“There are steps everywhere, you just have to find them” (+ bye bye molars)

Dear Js,

I was brushing my teeth before bed when it felt like I bit into a grain of sand. The “grain” rattled in my mouth and I caught it in my palm. It was white and the size of half a grain of rice. It was hard and a little pink on the tip and that’s when I realized it was not rice. It was part of one of my teeth. I felt around with my tongue. My molar had sheared off. There was now a hole between my last two molars that I could stab my tongue into. The edges of the hole were sharp and cut my tongue.

I went to sleep and the next day I checked it again with my tongue. The hole had disintegrated and become a crater. I called the dentist first thing in the morning. I thought my tooth was going to disappear that weekend. Especially since I grind my teeth at night. I got an appointment to fill the cavity but after poking it he asked me, “Does it hurt when I do this?” I said no. He looked puzzled and asked for some X-rays. He came back staring at them over his glasses and I knew it was bad news. He referred me to an endodontic dentist. Endo meaning “inside”. I rushed over there and in the examination chair, the dental assistant asked me, “Does it hurt?” I said, “No. I think that’s the problem.”

Yup, daddy is going to need 2 root canals. It’ll cost thousands of dollars to rebuild and crown them. I wasn’t as scared as I was annoyed. Well I guess I’ve put this off long enough. Asshole me in the past could’ve taken better care and seen the dentist more often during college. But he didn’t and now I gotta deal with this. I wanted to pull them out to get it over with. But my dentist advised that it would be a dumb choice for someone in his 30s. Better choice was to get them gutted and posted and crowned to hold me over for the next few decades. Better to make what’s left of my jaw and teeth last for as long as they can.

That made me think about dentists. They make decent money, but I imagined how they had to deal with people like me every day. I felt sorry that they had to constantly be working inside dirty mouths for hours on end. I’ll hate sitting in that chair for a few hours, but I can’t imagine how he must feel doing that long procedure for the 1000th time for the last 20 years and for the rest of his life. At least there is some flexibility in what I do and where I choose to go. The only thing that changes as a dentist (especially a specialist) is how much faster they can do it. How do they keep from going nuts?

Anyway, I guess my root canal is this week’s lesson — how to get through unsavory times. We all end up somewhere we don’t like sometimes. Sometimes we get there because of some stupid thing we did to ourselves. But all things pass. When we’re having fun, we want to stop time. We hate that we can’t, but in bad times it’s a blessing that time keeps moving forward. Because things change. Put one foot in front of the other. It doesn’t matter where you go. What’s important when you’re down is to move. Keep moving so things change. Either because you changed something, or something changed on its own around you. Time moves forward, and it will pass. And soon you’ll barely remember how bad you once thought it was.

No, wait. That’s a lame lesson. I have a better one. This will blow your mind, or at least make you second-guess what they teach you in History class (assuming we sent you to school after all). Have you heard of Yuri Gagarin? He was the first human to go to space. He did it during the Space Race, which was a pissing contest between the Soviet Union (USSR) and US during the Cold War.

Not long after Yuri Gagarin returned to Earth, USSR planned another space stunt for the 50th anniversary of the Communist revolution. They wanted to send an astronaut to orbit Earth, then send more astronauts after him to taxi and play some space musical chairs to switch spacecraft and fly the first one home. Probably to show off their space skills. But when the astronauts inspected the craft they were to pilot before launch, they found that it was a deadly bucket of junk. They did everything they could to postpone the mission. But anyone who tried to get in the way of the mission quickly and conveniently “disappeared.” In the end, the astronauts realized that there was no getting out of it.

The first pilot was Vladimir Komarov. He told his friend in the KGB, “I’m not going to make it back from this flight.” His friend asked, “Why not refuse?” Komarov answered: “If I don’t make this flight, they’ll send the backup pilot instead.” And the backup pilot was his friend Yuri Gagarin. He said, “That’s Yura, and he’ll die instead of me. We’ve got to take care of him.” Komarov then burst into tears. On the day of the launch, Gagarin begged them to let him take Komarov’s place, but they held him back. After the launch, the ship broke apart and burned back into Earth. There is a recording of the communications during the crash you can dig up if you’re curious. Komarov reported overheating, and he was screaming with rage at everyone, saying they “killed” him.

It’s always trouble. You can tell when leaders put PR or goals above reality. Every time someone stubbornly chases a goal while ignoring reality, bad things happen. True, it’s essential to make goals and be persistent, but you can never ignore reality. In fact, this was the same kind of trouble that caused the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster:

(Excerpts from: this article)
“They were trying to establish the Space Shuttle as a regular and reliable means of conducting scientific and commercial missions in space. They had an ambitious launch schedule. Classrooms across the country were ready for the first science class taught from space. And in just a few days, during the State of the Union address, President Ronald Reagan was planning to mention Challenger’s launch as a space program achievement.”

Meanwhile…

“That engineer told me something that would later become symbolic of NASA’s Challenger failures. He described the tense discussion about the cold temperatures forecast for the launch. The Thiokol engineers presented data about earlier low-temperature launches, including evidence of “blowby.” To him and his colleagues, the message was clear: it was too cold to launch. At first, the Thiokol managers backed their engineers. They formally recommended that the launch be postponed.

But they thought reality was something they could ignore…

NASA’s Lawrence Mulloy reacted to the resistance this way: “My God, Thiokol. When do you want me to launch? Next April?” That turned the tide of the discussion. The Thiokol managers pressed their engineers to reverse themselves. When that failed, the managers simply overruled them, and submitted their own launch recommendation.

The next morning, two of the engineers told us, they fully expected Challenger to blow up at launch ignition. One of the engineers silently prayed during the countdown. At liftoff, with no explosion, he began to wonder whether he’d been wrong. The relief didn’t last. Seventy-three seconds into the flight, as the spacecraft began an expected roll, the forces on the solid rocket motors began to pull one of them apart. The cold and stiff o-rings at one joint didn’t flex and seal as designed. Searing hot gasses escaped. In an instant, the sky was filled with smoke and debris. The engineers were filled with grief. And as one later told Zwerdling, “…we all knew exactly what happened.”

Richard Feynman was one of the people recruited to investigate the disaster. He originally refused:

My last chance was to convince my wife. “Look,” I said. “Anybody could do it. They can get somebody else.” “No,” said Gweneth. “If you don’t do it, there will be
twelve people, all in a group, going around from place to place together. But if you join the commission, there will be eleven people — all in a group, going around from place
to place together — while the twelfth one runs around all over the place, checking all kinds of unusual things. There probably won’t be anything, but if there is, you’ll find it.” She said, “There isn’t anyone else who can do that like you can.”

He found the problem, cut through red tape and ducked everyone trying to bury his findings. When he finally got his report heard, he cautioned, “For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.”

Remember this. Whether in your career or in life — whenever you realize someone pushing for a goal like a bull in heat and ignoring reality, it’s up to you to make a stand. Because, no, they won’t know any better. You must make a stand.

Motivation – I always seem to come back to the question of why I do what I do. I’m sorry to disappoint you, but even as a “grown up” I never really know for sure. But I’m telling you this because I think it’s important to hear that we never have it all figured out. It’s unreasonable to expect yourself to. Nor does it matter. When you were born you two were so helpless I was overwhelmed. It made me want to do so many things, or to be a better person. But as you grew older, you became more annoying. These days you two fight, snatch from each other, cry, make each other cry, push, kick, bite, throw tantrums, scream. And you make mama upset by saying things like, “I want to do what I want to do” or “Shoo” or “I don’t like you.” When she sacrificed to stay home with you two crazy brats. One thing that keeps her going is she loves you. As for me, I really don’t know what keeps me going. Or why I am a dad. Sometimes I know I love you, whatever that means. Sometimes I just put one foot in front of the other. Sometimes I do things for the sake of doing things. When you’re not motivated to move, sometimes movement becomes motivation.

Like how I do stupid things like making our new garage door gizmo…

I got super paranoid with being able to open the garage door from anywhere (accidentally). So I spent the rest of the night hacking up various security measures like Google Account authentication, rolling 1-time use codes, only allowing opening when connected to the home WiFi, and so on. The switch sensor didn’t work so well after all, because the door didn’t always open to the same position. So I ordered an ultrasonic sensor.

We also played with making music…


(BTW, as you can see, you’re in a shirtless phase.)

So what’s motivation anyway? Who knows. I just know I need to make things or I’ll go crazy or get sad. (I’m very lucky that mama puts up with this.) And sometimes when you’re sad, the best way to get unstuck is to move. Do something, anything. Read, write, make something. You don’t have to plan to go anywhere right away. But by doing something you always end up somewhere new anyway.

We’ve been talking about homeschooling. Your mom and I are having trouble finding a school for you. It seems that anywhere we send here you will murder your curiosity and free-spirited learning. Or it would be a hyper-competitive place where they label all the kids as “gifted” or “special” instead of a person. Especially here in the Bay where most parents care only about things that can be scored by a report card. Or we could send you to new experimental schools founded by tech entrepreneurs who want to “hack” education and solve everything with technology (even when the problem isn’t technology). Or if we send you to private school you’ll be surrounded by brats with the richest parents on the planet who got rich by spending more time on their business than their kids.

So we’ve been exploring other options. We’ve decided that between mama and I we could cover everything useful you need to learn through college. And there’s a big enough homeschooling community here that friends and the social aspect would be covered.

But then the question came up of what do we do get the high school diploma? How do we reintegrate you back into society to go to college? Then we thought, what’s college anyway? College tuition has risen much faster than inflation. It’s putting graduates deeper into debt and not any better at securing jobs. Plus if we start you guys early on learning to solve problems, sell and getting paid for it, do you really need college?

Was college useful for me? Kind of. It definitely wasn’t necessary. I did most of my learning outside the curriculum. As for social life, I pretty much had none. I was too stressed. Because tuition in USA was expensive, I did as much as I could back home. Which meant all the easy humanities, social sciences, etc. So when I came to the US, all I had left was nothing but hardcore engineering. Meanwhile, to pay for rent, I got the only job I could find on campus — I became an undergrad research assistant. When I graduated, I couldn’t find a job, which meant that I didn’t have long before my student Visa expired and I would be deported. So I met with the prof I had been doing research with and asked to work with him. I applied for grad school and got rejected. But thanks to that prof, he snuck me in the side door because universities will let profs do that. They paid the tuition anyway.

Everyone didn’t understand why I was so stressed. Come party. Relax. How could I? I was there on a student visa. I was always one mistake away from getting deported, or getting my funding cut. I couldn’t bum around or take a break. In the end I don’t know what I learned. Actually quite a lot, but nothing to do with anything they taught in college. In fact, the stuff they taught in the classes was so stupid, I failed one of the undergrad classes as a grad student 2 times. I finally sucked it up and passed the 3rd time. But that just goes to show how dumb the programs are. They give you prerequisites and force you to take this class or that class. When they are hardly any use in the real world.

I guess I learned about freedom. I learned how to go about the world on my own. Making my own decisions and bearing the consequences. But you don’t need to pay for college to learn that.

Telescope – “Woohoo, we found Jupiter and 4 of its moons tonight! Next is the quest for Saturn hehe.” One of our friends asked, “What kind of telescope is it?” I was tempted to make a smartass comment. Good thing mama said, “It’s a suuper cheap newtonian reflector on a dobsonian mount. Got it for $35 on an amazon daily deal. I did get an extra eye piece separately because the lower power eyepiece it came with was extra sucky. We might make a dobsonian some time down the line.”

Mama said out loud, “The best time to look at moon is the fourth quarter.” You looked at the sky and said, “It’s the fourth quarter moon.” You knew the phases from your book. The first night we got the microscope, mama took it to the garden to try to find the moon. It was trickier than she expected. It was cold but she kept trying. In the end she was giggline like a girl as she ran into the middle of our courtyard. The moon was running away and she didn’t have much time left. She finally caught it, standing up against the wall of someone else’s house. Someone opened window but she didn’t care. She was in the cold for a few hours. She crashed back into the house with a big smile, “I haven’t been this excited in a long time.” One of the fun parts of having kids is rediscovering things you forgot you love.

Back at the river. At night after our first time, we talked about what you wanted to dream about as usual. You said you wanted to take the animals from long ago to where we went today. Then you asked if you could take them to school too. I said sure. You said the bunnies can ride the creatures from the Cambrian period. But only the big ones because the small ones would get tired. Then they crawled across the piano.

We went back again two weeks later. It looks like soon the river will be no more. There was even less water this weekend. But on the flipside, that opened up new adventures. Because there was less water, you kids could walk in the river. You urged us upstream, while mama stayed back at camp to read her “Curly Girl Handbook.” She is trying to wear her natural curls and that was the book her friends recommended. I asked, “How is it that you’re only learning about curly hair now?” She said, “Because I rejected it my whole life. In Puerto Rico you either have super straight hair or super tight curls. Everything else was considered yucky.” She read the whole book by the river. She is excited to finally figure out what kind of hair she has and how to love it. Good news j, if you end up with curls too, mama will know how to care for it instead of trying to make it disappear.

(See ‘This week in pictures below for the pix/vids)

“How can I fly without nothing?” Mama tried to answer first: “You cannot fly with nothing. You don’t have wings. You need something.” Me: “Hold on. Do you know why you can’t fly? Because of gravity. Earth’s gravity is too strong. So one way to fly without anything is to go somewhere where there is little gravity.” That night, we watched Chris Hadfield floating around in the International Space Station. You almost peed your pants. You giggled when you saw anything float. “The scissors is flying away!” The next day you wanted an “astronaut sandwich.” Mama made you a PBJ with tortilla. They use tortillas in space because it doesn’t make crumbs.

Emails from J (you typed each by yourself)

Subject: “hi from J”
Body: i want to say t i ger
iwant to say train
iwant to say cat
ilove daddy
i
i want to say dog tank you

Subject:Re: (in the middle of something mama and I were talking about)
Body:hi daday
i lik to say dino
xos
oxs
mom
dad to daday
ui for cobra daday
dad
?

I replied…
Hi J
This is daddy
I like dinos too
I also like cobras
Were there cobras in the time of dinos?

You even typed one of your books to Abu
hi hound the hound
what s your sound
woof woof woof
hi chick the chick what s your sound?
peep peep peep
hi cow the cow?
what s your sound
mmmmmooooooooooooooooo?
hi bunny the bunny?
mm
sounds like
somebody
needs a hug

Abu replied. I don’t think she realized that it was a book.
Hi J
I received your letter and I’m very happy.You are writing very well ! I’m the one who need one of yours hugs right now. I miss you a lot .
Love you,
Abu V

By the way J, you gave me a virus. While it was cute that mama let you email me on my computer, I don’t know what you clicked on but you gave me a virus. I opened my computer and I was bombared with “YOUR FREE GIFT IS WAITING!” and “BUY BUY BUY” and “GET THE DISCOUNT” and other junk. You like the computer. You like hitting the down arrow (mama says, “Oh yes, we found that out recently.”) You like to browse for your Dinosaur Train episode to watch. You’d page through 20 pages, reading every word, and you’d end up picking the most awful titles.

Interesting developments

Mama said: j breaks into song and it’s the Beatles’ Black Bird. Proud mama moment right there 🙂 Brings me warm memories of my childhood and enjoying music with my mom and dad 🙂
When Joshua doesn’t let Julia nap…. Those are days when my patience runs so, so thin. How I wish that being the mama I want to be was easier. Maybe I just need to make more coffee.

j loves swimming. On Monday you know it’s swim time. Today once you and mama dropped J off j you said, “I’m ready mama. Swim? Jump in?” The whole way to swim class, “I’m ready mama. I’m ready. OK? OK. Doggy.” (You’re a doggy these days.) Then at class’ 5 minute free-swim you have you favorite helicopter foam floats. “Throw it in j.” “Throw it in!” “Go get them j!” You jump in. Mama supports you from the bottom. “I got it!” “Take them back.” Swim swim swim toss it back up. And again.

J your mind blew watching a video about how the Earth formed. You ran downstairs to check your book you got from the library the day before. “Look! It’s here too!” Then at lunchtime you pretended everything was Pangea breaking apart. Your chip… (pow grooooo hooo), your guacamole (crack krrrrrr), …

One day mama was mad. You didn’t let your sister sleep. You threw your train track pieces against wall.
J: “I throw things when I’m angry.”
Mama: “Does it help?”
J (looking down): “No.”
Mama: “Does talking to me help?”
J: “Yea…”
Mama: “So do you think talking to me is better?”
You stared at mama for a long time, refusing to lose.
J (finally): “yea.”

On the potty:
“Mama I made connect the dots for you. You can trace it.” Mama connected it and I heard a yelp. She showed me and it looked just like the book she showed you earlier.

j you call mama’s breasts big one and little one.

When you are a parent, first you fear the crying.

Then you fear that one of us will snap and the crying will stop. How do you not lose patience? How do you give love even when it hurts? I think that’s every parent’s struggle.

We think we figured out what was with the screaming. It’s that j doesn’t want to miss a thing. One night when we all pretended to go to bed, j went to bed without a fight. Whereas before, she would refuse to sleep and scream, “I want to go there! Mama!” When mama showed up you’d say, “No mama. I want daddy!” When I showed up You’d say, “No daddy NO!” Life’s too exciting to sleep.

J: you’ve been a little asshole lately. One thing I’ve been trying is to give you hugs. Sometimes you do some really shitty things like punch your sister and it makes me mad. I understand that shouting at you or hitting you will probably make it worse, because then you’ll just copy what I do. So these days when I see the devil in your eyes, I try to defuse the bomb by asking you if you need a hug. The first few times I had to hug-tackle you. But you are starting to sense that it helps so now when I ask you melt and go, “Yeaaaa…” and plop in my arms. I think one of the things that gets to you is how much we defend your sister. Or how we make you do things by yourself but we still do many things for her. You’ve said, “I wish I were j.” Or, “What would it be like with no j?” For the first, we explain that if you were her, you couldn’t do all the things a bigger boy like you can. And for the second, if we had no j, you would not be a brother, and you would have no sister.

We heared you tinkering at the piano. We said, “You know, you can play what you feel.” You made us a song. You said it sounded like Titanosaurus. Then it sounded like whale. Meanwhile, j, it seems you’re starting to read the notes and play the piano at Bing. Mama said you pointed at Twinkle Twinkle and said, “Red. Red. Red. Two reds.” (They didn’t differentiate the colors very well so there were two reds.) You tried to play it anyway. You pressed both reds using both hands. You made harmonies going up/down with each hand.

J: I cut your hair again. It was getting too long and stabbing your eyes and covering your ears. A real mess. Mama said to leave it but I said look he can’t open his eyes. So I cut the front and sides just a little. You said you like your hair long and mama didn’t want me to cut your back. I said, “But it looks like a mullet!” She said you’re a kid so you don’t need to look so proper all the time. Whatever. I think I did a decent job. I don’t think you can tell that we did it ourselves.

We tried to play treasure hunt with another kid. I had you kids take turns. You were very excited you really wanted your turn. I said the person who finds it has to hide it the next time. I let you win one round so you’d have your turn. I said okay, we’re going to close our eyes, go hide it. When we came back, you said with a big smile, “I hid it there!” I said, “J! You’re not supposed to tell us!” We tried again and the next time you said, “Try looking in there!” Each time we tried you hid it in the most obvious place and had a big wide grin when we could see it in plain sight. Then I realized that your game was to make us happy. You enjoyed seeing us happy when we found it, that you made it as quick and easy as possible for us to find it.

j’s new favorite bedtime book: The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore. Or as you call it, “MohlessMol mama, me want MohlessMol.”

Curious convos

Spanish book
j: “Mama read”
Mama reads in Spanish
j: “AAAAAA. No No No. Daddy read”
I read in Spanish
j: “No! No. No. Use words.”

J: “Mama, there’s an invisible string connecting my heart to yours and it’s made of love.”
Mama: *melting*, brags to friends, “Girls better watch out because when this one grows up he’s taking no prisoners.”

And the follow up to last night:
J: “Mama, why can we not see love?”
(Mama: Which we followed with a conversation about how you cannot see what we feel it is something that happens in our bodies but we can show our feelings through our actions smile emoticon. Now, for the TMI real mama moment, it would have been nicer if this had not happened while I was trying to pee hahaha. Mamas know many transcendental conversations with children happen while you are trying to do something in the bathroom.)

While I was burning a library audiobook CD…
j: “Me want that ABCD.”
Me: “What?”
j: “ABCD. Me want ABCD.”

j: “Shadol. That’s me shadol.” You’ve been adding the L consonant to words that end with and O sound.

J (looking at activity book cover): “This has over one Comma thousand stickers!”
Mama: “That’s one thousand. They just sometimes put a comma in thousand.”

J asking too many questions
Mama (at wits’ end): “I need some time.”
J: “That’s okay mana from now on I’ll just keep my questions to myself.”
Mama cries.

J: “When I’m angry I like to break things.”
Me: “But then all your things will be broken.”
J: “But DADDY! When I’m angry I like to break things!”
When I told this to mama later she laughed, and joked, “Stop trying to deprive me of my rage!”

j, while nursing: “You’re so sweet, leche…”

J: “Mama do you have nail polish?”
Mama: “Yes, why?”
J: “Can you put it on?”
Mama: “Why?”
J: “I like you to look pretty.”
Mama: awwww
J: “But I don’t like your curly hair.”

J: (at youtube) “I want to watch… faraway nebula red giant”

Interesting things

Arnold Schwarzeneggar talks bodybuilding, motivation and life. Mukbang – the Korean obsession with watching videos of people pigging out. Japan high tech bike parking. Silly squirrel trying to bury nut in dog. Extreme archery. NASA publishes article that Mars was once covered in a large ocean. Water doing weird things in Alient ballet. Philip K Dick (author of Bladerunner) – How to tune your B.S. meter to spot Pseudo-realities. F-16s.

This week in pictures

Drawings – I showed you how to “copy” to draw all the things you like.

You started tracing shapes with your fingers after our drawing session.

Solar system

Moons

Kids play what they see. Pretend telescope.

I made a raft

We climbed. You asked for help. I said, there are steps everywhere, you just have to find them. Something must’ve clicked, because you started looking for solutions to every climbing problem — whether you were climbing a tree or a hill or rocks. You then grabbed your sister over to show her the tree. And you told her the same thing – “There are steps everywhere, you just have to find them.” She didn’t need any help though.

Bubbles?

Scooter?

“Can I go backwards?”

“It fits”

ABCD

Activity book

Scooting to train station

Puzzle

River

I find that each time we go to the river, we end the day with you growing a little more mature. Like today, you saw me and mama cleaning up and you helped us without being asked. But not in a half-assed way either. You picked up the sand toys and put them in the bag. They fell out, and you picked the bag up and shoved them in better. Then you asked me for my raft and you put it in. And you didn’t just leave the bag there. You picked the whole bag of toys up and carried it next to our stroller. Then you grabbed our water bottles and hiked them up the hill back to the path. You couldn’t make it all the way up with all the water bottles, so you just sat 85% of the way and waited.

I think it brings us a little closer too. Maybe you get to see me as more of a friend, instead of the mean man you only see for a little while at the start and end of each day, who seems to always yell at you for doing or not doing something.

And as you can see, you two kids have so much fun with each other.

Love,

Dad

P.S. – You know what I noticed? I struggle the most to write when I haven’t been reading. I still have the box of books I bought over Christmas that I haven’t dug into. I’ve been falling behind on my reading. When I devour books, my brain is overflowing with new thoughts I want to share with you. But when I don’t put anything in, nothing comes out. No wonder the best writers read. Stephen King said, “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.” King has been famous for never taking a break from writing, even during Christmas. If he wrote that much, imagine how much he read.

P.P.S. – I wrote a new marketing-related blog post for the first time in years. It was inspired by something you said.

P.P.P.S. – We lost an hour of sleep today, thanks to Daylight Savings Time. I wonder if they will abolish it in your time.

P.P.P.P.S. – grandpa “Quadbird” has been practicing: