You’re in the water!

I wish I could arbitrarily declare a new rule or boundry and everyone just had to accept it.

I took the little miss to a playground after work and school today. She mostly played on her own or with me but for a little while she played with a few older girls.

The leader of the group was clearly enjoying her dictatorship and making sure to announce the next thing in order to keep all the other girls off balance and unable to declare some different idea. At one point there were four little girls on a large teeter totter and one of the girls wasn’t listening to the older boss girl. The girl in charge was getting frustrated and making demands but this younger girl really wanted to get her plastic shovel that was off in the sand. The younger girl got off of the teeter totter and started walking towards her shovel. The girl in charge, clearly having excercised all of her options, used the only weapon she had left. The younger girl had gotten two steps away from her shovel when the girl in charge shouted, “you’re in the water. You can’t be in the water. Get back in the boat.”

That’s right, this little girl changed the reality for all the other girls involved. Just moments ago the teeter totter was a car and they were driving somewhere, but she made a new declaration and the car disappeared and the road instantly turned to sea. At least, those changes happened for her and the little girls on the teeter totter. The girl heading for the shovel was faced with a dilemma and it really stopped her for a moment. She absolutely, without question, needed to get this plastic shovel. But, about the worst breech of ettiquette for children is to not accept the rules of a game. Even when those rules are changed in an instant and only changed to serve the interests of one bossy little girl. It’s okay to make the world change by declaring something new, it’s not okay to ignore the new declaration. I don’t know why this is how the playground works but it is.

The little girl who needed that damn shovel, though, determined that her need for the shovel was greater than her need to obey the rules of the pack. She took the last two steps to get her shovel. The girl in charge was irritated and the sea disappeared. The other little girls invovled got off of the teeter totter and everyone moved on to their own things. No one could maintain the fantasy at that point because it had been proven false.

Someday I’m going to be in a meeting at work and I’m going to want someone to stop saying literally the most boring thing in the world ( this happens at every meeting I’ve ever been in, sometimes I say it) and I will declare that no one in a blue shirt can use nouns and maybe, just maybe everyone will accept it and the boring will stop. Or maybe the boring shovel will win.

LW

I want to dance

Today, my little miss started her first ever dance class. It’s a ballet tap combo for 31/2 to 41/2 year olds.

She had a terrific time and is looking forward to next week.

And I walked away feeling jealous. I’ve never studied dance. Of all the random interests I’ve pursued either via books, a few community education lessons, or a more formalized series of classes I’ve interested in various kinds of dance for a long time but it’s something I’ve stayed away from.

I know I can learn dance moves and I would certainly appreciate the exercise component of it, so I don’t know what the hesitation is.

Actually, I do know. The dance genres and styles I would most like to learn are ballet, hip-hop, tap or maybe some combination of all three. These are all dance styles that adult, white men should, for the most part, avoid trying to pull off. If I had started studying any of these as a child or even as a teen I could claim some legitimacy in my interest but as someone in his 30s it would take me quite a while to overcome the concern that I was trying to be cool or reclaim a youthfulness.

I don’t really enjoy being young or youthful, but I enjoy even less the possibility that I’ll be percieved as though I’m trying to act cool or young. And shame and a self-consciousness would probably be a big hinderance in trying to learn a dance style.  Plus, the recital would be a huge source of stress.

The other reason I don’t take tap lessons or learn how to dance hip-hop is because I hold folks who do those things well in such high regard and I would always be frustrated I wasn’t at their level. I’m not a good beginner. I want to be an immediate expert. So, maybe I should take a tap class and experience that feeling of being terrible at something and yet maybe having fun. Perhaps I could learn that being bad at something won’t hurt me and I don’t need to be great at something to enjoy doing it.

Or, maybe I’m a natural and within 1 year of my first tap class I’ll be opening for Savion Glover.

Maybe?

LW

House of sickness

My house is wall to wall sick ladies. Actually, it’s just two sick ladies, one tiny and full grown. I’m worried about getting sick so my hands are raw from washing and I’m thinking about sleeping on the sofa instead of next to the wife.

It’s not uncommon for people to get sick at the start of spring. It’s not unusual for people to get sick at any particular season or part of a season. There are more cases of respiratory and viral illnesses in the winter but people get sick all year round. This is similar to the fact that sun damage to skin is still an issue in winter but people spend less time outside so there is less concern and awareness of sun damage in winter.

Whenever my house gets full of sickies I like to think about the various anti illness rituals and beliefs people hold. Because more flu and cold like illness things happen in winter that’s when the flu shots happen and when people have their anti cold rituals in place. Folks start uping their vitamin C intake, using their nettie pots, taking garbage like Airborne. I find all of these things fascinating. Most of them don’t do anything to stave off illness but their use is common and people swear by whatever thing or set of things they do to prevent and overcome illness.

We have this kind of thing in other areas. Just watch how people behave when waiting for an elevator or waiting at a stoplight. There are so many ideas about how to get an elevator to come faster or how to make a light turn green but activating some sort of magic underground sensors so people try random things and for the elevator comes or the light happens to change just after or while they are doing one of these random things they attribute the change to the action. This is also how psychics make their money, as the correct guesses or remembered more than all the guesses they made that were way wrong.

All of these things are attempts to have some control over what is largely a not controllable world. We humans mostly have to react to world around us with little ability to make everything bend to our wills. And that can be scary so we look for ways to manipulate the world around us. When we can’t find these ways we just see an ability to do so when one doesn’t actually exist.

The sad thing about this, for me, is that I should probably assume that any time my little lady appears to be doing what daddy tells her she may just happen to be doing what I asked despite my having asked rather than because I’ve asked. I’m fine with the idea that I can’t make a light turn green or ward off the cold but I really want to believe that my child will do what I tell her and be a good girl if I just work hard enough at it. And that’s what makes me a hopeless out of control human being.

LW

Wanting

My three year old was out of town recently for several days without her mom or dad. I figured it was time she learned some life skills so she hitchhiked across country from Delaware to San Jose. One evening I was talking with her on the phone and she said, “I want you daddy.” The statement was plaintive and a little sad. She missed me, she wanted to be near me, she was feeling things and not really knowing how to express them, but “I want you” was what she came up with. I thought that was pretty sound. And it really made me feel loved.

An essential quality in pretty much any story is conflict. And conflict arises from the wanting something. Whether that wanting be in the form of wanting an ice cream or wanting to lose yourself in the laughter of a beautiful woman the wanting is what matters. Love is, and I realize I’m jumping a few steps in this progression of connecting all love to want, love is an heightened wanting.

I think a very basic, perhaps instinctual human feeling, is a desire to be wanted. As a person without religion or a belief in something above and beyond the world around me I’ve had to figure out where my moral and ethical guideposts come from. (Obviously, they come from my parents and the cultural context in which I spent my childhood just like every other human being, but I couldn’t just point to a specific book or set of stone tablets as a simple origin.) It seems likely to me that humans are moral and treat each other overall with respect because the people who do that are more likely to survive and pass on their genetic code which means this tempermant might be selected for evolutionarily.

This concept simplified is that the meaning of life is that one should strive to have good people want them.

It’s an idea that can turn ugly. The desire to be wanted surely has something to do with my culture’s celebrity obssession and the desire to be on reality television. There’s some confusion and conflation of being seen by millions of people and being wanted. Sort of the little kid idea that any attention is worth having. So care should be taken and awareness is important. I can lead my life with a goal of having a group of people I think are good want me. But I have to make sure that I know exactly what that means and why it’s important.

Maybe the objective can’t be to be wanted but how wanted a person feels can serve as a guage for how well life is being lived. Maybe?

LW

Gutterpunks

There’s a section of gutter that’s been in various places along the boulevard outside my house for the last week. I know which house it came from based on the style and color but I don’t bring it over to their house. Instead I ignore the gutter and occasionally move it if the wind blows it into my yard. I sort of feel like it’s the responsibility of the people whose gutter it is to come and get it. Surely they see it. Or are they so unaware that they don’t realize a part of their house has blown across the street and it now mucking up their neighbor’s yards?

Really, leaving your gutter just blowing through your neighborhood is about the worst thing a person can do. It demonstrates not only a complete disregard for all of the people around you but also an open negligence for one’s home. The very place where you get your rest, eat you food, and store all your stuff and you can’t be bothered to keep track of the pieces of this place.

Sure, I’m lazy and choose to step over a piece of gutter every day rather than pick it up and bring it across the street but at least I go to the trouble of not having gutters because I know I wouldn’t bother keeping track of them. And that recognition of my own laziness is what makes me better than those beguttered people.

LW