effortlessly and with cheer and grace. I do it with much grunting, grumbling, banging and yelling. I suppose that, too, has its place in the grand symphony. The rest of the day sees me preparing a feast for the neighbours and then tiptoeing next door later for what I'm told will be some memorable punch. And then tomorrow will be a brand new year. It reminds me of that feeling I get when I buy a new notebook. The pages are empty, cool and crisp. Anything could appear there. Hope I don't mess things up.

Tipping point

Ok, so the thought that has been nagging away at me has, today, become a sentiment with a voice behind it. I'm looking forward to getting back to work. I think it was the moment when, after dropping off my poor overworked wife for what sure as hell looked to me like a luxurious on-call shift at her clinic, I schlepped the 4 kids home to discover that one had peed her pants in the van, another one had so pissed off her older sister by repeatedly kicking her in the knee during the two hour ride home from my sister's house that said older sister had scrambled out of the spawnhauler, spilling a half cup of hot chocolate on both her new (off-white) Christmas sweater and all of her new (and paid for by herself, so triply egregious) teddy bear shirt. While I scrambled to get clothes changed, read laundry labels, fill sinks with presoaks, carefully skirting around the pans of turtle food that are spread out to dry after being rescued from the tank yesterday after boy wonder poured about two lb of the stuff on the turtle's head, the same little precious boy wonder had stolen up the stairs to try to play marbles with his sister's newly acquired hermit crabs.

I stared down that nice bottle of 12 year old rum that sits mocking me on the counter, only because I knew I would soon have to go pick up my wife and rescue her, poor thing, from her nice, quiet office filled with chocolatey gifts from grateful patients. But once my love is safely home, that cork is history.

I wonder: is getting drunk on New Year's Eve such a cultural universal because it's the only way we can limp through the last few hours of 'freedom' before getting back to some semblance of real life?

Hope is not a consumer product

A more realistic year-end assessment than we'll likely get from any of our heads of states. And even a soupcon of real hope.

Year end

End of year reflections: 2006 was the year that I temporarily put aside the plan for early retirement, ocean life, full-time parenting, organic farming, winemaking and all those generally sensible things in exchange for urban life, a fully engaged career (for the first time in about 16 years), a second (paying) career as an agented author (with what about 20 editors have predicted will be a languishing mid-lister, but fuck 'em I say, it's fun anyway), a very nicely classic case of irritable bowel syndrome (no coincidence there I'm sure) . We've just been told that another gigantic ice shelf has collapsed -- the size of 11,000 football fields. I'm negotiating with my dean about the location of my virtual office in a massively multi-user virtual space. My ex-wife is carrying her fifth child, which means that some of my children will have 10 siblings. While on sabbatical last year, I lost enough pounds to be lighter than I've been in 25 years. Since returning to work, I've gained back 1/80th of a ton. At some point last year, I seriously considered training for the New York Marathon. Now, I haven't run for 16 weeks, my longest layoff in 4 years, have lost all my base, and become winded running up more than 2 flights of stairs.

So what's on tap for me next year? I will enter my fiftieth year of life. My youngest child will turn 3. My oldest child will no longer be a teenager. I will ask someone to sever my vas deferens. Both of them. With extreme prejudice. We've had the discussion many times. We are SO done! I will deliver a book manuscript to a publisher, and then new levels of madness will ensue. I will meet with an architect to discuss a virtual building for a research centre that I'm directing (until somebody discovers that I don't know anything). Somebody will notice that I no longer really do the kind of research for which I'm funded, and there may well be some flack over that. I will lose back those 25 pounds somehow.

Resolutions? Find a way to renew my faith in the abundance of the human spirit. Trust those I love to do the right thing with no helpful advice from me. Learn to enjoy relinquishing control.

Going off-line for a while

I'm here right now because I'm putting off going out to find a turkey. I know that the longer I put this off, the worse the experience will be, and the less likely it will be that we'll get a bird at all. Someone forgot to order our fresh, free-range drug-free bird. I think it might have been me. Someone left his shopping until the last possible second. That was me as well. It's unusual for me, but it's been a helluva year.

Not that I'm a very frequent blogger these days, nor do I have a huge audience (but a nice, dedicated, mostly anonymous one -- thanks for visiting. I don't know who you are (mostly) and I don't know why you come, but the fact that you show up so regularly and seem interested suggests that we'd probably like one another a lot if we met. I like the idea that the world is filled with potential friends), but I've decided to try to limit my screen time a bit over the holidays. Holidays for me will be fairly short, so I want to maximize the downtime, the intimacy with family, the quiet reflection (once I figure out how to make two toddlers reflect quietly).

I'll leave you for now with what will likely be one of our most cherished family stories of this season for many years to come.

Yesterday was our Asian wonderchild's preschool holiday concert. We showed up early, with toddler boy and blonde hippie girl in tow. We sat in the back row so that we'd be able to stand up to take pix without worrying about whose view was being blocked behind us. The teachers had set up a row of tiny chairs for us, and toddler boy and hippie girl climbed up on the chairs to see the show. As the first number drew to a close to wildly enthusiastic applause from the audience, the people in the row in front of me stood and leaned forward for a better view. I moved forward a bit, too, thus leaving toddler boy alone, standing on a chair, with nothing else to rein in his wild exuberance than a zoned out little hippie girl standing beside him, completely taken in by the sparkling decor.

As the second musical number revved up, I felt a little tug on my arm. It was hippie girl. "Dad", she said, "toddler boy is trying to...." as I turned my head I had this wondrous vision of my little guy reaching up to play with a marvellous red lever hanging above his head -- the fire alarm. I amazed myself with my graceful plunge over several rows of tiny chairs to reach his chubby fingers before they made all hell broke loose but, alas, I was a microsecond too late. As I ineffectually tried to put the red lever back in position (as if that would have made a difference at this point) the alarm pealed, the lights flashed, terrified grandparents began throwing themselves out the door and down the stairs to the parking lot. Parents milled about, wondering whether to leave, while we confessed our embarrassment. One mother, to her credit, told us "Oh, don't worry. Kids do these things. My daughter is the one who cut off your daughter's hair in the fall..." After ten or fifteen minutes of confusion and disarray, the teachers got the parents and tots back in their positions for take two of the second song. Just as the song began, a man in the back row shouted "Here they come! They're coming in!". Three firefighters in full gear, hats, oxygen tanks, burst into the room to reset the alarm. The kids squealed with delight. The women swooned. A dad beside me said "it's not a party until the cops arrive." My clever wife sat quietly in the corner, videotaping the entire fiasco. I watched my son, who seemed to realize only at around that moment that he had been the cause of this entire riotous affair. He looked down with some embarrassment and said "I couldn't help it, dad. I was just curious." Yes, he is.

Have a great holiday. I'm off to buy a turkey. Or perhaps a can of ham.

Countdown

If...I....have....to....grade...one....more....mediocre term paper.
I'm
going
to
expire..
...............

The heavy burden of my job

Ok, there's no way to make this not sound like gloating, so I won't bother to try very hard. I'm in Santa Barbara on a working trip to scope out new lab equipment and to make new friends in the world of virtual reality. It's going really well. I've fallen through floors, fought off grenade attacks, caught strange coloured balls with my nose, and driven sporty little cars across vast tracts of desert. In the real world, I've eaten some fantastic food, driven through the Sierra Madres looking for Bogart.

I've spent as much time as possible walking on the beach, but truthfully my daylight hours have been filled with workstuff, so less beach time than I'd hoped. I've noticed that there is a certain difference between beach behaviour here and on the other coast where I spent my last year. For one thing, about 30% of walkers here are simultaneously talking on cell phones. For another, the conversations are a bit different. A few snippets:

A young woman into a cell phone: "I just don't think you're trying very hard to be an active party in this relationship"

A fiftyish man to his male friend: "She's 27 years old. I can't believe he pulled this off. She's an ER nurse."

A preteen boy: "Howeeeyo. Howeeyo. Howeeyo. Howeeyo." (I'm not sure if this actually meant something or was an expression of exuberance of some kind).

There are other differences. A couple of acres of oceanfront land here sells for about 10-15 million dollars. It can be done for six figures on the other coast. On the other hand, if you factor in hours of sunshine, things would probably come out at par.

holiday

I'm well on my way to taking my first full weekend off of work since September. I've resisted the impulse to do much of anything useful with the entire stretch of time since Friday night with the exception of having watched a couple of movies -- one quite hideous and the other very interesting. I was surprised to find myself in the company of two of my kids for the Herzog film -- it's probably the only one I would let them watch at their current ages. My 11 year old plopped herself down beside me telling me that she was going to 'humour me' by watching the film. I told her I didn't care whether she stayed or left, thus ensuring that she would need to be palpably repulsed to hoist herself from her seat. Not only was she not repulsed, but she seemed rather enthralled, and truly resonated to the theme of clashing cultures and laughed out loud at feeble Western efforts to win over the ancient aboriginal mind with malfunctioning techno-baubles. She's 11. I love her more than I can say. My 9 year old daughter seemed to take much less from the film, but loved watching the expressions on the faces of Australian aborigines and imagining a large, green military plane as an ant (you'll have to watch if you want to understand). I adore her wide eye for pattern. Other than this, it's been mostly reading a good book completely unrelated to work, eating chocolates, drinking a little wine, and enjoying a night of beautiful stars in a scalding hot tub (our guilty pleasure still) in the company of my amazing wife. Oh, and there's been the usual steeplechase of preventing our two toddlers from dismantling the house completely. It's amazing what can be shoved down those forced air heat registers.

I needed this. I've got a busy week coming up -- a flying trip to the west coast for some visits to fast-talking 'sales engineers', a talk to give to people who know much more than I do about my research, a final exam to administer (and then convince other people to grade while I fly away), and a bunch of Christmas shopping, all of which will need to be done online if there is to be any hope at all for our kids getting more than lumps of coal in their stockings.

This time last year I was wading barefoot in the Atlantic Ocean, even sneaking in for the occasional skinny dip when I thought the risk of being carted off by the RCMP was moderate to low -- or at least lower than the risk of cardiac arrest from shocking contact with not exactly balmy waters. Things have changed. This is neither better nor worse, but it is a wild, interesting and unexpected ride.

warp speed

My life is now moving along at a blistering pace. There aren't enough hours in a day anymore. I know something curious is up when I decline that second glass of wine at dinner so I can get more done in the evening. I can't believe the rate at which interesting opportunities seem to be unfolding before me. Every so often, I worry that this isn't a gigantic burst of synchronicity that's propelling me, but a bad attack of mania. Maybe it's all in my head! What if it all vaporizes and I crash? I'm trying to be ok with that. It's very possible, maybe even probable. I'm trying to recognize that it would come as a relief, in a way. It's tiring holding all these balls up in the air. Hard to imagine some people spend their whole lives living the way I have been for the past six months. Hard also to imagine that, this time last year, the biggest decision of my day was: AM-walk on the beach and PM-write or AM-write and PM-walk on the beach?