Short Baby Poetry

One droplet,

Translucent, rolls downward

As slowly as time.

It shrinks,

Its trail growing longer

Running out of face.

His smile

Betrays neither awareness

Of the leak, or teeth.

I wipe his chin;

He drools again.

A Few of His Favorite Things

Oh, hello there. I thought today I’d use this space to collect together a few of Donovan’s favorite things. Now that he’s almost eight months old and he has more of a personality than ever, he’s changing all the time. Babies are fickle, capricious characters, and what they love today may be forgotten or even feared or despised tomorrow. So I guess I’d better type fast, so I can post this list before it becomes obsolete.

In no particular order:

Screaming. He’s discovered screaming, and he’d probably do it a lot more if he didn’t have to stop and giggle for about a half hour after every shriek.

Dog toys, so very much more than his own toys. My best business idea is probably the one where I go around buying up huge quantities of baby toys and dog toys, but then I market the dog toys to babies and vice versa because the only thing either of those groups wants is what the other has. Dogs and babies have a lot of money, right? A lot of buying power? This is a great plan.

(Really, anything that isn’t his to play with could fall on this list, especially if it’s something fragile and double especially if it’s something that he can use to try and accidentally inflict harm on himself. He can’t crawl yet, but he’s still very mobile thanks to his superhuman rolling ability, so I’d say he spends about 98% of his waking day journeying from one object I’m just going to take away from him to the next.)

Speaking of the dogs:

When dogs fight. Not like actual fighting, obviously, but these two doofuses (doofii?) like to spend just about all their waking hours roughhousing like lunatics, and based on the noises he makes in his sleep I think Miles even dreams about it, too. It’s Donovan’s favorite thing to watch, just about, as they tumble like the goons they are from room to room, landing often on my wife’s feet, to her pained chagrin. And on the subject of roughhousing like lunatics:

Roughhousing like lunatics. I read somewhere that when poppa lions are playing with their cubs, they pretend that the little guys are hurting them far more than they actually are in order to encourage them and build up their confidence in their fighting prowess. I forget where I read this, but it was probably on my Facebook feed, and so it was probably made up by someone trying to promote lion-based memes. Anyway, I don’t care if it’s true or not, so if it isn’t don’t bother to correct me, because it’s pretty adorable, not to mention that it provided me with a model on which to base my own father-son roughhousing paradigm. (I should clarify, in these sensitive times, that I mean roughhousing in only the mildest sense of the term – letting him grab my face, pretending to struggle to get away, etc. He inadvertently tried to play Mountain-and-the-Viper with me the other day, but luckily his little baby thumbs aren’t strong enough to, you know, crush my eyes and skull.) It’s one of his favorite things to do, but it’s also one of mine as well.

The music of Lily Allen. This one at least isn’t a phase. It’s one of the few things that have been constant about him for as long as I’ve known him (all his life). I can’t recall whether I’ve mentioned my son’s obsession with this British singer before on these pages, but my wife listened to her quite a bit when he was still on the inside, and now that he’s out in the world her music is the only one hundred percent effective method of calming him down when he’s fussy. All except her cover of Brittney Spears’ “Womanizer,” which he just hates for some reason and starts crying whenever it comes on.

What’s that, five things? (Not counting that parenthetical I stuck in there.) That ought to do it for now. I was going to close with a joke, but my dog stole my sandwich just now so I’m suddenly too pissed off to be funny right now. I invite you to share your favorite joke, dad or otherwise, in the comments below. 

Some thoughts on teaching my son about justice

So in keeping with my previously-expressed desire to use this space in part to record some of the wisdom (?) I hope to one day share with my son, when he’s old enough for more than sobbing, eating, and spitting up, I wanted to share a few words on the abstract subject of justice. I am a great lover of justice, but I find that in an unjust world it is often more important to love justice than it is to believe in it.

Here’s what I mean by that. Many of us, most of us even – and despite everything I DO lump myself in here, too – tend to have an unspoken and even a not-consciously considered believe and faith in the concept of justice as it should exist in our world. This can be necessary for the preservation of our own sanity, because the alternative is so much worse. The idea that we live in a fundamentally unjust society, world, or even universe – one not simply uncaring for justice but utterly and unknowingly unaware of it – is horrifying. Just as we have a need to believe in our own virtue – as well as that of our loved ones, as it reflects poorly on us if we care for the unvirtuous – we also need to believe that this virtue will be rewarded.

Of course, this is not true. The undeserving prosper, the innocent suffer, and we the witnesses in between attempt to make sense of it all. This, ultimately, is the great flaw in the belief in justice. Simply believing in virtue’s reward for oneself is admirable, even in its naivety, and often leads us to try and be our best possible selves. The problem comes when we project this necessary, sanity-preserving faith onto society, the world, and the universe at large.

When one cannot accept this void of justice, one makes excuses for injustice. This is one origin of victim blaming. When we witness (for example) the rape of a woman, we find ourselves able to “justify” this in our own minds by blaming not the rapist but the woman’s dress, behavior, location, or state of sobriety or lack thereof. While this can be a misogynistic train of thought and usually is, it does not always stem from misogyny itself but rather the need to calm our troubled minds by lying to ourselves that bad things do not happen to good people, and therefor when bad things do happen, those to whom they befall must somehow be deserving.

Therefore, for justice to exist, we must let go of the idea that justice does exist. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about a passage from the Tao Te Ching (I’ve misplaced my Kindle so I’m using the Dr. John C. H. Wu translation instead now; I’m not sure which I prefer or really whether I’m qualified to have a preference that means anything), specifically chapter 18: “When the Great Tao was abandoned, there appeared humanity and justice.”

Order does exist, but at such a vastly macroscopic level that it is impossible for us to see, and it does not correspond with the ideals of law or morality to which we ascribe it. Rather, it is the natural order of cause and effect, that one thing flows from many others and many others from it flow, both certain and cosmically calculable, stretching on into the infinity of inevitability.

No joke today! I just want to publish this instead of putting it off any longer.