fleshyorgansEssays from a guy with too much pontification on his hands |
All of a sudden my daughter just started using lots of signs and real words and everything. It’s bizarre. Like shit just got real.
There’s a little human in there, making her will known.
Man, I’ve gotta stop saying things like “shit just got real”; both because she might repeat it, and because people who are allowed to use lingo like that don’t use semicolons in sentences. Nor the word “lingo”.
That’s a different way of saying, “My daughter is kicking up a storm and moving around a lot, lately.” Goes to show that how you say something really changes the tone of the message.
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Link: Why I hate parenting acronyms and refuse to use them on Offbeat Mama:
Just gonna quote their quote on this one.
Basically [using acronyms] fulfills two important needs of insecure people: first, speaking a ‘language’ only known to a certain social group serves to exclude those not immediately in that group. Secondly, it confirms the bond to that very group and thus includes the person doing it.
I was totally like this after my wife and I got engaged. “Can’t you see that I’m engaged?! I am getting soup and I am engaged!!!”
And then after the wedding, “Can’t you see that I’m married?! I am eating soup and I am married!!!”
And then after we found out we were having a baby, “Can’t you see we’re having a baby?!* We are cleaning up the dishes from our soup and having a baby!!!”
* Granted, this one is easier as time goes on, because I can just keep my wife around as a sort of increasingly larger and larger, physical asterisk. Sort of handy.
Link: The myth of the “pre-baby body” | Offbeat Mama:
I wholeheartedly approve of this message.
As a father, one of my jobs is to support and encourage my wife to believe this. The idea of ideal body-shape is bullshit. Health is one thing, but how you’re naturally built and naturally grown is something entirely else.
It makes me sad to see people go through a life-change and then try to reclaim some mythical, idyllic past self. You get pregnant, your body changes. You turn 40 your body changes. You have gastric bypass surgery, your body changes. The key points are that you were never as lean and fit as you think you once were, and there is no ideal shape that everyone is going to fit into.
And the corollary: change is always happening. How you are now is how you are, and it is a result of everything that has gone before and gone into molding you. Buying into your own myth of your previous self is like trying to press Ctrl+Z on your person.
Just remember: it’s all forward motion — there is no “undo button” for your life.
Sometimes you’re just another butterfly.
I don’t want to be just like everyone else, I want to stand out. Sure, I want to “fit in”, but there are points where I don’t want to go with the flow, don’t want to match statistics, don’t want to be the same as the rest of society. I would rather be viewed as a creative and unique individual rather than “just like a man”, or “like every other computer geek”, or “the same as every other wife’s husband” (or some other arbitrary label). This dovetails with another post I wrote about labels.
Too bad reality makes itself known so frequently.
I am curious how they came up with this — if it was actuarial, like someone was keeping sexlogs and corresponding them to gender, or if there’s some underlying mysticism behind it. It’s probably only effective in China, anyway.
In any event, things like this are all about control. Controlling the future, or barring that at least controlling your response to the future by foreknowledge. It’s sort of futile, and distracts you from the real awesomeness of you’re having a baby.
(Also, in case you didn’t know it, 90% is greater than 50/50. The more you know.)
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