Thoughts for the "New Year"

Lots of mini-entries piling up in my brain, so here's a core dump:

• Babies are Analog Devices: So after nearly 10 months of having an infant in the house, I've come to the stunning conclusion that a baby is not at all like a computer. Let me explain a bit. Computers are satisfying to me not only because of the expanded powers of production and repetition that they offer, but because when things go wrong there's generally a very specific set of steps that always fixes the problem. There are exceptions, of course, and situations that never get fully solved, but for the most part a digital device has digital solutions - they either work, or they don't. Not so with babies. What worked to get him to sleep one day might not work at all the next, or might work a little bit but take some augmentation. Nap times are never quite the same, techniques for getting a belly laugh are wildly variable, and sometimes he's just plain stubborn and nothing works. Analog means fuzziness, and fuzziness means improvisation and endless recombination. There are no solutions, just resolutions. It's an important lesson to remember with babies.
  
  
• "New Year" is an arbitrary designation – I was just saying to my wife this morning that I get more and more jaded about the concept of the "New Year" every "year" that passes. Just because our calendar system says that the cycle is starting anew tonight doesn't mean there's anything actually special about this day, or that this is some kind of milestone that marks the "end" of anything important. Our government is still rotten to the core, Pakistanis are still suffering the economic aftershocks of their quake, and my baby will still sleep soundly through the night and want mommy in the morning. My point is that every day is the beginning of a new cycle and the end of the old - for that matter, every hour, every minute, every picosecond that passes is a rollover of some sort, if you want to look at it that way. Which I don't. I don't want to look at it that way - I want to see life as a continuum that stretches thousands, millions of years, a cycle of nested cycles that repeats ad nauseum as far as our puny human lifetimes are concerned. One measley year passing, one time of "reflection" and "closure" on the issues of 2005, seems silly in comparison to that. I hate the arbitrariness of it all.
  
  
• This has been the suckiest vacation evah – So here's a quick rundown of my vacation:
  
  
  1. Worked for two days.
  2. Had surgery to remove my gallbladder
  3. Went home to be in pain, sleep, and get an infection in my belly button that hurt like a bastard
  4. Christmas Day, when my in-laws came over and got all up in the baby's grill and our best friends were two hours late to the party for no apparent reason
  5. My parents arrived and proceeded to "help" us by staying with us for about four hours a day, not watching the baby when we needed them to, and then inviting everyone over to our house on Friday for the entire day while my wife was at work and I was coming down with a cold that was knocking me flat because I was already on antibiotics and still infected and in pain
  6. Tomorrow: My wife works 16 hours straight to make extra money and I get to watch the baby all day
  7. Monday: School is of course open for a professional day, unlike every other workplace in the universe
  
  My only question is, when does my vacation begin?
  
  
• Call in the Stasi – So now that the Times has disclosed that our government has decided that it's OK to spy on U.S. citizens with no checks or balances, contrary to any court decisions or laws that came before, they're also deciding it's a Great Idea to launch an investigation to find the person that leaked this information, presumably so they can be tried for being a traitor and revealing state secrets. Just when you thought it couldn't possibly get creepier or more dictatorial, it does. But it begs the question: Why can't they just wiretap everyone at the NSA, secretly, to find the traitor? Hey, it's legal now. Terrorists are everywhere, my friend - just keep an eye on your neighbors and report them, and we're well on our way to being East Germany! Hooray for police states and complete lack of trust!!

Might be the only time I agree with the man

Click link to see headline. He may be onto something here...

The bottom is nowhere in sight

I can't help but feel a lot of "I told you so's" welling up from my righteous gullet. Recall that I said that the creepy revelations about the administration were only the tip of the iceberg? Hello iceberg. I can barely contain my contempt for this kind of ignorance and self-serving justification. I know he believes that this surveillance, blatantly illegal and totally contrary to the laws of our country though it is, genuinely helps fight terrorism. And perhaps it does. But for a President to a) blithely authorize such a massize, sweeping, secret program, and b) purport to see absolutely nothing wrong about the legality of it is worriesome in the extreme. This man has been so sheltered in life that he wouldn't know how to approach an intellectual gray area if it resembled a bottle of Jack Daniels. To him, God put him on this earth to do the Republicans' bidding, and that's exactly what he's doing - carrying out a sinister, Messianic mission of subverting the founding principles of our country, one by one. Fuck the founding fathers, screw the Constitution, bugger off Congress - I'm going to do whatever the hell I want to because I am Jesus. I really believe he's that extreme and that scary.

This is when I get truly frustrated with the press's insistence on representing all viewpoints. As my NY Times professor Malcolm Browne told us, the running joke at the Times was that when reporting on Hitler and the Holocaust, the second sentence would begin "Mr. Himmler said, however..." I'm not saying this is anything close to that magnitude of seriousness, because what is, but I still sense an unwillingness of the press to go for the Administration's jugular and take them out altogether. Why did the Times sit on this story for a year? Why isn't the massive propoganda campaign being waged domestically and abroad causing more comparisons with totalitarian regimes of the past? Why isn't Cheney's staunch defense of legalizing torture and indefinite imprisonment being held up next to the frightening police states throughout history? Taken separately, none of these actions are enough to call any organization "evil", but taken all together the Administration's record of violating rights, reinterpreting the law to their own advantage, and overturning longstanding precedents that keep our citizens' civil rights safe amount to a broad spectrum move away from Democracy and toward a much more restrictive system of government. Thankfully, the public seems to finally be getting how duped they've been by lies and doublespeak for the past 5 years, but to my ear it's still not enough outrage to overcome illegal gerrymandering and the power of incumbents. Because that's the only way we're going to effect our regime change - via democracy and fair voting. That's how civilized societies do it.

We have to vote this regime out of existence before the iceberg reveals itself to be even more massive than we could possibly suspect.

De-galling

Guess where I am? Lying in bed, using a wireless laptop I borrowed from school, waiting for Vicodin to arrive so I can sleep. I have four holes in my abdomen, and just a few hours ago one of them saw the transit of my gallbladder as it left my body. I think it's the one in my belly button, because that one hurts the most. Anyhow, the operation is over with and apart from the discomfort and belly pain I'm actually feeling quite well. It took longer than expected to get home because we got there at 9:30 and I wasn't taken back until 12:30. Aggravating, to be sure, and D's parents weren't exactly the most gracious about having to stay with the baby for longer than anticipated, but all of this is par for the course and it's over now. My father-in-law just arrived with the Vicodin, so that's good - the resident (who shared my exact birthdate and seemed to identify with me all the more for it) prescribed about a thousand Vicodin on the theory that it's better to have more than less, and also probably because he took a read on me and didn't figure me for the Matthew Perry type. I plan to take one tonight and then see how I feel, since he said he himself took one after oral surgery and was sick in bed for three days. Guess narcotics don't agree with everyone's system.

They agree with mine, however - I got 20 mg of morphine upon waking up from the anaesthetic and I felt and feel peachy after it. The pain upon waking up, coupled with cold air drifting through my gown, the huge oxygen mask over my face, and the fact that I couldn't see anything clearly without my glasses - made coming to not the most pleasant experience. But once that morphine was in there, the mask was off, and the blankets tucked in, I drifted in and out of consciousness in the most blissful way. It's a decidedly unsettling experience to simply lose 2 hours of your life at a time when you'd normally be awake. The year's shortest day got even shorter, and the last thing I remember is quoting Chevy Chase to the male RN in the OR, who seemed deeply impressed and hung around with us after the operation just to chat. I guess he liked me. I tried to be humorous and cool about everything, even though the whole time I was doing it I wondered if it was more of a coping mechanism than anything else. Whatever - it worked for them and it worked for me. And none of the horrendous side-effects came true - no nausea, no carsickness, no referred pain in my shoulder from the CO2 gas bubbles bumping up against my diaphragm. I'm just feeling like I did a thousand sit-ups and ingested some serious sedatives. The fact that this whole thing is an outpatient experience is a huge advantage - wasn't too many years ago that it was a huge incision and several days in the hospital recovering. Some Christmas that would have been.

The whole blow-by-blow story is just too boring to go into - suffice it to say that it took a few hours longer than we would have liked but in the end I'm in better shape than I thought I'd be. Now it's time to close my eyes and sleep until as close to noon tomorrow as my body will allow. The one hitch is that I haven't eaten anything except two Jello cups since about 9:30 last night, so I'm bound to be starving when I wake up. Hopefully that will be closer to 7 AM and not 2 AM or something horrific. Nothing worse than lying in bed drugged, sore, and ravenous.

Kudos to the Dems for holding up the military spending bill because of the ANWR amendment. Ted Stevens, would you please die soon?

Busy life

Holy Jesus life is f'ing crazy. A mostly complete list of Things My Wife and/or I Did Between the Hours of 6 PM and 9 PM tonight:

• Finished editing a DVD of the baby and began burning process
  
• Completed two dictations for psychiatric evaluations
  
• Two loads of laundry, washed and now drying
  
• Baked a pre-stuffed chicken with vegetables, made a pan gravy
  
• Bathed, dried, medicated, diapered, dressed, and put to bed a very cranky baby
  
• Ate chicken, stuffing, veggies, gravy, a beer, and a bulb of roasted garlic spread onto bread, which I threw in there for the pure pleasure of it
  
• Sterilized all breast pump parts
  
• Baked amazing walnut brownies (from a mix) for an office party tomorrow
  
• Made a meat sauce with ground turkey for freezing
  
• Emptied two trays of breast milk, cleaned them
  
• Pureed steamed apples for baby food, put in labeled trays, then freezer
  
• Loaded and set dishwasher
  
• Finished residency interviewee evaluations
  
• Folded and put away clean laundry from last week
  
• Typed this blog entry
  

Where's all our middle-class free time? What happened to that shit? We totally ditched our coveted TV time for all that work tonight, which sucks.

Oh, and I'm having my gallbladder taken out laparoscopically on Wednesday. Happy Holidays!