Entry 191: Eating and Sleeping and Pooping

There is a part in John Krakauer's non-fiction book Into the Wild (great book, shitty movie) in which he describes the contents of his subject's journal.  His subject is a kid named Chris McCandless who in 1992 as a 24-year old gave away almost all his possessions and set out to basically "walk the Earth".  He ended up in the Alaskan wilderness where he squatted for a while in an abandon bus before falling ill and dying, likely from eating a misidentified toxic root.  Krakauer mentions how his journal starts out discussing a wide range of topics before evolving into just a list of the things he ate that day.  The point being that although McCandless probably intended to have some sort of spiritual journey, it basically turned into little more than an exercise in survival.  Procuring food was his entire life.

These days, S and I are sorta feeling like this, only it's not about getting food, it's about not getting food.  We're dieting, and it's becoming almost an all-consuming thing, much more so for S than me; she's doing some sort of "ideal protein" diet that's super restrictive about what you can eat until you reach your target weight.  I wouldn't say she's enjoying it, but she's doing well with it.  She certainly has my deepest sympathy.  I know from my wrestling days how much it sucks to eat like that.  It makes you feel irritable and enervated all day.  I used to cut about 25 pounds going into each season, and I was already lean and mean from training all summer. (My senior year I was the 168-lb. champion of the South Puget Sound League, South Division, I might add.)  When my wrestling "career" finally came to an end, my first impulse was "good now I can eat like a normal fucking human again".

So I don't have the bottle for a hard-core diet like S is doing.  But I'm doing my own diet, and I'm trying to legitimately do it, not just say I'm going to do it and then pig out like I always do.  The thing is, I don't really need a diet that badly, but I've crept up solidly over two-bills for the first time ever, and while I was back in WA I saw a few old friends sporting brand new big bellies, and that's motivation enough for me to nip my medium-sized belly in the bud.  Plus, if S is eating a raw cucumber and plain tofu for dinner every night and I'm mowing down a cheese platter and French fries, things might get a bit rocky in the G & G household.  So my diet is basically protein and vegetables, no snack food, no sweets, no soda, no juice, no beer, little dairy, almost no carbs and sugar, small portions.  That's it.  I give myself one cheat day per week where I can have a cold one or a slice of pizza.  I figured this is OK as it will significantly increase the probability of me being faithful to the diet the other days of the week.  In fact, I've been thinking of discussing with S the idea of a cheat day in our marriage.  I'll let you know how it goes.

[Mathew Modine in Vision Quest]

In other news of necessary human activities, I've been TIRED lately.  This has nothing to with diet, it has everything to do with baby.  We've been sleep training him using something called the Ferber Method (ask S, it's her idea), and it's going remarkably well, but it means he's waking up at 6:00 a.m. now, and he's just "up".  S goes to work early, so it's on me to watch him.  He used to want to snooze for a while with Daddy, but not so much anymore.  Now he wants to play.  And I can't just wall off a section next to the bed, let him go to town, and go back to sleep either (believe me I've tried); he'll somehow get into something he's not supposed to or he'll pester me or he'll start throwing a fit.  Whatever the case, I'm awake.  And I've found waking up earlier doesn't make me go to bed earlier.  It just makes me tired.

Finally, I'll leave you with an odd anecdote about taking a dump.  The other day I'm in one of two stalls in a bathroom in my office building, and I hear two other people come into the room, one right after the other, and the first guy takes the stall next to me.  (I assume the other guy is using a urinal.)  Normally having somebody in the neighboring stall prompts me to finish and evacuate the premises ASAP, but I was laying some serious cable, so I stuck around (and stunk around!  Haha... Good one, D).  About five minutes go by, I'm finally done, so I get up and leave the stall and literally bump into the third guy.  He wasn't using a urinal at all.  He's just been standing there quietly in the bathroom waiting for one of the stalls to open up.  And not just standing there, but practically hugging the stalls like he's worried somebody is going to cut him in line.  It was really strange, especially so since there are three other bathrooms in the building and rarely is a single stall in use in any of them, let alone both stalls in one at once.  It's not like the guy was having an emergency; he was just waiting patiently -- waiting patiently in a box filled with somebody else's butt funk for his chance to go into a smaller box filled with even more butt funk.  Like I said, strange.

Until next time...

Entry 190: Vacation Part Two (An Entry My Wife Thinks Nobody Will Read)

Sometimes I'll read S my entries in this blog before I post them.  The other night I was doing this -- I was roughly three-quarters of the way through -- and she starts laughing hysterically.  Normally this is a welcome reaction, but I wasn't at a part that's supposed to be funny.

Me: What?  Why are you laughing?

Her: Hahaha... Because... Hahaha... This is such a long entry... Hahahah... And you're just talking about stupid stuff from our vacation... Hahaha... Nobody is going to read this... Hahaha... And this is how you spend... Hahaha... Your... Hahaha... Free... Hahaha... Time... Hahaha... Hours... Bwahahahahahahahahahahahahaha...

And with that: part two.

[Chambers Bay 1]

Day 7: July 6, Fife, WA
S's cousin and her family randomly live near my parents, and her son recently graduated from high school, so they threw him a graduation party on Saturday.  A bunch of S's family, including her parents, came in from out of town, and my entire immediately family came, so it was the first big G & G family get-together since the wedding in Bangalore.  It was fun, and the food was good. 

The only part I don't like when our families meet up is the introductions.  I know most everybody's name in S's family, but when an appropriate moment comes to use one, I get a weird pang of anxiety that I'm going to mess it up, somehow.  Part of the problem is that they have Indian names that don't roll easily off my American-English tongue, but also it's because I just do that with people I haven't spent a lot of time with.  It's kind of an OCD-type of thing, like checking your alarm five times, or turning your car around halfway down the block to go back and make sure the house door you just locked is in fact locked.  Like, say, there's somebody named Ryan whom I've met a few times.  When I go to use his name I immediately think the correct name, Ryan, but then something will pop into my head -- "Are you sure it's really Ryan?" -- even though I know his name is Ryan (the same way you know you already locked the door even though you're checking it).  The upshot is that I often just avoid using people's names until I hear somebody else use it.

[Chambers Bay 2]

Day 8: July 7, U.P.
My parents host a meet-and-greet on their back patio.  This is something that never could have happened when I lived there, because back then we didn't have a back patio.  We didn't even really have a backyard; it was more like one giant thorn bush.  It's remarkable how much nicer the house is now.  I guess that's what happens when homeowners are in the A.D. phase* of their lives.

Again the party is fun, and the food is good (catered by Chez Costco), but S and I quickly learn it's a struggled to take Lil' S outside, because as soon as you set him down he crawls to the nearest scrap of foliage and puts it in his mouth.  My parent's yard is covered with these little things from fir trees (we call them nerdles, but I'm pretty sure that's not the scientific name), and I must have rooted out about a dozen of them from Lil' S's mouth throughout the day.

Day 9: July 8, U.P.
Another lazy day in U.P.  Well, lazy isn't the right word.  I was up at 6:30 a.m. as I was almost everyday throughout the trip.  Lil' S ended up in bed with us for at least half of every night, and it's hard for me to sleep next to him.  For one thing, I'm so much bigger than him that I bend the bed, so that he rolls into me, much the way a bigger celestial object bends space to emit a gravitational pull on a smaller object.  Then -- keeping the space analogy going -- it's like I have a little star sleeping adjacent to me, as he curls up into an orb and radiates massive amounts of heat onto my back.  It's much cuter than it is comfortable.    

[Chambers Bay 3]

At night we go to my sister's and brother-in-law's for dinner with family and friends.  My brother is there with his wife and their six-month old baby, Q-Ball.  Q-Ball is roughly four months younger than Lil' S and roughly four pounds heavy.  The kid is huge.  He and Lil' S couldn't really interact too much, because Lil' S is too rough with him right now.  Q-Ball likes to just sit there and chill (well, that's really all he can do), and Lil' S is becoming a little baby bruiser.  He'll kinda wrestle now (I've been teaching him well, apparently), by which I mean he'll crawl up to somebody, latch his little claws onto whatever body parts he can get a hold of, and then thrust himself forward.  Q-Ball didn't really appreciate this, so we mainly kept them apart.  Actually, it's kinda funny that each son's personality mirrors his father's.  I was a lanky scrapper as a kid, and my bro was a gentle giant.  Is this genetics?  Is it the result of responses to very early behavioral cues?  Or is it actually not true, and I'm just grafting the personalities onto the babies that I expect them to have?  I have no idea.

[Note: I just realized how late it's getting, and there is no way I'm extending this entry to a third part, so it's hyper-blog from here on out.]

Day 10: July 9, U.P.
Family picture day at Chambers Bay.  Beautiful.

Day 11: July 10, Olympia
We take a day trip to Olympia to visit S's friend and her one-year old.  It's great, but she lives on a lake, and never suggests we go down to the water.  I'm not sure why.  Maybe she was worried about having the kids down there.  Whatever.  It's still fun.

[The lake by S's friend's house near Olympia.] 

Day 12: July 11, U.P.
The whole family gets together for a cookout on my parents' patio.  We roast marshmallows over a gas fire, eat s'mores, and tell jokes and ghost stories.  Well, technically I didn't eat any s'mores.  I fucking hate marshmallows.  

Day 13: July 12, Seattle
I ditch the wife and kid in Federal Way and head up to Seattle to see some folks.  We go to this cool, hipster-y, corner store-looking place called Chuck's Hop Shop for a few beers.  It's great to see everybody.  I can't help but pine, at least a tiny bit, for the good ol' carefree kid-less days of the twenty aughts.

Day 14: July 13, D.C.
We make it back to D.C. safely; which is pretty much the only thing positive I can say about our trip home.  We pack two spare outfits for Lil' S for the flights (we have a layover in S.F.), and it's not enough.  He incredibly takes three onesie-busting dumps in a span of eight hours.  The last one he just has to wallow in for a few hours until we land and get our luggage at Dulles.  Unless we want to fashion some baby clothing out of a barf bag it's our only option.   

At one point I changed him in the bathroom of a small commuter jet with no changing table.  It's up there for the worst ten minutes of my life.       

Until next time...

*A joke my dad likes to tell is that there are two phase of freedom in your adult life, B.C. and A.D.  Before Children and After Dog.  Solid witticism.

Entry 189: Vacation Part One (And The Buffer Day)

Back from the west coast, enjoying my "buffer day", i.e., the day after you return from vacation before you go back to work.  I have a tendency to want to stretch my trips as long as possible, but I've learned through experience at least one buffer day is needed.  Getting in late Sunday night and then going to work Monday morning is completely miserable.  You need a buffer day.

Our house was completely in tact upon return, which is nice.  We have no pets, and our mail box is a slot in the door, so it's relatively easy for us to travel.  The yard maintenance people came while we were away, so we came home to a freshly edged front lawn, which, I must say, was absolutely delightful.  The only bad part about returning was that S accidentally left out half a kiwi on the kitchen counter, so there was a swarm of fruit flies in our kitchen -- pretty gross, but fruit flies are harmless and rather easy to get rid of, you just dispose of the rotting fruit. 

Oh, actually, there was another bad part about coming home: I'm sad!  Not super-depressed sad, but Sunday-night-after-a-great-weekend sad.  We got to see both S's and my families on this trip, and it was really great.  It's such a shame we're all spread out across the country.  In fact that's my biggest problem with the U.S. -- it's too big.  We should consolidate, so we can all be closer together.  Let's be honest, we can do away with most of the middle of the country and hardly skip a beat (we can lop off the South while we're at it, just for good measure).  Sure, we'd have to sacrifice some good farmland and beautiful sprawling scenery, but if I could drive from D.C. to Seattle to San Diego to New York in a few hours, it'd be worth it.  Plus, we'd wipe out the Bible Belt almost entirely, not my main objective, but a great side-effect.  

Anyway, the vacation was fun.  As I predicted in my last entry it was not relaxing per se -- the little guy (and the time change) had us up before 7 a.m. pretty much every day -- but it was better than relaxing, it was satisfying.  We did a lot of things and saw a lot of people.  Here's a day-by-day recap, because if there's one thing people are interested in, it's the details of other people's vacations.

Day 1: June 30, L.A.
Our first stop was a visit to S's cousin and her family in L.A.  S's cousin is of Indian heritage (like S) but was raised in England (unlike S), and when we first got there she explained that she wasn't normally a typical obsequious Indian woman, but that she was going to play the role of one because she hadn't seen S in years, and it was our first time meeting.  Then play the role she did.  It got to be a little much, truth be told.  The funny thing about having somebody constantly fuss over you is that it usually does exactly the opposite of what's intended.  It makes you feels less at home and more stressed out, because you feel compelled to do/eat/drink/use whatever is prepared for you.  With that said, I very much enjoyed our stay.  S's cousin is incredibly sweet, her four-year old daughter is a little cutie (although S's cousin kept referring to her and Lil' S as brother and sister, which annoyed me for some reason), and her husband is a cool guy -- he took me on a little impromptu tour of Hollywood and it's neighboring environs, which I liked and appreciated.  I saw the theater where they host The Oscars.  It looks just like a building.

Day 2: July 1, L.A.
We only stayed one night with S's cousin, so we left a day after arriving to head up to Camarillo, CA to visit S's old friends L & A (L & A, and we were in L.A., what an amazing coincidence!) for a few days. (S let it slip to her cousin that we were staying two nights with her friends and only one night with her; it didn't go over well).  But before we split town we had lunch with an old friend of S's from college -- a white guy who, as it so happened, married and just had a baby with a South Indian-American woman, so there was some symmetry across the table.  I think S's friend's wife is even less "Indian" than S is, which is really saying something considering S once had an ongoing joke with a coworker, who was born and raised in India, that she was a "fake Indian".  All I have to say about that is if you can speak the obscure dialect of Kannada fluently there's nothing fake about you.  Heck, just knowing what Kannada is allows you to claim 10% honorary Indian-ness.

Anyway, I've mentioned before in this blog that S and I pretty much have the same two or three arguments over and over manifested in different ways.  One of them is me being too critical (her view) and her being too sensitive and taking non-personal remarks personally (my view).  This came into play when she booked lunch with her friends for 3:00 pm.  I did the math on this one: 3:00 pm start time, 4:30-ish end time, we're driving out of L.A. to Camarillo about 60 miles away, L.A. literally has the worse traffic in the country, we have a baby who doesn't like sitting in a car seat... You can see where I'm going with this.  I broached the subject with S, and I'll give you multiple choice as to her response:

a)  "Wow, I didn't consider that.  Excellent observation dear husband.  Thank you.  I shall call my friend and reschedule, pronto."

b)  "Hey, if you don't like it then you can do all the planning on your own from now on like I do!"   

(See below for answer.*) 

Ultimately I "won" this round, we bumped lunch up a few hours, we had a pleasant meal, and we were on our way to Camarillo before rush hour began.

[I can't believe I forgot to take a picture of Camarillo while I was there.  This impersonal stock photo will have to suffice.]

Day 3: July 2, Camarillo, CA
The contrast in hosting styles between S's cousin and her friends L & A became obvious when I went without lunch.  L & A have two little kids, a six-year old girl, and a two-year old boy.  The girls (A, her daughter, and S) all went shopping at some sort of "a-ma-zing" (S's description) outlet mall, while the dudes (L, his son, Lil' S, and me) stayed home.  At some point before lunch we all took naps (I actually read Doc: A Memoir while Lil' S slept by my side, but you get my point).  A few hours later after Lil' S awoke, we moseyed out of the guestroom to hang out.  The girls weren't back yet, L was on his laptop, and I noticed there was a used plate by his side.  He had obviously prepared himself something for lunch, and since I was in the guestroom with Lil' S he didn't offer me anything.  Then he apparently just forgot about it by the time we emerged, so I went without lunch.
 
Now, obviously I could've asked for something, or asked where the nearest supermarket was, or something, but L is predominantly S's friend, I like him a lot, but I don't know him all that well, and I have a weird social tick where I don't like asking people for things I don't know super well (I don't even like asking a store employee where something is), so instead I just didn't eat.  It wasn't a huge deal; we had been eating like crazy the entire trip; I could stand to miss a meal.  Plus, I knew we were going out for dinner later, so I could just gorge myself then, which I did.  Baby back ribs.  Heavenly.

As I allude to above, I actually prefer a more laissez-faire hosting style (the odd missed lunch notwithstanding), and our time with L & A was terrific, if brief.  They're really great people; I could see S and I hanging out with them regularly if we were all in the same city.  And actually I wouldn't mind living in Camarillo.  It's a cool little city tucked between the mountains, with a nice community feel, and beautiful weather.  If it offered a bunch of jobs in international development and operations research, us moving there might actually be realistic.     

[A highlight from NFL wide receiver Greg Camarillo.]

Day 4: July 3, L.A.
Back to L.A. to catch a flight to Sea-Tac, but before we leave town we meet my cousin C who recently moved to Santa Monica for lunch.  We have a nice but brief visit (a recurring theme in our trip to So-Cal).  After lunch we took a stroll to the Santa Monica pier.  S held Lil' S's hands and walked him on the beach.  It was his first experience with sand; he seemed indifferent to it.

We didn't buy Lil' S a seat for the LAX to Sea-Tac flight, but it couldn't have gone smoother.  He literally slept the entire flight.  He sprawled across our laps and dozed off while we were taxiing to the runway, and then we had to wake him up after landing.  He was pretty good on the cross-country flight, as well.  I joked to S that we had just used up all our "good baby flying karma".  Which, unfortunately, was all to prophetic, but I'll get to that later.     

[The Santana Monica Pier.  Again, no good pics from my camera.] 

Day 5: July 4, Totten Inlet, WA
After settling in at my parents' place (a.k.a the house I grew up in) in University Place, Washington where we'd be spending the next ten days, we headed to my friend JW's family's beach house on the Totten Inlet near Olympia to spend Independence Day.  JW and his wife Y live in Japan now, so it was fortuitous they were in town.  It was great to see them.  Much of JW's extended family was there as well, and they're... I guess I'll just say odd for lack of a better word.  They don't interact in a way that's socially typical.  I don't mind it, on the contrary I find it entertaining, but I think it can be confusing initially to somebody like S who hasn't experienced it.

The day was quite fun, although we quickly learned of all the holidays the Fourth of July is probably the least suitable for a ten-month old baby. (New Year's is up there, but at least with New Year's all the really loud noises are confined to about a five minute period around midnight.  On the night of the Fourth we were hearing loud booms for hours.)  There was no way we could stay for fireworks unfortunately.  Part of the problem is that the beach house is a small cottage; there is no good place to put a little guy down for the night.  S, being the great wife that she is**, sat in the car for an hour or so while Lil' S napped in the car seat so that we could stay longer, but being out much past 7 p.m. just wasn't practical.  So, we split without seeing a single firework -- nary a Saturn Missile nor a Piccolo Pete, not even a Pop-it. 

Day 6: July 5, U.P.
The first "off" day of the vacation.  We didn't do much.  My sister K came over to my parents with her kids B (7) and G (5), and we just hung out, wrestled, made paper airplanes (B is really into origami right now), and ate junk food.  This is how I envisioned spending my vacation.

Alright.  I'm out of time.  It's late, and I still have a few things to do.  Don't worry, part two of this enthralling*** post will be up in a few days.

Until next time...


*The answer is b.  In S's defense, we were both tired, she did do the majority of the planning, and I've been told my delivery sometimes comes off as condescending in a Sheldon Cooper from The Big Bang Theory type of way.  I prefer to think of it as to the point.  

**Or maybe she just needed a break and wanted to watch TV on her iPhone for a little while.  Whatever the reason, I'll take it. 

***I just put two and two together with the word enthrall.  Its base is the word thrall, "a state of servitude or submission" like you're so caught up in something it has a binding, submissive effect on you.