A few weeks ago, we were in a prenatal class one evening with a couple that was going that night to have labor induced. I forget why they were inducing — high blood pressure, maybe. I remember thinking that they seemed very calm about it all. The class was to end at 8:30, and they were going to go see a movie and then check in at midnight. I think she was then going to get some kind of drugs before going to sleep and that they were going to do the actual delivery in the morning. If it were me, I remember thinking, I’d be nearly mad with nausea, my heart would be pumping, and my whole body would be atwinge with adrenaline. No way would I be that calm under such circumstances.

As it turns out, I’ll have a chance to see first-hand what my reaction will be. Now that I’m closer to being ready, now that I actively and immediately want this whole childbirth thing to go down, I think I might be pretty calm about it too. 36 hours and counting.

I think one of my main feelings will be one of apprehension, as when you go to a new restaurant and don’t know its particular order of operations. Do you place your order and then move down the line to collect your tray or do they bring it out to you or do they call your name over a loud speaker? Do you pay at the counter after you eat or will the server collect your payment? I won’t know the routine. Do I sit in the corner or stand at her shoulder or do I assume a three-point stance and stare into her crotch? Do I take the lead on counting to ten during contractions or will the nurses and doctor set the pace? I imagine the experience is filled with opportunities for gaffes socially and personally offensive. I plan to commit fully half of them while trying my hardest to commit only a quarter of them.

I also think I’ll have another sort of performance anxiety. There are stereotypical expectations to be lived up to, after all. The hospital staff surely won’t expect the calm, rational person I’d like to think I could be. They’ll want a dad-to-be who’ll be good for stories in the locker room, who’ll put his puffy red face in his wife’s and bellow instructions (”you’re doing it wrong!”); or who’ll weep histrionically about how bad he feels about all this, drawing attention from his wife to himself; or who’ll be frantic and frazzled; or who’ll faint at the first sign of blood or wrinkle his nose in disgust when his wife craps the bed. I’m none of these guys.

And then there are Mleeka’s expectations, which are for the time being explicitly only that I be supportive. But I worry that she’ll need me to be assertive and politely instructive when I’m trying to be tender and comforting for her, or that I’ll try to help out by reminding her not to hyperventilate when what she really wants at the moment is for me to soothe her. A week or so ago, she started having a pretty painful contraction and was breathing rapidly. I suggested in what I thought was a calming, gentle voice but what she interpreted as a patronizing tone that she try breathing a little more slowly, and it was clear immediately that she needed no breathing instructions from a lout like me. I mention this not as a plea for sympathy or in an attempt to make her out to be the stereotypical bitchy pregnant woman (for she has assuredly not fit that stereotype). I mention it because I’m afraid I’ll provide the wrong things at the wrong time during her labor and because the thing I want tertiary to a healthy baby and an easy experience for my wife is not to fail her.

And finally, I think childbirth for me will be rather like an out of body experience. Sitting at my desk today, I suddenly began to feel spatially distorted, almost as if I was about to fall victim to the spins and pass out. When I leaned back in my chair, I felt as if I was leaning way forward, almost as if my perspective were from just above my head (as in eyeballs resting on top of my head) and tilted 30 degrees forward. When I leaned up, my perspective changed to another bizarre angle and I felt a little detached from myself. I’ve had similar detached feelings on long trips away from home or when in strange circumstances, sometimes when I’ve been giving some kind of presentation. It’s related also to another phenomenon Mleeka and I have discussed wherein you feel as if you don’t know a person you do in fact know quite well, when you can look at your spouse, for example, and feel as if you couldn’t name three facts about her, though you know objectively that you’re quite well acquainted. I think childbirth will be like one of these experiences. I’ll feel as if I’m watching things, and in a way, I will be, self-conscious as I’ll be about my various apprehensions. I’ll be like John Madden drawing circles around my screw-ups and noting things unexpected and wondering if that’s really me down there bumping into the fetal monitor and stepping on the nurses’ feet and thinking suddenly out of the blue that we should have brought spurs to match the stirrups and wondering what we’re going to do for the next two days in the hospital, then thinking how hot the lights are and whether they’ll make me wear a mask after she’s born because I’ve been sick and — holy shit, there’s my baby, my, there’s my, my baby, my baby’s here — and I’ll come splashing back into myself in a rush of blood and heat, my ears ringing, my throat thick as an elephant’s knee, everybody a mint-green blur, waiting, waiting for that cry, that sweet sweet first cry that no amount of petty performance anxiety or worrying or reading or preparation or practice or projection (astral or otherwise) could even have begun to prepare me for.

I’ve been thinking a lot in terms of lasts lately:

• This is the last beer I’ll drink for a while.
• This is probably the last time I’ll watch Show X before the baby’s here.
• This could be my last peaceful night’s sleep for a bit.
• This is the last book I’ll finish before she’s born.

They’re not all privations as I seem to have suggested above, or not all materialistic, selfish sorts of privations. There are the ones like This may be one of the last times I curl my arm around her undinal belly to feel the small hardness of the baby’s foot or the larger hardness of her butt and This may be my last night having to wait for her to be born.

And with all the lasts will come many firsts, no doubt many more firsts of significance to me than those I’ve had or can recall to date. Some examples that spring to mind:

• Her first cry
• Her first smile
• Her first giggle (I’m hoping for a guffaw, myself)
• Her first word
• Her first step
• Her first bath
• Her first recognition of me
• Her first effort to yank the beard right off my face (babies are good for that)
• Her first attempt to roll over

There are a million more that’ll happen in just her first couple of years that I haven’t even conceived of yet. She should be here within the next 48 - 50 hours, and, yes, it is a time of lasts — tomorrow will be my last childless day of work and Wednesday morning will be the last time I wake up not a father and for all I know, this will be my last entry before I have a daughter — but it’s also a very exciting time of firsts that I couldn’t be more pleased to be facing.

Possibly the best text in a spam message yet:

But a goose, as is well known to every one who has any knowledge of science, cannot be inscribed in the baptismal register; for a goose is not a man but a fowl; which, likewise, is sufficiently well known even to persons who have not been to college.

About a year and a half ago, I decided to sow some grass on the hill behind my house. To increase the likelihood of having any grass actually grow, I decided to buy some straw to spread out. I worked odd jobs when I was younger, and one summer, part of one of my jobs included moving straw bales around, picking up a truckload from a field and stacking them in a barn. So you’d think I’d have a pretty good idea of how big a straw bale is. I estimated that I’d need about four bales and was figuring I could get them stacked pretty neatly in my back seat, at worst having to sit one up on its end in the passenger seat. Mleeka argued that I was grossly misremembering the size of a straw bale. And it turned out that she was right. One bale took up pretty much the whole back seat. Another could be shoehorned into the front seat with some effort. It took me two trips.

Another point on which I should have listened to Mleeka was her suggestion that I drape the seats in a sheet to catch any bits of straw that happened to scrape off the bales. By the time I manhandled four bales in and out of my mid-sized car (which had theretofore been fairly clean), it was downright barnyardlike. There was straw under the seats, in between the cushions, jammed into various cracks.

Naturally, after a day of lugging straw around and seeding a very steep hill, I was of no mind to top off my labor by cleaning out the car. Maybe tomorrow, I figured. Or next weekend. I began calling the car “the manger,” declining to offer rides to people lest they wind up looking like a scarecrow upon our arrival.

As already noted, that was some time ago. In an effort to treat my forthcoming child to only the best things in life — such as largely non-allergenic transportation — I decided yesterday (at last) to clean the car out. I hand-picked straw and other trash, vacuumed, and Febreezed until the car was fit for passengers of the uncloven extremity variety (at least) and now will feel pretty good about bringing the baby home, though I’m a little sad to see the manger go.

I’ve been trying for months to go wireless on my home network. I got Mleeka’s computer wireless after struggling with the config for hours and hours only to realize at last that the 802.11g card wouldn’t work in her system (despite the fact that my router’s a G). I downgraded to an 802.11b and she was on the Web from the couch with nary a cable in site.

But she runs Windows on her laptop, and Windows has broader support for things like wireless drivers. Further, I had bought her a good old Linksys
card, which is very widely supported, even on other operating systems. My laptop, running Linux, had an internal Broadcom card. I jumped through various hoops to try to get the thing installed. I put hours and hours into this, downloading the NDIS Wrapper that’s supposed to make Windows drivers work in Linux, installing a pay-to-play driver from Linuxant that wound up not working (luckily, they offer a free trial). I finally gave up, resigned to being tethered to the wall in my office. Ah, the sacrifices of using open source software — I can use nifty software for free without any guilt, but I have trouble connecting to my wireless network. It could be worse.

Having a baby imminently on the way has really lit a fire under me to go wireless, though. After all, I can get away with hiding in the office to be online now, but it’ll be harder to do so when I’ve got a baby to keep an eye on. So I decided the other night to give wireless another shot. I downloaded a much more recent operating system (Fedora Core 2 — I’ve been using RedHat 9 since I got the laptop) in hopes that the drivers were better supported. There’s still no official Broadcom driver, but after a few hours of research and fiddling with settings and swearing, I got the NDIS Wrapper to work, and I’m now blissfully cordlessly on the network at home. This is a very good, very liberating thing.

As noted above, I have a baby on the way. Maybe it’s a little trite — a little too self-consciously clever — to extend the wireless analogy to her, but I couldn’t help thinking that she too will be going wireless soon. For 37 weeks, she’s been connected to Mleeka, imbibing her every life’s need through what will become her belly button. She’s been stuck, rattling around and at times apparently trying to kick her way out of the womb. She too is striving for liberation, perambulatory freedom (before too long, at least).

Trite as it is, I like to think that we’re going wireless together, in a way for one another, though naturally I derive benefits from my wirelessness and she will derive benefits from her wirelessness independent of the benefits our respective wirelessnesses will do for one another.

I think in terms of computer metaphors a lot. Years ago, when Mleeka and I were still a long-distance item conducting our courtship largely online,I wrote a little love poem about the limitations of our electronic courtship. It included a conceit in which I proposed that the tapping of our fingers on our keyboards was somehow as close as we could come to tenderly padding one another’s fingers in person. By and large, it was a nice sentiment, however dorky its manifestation.

But that’s how I do things. I have trouble just coming out and saying nice things but can justify them if I can wrap them up in a nice tidy little package — a clever poem, say, or a metaphor-laden blog entry.

So it’s a little weird, maybe, for me to go on about Fedora Core 2 and NDIS Wrappers when what I’m really trying to get at is something about my forthcoming baby — specifically, that as I have striven over the last year or so with varying (increasing) degrees of urgency to get my laptop wireless, so too am I at last really ready to have my baby wireless.

All of this has made me a little nostalgic, and I’ve gone and dug up that love poem. I haven’t yet been able to write anything for the baby, though I’ve wanted to. Even now, nostalgic and sappy as I’m waxing, I don’t think I’m on the cusp of any creative outburst. In any case, for nostalgia’s sake, and as a little history of my heart, here’s that other bit of technosentimentality that my rumination on wirelessness brought to mind.

Let Me Count the Ways

We count the ways we love in kilobytes
across unfeeling networks of thin wires.
Our words, displayed onscreen in pixelled lights,
just flatten how we talk of our desires.
In love that’s papered daily through the mail,
one gets some artifact that can be kept.
But email romance leaves no paper trail,
our contact through keystrokes at best inept:
I touch your fingers only as my own
pad urgently across the alphabet
while you, some miles away, aren’t quite alone,
but pad my fingers back across the Net.
How do I love you? How make the distance better?
I count and recount every stricken letter.

I’ve read several books in the last couple of years that irritated me because they represented my general position on things but were poorly edited. When I say poorly edited, I don’t mean that there was a typo or two. I can’t remember the last time I read a book free of typos; typos aren’t great, but they happen, and running across a couple of them doesn’t spoil a book for me. When I say poorly edited, I mean that there are gross errors of grammar and (sometimes) structure, or just a failure to trim the text down to what’s relevant and useful, that renders the book a poor representation of my position. If a salesperson’s pitch is full of grammatical flubs and is poorly organized, he’s not as likely to sell to me as he is if his pitch is coherent and sharp. Likewise, if a prominent person purveying an idea I support does so poorly, it irritates me because it’s a failure to present the idea in the best light possible.

Two such books I’ve read recently include The Fundamentals of Extremism (a collection of essays) and Can We Be Good Without God? The latter was fairly well structured and was by and large a good read, but it was riddled with typographical and other minor errors. I was reviewing the book for the publisher (Prometheus), and after reading it, I sent a couple of pages of suggested corrections to the editor. I know this seems smug and self-congratulatory, but that’s really not how I intended it. I just want the next edition (if there is one) to be improved so that the ideas aren’t immediately stripped of credibility by issues easily caught and more easily resolved. The former book was a different case altogether. A collection of essays by different authors about the religious fundamentalist movement in America, it naturally had some inconsistencies of tone and style. These are forgivable. And it had the usual (probably more than the usual) frequency of typos and grammatical anomalies. These were borderline forgivable. What really bothered me about what I read of this book (I couldn’t bring myself to finish it) was its density in places and its distribution of information, often internally redundant, that I already knew. This last circumstance doesn’t necessarily condemn the book; after all, it may just be that I know more about these issues than your average person or that the book is in fact targeted toward those (the fundamentalists and those curious about them) who do need to learn these facts from just such a book. There was no one thing about this book that was wholly unforgiveable, but the various things I perceived as problematic about the collection render it to my mind not a book that I would hold up proudly as an instrument supporting my worldview.

Another poorly edited item that comes to mind here is a tee-shirt I saw a few years ago containing a pithy comment (which I forget) the cleverness and punch of which were undercut by a glaring and painful apostrophe error that screamed “those who support this position are too stupid to express the position beyond a first-grade reading level; the position itself must therefore be unsophisticated.”

Part of the problem, of course, is that non-mainstream thinking is often published by non-mainstream vendors. A tee-shirt produced by a major organization stands a greater chance of being well-edited than a shirt whose message is composed of adhesive felt letters by an enthusiastic if grammatically-challenged individual. Random House has a much greater budget and astronomically more resources to throw at editing books than Prometheus or, say, The Atlanta Freethought Society.

Which brings me closer to where I actually intend to go. The AFS published Massimo Pigliucci’s first non-technical book, Tales of the Rational. It’s a book in the same basic vein as Sagan’s The Demon Haunted World that seeks to reclaim science from religious fundamentalists, and as noted above, books that aren’t likely to gain a major foothold in the maintream readership (and a book proscribing religion as a way of understanding the world by someone just making a name for himself surely is one of these) aren’t typically picked up by major publishing houses. And so they’re often not the best-edited books. This is surely the case with Tales of the Rational, another offering that I put down partway through because I was so irritated by the simple errors. Reading books like this makes me want to call the authors and volunteer to read them (free of charge) prior to publication to fix the errors that would otherwise slip through the cracks; I want, in short, to ensure that editorial failure doesn’t undermine the good ideas in such books.

I recently got my hands on a copy of Pigliucci’s latest book, Denying Evolution, which purports not only to explain where the fundamentalists are wrong about evolution, but also to propose that the general failure among the public to understand the theory is largely the fault of scientists and educators rather than of malicious and darkling evangelists. Denying Evolution is published by Sinauer, by no means one of the gargantuan presses (they have only about 100 titles under their belt), but one that specializes in scientific texts, with an emphasis (they say) on quality. So far, I find this emphasis to be pretty much on target. I’m about 40 pages into the book, and I’ve found only one typo (”crationism” should be “creationism” in Figure 1.1 on page 6). The editing seems to be very good by and large, not only in terms of correcting any typos that may have appeared in the manuscript, but also in terms of pacing the text and ensuring that maximum information is purveyed in minimal space in prose that is very readable (unlike The Fundamentals of Extremism, for example, which is dense and uneven within and across essays).

So far, the book is one I would be happy to send out as a general ambassador for my ideas, one I don’t necessarily wish I had gotten my hands on before it was sent to the press. It starts with a brief history of Pigliucci’s motivation for becoming active in the evolution debate — a pretty understandable entanglement for a young evolutionary biologist suddenly thrust into the wilds of Tennessee, home of the Scopes trial. Pigliucci then gives a history of the evolution/creationism debate, suggesting that it it perhaps hotter now than it has been at various times since Darwin published his ideas in the mid 1800s. I found the history interesting and pretty concise, and I learned some things. My only beef with it is a mild unevenness of analysis. For example, Pigliucci questions what’s behind the hotness of the debate in the American South, noting that in the years following Darwin’s publication, the number of scientists in the South was roughly equivalent to those elsewhere in the country. But the debate hasn’t been between scientists and scientists so much as between the religious and the secular, in many cases between the more and the less literate. And illiteracy and the lack of a general desire to live the examined life has been documented in the South by such figures as H.L. Mencken, whom Pigliucci mentions later in his history for his report on the Scopes trial. The issue I’m getting at here is a tendency (common among authors of all stripes, probably, in all honesty, out of a sort of time-efficiency necessity) to examine only the immediately relevant portions of a person’s work. Mentioning Mencken in connection with this debate without bringing up his often vicious condemnation of the South as a den of stupidity and cultural/intellectual laziness amounts to incomplete analysis.

Of course, Southern culture isn’t Pigliucci’s focus, and so it’s not necessarily appropriate for him to write a dissertation on Mencken, but it strikes me as name-droppish to mention a prominement figure without giving a more full consideration to his notions. And, looking at the lengthy index of names invoked in the book, I can’t help wondering if this will be a problem throughout.

This is a pretty small beef, though, and certainly not one to bar my continued reading of the book. Besides, for all I know, Pigliucci does give further consideration to the elements of Southern culture that have led to its poor reception of evolutionary theory. In any case, so far, I don’t think this book is a victim of poor editing, and I look forward to plowing ahead.

Things we did this weekend and so far this week:

• Retrieved and assembled used car seat from cousin
• Assembled frame for stroller that accommodates car seat
• Finished cutting out wooden letters of the baby’s name
• Had final baby shower
• Assembled various gifts from shower
• Did various returns and trades from all showers, getting ride of duplicates and some of the non-registry gifts that we knew we wouldn’t get any real use out of
• Bathed dog
• Cleaned the hell out of the house
• Mowed lawn
• Picked up and assembled toddler table and chairs and Pack and Play play-yard/bassinet
• Reinstalled operating systems on two computers
• Got wireless working (at last!) on my Linux laptop (one of the OS reinstalls)
• Learned vaguely how to operate stopwatch
• Felt guilty about freeloading two free meals off my visiting parents
• Got unexpected Target gift card from coworkers
• Took lots of clothes to Salvation Army bin

Things remaining to be done before the baby’s arrival:

• Change air circulation filter (I forget what this thing’s actually called)
• Review contents of bag packed for hospital
• Review birth plan to make sure I’m on the same page as Mleeka
• Spend unexpected Target gift card, probably on things to make the back bedroom look not quite so empty
• Get epidural (for Mleeka)
• Overcome abject fear at the prospect of becoming a parent

It takes a lot of preparation to have a baby. For example, last weekend (another busy one that I didn’t fully document), I knew that I needed to make room in our room for the Pack and Play that we were either going to get as a late baby gift or to purchase. To make said room, I needed to move a bedside table. I wanted to move it to the office, the floor of which was covered with papers and piles of books that wouldn’t fit on my already-overflowing shelves. So I got up Saturday morning, built a 6-foot bookshelf, filled it with books, threw away all the office trash, moved a desk from the office out into the garage where it now serves as an auxiliary woodworking table, moved the bedside table to the office, and cleaned up the bedroom to make room for the Pack and Play, which fits perfectly where the table had been sitting.

It was rather like one of those tile puzzles where there’s one little tile missing and you slide all the tiles around one slot at a time to try to make sense of the picture or to get the numbers in the right order.

I spent a lot of time this weekend fitting plastic pieces together and clipping tags and screwing things together. Major items lending varying levels of frustration to my weekend were a vibrating/massaging/musical baby bouncer chair, a baby swing, a toddler table and chairs (we don’t need them just yet, but they were on our list for the future and we got them), the Pack and Play, and the stroller. Our baby’s room has gone from looking sort of empty to looking almost overstuffed. The closet in particular is jammed full of clothes and diapers and booster seats and Diaper Geni refills and bottles and wipes and a thousand other things. I’m not complaining, incidentally — it’s just amazing how much we’ve accumulated how quickly. Just a few years ago, we were living in a 400-square-foot rat-hole of an apartment. When we upgraded to a 900-square-foot apartment, we thought we had plenty of room to grow, but we quickly filled it all up. Now we’re in 1650 square feet and are beginning to tax the seams a bit after not quite two years. It’s funny how stuff piles up.

As for having the baby, I’m pretty much ready. I had been saying that I needed a few more weeks. And I could still use some time to read and knock some other non-baby-related to-dos off my list, but I’m past the point at which I feel like I need that time. I’m ready for the baby to get here, to slide like that last tile into the nearly-organized …blah blah.

I’ve been party recently to a discussion touching on politics and public taste and the media. The title of the email thread is “Bread and Circuses,” after a famous declaration by the Roman poet Juvenal that “the people that once bestowed commands, consulships, legions, and all else, now meddles no more and longs eagerly for just two things — bread and circuses” (source). What Juvenal lamented, an implication of the discussion goes, politicians and media moguls today revel in, with their weapons of mass distraction and their aircraft carrier landings and their American Idols and their bizarrely-prioritized newscasts.

Keep the people fed and entertained and they won’t question authority.

I think the discussion has brought out some valid points, but I won’t concede that there’s any sort of vast media/political conspiracy to keep the people down by distractions so that they’ll

I was reminded yesterday of an incident from my childhood in which I cajoled my dad into buying me a toy he apparently couldn’t really afford. We had gone to a shabby department store (precursor to Wal-Mart and much lower rent than any of the -Marts I know of) for something, and I believe I recall that we were in a bit of a hurry. The toy section was all the way back against the left-hand wall as you entered, and we passed it on our right as we were making our way to the front. Whether he let me stop and browse or whether the toy in question just caught my eye I don’t remember. Nor do I remember whether I squawled and cried or whether I held forth with a persistent whining pleeeeaaaaaze or attempted some other, less conventional method of acquiring the desired object.

I do remember that I walked out with the toy and that Dad had been very reluctant to buy it. Again, details elude me, but I don’t imagine he was holding back just to be mean. I’ve always had the impression that it was a matter of money, that he as much as told me he couldn’t afford it right then, and that I pressed until I got my way.

I’ve always felt a little guilty about this incident when I’ve thought back on it, though of course I meant no harm and was simply a kid governed by the sense of materialism foisted upon me by the bright, exciting images brought to me by various sponsors during my 6-hour weekly dose of Saturday morning cartoons.

It’s not the money that bothers me. I was the kid, after all, who was convinced for much of my childhood that we were poor (a conviction that probably colors my recollection of this event). I remember gazing into our pantry for snacks and being discouraged to see a Stonehenge of condensed soup cans, some stale cookies, remnants of potato chips, and (maybe my recollection of my gastric melancholy is a little off, here, but these seem fitting enough culinary companions) gallons and gallons of castor oil and wheelbarrows full of turnips and rutabagas. To have such a dearth of brightly-colored, gelatinous sugarfood surely meant that we were poor.

I was also the kid who, from time to time, fearing for the state of the family finances as measured by my survey of the pantry, would sneak some change or dollar bills I had earned by doing some trifling task or another back onto my dad’s dresser with his pocket money. I’d say I more than made up, over the years, for the $20 the toy set my dad back.

No, it’s not the money, but the guilt that bothers me. Nobody wants to deprive his child of a desired object, and I know it must have rent my dad’s heart to say no to me in this case. I distinctly remember that he seemed very regretful to turn me down initially. I can’t help thinking of my own future finances and of the things I may wind up having to refuse my daughter and how I’ll be much more hurt by that than she will, who will run home and delight in playing with cardboard boxes and bubble wrap.