Learning the Lessons Of Nixon
Sunday, September 16, 2001
Rowan's christening
Rowan's christening was today (there are many pictures in the gallery). Evan and I were so tense getting ready for it...we're so inexperienced that every trip out is still a cause for anxiety...will everything work out? Will we have what the baby needs? Will he scream his head off the whole time? And because of the special occasion, we were especially tense. Plus, everything that usually takes only a small amount of time takes many times longer, because we have to keep running back and forth between whatever task we are doing and caring for the baby. This can be frustrating, but all I have to do is hold the baby, and he fixes me in his headlights and starts beaming me those Infant Love Rays, and suddenly I'm ready to save every penny for private school and give him everything I have. The love is just overpowering.
I can't say I really felt I could plug in to the ceremony, because I was so busy attending to Rowan and trying to keep him calm. But one thing that struck me was how much emphasis Father John put on Old Scratch during the service. In every baptism, the godparents are asked to renounce the works of Satan, and an incantation is said over the baby to ward off evil spirits. But because of the horrible bombings, Fr. John dwelled longer on this part of the ceremony, praying for evil to be thrust out of the world, and for Rowan and John (the other baby who was baptized today) to work to bring love into the world and to drive out evil. It was interesting because the Church mostly tries to hide old Scratch behind the hedgerow.
posted by cadence90 loyola 9/16/2001 08:18:22 PM
Wednesday, September 12, 2001
more happy things
I posted a few new pictures in Rowan's Gallery. There's a nice picture of Evan feeding the baby and another of all our friends making a big fuss over the baby. Here's a picture of Rowan trying to contact his agent. And another of Susan with the baby. That gives you a good idea of Rowan's current size. Between his pediatrician appointment two weeks ago, and the one we had on Monday, he gained a pound and five ounces, and an inch and a half over his birth length, and a centimeter in head circumference. Some of the infant socks we have no longer fit him. He can turn over onto his side on his own now, and he seems to have a lot of head control for a baby of his age (just over a month old). Everyone tells me to write everything down, because you won't remember when your baby does things first (is that because of the sleep deprivation)? Anyway, I write everything down!
posted by cadence90 loyola 9/12/2001 09:01:52 PM
bloggers everywhere
A guy at MIT has an XML-based system for determining what the most popular links Bloggers are putting into their posts in their weblogs -- it's called Blogdex. Here's today's top 10:
top 10 recent links in the blogger community (using a new weighting algorithm. see the news for details):
1. http://www.cnn.com/2001/US/09/11/worldtrade.crash/index.html 44.0 points (info) (who?)
2. http://page.blogger.com/search_attack.pyra 39.0 points (info) (who?)
3. http://www.cnn.com/ 37.9 points (info) (who?)
4. http://www.shunn.net/okay/ 35.0 points (info) (who?)
5. http://www.metafilter.com/comments.mefi/10034/ 33.0 points (info) (who?)
6. http://www.cnn.com/2001/US/09/11/chronology.attack/index.html 32.0 points (info) (who?)
7. http://www.milov.nl/linkthispage.php 28.3 points (info) (who?)
8. http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/americas/newsid_1537000/1537469.stm 19.0 points (info) (who?)
9. http://www.redcross.org/ 18.9 points (info) (who?)
10. http://www.cnn.com/2001/US/09/11/worldtrade.crash/story.html 17.0 points (info) (who?)
posted by cadence90 loyola 9/12/2001 08:49:35 PM
tired cardinals
Today my dad and I took the baby to the prayer service at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross. The Cathedral is in South Boston, and is enormous. We came early and there weren't too many people there, but by noon the entire cathedral was completely full -- maybe 1,000 people? In the nave above the altar, hanging from the ceiling 100 feet above are two little red disks with little tassels on the edges. Dad told me that those are the hats of Cardinal Cushing and Cardinal Medeiros, two cardinals who served here before they died.
While the cardinal preached, and the quartet sang, one priest stood in front of the Mary altar (to the right) and signed the service. It made me think, maybe there's signing poetry. Unlike English and other languages with an alphanumeric writing system, ASL and pictographic languages probably have a "metalevel" to their poetry -- not just what's said but the beauty of the characters and signs in conjunction with one another.
They served the entire cathedral the Eucharist in what seemed like record time, there were dozens of priests and ushers. Also many police -- as we went in, two friendly plainclothes officers with badges on their jackets politely asked to search our bags. Is this what life will be like? Like one big airport gate, whenever you go to a public event? One of the big questions will be how open a society we will be now. Will having your bags searched, or needing ID become a regular feature of daily life? Will we think of the days before Sept 11 as touchingly innocent, the way we think of eras when we didn't lock our doors?
I found the weblog of another blogger who was in NYC and saw the disaster on his way to work, and had his digital camera with him.
For those of you who are not familiar with the technology, I use a service called Blogger to create this online journal. Blogger requires that you have access to your own web account. If you don't have your own website, you can still have an online diary at either Diaryland or use the free (ad-sponsored) hosting at BlogSpot. Maybe now is a good time for all of us to start talking. The power of speech is not just for The New York Times or CNN. We are also part of the historical record, and our voices make a difference too, even if only a few people hear.
I feel so discouraged and afraid to think of the dangerous, evil world Rowan has been born into. I can only hope that he and all the other children can find a way to live in peace with one another, since we, the grownups, have not been able to manage it.
As we left the cathedral, Dad said we should get in the receiving line and ask the Cardinal to bless the baby. I felt a little shy, but we did it anyway. Dad reminded me just before we reached the Cardinal to address him as Your Excellency and not Hey Guy. He blessed the baby, but he looked so tiredand sad in his magnificent robes.
posted by cadence90 loyola 9/12/2001 07:40:42 PM
Tuesday, September 11, 2001
cnbc
I'm sitting watching CNBC and one of the commentator's jackets is coveres with plaster dust.
posted by cadence90 loyola 9/11/2001 09:43:24 AM
horrible, horrible
The two World Trade Towers in New York are gone. Terrorists plunged two 757s into the towers, and then they were on fire and imploded. The entire of lower Manhattan is covered in smoke and debris. Every airport in the country has been closed. The financial markets are closed. All international flights to the US are being diverted to Canada. Two of the flights was hijacked from Boston (hit the world trade towers), another from Newark crashed in W. PA, believed to be headed towards the Sears Tower, possibly, one from Dulles hit the Pentagon.
The two world trade towers have 50,000 people working in them. That's more people than in the town I grew up in (Woburn, pop 30,000). People were seen jumping from the towers,but Phil pointed out that the windows don't open and that they were probably blown out the windows by the blast. There was footage of a plane flying through the sky, passing behind the tower, and then blowing through it about 75% of the way up in a ball of flame. The first tower collapsed, then a second plane hit the second tower. It was on fire, and then it too collapsed, in a way that suggested another bomb in the building. There was footage of firefighters and police fleeing in terror as the second building collapsed, covering the nearby firetrucks with flaming rubble.
Another plane was hijacked and then crashed into the Pentagon, and then there were reports of two more planes that had been hijacked and were still in the air. One crashed outside of Pittsburgh, and then there were reports of a second one crashing but no reports from where. A car bomb went off at the State department. We closed our border with Mexico. And our border with Canada. And Disneyland, and all baseball games (it starts to get absurd). I called Meg and she said, well, think of the method of the attack -- it's probably not a Westerner, they would set a bomb and try to get away. The only people who do suicide with planes are the Islamists and the Japanese, and the Japanese would think it was bad for business. I called Evan at his office, no one is getting any work done. Probably no one in the country is getting any work done.
I'm sure everyone is terrified about what we will do. We have the nuclear weapons. If we find out that someone in Iraq did it, the Chief Chimp might wipe them off the face of the earth with a nuke. My father said, he hopes that we are big enough not to be like Israel and Palestine, that there has to be some other way than an eye for an eye. Then he said, we need to have a totally new way of thinking, Star Wars is not going to do it. It's true, no amount of defense spending could have protected us for this. And whoever did it is probably not "a state" -- so it's not even a world of conventional wars anymore.
I look at my little baby and think what a horrible, evil, dangerous world he has been born into. I told him that I would keep him safe even if it meant moving to a remote locations with yaks as the only transport. I don't know when I will ever feel safe flying in a plane again. People are comparing it to Pearl Harbor.
posted by cadence90 loyola 9/11/2001 09:33:56 AM
Sunday, September 09, 2001
I didn't really make any posts then
because when Susan was over for some reason the baby was just having a bad hair day and cried all the time, and we were all stressed out and didn't get any sleep. But she said so many funny things, the primary one was: "Everyone wants the hair they cannot have." And she brought two big crates of baby books (she says she's taking her duties of religious education seriously).
posted by cadence90 loyola 9/9/2001 05:20:22 AM
Saturday, September 08, 2001
wow, outside!
We got to go out today. Earlier in the day, Evan and I took the baby for a walk in the stroller, and I showed Evan the huge rows of trellised grapevines behind the Commander's Mansion in Arsenal Park. Most people know about either the Arsenal Mall or the office park that the former armory/arsenal has been made into, but few people know that there is an enormous park behind those buildings, including an incredibly elaborate playground, and a house that was once the mansion of the head of the Continental Army (that is, the head of the Army shortly after the Revolutionary War. Then, later, just after the civil War, an Armory was built there that was in use making cannons & other death-dealing hardware until the early 1900's. It was also the site of a historic labor strike, when Frederic Winslow Taylor, progenitor of the Scientific Management method (that is, breaking up a task into its constituent parts instead of having one person do a task from end to end. Perhaps you have heard of his assistant, Henry Gantt. He made the first Gantt chart). The workers found Taylor's methods inhuman and intolerable, and staged a sit-in that was violently repressed by the authorities. The resulting scandal was the source of congressional hearings, where Judge Louis Brandeis, who was also called to testify, famously called the scientific method, "a way to make a man into a machine, to be less than a man, and even less than an animal." Of course, the scientific method is now the basis for all factory automation, and was the intellectual force behind much of the latter half of the industrial revolution. Breaking up a task into parts and then having many people doing them concurrently is essentially the theme (I can't think of the right word; geist, animating spirit or idea) of every factory. It's my personal opinion that Taylor and his ideas have had more effect on modern life than the ideas of Freud. We don't realize it, because breaking things up into bits is just something we are inside, just as we are inside the biosphere. Yet this is part of our "biosphere of ideas." But much of modern malaise comes from peoples' work in which they do one small thing and never get to do anything from start to finish, and thus have no sense of ownership of anything (is it any wonder that we watch Martha Stewart and New Yankee Workshop? They are fantasies of work that is like craftsmanship, where we can finally MAKE something, and then have the satisfaction of seeing it completed)).
How many parentheses did I use there? Good Lord. And I had no intention of going off on a tangent about FW Taylor. (By the way, I strongly recommend a fascinating biography of the man called The One Best Way. That book really blew my head apart, it made me realize so much about the structure of the modern world that I had sensed but had no words for.
Anyway, Evan and I pushed the baby around, and then later we got to go out again. Everyone (that is Evan, my mother, and I) was so worried that this would turn out to be a disaster, that the baby would howl and perhaps vomit all over everything, but we got to go to the Someday Cafe and meet our friends and then even eat out. What a tremendous luxury! And how nice everyone was, bending the 8th tradition to accommodate our babyfied state. No going to fancy restaurants for awhile. The baby was great, and anyway, everyplace was so noisy that when he did cry no one noticed. And my mother ate a burrito. Amazing. Unless you know her you have no idea.
posted by cadence90 loyola 9/8/2001 07:57:45 PM
Friday, September 07, 2001
human rights watch
Every week in The Economist there's a section of Help Wanted ads at the front for big jobs at European state agencies and NGOs (non-governmental organizations, like World Health Organization, or AID, etc.). Sometimes I imagine a spoof ad for a UN Bath Observer:
United Nations seeks ground-level personnel for UNHRBOP (UN Human Rights/Bath Observation Program). Small babies are being bathed nearly daily in sites across the US; observers will ensure that bathing procedures meet international guidelines for safety and comfort. Experience in temperature recording and infant decibel reading required.
posted by cadence90 loyola 9/7/2001 03:00:49 AM
Thursday, September 06, 2001
bummer
Pauline Kael, the movie critic, died a few days ago. Some of my favorite writers are critics -- Lester Bangs (music -- his essay Let Us Now Praise Famous Death Dwarves about Lou Reed is one of the funniest things I've ever read) and essayist/critic Philip Lopate (whose best book, Bachelorhood is sadly out of print). Oh, and Joe Queenan, whose book Red Lobster, White Trash, Blue Lagoon is squirt-seltzer-out-your-nose funny, and Paul Fussell's Class...
Well, goodnight, Pauline. Have a nice time at the celestial cineplex.
I'm up with the baby even though he's asleep. I had another horrible dream that he died (No one tells you about the increased dream activity. I'm sure that hormones rewire your head to become a better parent. Perhaps dreams, even bad ones, are a sort of nighttime method of accomplishing the psychological transition to parenthood? To the new and frightening vulnerability, working this out as you sleep? I'll have to start reading Jung again). But just now he stirred in his sleep and thrust his left arm up in the air with his hand splayed, like a silent version of Horseshack saying "Oo, Oo, Mr. Kotter!!"
I know this sounds silly, but tomorrow I am going to have to call the pediatrician if he doesn't poop. Breastfed babies are supposed to produce a lot of diapers. Since you can't see how much milk they are getting (as you would with a bottle-fed baby), you have to judge input by output. The puzzling thinig is is that he is eating quite a bit, and producing lots of wet diapers. He doesn't have a fever, and he's not sleepy the way a sick baby would be. Perhaps he's just constipated. Do they have milk of magnesia for infants?
Now, I know it's bad form to discuss one's intestinal status; you become one of those tiresome people who talk about how much fiber they have to have in their diet. And in this journal I have tried to keep the subject matter mostly to myself. I mean, if I was keeping a private journal, it might resemble something more like Harriet The Spy's notebook, and I think my old private journals did contain a lot more speculation/commentary on the mental states of other people. But that didn't feel very fair in a public journal, since those folks didn't agree to have things private to them aired in a public place...so I had to stick to my own head as territory. But I write about Rowan all the time. He'll probably think this journal is like one long embarrassing photo of himself naked in the bathtub, or smeared with chocolate cookie bits. I take pictures of him all the time too, and I mostly don't take pictures of people because I think they might find it intrusive. But, of course, Rowan can't object, and in many ways I still feel like he is part of me, like we are some sort of co-being. Some people call the first three months "the fourth trimester." I think that's very accurate.
The Best Lover a Movie Could Have by David Edelstein
posted by cadence90 loyola 9/6/2001 10:15:52 PM
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