Nonsense, Drivel, and Balderdash

There is a scene in High Fidelity where one of the characters finds John Cusack sitting on the floor of his apartment surrounded by LP records, in the midst of reorganizing his music collection. The friend tries to figure out how it is being organized… “Chronological? No… Not alphabetical…” “Autobiographical.” Cusack says, explaining that he remembers when and where he got each record. “That sounds…” “Comforting?” Cusack says. “Yeah.”   A year ago or so, I started keeping a spreadsheet on my work computer entitled “My Top 100 Albums” and began adding titles as they came to mind. As I neared the target number, I started adding columns to track what year each album was released, the genre, and other bits of data that I found interesting. It started as a way to analyze my influences. Which musical decade created the most of my influences? 2000-2009. Which year was the most fruitful for musical discovery? 2005. What gender makes up the majority of my favorite artists? 74% male. How did...

A silent evening but for the whistle of the wind blowing outside, a reminder that a year has come and gone since two became three. I hand my wife a cup of tea while she sits in our tiny living room, writing in Martha's baby book. From time to time she stops her pen to think, asks me to recollect this or that, nods, and moves her pen once more. Slowly the pages fill with details and memories kept for Martha to read when she is grown. How strange that she should need a book to learn all about a year that revolved around her. 

We've never been too big on Valentines in our relationship. Seems silly to allow the world to tell you when to buy flowers or go on a date so that they can jack the prices up for both. Since we've prioritized family over moolah this year, we sometimes have had to improvise in other areas. Jessica dropped me off at Barnes and Noble by myself for 2 hours so that I could read comic books. That's true love right there folks.

The limitation of language has been bothering me for years now. If language is what we use to convey and process knowledge, but language is imperfect, how can anything truly be known? But this week I have been trying to reevaluate that imperfection, that limitation.  The admittance or certainty that language is limited somehow confirms that there are experiences that lie outside of the realm of our utterance.  Frustrations with finitude seem comforting in some way, validating the sublime somehow, regardless of whether we will ever be able to truly know it. 

Ever since freshman year of college, I have practiced the lenten practice of self-denial, of fasting.  There are many reasons that people keep this tradition, but for me, I find that the it is practice that forces me out of my comfort zone and makes me be a bit more intentional about the way I live. It is ritual that is, oddly, both self-centered and selfless, one that requires me to look inward at myself in self examination in hopes that I live more purposefully facing out.  This year, I am giving up the hours of podcasts and audiobooks that I use to pass the time while I travel on public transit.  Over the past few years I have found that my creative output and ability to experience life poetically has shriveled up. I think I live anesthetized by a constant stream of "input." I think that forcing my brain to rest, process, and "be" is a crucial practice that I have slowly lost over the course of the past 5 years.

We can try  as hard as we want,  but our sins of concrete and human design will never be as pure  as after they are  covered and smoothed  by a fresh blanket of snow. 

She speaks with all the inflections of meaning. "Uh huh..." I reply. Nodding seriously, she picks up a piece of lint. She inspects it in the sunlight and shows it to me, babbling all along. "That's a very good point Martha," I say. I stop her from putting it in her mouth. 

I have been sitting in on the admissions meetings for the architecture department all week. We go through all the materials that students submit for consideration: portfolios, transcripts, essays, and recommendations. Our faculty always take recommendations with a grain of salt. For one thing, students coming from Europe always have worse recommendations and we always have to think of their ratings has being a few points higher than stated because European instructors have a much harder time giving out praise than their American counterparts. Having studied in Europe and in the U.S., I can vouch that this is true; Americans are much more comfortable celebrating the successes of others and prefer to motivate via carrot than via stick. 

We got two new student workers in the office.  One is slightly smelly.  The other one can't start working until his mom mails him his passport. They may be Harvard College students, the cream of America's crop. But they are still 18 year old freshmen. 

Saturday morning and my usual alarm clock goes off and runs through her litany: "Dada, Mama, Agua, Duck..." It doesn't matter who comes to her rescue as long as it gets her out of her cage. Feeling sorry for the little one and guilty as the non-nursing spouse, I drag myself out of bed. The baby is up for good, which means I am too. I pick her out of the crib, and carry her to the living room where we will hold our usual Saturday morning vigil and wait for the dawn, just as we have for the past 12 months. 

A hasidic Jewish man was at the bus stop with me this morning, dressed in his usual black outfit and hat. He wished me a good day through his long beard and I reciprocated through my short one. A few minutes later, as we waited, I watched him pull a small text out of his coat pocket and carefully begin studying the words, silently mouthing along as he read, eyes squinting in concentration.  Envying his piety, I wondered what text could provide him with such comfort and evoke such devotion.  In the end, he was just like the rest of us, reading the bus schedule and waiting. 

There was something different in the way Martha sat up in her crib, screaming, searching round her room, through her mop of hair, for something to give her comfort. I went in the room, dark except for the light of her pink hedgehog lamp, and picked up my sobbing child. She buried her head into my shoulder and her body into my chest, heart against heart. Slowly, stillness returned as fears were overpowered and forgotten. Big fists finally unclenched after hearing little lips sigh.

Don't bother that chicken in the oven. Let it sit there, covered in salt, pepper, and spices, until it is crisp and brown. Once it is done, give it a rest. It needs its space. But the rice... the rice needs some company, and the drippings -hot and salty and greasy- have been sitting in a corner of the baking dish for over an hour, waiting for you to make the introduction.

I recently saw that a friend of mine has set a new year's resolution to keep a five sentence journal for herself. It seems like a good way to chronicle thoughts and milestones without setting unreasonable, and ultimately  unreachable , writing goals. Nanowrimo never worked for me because I can't commit to writing thousands of words a day. But I can do at least five sentences. So here we go. 

Three months in; wife and baby out of town for the first time and, at last, a chance to get some rest after this endless drain.  But was it ever this quiet before? Without the white noise machine muffling the cries and sighs and sleeping laughs? I now stumble without the night light. The room had never been this dark.  Crawling into a bed devoid  of competition, I stretch full out. I roll over until I’ve found  the coveted middle, but end up lost in the cold, cotton endless; wistful for the bodies and edges by which I have come to measure myself. 

Our baby girl has finally arrived and her name has come with her. When we began the long process of looking for the perfect name, we had a couple of things we wanted: Bilingual: Her name had work in English and in Spanish.  Personal:  We wanted a name that was personally meaningful, one that reminded us of people we love.  Finally, we decided on Martha/Marta . Martha in the red sweater and green crown Martha, the English version, is my maternal grandmother's name. I hope that my baby girl grows up to be as steadfast and as loving as her namesake. My grandma is humble and not self-seeking. She is a strong and resilient woman in a way that makes you say "they don't make em like that anymore." But I can only hope that we have made at least one more.  Marta, the Spanish version, is the name of one of our best friends from Spain. Few people are as loyal as Marta, she would move heaven and hell to help a someone she loves. From her we hope our baby ...

A few days ago, the governor announced that Boston would be in a state of emergency this week. I found this amusing because, in my mind, he Jacob household had already planned to be in a state of emergency on January 26 long before any satellites had begun promising signs snow. My amusement was short-lived however as the reality of the situation began to sink in and I began to picture my wife giving birth in the back of a hospital bound Toyota Matrix that has gotten stuck in the snow. Fortunately, before full panic set in, my aunt called me and offered to put us up in hotel just half a mile from the hospital. That is where we are now. Right now, Jessica is sleeping, sprawled out, stretched in ways that are only possible when you aren't sharing a bed. I count six different pillows, each positioned strategically to alleviate her burdens.  Pregnancy has not been gentle on her, and different discomforts have disturbed her slumber for the past three or four months now. Seeing he...

Waiting. That is what it is has come down to. At any given moment, a cocktail of emotions mixed around inside me, varying the ratio of apprehension and expectation, of dread and delight. It is a weird thing to know that your days are numbered, that life will forever change in the matter of a week. On one hand, I feel like I should take advantage of this last week and go crazy, but on the other hand Jessica's pregnancy has been so miserable that we have already been introduced to long sleepless nights.  The feeling of waiting didn't really start until recently for me. This past year has been so crazy that I have mostly just been caught up in a current of change and uncertainty and spent most of my time trying to stay afloat. Instead of waiting for the baby to come I was scrabbling away from the inevitable, hoping to delay things as much as possible until I could find a job and some stability. But recently, as things have settled down, I have started looking at the calendar mo...

It is weird that the most common way of expanding your family is by growing another member. "I want a child." "OK, why don't you plant one? Wait some months till it's ripe."  Like a zucchini. My wife's belly is a single-fruit garden. It is bizarre when you think about it. But maybe everyone thinks this way. All the pregnancy blogs always refer to the size of the embryo/fetus/baby in relationship to fruit. No one seems to be fazed by this idea. The same girls that cringed and squealed when hearing campfire stories about seeds getting stuck and growing in ears or noses somehow say "aww" when the internet tells them: "Congratulations. Your child is the size of a cumquat." You would think that we would want comparisons to things that are actually cute, fuzzy things, but for some reason that just seems worse. "Congratulations! Your child is now the size of a young badger" just seems terrifying. Fortunately, the chil...

The potential for rapid change is always amazing to me. A winning lottery ticket or a car careening into oncoming traffic can forever change the course of someone’s life. While this past year didn’t hold anything nearly that drastic, it was a year of upheaval. It began with despondency, was filled with uncertainty, but fortunately ended in hopeful resolution. Last January, I was in the doldrums of my professional career. I was stuck in a teaching job I abhorred, but was still struggling to admit that I needed out. Now, 2015 dawns with a new career outside of the classroom, in an administrative position at Harvard. Between then and now: finishing up my last year of middle school; trying to balance my teaching job with a new job search; making ends meet with menial temp work for 5 months; spending my free time applying to -and getting rejected from- hundreds of jobs… and finally, after 9 months of searching, landing the full time gig where I am now. Of course, my professional life ...