Friday, February 27, 2009
Monday, February 16, 2009
Screaming Babies
I (we: Erin and I) have a new baby as of 6 weeks ago. I think by now we know that she is kinda fussy. I don't know if I will go as far as to label her 'colicky' but she cries a bit. This weekend she got a sniffle. Not terrible but enough that her breast feeding tapered off because she could not breathe well. Turns out the bottle works better than the breast when she can't breathe through her nose very well. So she spent some time screaming this weekend and ... I struggle with this.
I don't know how else to say it. I really struggle with this. I work with mostly women being a nurse and female nurses usually don't stray too far from a certain ... personality type. I won't go into it further but suffice it to say that most of them are good mothers and this is also their 'style' of nursing. They mother. So I have heard certainly enough advice and possibly too much from my working cohorts about babies. Some is of great use. Some feels like an bird telling a fish how to ride a bicycle: pointless.
I have taken to wearing hearing protection while she is crying in earnest. Erin thinks this is ... a suspect behavior in a father but I know other men who do the same including her own brother. There is something maddening about the noise she makes that turns my ability to maintain love and patience for my daughter to mush. At some point without my ear muffs I just want to break her in half. TOTALLY irrational? Definitely. Shaken Baby Syndrome makes sense now. I am not justifying it but I do understand the urge. A patient of mine said "Oh, I wanted to chuck mine in the woodstove more than once." They estimate that annually 50,000 babies get shaken hard enough to sustain some damage and 1/4 of them DIE. Holy Shite. That's a lot of shaking. I get it though. Scary. So I am trying to practice just putting her down and walking away.
An old friend says I am 'cranky' about the whole crying thing. That would be an old friend who is a mother of two. Politely I would respond: THWWWWWWP! Call me a wimp, roll your eyes in motherly indignation, bask in the glorious female role imperative that you take inconsolable, screaming babies in stride without any real struggle. Let me congratulate you! You are more of a woman than I am! I am not a woman. I am a man and this man struggles with it.
I don't know how else to say it. I really struggle with this. I work with mostly women being a nurse and female nurses usually don't stray too far from a certain ... personality type. I won't go into it further but suffice it to say that most of them are good mothers and this is also their 'style' of nursing. They mother. So I have heard certainly enough advice and possibly too much from my working cohorts about babies. Some is of great use. Some feels like an bird telling a fish how to ride a bicycle: pointless.
I have taken to wearing hearing protection while she is crying in earnest. Erin thinks this is ... a suspect behavior in a father but I know other men who do the same including her own brother. There is something maddening about the noise she makes that turns my ability to maintain love and patience for my daughter to mush. At some point without my ear muffs I just want to break her in half. TOTALLY irrational? Definitely. Shaken Baby Syndrome makes sense now. I am not justifying it but I do understand the urge. A patient of mine said "Oh, I wanted to chuck mine in the woodstove more than once." They estimate that annually 50,000 babies get shaken hard enough to sustain some damage and 1/4 of them DIE. Holy Shite. That's a lot of shaking. I get it though. Scary. So I am trying to practice just putting her down and walking away.
An old friend says I am 'cranky' about the whole crying thing. That would be an old friend who is a mother of two. Politely I would respond: THWWWWWWP! Call me a wimp, roll your eyes in motherly indignation, bask in the glorious female role imperative that you take inconsolable, screaming babies in stride without any real struggle. Let me congratulate you! You are more of a woman than I am! I am not a woman. I am a man and this man struggles with it.
Monday, February 9, 2009
The Latest Obsession
I have long fantasized about owning a Land Rover. This has been nothing but a pipe dream but I did enter into it deep enough to buy a nice repair manual long since lost. I test drove a Defender 90 15 years ago and liked it a lot for what it was. I could not afford a new or close to new Defender now so that route is out. I remember (recurring theme here: see 'Things that Beep') the Defender 90 in spite of being a new vehicle had very little in the way of 'extras': no carpet, no electric windows, no heated seats etc. All the ridiculous little gee-gaws that cars of every price point seem to have that you pay for and don't necessarily want were missing. Simple.
So I was looking around thinking that maybe once I get to Albuquerque I might get a LR. Well there are all sorts of rigs out there for sale, some for too much, some for a reasonable amount. My favorite find is this one: http://agustinspurlock.com/gallery1/index.htm This is the sort of fantastic exploration that gets you little nuggets of interest for future reference. For example: check out this guys name: Agustin Spurlock. Initially I thought NFW this guys name is really Agustin Spurlock. Sounds like a pulp fiction detective.
The thing I really like about old Land Rovers is there timelessness. At some age it ceases to be important exactly what year they were built but what condition they are in, how many miles since the last motor rebuild, what sort of transmission is in it, is the frame galvanized, does the winch work etc. This vehicle is nearly forty years old. It does not have ANY thing extra by todays automobile standards. If you are hot you open a vent just above the hood beneath the windshield by hand and air comes in. The beauty of this sort of engineering is it lasts because it is simple and if it breaks you can fix it. Land Rovers have aluminum body panels that don't rust, they are simple and flat and bolt to a frame: Old school. No unibodies. Land Rovers for all there British quirks and poor 'performance' by modern standards achieve something that most cars do not: they last. They do not last because they never break down or never rust (they do both). They last because they are the sort of vehicle that someone wants to maintain.
I made a deal with Erin (the mother of my sweet daughter and my favorite person on the planet) that we would NEVER drive a minivan. Bear with me, this is germaine. Along the continuum of vehicular soul minivans are bereft. They have no soul: they are conveyance, they are convenience, they are convention, but they do not have that something that a vehicle must have to engender LOVE. They are a Land Rovers antithesis. Thus my love for LR's. So.
There is something about the pace of Land Rovers that I like. It runs against the mindset of ever increasing media distraction and multitasking imperative that our culture and its advertisers push us towards. There is something peculiar and eccentric about LR's that adds to their 'soul' value.
More later.
So I was looking around thinking that maybe once I get to Albuquerque I might get a LR. Well there are all sorts of rigs out there for sale, some for too much, some for a reasonable amount. My favorite find is this one: http://agustinspurlock.com/gallery1/index.htm This is the sort of fantastic exploration that gets you little nuggets of interest for future reference. For example: check out this guys name: Agustin Spurlock. Initially I thought NFW this guys name is really Agustin Spurlock. Sounds like a pulp fiction detective.
The thing I really like about old Land Rovers is there timelessness. At some age it ceases to be important exactly what year they were built but what condition they are in, how many miles since the last motor rebuild, what sort of transmission is in it, is the frame galvanized, does the winch work etc. This vehicle is nearly forty years old. It does not have ANY thing extra by todays automobile standards. If you are hot you open a vent just above the hood beneath the windshield by hand and air comes in. The beauty of this sort of engineering is it lasts because it is simple and if it breaks you can fix it. Land Rovers have aluminum body panels that don't rust, they are simple and flat and bolt to a frame: Old school. No unibodies. Land Rovers for all there British quirks and poor 'performance' by modern standards achieve something that most cars do not: they last. They do not last because they never break down or never rust (they do both). They last because they are the sort of vehicle that someone wants to maintain.
I made a deal with Erin (the mother of my sweet daughter and my favorite person on the planet) that we would NEVER drive a minivan. Bear with me, this is germaine. Along the continuum of vehicular soul minivans are bereft. They have no soul: they are conveyance, they are convenience, they are convention, but they do not have that something that a vehicle must have to engender LOVE. They are a Land Rovers antithesis. Thus my love for LR's. So.
There is something about the pace of Land Rovers that I like. It runs against the mindset of ever increasing media distraction and multitasking imperative that our culture and its advertisers push us towards. There is something peculiar and eccentric about LR's that adds to their 'soul' value.
More later.
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