Saturday, January 31, 2009

Snowed

Pittsburgh has been under meteorological assault for the last month: an empirical histogram of January weather patterns would be a straight line, with equal tallies for Snow, Arctic Snap, Freezing Rain, and Otherwise Shitty. For a while there I was taking it like a hero, rising at dawn and swaggering to the window to sneer at nature's Torture of the Day, all smiles and contempt, of course, what will it be today, mon vieux, black ice and howling winds? most excellent, I'll take a double. Gradually, the weather assumed a face, an intention: it was Nurse Ratched, and I was McMurphy, jaunty and unrepentant after a brisk turn with electroshock, or it was the erudite, smooth-talking Nazi torture master, and I, I was the unflappable, unbreakable British spy, all stiff lips and understatement. But even McMurphy had a hard time with the lobotomy; even Zweig's Dr. B. hit the wall. These days, I ooze instead of leap from my bed, and my sallies to the kitchen window are accompanied by an unmistakable twitching, of the fingers, of the soul. Let us hope the Punxutawney Marmot has a bad run of it on Monday.

Benjamin, a well-adjusted type, seems impervious to the weather system: his laughter rings from the rafters. What is startling about his laughter is its range, which includes, among other things, a Falstaffian Guffaw, a spasmodic giggle-shriek that sounds a little bit like a pentecostal preacher, and a long slow chuckle that suggests a wounded torero, or a hyena in waiting. Life is good, why worry about the weather, he seems to ask every evening as my frazzled form crests the top of the stairs, wind-burnt and road-savaged, why worry when there's so much to laugh about? And he shows me how to do it, erupting in giggles as I set my gloves on the heater, chuckling at the rattiness of my facemask, tittering at my goggles, my rakish helmet, my soggy coveralls, my spattered jacket my crusted socks. All very well, I retort bitterly as I dandle him on my knee, why should you care? You, after all, are a hydroponic animal, heated, lit, and nourished in an artificial ecosystem whose parameters are finely tuned to optimize performance: a creature, in sum, that does not need to ride seven miles through ice-crusted slush on roads with potholes the size of minivans and drivers who belong in anger-management therapy to get a bite to eat. Har har, he responds. Oh, my beautiful boy, how can I argue?

The kid is changing. His temper is, if anything, sweeter than before: he is beginning to understand the cycles of hunger, curiosity, exhaustion, sleep, and even as he's stuck in the bitter end of one round, he seems to be able to anticipate the next, which soothes him. He can concentrate. We set him in his tropical Jumperoo, and he will spend half an hour trying to perfect the hand motion that will send the plastic spinny-thing with the smiley-sun on a spindle into exactly the right rotations. He will grab Paco el Pajaraco by the beak, stare into his glass eyes, and wrestle him, psychologically, into the Mouth (where else?) I'm still trying to make my peace with this, reconcile my hypochondriac's heart with the fact that my son will cram any old grimy floor-sodden sock into his mouth and suck on it happily. He's a kind of slow moving Tazmanian Devil, and everything (especially breakable things) are meat, to be set upon and devoured. His charm is his leisureliness: he will suck a stuffed chicken to the bone, but slowly, savoring every subtle combination of floor mank, polyester, glass, cotton, and synthetic product label.

So many stories to tell: The Eruption of the First Tooth, The Curious Case of the Scream in the Night, Mark Toes and Life on the Baby Bath. Not tonight, but soon: February is official Blog About Baby Month. January was ruinous. With wife and baby gone, I doubled my mathematical efforts, with wife and baby back, I doubled them again. The month is a blur of late nights, early mornings, black beverages, endless meetings, vain pursuits, and formal motions. December made an attempt on my ear, which I resented, but January made an attempt on my sanity. Let us hear it for February, which, if the current climate distribution holds through Monday, and the Marmot doesn't do anything stupid, will be a month of sudden thaws, exuberant growth, spontaneous song, and copious outpouring.

Sunday, January 18, 2009

Benny's Back!

Woah, move over, Inert Slug Baby of Yore (ISBY)! There is a new monkey in town, and he can do all the tricks you could not. Let me list them:
* He can flip from back to front and front to back, at will, clothed or unclothed, happy, sad, sucking, drooling, laying on the carpet, squirming in bed, or dangling precariously on the couch in the Infantino straightjacket.
* He can heave the long, world-weary sighs of a career burocrat at the end of an especially dull work week.
* He can sleep an hour in the afternoon, alone and with no special inducements.
* He can grab the green widget in his tropical jumperoo and shake it, really give it hell, as if it were Phillip Marlowe and he was Mugs the Tough, Bumbling Expendable Goon, but so much cuter, and executing leaps and pounces all the while, lips stuck forward in a beak, eyes hard and narrow, the ponderous bulk of his cheeks rising and falling like the Tecoma Narrows Bridge in November, 1940.
* He can flap his arms like a chicken with Turret's syndrome.
* He can wake up at midnight and stare at his madly blogging father with cool eyes, pressed lips, and no panic.
* Woah, cancel that "no panic" part--more anon.

Saturday, January 17, 2009

Features

When Zoogle left home almost two weeks ago, he was a generic blob of baby flesh, indistinguishable (except in size, and perhaps curvature) from any other swaddlable entity: cute, sweet tempered, and not particularly nap-inclined, that was Z. But to judge from the pictures I've received, features are beginning to coalesce rapidly. Exhibit A, Child Left: the intentionality in that look is palpable. I do not know if this is Bennie the Scientist on the cusp of a eureka moment, Benny the Player on the brink of a score, or Benny the Evil Genius taking stalk of his race, but there is a nefarious intelligence in that look that speaks of Wild Times in the future.

I, in contrast, am losing features. For every additional hour I stay up and work on my paper, I lose one more feature. Like rats on a ship: they can sense the shift in ballast. Perhaps this is my connection to Cosmico these days. When features leave me, they head over to him, a scurring, piecemeal Trasmigration that takes them under the waters, past customs, into the eucalyptus groves and up to the fourth floor apartment, where they dodge the suegra and scamper past the traps of language to cast themselves likes sprinkles on the moist frosting-soul beyond the Cheeks and the Lone Tooth.

Friday, January 16, 2009

Trasnochada

It is two in the morning and I have been working for twelve hours, obsessively trying to finish off two horrible piddly pissant projects that for reasons unfathomable refuse to give up the ghost. My eyes are seared flesh, my back is twisted in knots, my hands are jittery from the Bottomless Mate Gourd I've been nursing all day and my brain is a charred circuit, one synaptic pathway flaying loose and uncontrollable against the wire fence of my volition. Dangerous territory. No position in which to be writing blog entries.

But. Open nights. Nights without limits, agendas, restrictions, or consequences: nights with no sense of day. Am I the only one who succumbs to these things, who willfully forgets the breaking point of the body and joyfully wrests every last volt of one day's bodily energy to the cause of This Night, so alive with the flutter of wings?

So I have the energy, at the very least, to post this photo, which my wife was good enough to send me, and which I find spectacular.

Sunday, January 11, 2009

The Ba(t)ch

On reviewing my last two blogs entries, two things trouble me. The first is that a self-professed third-generation carpet designer (whom I naturally do not know) was kind enough to leave a comment drawing my attention to the fact that carpets are not designed by committee, but rather by l'artist, a lone mind in the thrall of a vision. This, I admit, was news, and though I'm thankful for the insight, I now wonder how many other people have found this blog through random google searches, how many fourth generation hat makers, second generation lutiers, hereditary sous-chefs or seminal sommeliers now know all there is to know about Benjamin and the twisted workings of the mind of his father?

The second thing that troubles me is that in Bye Bye Benny, nowhere did I mention that it was also Bye Bye Wifey. In retrospect, it is not clear to me why not: did I overlook this fact? If so, it may mark the beginning of the long plunge into Spousal Blurring: life lived ever more vicariously through the antics of the child, identity slowly obscured by the shadow of an Agenda, Presence fragmented into timetables. Troubling.

What is more troubling is how naturally I slip back into Bachelor Mode: my first stop on the way home was the beer store, where I picked up a 24 pack of hand-crafted Michigan porter. It's been that and beans and rice for the last four days, Clarence White style guitar in the evenings, dirty socks on the radiators and dawn bedtimes. A batch of whole-wheat, half-sugar chocolate cookies eases the tedium of my solitude.

I do think of my wife. I think of her each time I eat a cookie. I think of how she would be horrified at my attempt to mix healthy and decadent eating, how she would throw her hands up, sputter, and in the shrill tones of fish-mongress begin to enumerate the viable vehicles for germ-bearing wheat, the artisinal loafs and the cultured johnny cakes and the various sorts of English puddings, and at the end of this Homeric incantation, when she had finally run out of breath, how she would point out, in quiet conclusion, that nowhere on this universal, cross-cultural, trans-temporal list would I find the Cookie. I think, too, of how quickly those cookies would disappear were she here, and I smile, and thank God for the small pleasures of marriage.

Saturday, January 10, 2009

Bye Bye Benny


The next two weeks will be slim pickings for the Benny Blog, the Ostensible Subject having been boxed up and shipped off to Colombia in response to what was billed as "overwhelming family pressure." Catalina took charge of the delivery, of course, and I would have accompanied them were it not that overwhelming family pressure stops just shy of the nuero: we are welcome, but in the last extremity, expendable.

Benjamin, it turns out, is a natural traveler. Catalina decided to leave from Washington D.C. instead of Pittsburgh so that we could indulge in the nostalgia of a return to our favorite Ethiopian restaurant, a dive in Adam's Morgan where we used to get loaded on mead every time I'd pick her up from the airport back in our courting days in Charlottesville. The allure of the return was strong enough that we decided to risk pissing off Zoogle with a five hour car ride. But Z. took it like a champion, sleeping four hours and delivering unintelligible traffic reports for the remainder. That was Sunday. On Monday, Catalina undertook what I assumed was going to be 12 grueling hours of solo plane travel with a howling baby who would be dropping his binki on the ground, dirtying his diaper, swearing at security, and generally causing pandemonium. But once again, Zoogle surpised: he flirted shyly with security, made cute faces at the seatmates, smiled coyly at the stewardess and watched in meditative silence as the sun fractured into pieces on the clouds over the Carribean.

The bad news is that I may never see him again. Several days ago Catalina gave me a frantic call at midnight, sputtering something to the effect that the new Child Abduction Law stipulates that no child, regardless of nationality, shall leave the country except in the presence of both parents, unless he is also accompanied by a signed, translated, and notarized permission note from the other, along with an original copy of the birth certificate. I think the case is hopeless: even if I comply, what Colombian official will believe that such a beautiful child belongs to a gringo?

Tuesday, January 6, 2009

Hotel Carpets

What amazes me about swanky hotels is their miraculous power to turn tack into pomp. Consider the carpets: where but in the Village People's summer home or the Hilton could you hope to see such a cancerous fusion of color and geometry? But for some mysterious reason, what in a private residence would seem an assault on the senses comes across as lush and exotic in the setting of a hotel. Is this because in a hotel, our senses are already so bludgeoned by the scale of our surroundings that only something truly shocking can touch them? So numbed by the chandeliers and the brass and the flagstone and the uncanny civility of the guy at the door that any less-than-vomitous floor covering would come across as drab and weak? There are numerous ways to ‘explain’ these carpets: as the unfortunate artifacts of design-by-committee, as the aesthetic overhead of killer bulk-discounts. But like other things that occur with suspicious regularity (certain headaches, disappearing witnesses, small transfers) these carpets have begun to assume a significance disproportionate to their strangeness. I begin to suspect that they harbor some secret, some clue to the nature of the world: that they bear witness to a profound truth about biological visual systems, or reflect the dark workings of a nefarious cabal.

Mathematics conferences are good for paranoid, speculative thinking. I am at the Joint Meetings at the moment, the biggest mathematical hoe-down of the year. It is a wild affair, non-stop lectures, continual social events, and a Job Fair eerily reminiscent of a livestock auction: fast talk, a ticking clock, finger motions that carry the weight of contract. In principle, I am here with the sole object of finding a young firebrand to fill the shoes of a recent retiree, though in fact I volunteered for the assignment because it represented an opportunity to get sent to a conference at departmental expense. I admit frankly that my presence on the hiring committee is a little twisted: not only am I a short-timer in the department, but I seem to lack the basic respect for the Career Path on which this whole academic process is predicated. Add to this an absurdist streak and a tendency towards polemic, and it seems clear that the department had no idea what they were doing when they chose me for this mission.

Not surprisingly, my stint as a headhunting 007 got off to a horrible start. The conference is in the Marriot, but having registered at the eleventh hour (of course), I ended up with a room in the Hilton, another ‘official conference hotel.’ Since I assumed that ‘official hotel’ meant ‘a hotel that is within easy walking distance’, I left my room for the first interview with about 15 minutes to spare and headed to the place marked ‘Marriot’ on my city pocket guide. Nary a mathematician in sight, naturally. Another look at the map revealed that Washington D.C. is lousy with Marriots, at least one every other block. How that detailed escaped me the first time will never be known, but the concierge at the Marriot-Washington apprised me that I was not the first person to come in this morning looking lost, and that the previous chap had been directed to The Rennaisance across the street and hadn’t returned: would I care to do likewise?

In The Rennaisance, both the bellhop and the concierge looked at me like I was mad. No mathematicians here, they said in the same tone in which they might have responded had I stumbled in reeking of gin and demanding to know where the weebies be hidin’. They sent me to a Marriot three blocks up. At this point, I was desperate: three calls to my co-worker had gone unanswered, and a frantic search through the phone-book on Catalina’s cell revealed no names that might know the right address. Meanwhile, the time slot for the first inteview was quickly evaporating. It eventually occurred to me that my very own ‘official conference hotel’ might, perhaps, know something about the conference. Sure enough, they knew the name of the hotel: Marriot Wardman. And though they couldn’t give me its address (let’s not expect too much) I figured that any cabbie ought to be able to work his mojo with the name alone. Armed with more hope than cash, I hailed a cab, issued the name, and breathed deep as we sped toward that nest of learned astronomers. En route, I tried to break the ice with the cabbie, laughing as I explained what a jackass I was for not checking the address first. The cabbie, jaded on tourists and perhaps not so confident with his English, seemed disinclined to banter, just nodded tersely and kept his eyes on the road. It was only as we were pulling into the valet parking spot and I said “ah, at last, the telltale mismatched socks” that he cracked a smile. God, what a relief: even the D.C cabbies know about mathematicians! I tip lavishly and hit the interview center at a gallop.

The interviews are a blur. They’ve been going for two days, and continue tomorrow, one every half hour, starting early and running late. How is one to keep this stuff straight? Over 500 people applied for one position. Most of the applicants look pretty good on paper, but all have their quirks: Wingfin Zhu from China published 17 papers in three years, but has a thick accent and a visa that would be cumbersome to work with. Priscilla Pentergeist ‘feels drawn to remedial courses’, but can’t say anything meaningful about her research. Slava Kreuschelheim is promising, but plays his cards close to the vest: does he really want a postdoc, or his secret ambition just a nice stable position in a third rank college? We hem and haw, ask questions, raise eyebrows, feign smiles, take notes. Our dossier grows. Everyone is ranked. One will be chosen.

I find it very odd to be in a position that everyone but myself considers to be one of power. Many of these candidates will not get jobs. They will panic, mope, consider their professional career undone, finally find something temporary, slog on. People kill years this way, carefully grooming themselves at each step, always conscious of the tyranny of the CV, keeping meticulous track of what counts and what doesn't. It can take the better part of a lifetime, and exhaust the better part of one's spirit, to realize that there were other things one could have done. I keep meaning to ask these people, 'hey, have you considered a career in a carpet design?'

Saturday, January 3, 2009

The Flip

There is an internet entity called the Baby Center that sends out a weekly email to expectant or recent parents. If you register for the service while your baby is still just a date on the calendar, you get detailed weekly updates on how the belly worm is advancing. "Your Baby at 20 Weeks," reads a typical message, "sleeps between 18 and 22 hours a day, is growing hair on its toes, and moves in response to the sound of your voice." Of course I, in my usual perversity, always found the omissions more interesting than the inclusions. After all, what do these guys know about this kid, in particular, who, in contrast to all the other kids, is not just a rapidly bifurcating cellular mass but, rather, Benjamusco the Magnificent, a dour and opinionated vieux precoz? Do they know that he curses every time pa pulls out the guitar, shudders every time mom eats broccoli, and dreams of algebraic varieties?

Once the child is born, the messages continue. Since Benjamin came a week late, all the post-partum messages seem to come a week early: we were told his umbilical chord should be falling off when in fact it was still fresh; we were wished a happy one-month anniversary when in fact Benny was still a larval three weeks; and so on. The dissonance between the Word and the Flesh was mitigated by the fact that Benjamin always seemed slightly ahead of the curve: he was sleeping through the night long before the Baby Center began spurring us on to hope, and he was singing Baroque arias at a time when the Poster Baby was just beginning to experiment with clucks. So when the message arrived advising us that our child might start flipping over, we were puzzled: for all his talents, Benjamin had never shown the slightest interest in changing position. Perhaps he was too fat too move? Perhaps he had muscular dystrophy, or was born paralytic? The speculative paranoia of the new parent needs very little seed material.

I am pleased to report that the paranoia is vanquished: the child has mastered the flip. Perhaps mastered is too strong: he has 'demonstrated competence' in rolling front to back, under the additional hypotheses that he starts from the praying mantus position, isn't too tired, feels like flipping, is naked, and wants to show off. Catalina gave me the proof this morning: three times, in rapid succession, she set him face down on the ruana, arms pinioned under the body, a captive to his own bodyweight. Then, like an obese salamander in some ancient Mayan harvest ritual, he lifted his fat face to the sky, puffed out his body, and rolled free, capsizing in a slow, graceful roundabout until he was all the way over, the earth firm on the backside, the heavens mercifully fixed, the strain vanished: a huge motionless upside-down amphibian with a smile and a case of the giggles.