A-HA!

The wife is out jammin’ with her band tonight. That sounds a bit impersonal. I need to think up a nickname for her. Whenever you introduce someone as “The Wife” it seems to connote an entirely different person than the one you had married. With that noted, a truly unique nickname is hard to come up with, so I will have to just move on with the admittedly impersonal moniker of “The Wife.”

So, where was I. Ah yes: The Wife, The Jammin’ Wife. With the kids in bed, and the cats taking their pre-nighttime nap, this leaves me with some spare time. It was hard to decide what to do with myself. I had resolved to write more, and being only January 9th, I can’t give up on that resolution yet. But at least one post in the blog is about how I want to be more of a photographer, so maybe I should take some photographs. But really, how many interesting photos can I make out of items that I find in my cupboards, or under my couch. I just started a flickr account, so maybe I should upload some of the photos of crap that I have already found in my cupboards:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/73910193@N03/

Or given that my combination of cedar and cat allergies have prevented me from sleeping for the past week, maybe I should just shave the cat, and turn in early.

What I really want to do is to take some data from work and make a graph. Surprised? I understand. If you were my wife, (The Unsurprisable Wife, to be more exact), you wouldn’t have been surprised. For the past year, I have been obsessed with visualization of data. I have been reading Edward Tufte, browsing visualization blogs, reading interesting posts mentioning William S. Clevelands’ work, and learning R and the wonderful ggplot package by Hadley Wickham.

With my recent obsession I have realized that data visualization has always consumed a bit of my internal CPU. Every time I have come up against a large data set, I have spent some time trying to determine how I could make a worthwhile picture out of it. Some times I succeeded through sheer force of will, and manually created tables and charts. Other times, I looked at the tools that I had at hand, and rather than try to chisel a replica of stonehenge with a butter knife, I decided that my time was better spent doing what my company actually paid me to do.

Within the second half of the past year, work was slow. So very slow. What my company was essentially paying me to do was to drink coffee and read my email. Lucky me. I hate idleness. I hate wasting my time. Lucky me, a small part of my responsibilities was to help the product’s performance architect. He made some wicked cool plots. I spent the second half of the year working out how to make some relatively cool plots that no one really needed. My wife, The Patient Wife, was subjected to all of my plots and graphs. Each time, she would listen as I started to tell her what the graph meant. I was never able to bring her to an “AHA!” moment before she fell asleep. ( The narcoleptic wife )

We have had this discussion several times. When I am looking at hex dumps, and she is talking about chord signatures, when I am looking at trace logs, and she is looking at flats and sharps, xkcd vs Phish, source code vs. musical notation.

Each of us has tried to explain again what the other has failed to grasp with that “AHA!” level. Several months ago, ( Before I showed her my last plot and before she tried to explain what “Natural” notation meant ) we had agreed that I would never teach her computers, and she would never teach me music. That is really a promise that can’t be kept. No matter how outlandish your vision, your passion, may seem to other people there is an innate desire to continue to explain that vision until others reach that same state of passion.

Luckily this drive isn’t always fruitless. I have found some interest in data visualization in my new group. We started exchanging some examples, and found some common appreciation for each other’s work. One of my colleagues scheduled his vacation to start on his wife’s birthday. I had forgotten to send him a link to the wicked cool plots that my friend, the performance architect had created. I sent an email to my new colleague after dinner so I wouldn’t forget while he was on his vacation. I didn’t expect him to read it until he returned. As I was sending it, my wife expressed that what was really interesting to her was not the plots, but the psychological differences in how our respective brains were wired. Mine was wired to be fascinated with pixels on a glowing screen. As we talked about it some more, a reply came back from my colleague ( On his wife’s birthday) that the plots were indeed wicked cool. In the rest of our discussion, my wife changed her grouping from “you” to “people like you.” I think she really meant: “crazy people like you.”

As I have already mentioned my wife, The Musical Wife, has tried to explain musical concepts before. Tonight she explained that she is most successful playing a piece by feel. She can sight read music for flute, or guitar, or even voice. The reading is somewhat difficult though, until she hears and feels the piece played the way it was meant to be played. After that time, she uses the music for hints, and plays mostly by feeling. I don’t understand. Not one bit. Only way I feel music is to sit on the speaker.

But I am glad that she has found a group of people who seem to get it. To have the same AHA moment.

Hiatus

I was looking back at my few blog posts, and really enjoyed reading them. Considering I am one of two consistent readers, that is a pretty secure percentage of satisfied readers. I think I also remember that I enjoyed writing them. As part of my New Year’s resolution I will try to return to writing periodically.

I am not going to spend any time making excuses for disappearing. One reason is that returning to this blog is part of a resolution. If the lack of lake front property, my abundant waistline, and my general anonymity in the photography world is any indication, my second disappearance may be in another two months. ( That seems to be when the glitter starts wearing off of bold champagne fueled proclamations. )

Instead of excuses, let me take this chance to do a brief recap:

1) I am still not your superhero.
2) The world still needs someone to be a superhero.
3) My boys are still growing at an exponential rate.

Examples, please.

I gave up on my last position at work before 12 months. It’s an all time record, and one that I hope never to repeat. Why did I leave? I was doing well, outperforming my peers, breaking new ground, and just starting to impress people outside of my management chain. I think my inner monologue during a brief interchange between my manager and I explains it best:

Manager: Thank you so much for going so far to resolve this problem, the amount of detail in this record is amazing.
Me: You are welcome. It’s …well …it’s just what I do.

Inner Monologue: Your consistently low expectations for everyone on your team is why I have to leave.

Clark Kent would have just kept on banging away at the keyboard, saving people in his off time, not worrying about advancements or promotion.
Maybe a smarter man would have stayed, and found a way to get promoted by being the one eyed man on the island of the blind.
A true Taoist might have just done the job set before them, expecting no praise, or differentiation between them and their moronic peers.

I took a position within the same large company in another group. One good thing about a large company is that there are opportunities for changing your destiny. Unfortunately they are usually tied up with too much bureaucracy. What I am left with is a temporary arrangement where I don’t really have a job, but they are doing some accounting magic to get me paid for the next month with the hope that we can work some Human Resources magic by the end of that time. Can I get a Whiskey?

Number 2 doesn’t have any short examples. I am sure I can find something going pear shaped to write a whole post about in the next week.

Which leaves… My family.

I haven’t really written about my wife. Primarily because she is the other consistent reader of the blog. It seems a little weird to write about her when she is right here. Well, not right here, she is starting off the New Year with a wicked sinus headache/migraine/hangover. Hopefully starting off the New Year at a low point will allow her to rise to unprecedented new heights in the coming year, although that will be hard. She has just wrote her 11 in 11. The 11 amazing things that have happened in 2011. Although some of them are the normal amazing that comes with the growth of our kids, a good number of them are truly amazing things that she has made happen. Maybe I will have to add “compliment my wife more” as one of my resolutions.

Dump Truck, my 2 and a half year old is still ginormous. Two days before Christmas he had a lymph node that was large enough to be goiter, a red eye, and the start of an ear infection.. Luckily it was just a normal infection, and didn’t appear to be something terribly bad. It was even possibly a virus. To be on the safe side, the doctor prescribed antibiotics anyway.

I am against needlessly feeding children antibiotics, but we had given the lymph nodes a few days to shrink before taking him to the doctor, and the red eye worried me. Thirdly, my children are ones that don’t complain about ear infections until the pain is at 11. Given that this was two days before Christmas, it didn’t take a crystal ball to see that if it was bacterial, we had a good chance of caroling in the emergency room.

How does this show his immensitude? Well, our insurance company put a hold on the antibiotics. They are done by weight, and some automatic computer system compared 36 lbs, and 2.5 years and said “ErrorErrorBleepBlorpError.” So we had to manually confirm his weight before getting the medicine. ( I am not sure why our insurance was checking it, instead of our pharmacist, and why the pharmacist trusted my memory instead of calling the doctor. Too many questions, not enough answers for a parenthetical aside.)
.
As we shared this anecdote to my wife’s social network, we had people coming out of the electronic woodwork to mumble “football.” Give me a break. I have been spending the last 2.5 years trying to teach him to not hit his brother. I think it will be unfair to ask him to transition in the future to butting heads and tackling people. Besides, being a nerd, I have always been nervous about the danger of instilling team think into a child. I am sure that there are great coaches out there, ones that encourage fair play and personal achievement through shared effort.

My worry is that the very nature of coaching is to remove some choice from the child. You run the play the coach wants you to run. It’s too easy for people in that position to abuse that authority. Even without abuse, it still is another institution teaching a child to follow orders.

Speaking of institutions, The Artist, my oldest, has started kindergarten. What an education that has been. Mainly for me, but in some ways for my son. Not really in the classroom sense, as he can read quite well, and already has a very inquisitive mind. But it is an exercise in social interaction. His last pre-school was a very small class. Two boys ( including him ) and three or four girls. It was small enough that everyone could take time to listen to each other’s rambling 4 year old stories. There was also enough teacher interaction that any conflicts were easily resolvable before they really started.

Neither of those is true in his new school. His favourite response to all of my questions about his day are “Nothing.” So, I have had to try and glean what has been happening with him from short discussions after picking him up from school. It is painful to listen to a story, realize that there is probably a few bad decisions and try to gently prod him to make right decisions, without trying to be too controlling. It doesn’t matter if Dad says that “Catch the Girls ( and put them in Jail)” is a game that encourages hurtful differentiation between sexes at an age when there is really no need…Or that using karate chops is not a good way to stop a fight between two other people…Or that being kicked and pushed to the ground does not seem like the best way to “learn” karate ( or kung fu ) … etc.

It doesn’t really matter what Dad says, because Dad is not there. So, I try my best to do more listening than correcting. My hope is that if I don’t condemn “catch the girls” too harshly than maybe it will encourage him to say “Nothing” less often and that will allow me to intervene when he appears to be heading towards a really life altering decision in the future.

I didn’t realize that Kindergarten would be so much of a new world for both of us.

Motivation.

How do you teach a kid to swing? It doesn’t seem like it should be that hard. Back, forth, back, forth, Row, Row, Row. A steady beat of actions that should be almost part of our instinctual responses.

My oldest son however would not, could not no matter how he tried. I had tried gently reminding him of the steady beat for years by pushing him in a baby swing, and chanting rhythmic commands. I had continued the chanting on and off until he was using a big kid swing. At that time, I tried to also show him how to move his legs with my hands.

Ok Son, now you try.

flailing “I can’t. It doesn’t work.”

Here, move your legs like this, lean back. Good, …Keep trying, you need to practice, then it will be easy.

more frantic flailing “I Caaaaan’t. Ok, I guess you don’t want me to have fun.”

The discussion continued, until I decided it would be best to compromise. Ten tries at swinging, and then I would give him a “Super Boost”

This worked well, because he was ok with practicing as long as there was a finite, reachable end to his frustration. I was then able to give him a boost, and not feel guilty for pushing my younger son in a baby swing while Flounder was receiving no help beside him.

We continued with this comproimise until I wanted to try another go at really teaching him:

Here’s how you start moving…Walk backwards, yep, like that…push off, and start swinging back and forth.

exasperated sigh and flop on the swing seat “I can’t do it.”

Yes you can, please try.

tries half heartedly “It doesn’t work, you lied to me.”

I lied? Really, Get up. Here, see…Swing, Swing….

I then explained that I loved to swing. ( which I do ) and I was so good at it, that I was even able to do the “Loop-De-Loop” a couple of times. But that it was hard for me to learn too, and that I had to keep on practicing and trying. I had hoped the tall tale would give him something to strive for, and show that he needed to work to get there. Instead of being motivated, my oldest son wanted to hear more details about the infamous loop-de-loop. He asked me all the important questions: Did I fall off, Did I get sick, what happened with the chains attached to the swingset, How many times around did I go in one try. Unfortunately, we were back at square one. The only way he would swing without a tantrum was if I started him, and then gave him a Super Boost after 10 tries. My youngest son, was now starting to be able to say “Supaboost” and could regularly count to 10.

Most of these encounters occurred within the six months prior to his start with kindergarten. Knowing my son, he would be mortified if he went to class and was unable to do this simple task. I had to find a way of motivating him. But how? It is really hard to determine the nuances of five year olds. One day you can get them to eat spaghetti by telling a kid they are worms. The very next day, he will push leftovers to the side for the very same reason. And surely just plainly telling them to do something has received a resounding no since they were able to control their vocal cords.

As the days rolled forward, with a sense of desperation, I decided to forget that he was a kid, and try reason. Listen. I love to swing. I think you have as much fun swinging as me, and I would like you to continue having fun in Kindergarten. But I won’t be there to give you superboosts. No one will. I am not trying to frustrate you, but trying to help you learn so that you can keep swinging and having fun.

Of course the short discourse was met with a tantrum, and rolling on the ground, so we quit for the day.

What was really surprising was what happened the very next day. I was out of the house for most of the day, returning right before dinner. My wife had taken the rest of the family to a public playground. My oldest son came home to
our playscape a swinging expert. He was swinging at least a 175 degree arc in the swing. Pumping his legs effortlessly, and at the same rhythm of his momentum.

I complimented him, I congratulated him, I applauded, I asked my wife what she did. Nothing. He said he wanted to swing, and I said OK, and let him run to the other side of the playground.

I continued to watch until he asked me how close he was to making the loop de loop. We had talked about the loop de loop months ago, and I just figured that it got buried in the back of his mind with many of the other things that I tell him in a given day.

Well, about the loop-de-loop. It is actually very very hard to do a loop. Not many people can do it. Dad actually told you a tall tale when I said I could go around. You know, just like in your book.

Pause

Do you understand?

Yeah, You are the only one who has ever done a loop-de-loop.

Close enough son. Want a free superboost?

Altruism. Five year old style

This past Sunday was Mother’s day. Ahh, the day when I take my children out into the world, and convince them that no matter how fluffy the bathrobe, that Mother is not partial to pastels and would probably prefer a new capo for her guitar.

I actually took them out the Saturday night before. Stop rolling your eyes, it was not last minute, it was actually planned for my wife’s benefit. I would take the kids shopping, and out for dinner and my wife could go to a neighbor’s birthday party.

We stopped to see koi fish between buying a new guitar capo, and dinner. Then our plan was to head back to see the koi again after dinner. I decided to add some frozen yogurt to the plan.

That’s when my son, The Artist, said the most altruistic thing a five year old boy could say:

“Dad, tomorrow is Mom’s day. The whole thing is for her. We should not buy anything for ourselves today, and only buy something for Mom.”

Yes, son. You are correct. Besides the dinner, and the frozen yogurt, and two visits to the koi pond, I think we will just do things for Mom today.

Wait till he sees the bees.

Another reason that I am not fit to be a superhero:

Bees.  I grew up thinking I was allergic to them.

Superman doesn’t carry an epi-pen.  Batman might have, but only so he could save Robin’s life.

Turns out that the truth was actually much worse.  I finally broke down and scheduled a serious round of allergy testing.  Everything from fish oil to pollens to cat dander to bees was injected under my skin.  I didn’t cry once.  I did wince a bunch of times, though.

So, Doc, how allergic am I to bees?

Well, Not at all actually

Huh, what about the shortness of breath, the extreme feeling of unease, etc?

Panic attack?

Ahh.  Yes, that is better, I am scared of those pointy bees.  That’s ok, though. Plenty of people have panic attacks, and it is a valid physiological reaction. Of course, in my case, it was more of a limited phobia. Kind of a scaredy cat response, instead of a full physical ailment. But that is ok, too. Now I know with medical certainty that I am safe. And with that knowledge, I started to work on challenging my preconceptions, and changing my emotions. I started preparing myself to not be terrified of those pointy bees.

I would calmly shoo away angry bees that were trying to drink my soda. I sat in the middle of a field of clover for the perfect close up shot of a bee sipping nectar. I was becoming the calm zen beekeeper in this crazy apiary.

One day last week, I was driving home with my windows down. The weather was unseasonably beautiful. Not to hot, not too cold. Beautiful. I know it isn’t the best safety decision to drive with your windows down. But I figured with how slow traffic was moving that it was an acceptable risk to bask in this sun.

There was only one highway exit that I had to go on. A mere half mile where I would be moving somewhat faster than the 25 mile an hour crawl. In the middle of driving, I heard a THUNK against the window frame, and felt a THUNK against my cheek. Traffic then slowed, and I was able to look at my lap, and see the dead bee.

Poor helpless bee, I thought. Life ended because of my window. What a shame you beautiful black and yellow thing.

As I gazed introspectively, the traffic started to move. As my speed increased, I stole one last look at Thunk, and saw that he had regained conciousness.

The zen bee keeper in me celebrated his recovery, while my inner child gripped the steering wheel until his knuckles were white, and screamed until his throat was hoarse. Both of us then tried to climb out of the seatbelt, and out of the van while silmutaneously trying to keep up with the speed of rush hour traffic.

Unfortunately the bee didn’t make it. It must have wanted to regain consciousness just to remind me that life is pretty static, and there was no escape from their pointy bottoms.

My todo list is monotonically increasing, while society’s professionalism has been monotonically decreasing.

It’s been a while since I posted.

I have been busy at work. No, really.

Really Busy.

I started a new job at the beginning of the year, and I feel like I am barely treading water.

Each day brings a new flurry of reading and studying. Everything from new mathematical papers detailing graph theory, to database performance tuning, to new programming interfaces, and technologies.

Each one is additional to the duties that I need to perform to be given a paycheck, and each one is well outside my usual knowledge base.

So, in order to understand a performance report for a database, first I have to learn more about tablespaces, and how indexes are organized.

In order to read papers on graph theory, I have to remember ten years back to the last time I heard the term eigenvector.

It’s frustrating, and awesome at the same time.

Along those same lines, I was surprised by something that I heard today. Another new member to the team was lamenting that in one of her old jobs, everything was standardized. One type of operating system, one directory structure, one database. Everything was the same for each account that they supported.

Everything was easy to support, and she asked me if I wished this job was similar.

I won’t deny that I wish that my days were easier. It would be great if I could reduce the number of times in a day that I banged my head against a keyboard because I added another topic for my reading list. But I don’t understand what happened to our country’s culture of excellence.

Wasn’t there a time not too long ago, where society in general strived hard to acheive, and work beyond what was expected of them?

I have this fantasy vision of the hallowed halls of learning where electric engineers
worked out how to harness electrons for computing. Groups of hobbyists creating, actually
creating computers after their day was over at the office. There is also this faint feeling that in the past, there was a greater feeling of responsibility towards your job, and your company.

The companies have ruined employee responsibility by stealing our pensions, and our stability out of short term greed. In addition there are commercials on television showing us what some kid in Finland will be doing with his strong skills in math and science and telling us how far behind the rest of the world our education system performs. Certainly doesn’t sound excellent.

I am sure that part of the problem is that the present is only truly perfect in retrospect. Our perceptions and feelings about the past are mainly the results of our own internal propaganda.

Sure, it seems cool to be a gentleman that travels to the office in sharp suits and neat hats to do Meaningful Business in a fifties sort of way, but the reality is that with that perception comes the inability of society to accept women into meaningful roles in the workplace.

Beyond our perception, there is something else that is at work. The mystifying of hard work. I have heard too many times in my relatively short career the phrase “Wow….That really looks professional.”

There should be no surprise. I was actually paid to make this Power Point Presentation. Although I didn’t take a class in presentation technologies, the user interface was rather simple. And if I couldn’t have figured out how to make a presentation, It would have been my job to ask every office zombie in the same zip code for help until I could make it “look professional.”

What should be heard more often is “Wow…This looks amateur, did they actually pay you to do this? I wouldn’t use these slides to torture monkeys.”

Maybe if we could utter that phrase in everybody’s office at least once a week, people will start taking more pride in their work. If not because they actually have pride, but are afraid of ridicule.

One thing is for sure, if everyone at the children’s book publishing office was afraid that someone else might actually read their story about musical vegetables, and give an honest opinion about it, then I wouldn’t have to worry about filtering my childrens’ books for phrases with incorrect rhymes.

“What’s the biggest mistake you ever SAW, trying to rhyme the wrong word with DINOSAUR.”

Unhappy parents

I read a story recently.

Apparently not only do children make parents unhappy, they also make you delusional. It’s apparently a similar function as the statement: “This tastes awful, try it.”

Kid Crazy: Why We Exaggerate the Joys of Parenthood

As I am reading through the article, I try to not only understand the immediate piece, but also I think about how the study was performed, and how the conclusions may have been reached. Well, I guess more importantly, I look at my sons and ask myself if they have been causing me untold grief over their short existence.

The first thing that came to mind was how easy it is to believe you can understand something without experiencing it.  I try not to provide advice to newborn parents unless they ask, and then it is typically a very specific response.  Before you are a parent, you don’t even know the correct questions to ask.  And then I start to think about how a really incomplete undedrstanding of any expericne can lead towards mistakes of hubris.  All of the people who support the conclusion of the study will say this was a *scientific* study, and therefore there was no real place in this scientific study for beliefs, only facts.

Well, there’s science, and then there is science.  One thing is that ever since that wimp Little Albert freaked out about the rat, I think that the general population started to frown on truly experimenting on the public. Until we can raise enough infants in a laboratory setting to run an experiment with some statistical significance, these studies will mostly rely on surveys. First point about surveys: they can hold alot of bias. Second point about surveys: maybe the happier parents are just too damn busy to be filling out a survey.  ( Second point is it’s own post, and resolves around truth, and truth in science )

Or maybe I am delusional. I think though that I have a better theory. I will admit something about being a parent. I have only been a parent for not quite five years, and I have never been more happier than some moments that I have had with my children. The feeling of having my youngest son, Dump Truck, grip me around the throat and hug me with all of his might. The simple pleasures of having both Dump Truck and The Artist (my older son) chant “me next, me next” as I swing the both of them in turn around the great room. The quiet observations of The Artist as we hike in the woods.

<em>Wait, did he just *admit* that some of his happiest moments have been due to his kids. Weak.</em>

Well, The admission is that although I have had some of my happiest moments, I have also never been as angry as I have been with my children.  How so?  Here’s a good example:

I have started leaving for work before my children wake up.  This is good for the family on many different levels.
I get to arrive before anyone else, and spend some early morning time impressing my new manager.  Because this is a new position, and in
a different office, I am able to avoid rush hour traffic and arrive home before dinner starts.

The Artist doesn’t think it’s a good idea at all.  Even though I hug him when I arrive home, and kiss him before bed, he has started to take issue
that I don’t kiss and hug him before I start my day at work.  Being a creative problem solver, he decided that he would get up before I left in the
morning to tell me to have a good day at work…

<em>Awwwww</em>

Yeah, sure it’s endearing, but it is a really horrible idea.  I don’t even want to know how he gets up before I leave.  Maybe he stays up all night staring at his clock, and waiting for the auspicious positioning of the big hand and little hand.  Unfortunately, he is not quite five.  That means that he can’t even reliably read a digital clock.  Sometimes he freaks me out by running after me as I step out the front door, sometimes he wakes me up five minutes before my alarm, and sometimes he wakes me up five hours before my alarm.  And of course, once he is up, there is a limited amount of time before he pokes my wife in the eyeballs to see if she is ready to get him some cereal to start his morning.  Horrible idea, and one I decided to resolve.

So, being a creative problem solver, I came up with a plan.  The Artist may not be able to tell time, but he can actually read quite well.  So, I made a deal.  If he stayed in his bed the entire night, until Mom
woke him up to get ready for preschool, I would write him a note in the morning before I went to work.  Genius.

This was on Thursday.  I was exhausted from being woken up early Thursday morning, and I went to sleep peacefully expecting that my first concious thought would be how I needed to turn off my alarm.
Turns out, that our deal was null and void in the darkness of early morning, and once again I was woken up, and once again I led The Artist back to his bed, kissed him, and calmly told him to stay there until he saw the sunrise at least.
Afterwards, I returned to my own bed.

An hour later, and still an hour before I wanted to be awake, The Artist woke me up again.  I didn’t want to wake my wife, so I furiously pantomimed for him to leave the room so we could talk.   As he was leaving the room, I tossed my pillow at him.  It turned out that my silent outburst was for his own safety.  I didn’t throw it hard enough to knock him down, but if I didn’t throw that pillow, I would have so much pent up aggression that I have had to  run screaming into the yard when I heard  this:  <em>”I wanted to know whether I could still have the written note in the morning even though I woke you up.”</em>

So, that is a scene for you.  There are times that being a parent means being exhausted, trying to explain reason to a child who hasn’t learned anything about reason and beyond that, there is no break from them, as they are yours:  Your Joy, your responsibility, your inescapable housemates.  When you are filling out a survey, which stories are you most likely to clearly remember?  The beautiful stories, the ugly stories, or the last one that occurred?  When you are busy enjoying your life, and the company of those around you, do you usually say: <em>Wow, I am having so much fun, I think I will round out the day by filling out a survery!</em>

Does the survey have a banner that asked you to reschudule if you mood is  too caustic?

Anyway, although they have been providing some really tough challenges to me through their personalities, I would say that being a parent has been a positive experience for my life.

But then again, maybe that’s the delusion speaking.  Where is my kool aid.

Jealousy

You are not your job. Well, at least not unless you want it that way.
Though, you do spend a fair amount of time shackled to your occupation.

When I get home, I find it hard to turn off, and often find myself starting off into space, thinking about the problems I didn’t get to that day. On really lucky days, I even dream about work.

So, How do you do it? How do you live your life and not be your job?

One of the ways that I try to live is to pretend that I am a photographer when I am not at work. With the digital age, it’s easy. A minimal up front cost, after that it doesn’t cost me anything to look through some glass, and save electronic bits of the world.

Then when someone asks me about my hobbies, I can say something besides:
“Dreaming about non directed graphs….Oh Oh….and parsing large amounts of data using magic and perl”

I would like to be a better photgrapher. Not sure I have any real talent and even if I did have talent, it’s hard to find the time to really develop my skills. That unfulfilled desire makes it difficult to see other photographs that are really well done.

Oh, of course, how hard is it to take a nice picture when you are in Tblisi. It’s so exotic, I can’t even spell it, I don’t even have a passport. And with THAT lens, I could take nice pictures with THAT lens.

That’s not the truth, that’s jealousy. Let’s face it. Ansel Adams took some of the most iconic photographs in American history. He used a large format camera. Basically a box with a lens on the front. ( A very good lens, but a box nonetheless)

Besides that, your hometown is exotic to someone. It’s hard to move beyond that initial jealousy and appreciate someone else’s efforts. And because so very few amateurs are professionals… more specifically, I mean that few amateurs can produce professional level work. Which makes it easy to find one fault to criticize in most anybody’s photograph.

I have decided to try and better my attitude, and give myself a goal to strive towards. It’s time to go commercial. Off of the kitchen walls, and on to something exciting. Like selling a box of notecards. Not looking for a contract with Hallmark or anything…but maybe I can have them printed on a small scale…even if a few dozen consumers find my best images to be interesting, that would be worth the effort.

Listen, the point isn’t *how* exciting, just to be more exciting than pictures sitting on my hard drive.

This bring another challenge to the table. How do you sell your viewpoint? Some of my favourite pictures are not really in a ‘classic’ style, not in a ‘street photographer’ style, either. It’s hard to describe. More like output from a deranged baboon that really likes to push shiny buttons.

One of my favourite pictures is a short line of electrical towers framed by a beautiful blue sky with cartoon clouds. The three huge metal structures providing a man made pattern against the natural surroundings. I thought it would go lovely in a nice box of notecards along with a notecard that has a picture of a windmill. With each of them having blue skies and clouds, I was certain they would make a delightful combination. My wife told me, and is correct, that no one would be excited to get a high voltage tower in the mail. Maybe it could be a “Sorry that you couldn’t make it to my party, even though you RSVP’d, and you do know, that this is all non-refundable” type of card, but other than that the marketability is pretty low.

Even fewer people would like to receive the black and white picture of the pepper a day away from rotting. All of those wrinkles made a wonderful texture that you could almost feel in the photograph. I imagine one could still hang it on the wall even though it is rotting food. Maybe not the dining room, and the kitchen of course is right out, but maybe the den. Or the garage. Aren’t those the walls where all of Dad’s insanity is supposed to be stored? But I digress.

What is the real question here? What’s the point? I guess I am trying to work out in my head how the struggle between marketability and artistic expresion works itself out.

I have the luxury of thinking more about this, because I am not going to rely on the proceeds of photos for feeding my family. I have an acquaintance that makes beautiful drawings of really strange subjects. Does a more mainstream artist sleep worse, or better than an artist that is true to an offbeat vision? Is it possible in an internet connected world to exploit the long tail of consumerism, and bring truly unique viewpoints out to the parts of the public that would appreciate them? I don’t know, and suppose I won’t ever really know.

Ah well, keep your eyes open for a black and white wrinkly pepper.

Ee cummings and the behaviour of computers

Spell check is a bane of our educated society. Sure, I agree, language is nothing without shared agreement.

My son, the Artist went through a phase where he was using “behead” in an entirely incorrect way.

“let me go behead you, Dad.”

Ummm…”ahead” maybe? Or well, I guess behead works..read some psychology books and let me know which meaning you meant.

Anyway, back to the evils of spellcheck. Removing the possibility of mistakes also removes something else. How would ee cummings like it if every beginning of a sentence had to be capitalized? Seems to me that something in the Tao Te Ching mentioned that when the entire world recognizes the same thing as bebautiful, this in itself is ugglIiness.

Besides, the behaviour of spellcheck is not always correct. Behaviour is an acceptable way to spell a word. I prefer it to the other forms, but I have given up trying to teach any of my word processors without forgoing my love for $ and my prefered time format. Besides, spell check can’t keep up with the mess of jargon that I swim in every day.

Rather, I just make a few mistakes. What’s wrong with that? Mistakes are the only way that you really learn. Besides, checking for typos forces me to go back and read what I wrote at least once.

What I believe is more common is that people assume that a false authority must be correct, and stop challenging…well anything.

The Artist.

This past Monday, Feb. 14th, , I made home made pizza.

It’s what passes for romantic in a house that my wife and I have to share with Dump Truck and my eldest son.  It’s amazing how things change.  It used to be a sign of true love to never pass the threshold of our house without a kiss ( no matter how late, or early ).  Now, when I leave for work, I do so early enough that the sun hasn’t finished rising, and our children should still be asleep.  It’s more a sign of true love to leave her sleeping, and both of us pretend that she can sleep for hours (instead of minutes )  before there is a kid poking her face and asking if she is awake.

Back to the pizza.  It might be a culinary artform somewhere, but it really doesn’t seem like it should be all that hard to make a pepperoni and cheese pizza.  Right?

I mean come on, flour, yeast, toppings, hot oven, enjoy.  It’s not even that I need to travel far to get yeast, or have to cook in a wood fired oven.   Even the cheese is already shredded.

It therefore continually frustrates me how badly they continue to turn out.

I was supposed to make special heart shaped pizzas.  Rather there was a burnt pizza sitting on the stovetop trying to stay warm while I watched the second pizza through the glass.  It looked like you would have expected if Jeff Goldblum in “The Fly” had just transported in to deliver it.

So, when they were both done, we informed the kids, and they went screaming towards the table chanting “pizza, pizza,  pizza.”  Well at least the eldest.  Dump Truck just kind of squealed “pzzzzaHHHH”

A real hero could have made special heart shaped pizza.  What did I do?  I lied.

Before they could make it to the table, I cut the pizzas into somewhat triangle shaped pieces.

“Daaad.  What did they look like out of the oven?”

A heart.  A big, beautiful heart.  And I cut it up for you.

He looked at me with trusting, idealistic eyes.  And then started to eat his heart shaped pizza.

I think the best nickname for my son is the “Artist.”   He has that imagination, and world view that only an artist could.  Of course, that isn’t the only reason.  With just imagination, you could be a raving lunatic.  In some scenarios, unrealistic idealism could just mean that you are a moron.  Context certainly means something.

He is half a year from five right now.  And for the past couple of months he has been obsessed with coloring and drawing.  He will spend hours trying to transform simple black and white pages into museum pieces.  We went to a restaurant that had a coloring page for a kids menu.  They gave him only yellow, green, red and blue crayons.  Pretty standard, but the choices were pretty diminished compared to the full pallette he had at home.  Even if he could have brought only four crayons from home, those wouldn’t have been the winners.

Not to be limited, he decided to make a system to translate between the colors he had, and what he wanted.

“Dad, Blue is peach…..”  ( We have had a talk that no-one is colored peach, and that there is plenty of variety in real people.  But little minds are persistent,  people are still peach for now… )

“And Red is blue, and yellow is purple.”

Well Artist, shouldn’t blue be blue?

“No Dad, then the people wouldn’t be peach”

The really surprising part of the story is that when we got home, he explained his system to his mother.  I thought it was just a temporary delusion.  But his mind’s image persisted.  That’s pretty incredible.

I like it.  The only worry I have is that there is only limited space to continue hanging the artwork.  I have promised to start taking some of to work.   Until then, we have come up with a solution.  He is building a thick folder of artwork.

He even knows that it is his “portfolio.”