This week, I was laid low by norovirus on the same day I got my period. Other than c-section recovery, I have never experienced anything quite like it. I am truly humbled. I just drank a full glass of water and thought, "ok, that's enough food for now."
Also this week: It was 80 degrees and sunny yesterday, and we had a thunderstorm overnight. Today it is 40 degrees and we are getting snow overnight.
And now please excuse me while I prep for the frogs and locusts.
For my job, I write general interest stories about computer science research. My colleagues call themselves "science writers." I dislike this term, but it's generally correct.
After three years here, I've written about a lot of weird research — everything from robots to reinforcement learning to cancer cells to virtual reality. All of it involves artificial intelligence. I've learned enough that now none of it seems weird anymore.
I've also learned enough that now podcasts and tech journalism are starting to make me mad, because most reporters have no idea what they're talking about. So I'm at the same level as, say, a second semester college freshman.
I like my job a lot, even though I have to talk to faculty members about their innovative machine learning algorithms when I barely passed high school calculus. It's a good job for me: I'm curious and I don't care about looking stupid. (Faculty are often astounded at what I don't know. Most of them are polite about it.)
All this to say: I now know just enough about computer science that the current "discourse" around AI is driving me nuts. It used to be that only the political chatter drove me nuts, because I had studied too much political science. Now the tech chatter is also driving me crazy. It's a good thing I don't read the news or there would be nothing left to read.
My most urgent request: can people please start using the right terms? AI as a concept has existed for like 70 years. It is not synonymous with ChatGPT! AI includes many different types of technology. Machine learning is just one type of AI and LLMs are a small subset of machine learning. And ChatGPT is just one brand of LLM! If AI is the internet, then ChatGPT is AOL.
Also: If you read anything that suggests AGI is coming within the next decade, you should immediately know that the writer is both full of shit and/or receiving a paycheck from a company working to build AGI. No one even understands yet where general human intelligence comes from! How exactly do you think these same people will build general artificial intelligence? I don't care if they have billions of dollars to do it. Throwing money at an idea doesn't make it magically appear.
Finally: you may think that AI is coming, but AI is already here. Do you use facial recognition to open your phone? Does Spotify recommend music for you to listen to? Do you sometimes follow people that Instagram recommends? Do you use GoogleMaps to check traffic? Do you check the weather forecast?? Do you exist in the world with a computer and a smart phone? To stop using AI you will need to learn how to time travel. And I bet AI could help with that.
The only question in my mind is what we do with AI. It's the same story as the internet: computer scientists invented this amazing network for sharing information and we used it to buy things (Amazon) and share what we ate for breakfast (social media). We did some good stuff with it too, but on the whole I'd say most people wish we had handled it better.
Now we have AI, and we can either use it to create fusion energy or we can use it to write mediocre student essays. I can tell you which technology I would like my children to have.
It has been said that terror is the principle of despotic government. Does your government therefore resemble despotism? Yes, as the sword that gleams in the hands of the heroes of liberty resembles that with which the henchmen of tyranny are armed. Let the despot govern by terror his brutalized subjects; he is right, as a despot. Subdue by terror the enemies of liberty, and you will be right, as founders of the Republic. The government of the revolution is liberty's despotism against tyranny. Is force made only to protect crime? And is the thunderbolt not destined to strike the heads of the proud?
Today I successfully got rid of a stain on my tub that has been bugging me since we moved in three years ago. No amount of scrubbing would get it off, but I finally found a product that did it. It took approximately 2 minutes.
Is it bad that I got more satisfaction out of this victory than pretty much anything else I've done this year? I'm just so happy I no longer have to look at that gross brown stain every time I wash my hair.
Perhaps this is the apotheosis of middle age?
I grew up in one of the coolest places on earth: brownstone Brooklyn. I lived there before everyone knew it was cool, which is, of course, the apex of coolness.
To be honest, I didn't know it was cool when I lived there and neither did my parents. They only bought a house in Park Slope because they couldn't afford the classic six in Manhattan that my mother really wanted. They couldn't even afford our house in Brooklyn at the time, actually.
Pretty much everyone in my social milieu wants to live there now, especially people with kids, which is weird for me because it wasn't really an amazing place to be a kid. (We moved when I was 11.)
My sister and I used to play in an empty parking lot across the street that was filled with broken glass and needles. I don't remember a single playground, though there must have been some. My dad slept with a baseball bat next to his bed because of the frequent break-ins. Sadly, one of my earliest memories is realizing that our next door neighbor, a young man, was dying of AIDS. My sister and I used to play a game called "homeless" in our living room — we would put on all the hats and scarves in the closet and ask our parents for loose change. (Not a joke.)
Looking back, the parts I really liked were the normie parts. I loved my neighborhood pizza parlor (shoutout to Gino's on 7th) and the local bookstore. The park was nice. And it was nice that we could walk there, but I was never allowed to leave the house without an adult so for me it was functionally the same as needing a ride. Mostly, I went to school and my parents went to work and then we all came home and ate spaghetti.
Now that I'm older, I'm not exactly sure what my parents got out of living in Brooklyn either. It wasn't work — my father's career was materially hurt by being in New York because his law firm was based in Philadelphia. My mother worked part-time for a state agency, nothing that couldn't have been replicated elsewhere. They played with us in a parking lot across the street and took us to get pizza, which is pretty much the exact same shit I do with my kids.
Some of my most vivid memories are about leaving the city. In the summers we used to spend many weekends in suburban New Jersey, close to where I live now. My parents would take us to a hotel with a pool and we would go shopping at a regular (but enormous to us) suburban grocery store. (We were trying to avoid the Park Slope Co-op, which was and is a perfect example of socialist hell.) I have so many memories of the Roy Rogers on Route 1 in New Jersey, which had a huge ball pit that we would play in for what felt like hours.
Brooklyn has improved over the years, I guess. There are better playgrounds and probably you can go to the public pool these days. I bet that parking lot is fenced now. But those improvements came with a 10x increase in prices, so unless you inherit the house your parents bought in 1987 it doesn't mean much. (My parents sold in 1998 and broke even.)
I don't know anyone who lives in Brooklyn, so I don't know if they are cool. My parents and sister live in Manhattan and they might be cool? (Does coolness look a lot like unhappiness?) I can't tell because I live in suburban New Jersey where there are lots of books and many pizza joints and I remain, despite my childhood, deeply uncool.
As all of you know, I am a big fan of Machiavelli. The Prince was the first book of political theory I ever read — I found it in a used bookstore on a vacation to Montana when I was 16.
Later I read a ton of Machiavelli in college, but in graduate school I found The Prince incredibly hard to teach. Undergraduates found it too obvious — to them, Machiavelli was just describing how politics works. I could never quite bring home for them what an astonishing book it was, and is.
(It didn't help that the professor in class actually compared Machiavelli to Lord Voldemort. Why he assigned The Prince only to dismiss it so stupidly, I have no idea.)
Anyway, in an attempt to escape the inescapable lure of reading the news, I reread The Prince last week. I found it more compelling than ever! I wonder if anyone surrounding our new Medici prince has ever read it? I sincerely think it could be of use to them. (Though since I would like Trump to crash and burn in a stupendous fashion, perhaps it's best if they don't read it.)
Lesson 1: If you are going to punish people, do it fast and all at once and then do nice stuff
"Someone could question how it happened that Agathocles and anyone like him, after infinite betrayals and cruelties, could live for a long time secure in his fatherland...I believe that this comes from cruelties badly used or well used.
"Those can be called well used (if it is permissible to speak well of evil) that are done at a stroke, out of the necessity to secure oneself, and then are not persisted in but are turned to as much utility for the subjects as one can.
"Those cruelties are badly used which, though few in the beginning, rather grow with time than are eliminated...For injuries must be done all together, so that, being tasted less, they offend less; and benefits should be done little by little so that they may be tasted better."
Lesson 2: Changing any kind of "system" is suuuuuper duper hard
"It should be considered that nothing is more difficult to handle, more doubtful or success, nor more dangerous to manage, than to put oneself at the head of introducing new orders. For the introducer has all those who benefit from the old orders as enemies, and he has lukewarm defenders in all those who might benefit from the new orders.
"This lukewarmness arises partly from fear of adversaries who have the laws on their side and partly from the incredulity of men, who do not truly believe in new things unless they have a firm experience of them. Consequently, whenever those who are enemies have the opportunity to attack, they do so with partisan zeal, and the others defend lukewarmly so that one is in peril along with them."
Lesson 3: It's way, way harder to take over a republic (aka, Putin has it easier than you do)
"And whoever becomes patron of a city accustomed to living free and does not destroy it, should expect to be destroyed by it; for it always has a refuge in rebellion the name of liberty and its own ancient orders which are never forgotten either through length of tie or because of benefits received.
"In republics there is greater life, greater hatred, more desire for revenge; the memory of their ancient liberty does not and cannot let them rest..."
Lesson 4: Do don't stuff that looks bad, even if you think it's good
"Men in general judge more by their eyes than by their hands, because seeing is given to everyone, touching to few. Everyone sees how you appear, few touch what you are; and these few dare not oppose the opinion of the many, who have the majesty of the state to defend them; and in the actions of all men, and especially of princes, where there is no court to appeal to, one looks to the end.
"So let a prince win and maintain his state: the means will always be judged honorable, and will be praised by everyone. For the vulgar are taken in by the appearance and the outcome of a thing, and in the world there is no one but the vulgar."
And finally, the kicker, Lesson 5: You may think you're winning, even when you're losing
"Yet one cannot call it virtue to kill one's citizens, betray one's friends, to be without faith, without mercy, without religion: these modes can enable one to acquire empire, but not glory."
In conclusion: I read Machaivelli so I wouldn't have to think about the news, but in reading Machiavelli all I could think about was the news. Mission accomplished, lol.
Next, I will be reading Plato and you will all be subjected to more quotes. I apologize in advance.
A few weeks ago, I went to Houston to see Miss Self Important. It was a very nice trip! And I'm somewhat amazed to admit that it's the first time I've been on an airplane in almost six years.
The last time I flew before this was from DC to Detroit in May 2019, shortly after I moved to Michigan. And on that trip I stayed with Alex, so the 5402 reunions are apparently the only reason I go anywhere!
A lot of things have made me uninterested in flying since May 2019. First, I was working in retail and therefore was short on free time and disposable income. Then, I got a puppy (my beloved canine baby) in June 2019. And you all know what happened next: covid, moving, human baby, moving, changing jobs, house buying, changing jobs again, moving, next human baby.
And here we are, six years later.
I know people (my parents, specifically) think it's weird that I don't travel anymore. I have questioned whether this is some kind of super specific postpartum anxiety, and maybe that's part of it. Mostly I don't travel because I have small children and I find traveling long distances with them less pleasant than just staying home. I like home, I like sleep. I don't get bored. I enjoy not having to schlep a pack n' play and sippy cups and diapers long distances just so I can sleep worse in a different country.
Also, travel for the sake of travel (not to see people) seems kind of pointless now. Maybe it's because I've already traveled a lot — like, to every continent except Antartica and almost every country in Europe. I'm the sort of obnoxious person who has been to London and Paris so many times they've lost track. And sure, London is nice, but it has essentially the same stuff as New York, and New York is a lot closer. I could go to New York right now and be back in time for dinner.
I enjoyed my travels and I'm happy I did them when my life was simpler. But I'm not sure what I got out of traveling. I learned about the world, I guess, but mostly I was just a tourist killing time. I don't think I even scratched the surface of most of the places I've been. I was mostly traveling just to say I traveled — the early 2000s equivalent of going someplace just to post the pics.
There's nothing wrong with that, of course! Traveling just to travel and be in a new place is great. But, I don't know, not doing it also seems fine? I don't feel like I'm missing anything.
As my kids get older, I imagine I will start traveling again, taking them to Europe like my parents took me. But honestly, I'm not sure. I might just take them to the shore. Could be more relaxing.
For me, COVID began on March 13, 2020. That's the day we were all sent to work from home for two weeks. Looking back through my emails, it was clear that no one had any idea what was about to happen.
I have little memory of what I thought, but I can't have been feeling too pessimistic about the fate of humanity — I got pregnant a couple weeks later.
And here we are, five years on, and our collective ability to prognosticate has not improved. Every meeting I go to now involves some kind of lamentation about "these dark times." Someone casually asserted that we are "kneecapping the next generation" in a meeting today. The department I work for has a faculty slack channel which mirrors my LinkedIn feed — a litany lamentations about the collapse of modern science. Even before all the Trump bullshit, every meeting involved some version of "what if she doesn't win?!" handwringing. What if, indeed.
On the other side, those living Trump's paradise feel basically as despondent as their vanquished foes. They are doing their best to stem the overwhelming tide of civilizational collapse. Children are being mutilated by doctors and poisoned by big pharma as we speak. Free speech is impossible, free thinking a crime. Liberalism is disintegrating as we scroll merrily on our phones. In a generation, there will be no more children.
Honestly, it's all I can do not to roll my eyes so hard they fall out of my head.
On November 8, 1989, no one foresaw that the Berlin Wall would fall the next day. (Soviet experts are still weeping for the unfinished dissertations.) I have no memory of portents issued on September 10, 2001. December 7, 1941 lives in infamy. In June 2015, no one except Trump thought Trump would be president.
Maybe the world is ending. Maybe AI will infect my brain and steal my job. Maybe my children will be fighting in Taiwan in 2045.
You know what's much more likely? A future we have not predicted and can't even begin to imagine. It's possible something is coming for us. If it is, my only guess is that it's something we haven't considered yet. That's generally how catastrophes happen.
For most people this is probably too scary to contemplate, but I take great solace in the fact that while people have been forecasting the end of the world for millennia, we are somehow still here, living in unbelievable comfort at the pinnacle of technological progress.
The world may be ending, but spring is here and I just took a walk around campus where the leadership has a stockpile of 34 billion dollars to use for the preservation of something resembling knowledge. Later I will retrieve my healthy children, load them into seats that have been rigorously tested to protect them, and go to our house, where everyone has their own bed, the air is automatically conditioned, and our water is cleaned by a UV filter. I will use my tiny computer to play us any piece of music we can think of while preparing food that is fresh and plentiful.
I could lose all this tomorrow, yes. But that is always true. I could get hit by a bus. I could lose my job. My children could get sick. There could be a natural disaster or a nuclear holocaust. Should this make me more or less miserable today? Why is it so hard to imagine that things might work out in the end?
The main reason I left academia is that I didn't think I had enough interesting things to say about the 20ish books I was an expert on to sustain me through a 40 year career. Basically, I just couldn't imagine giving the same lecture on Nietzsche until I was 65 (or 80, or whenever faculty will retire in the 2050/2060s).
I came to this conclusion fairly early on and it was reinforced constantly in graduate school. A professor I studied with, who was a wonderful teacher, told me he went back and reread the books for his introductory class every 5 years or so, "just to keep the subject fresh." After TA'ing his class (which was excellent) I had a feeling he hadn't refreshed his lectures in way more than a decade. He didn't need to — he knew what he thought about Marx and what he thought about Marx was interesting to freshmen. The idea of doing this myself, though, made me miserable.
The problem, of course, is that I hate lecturing and love reading. I never found teaching Plato very gratifying, but I often wish I had time to reread The Republic. (I've only done it once since graduating, sadly.) I am grateful that I knew myself well enough at 25 to realize that a life as a professor would make me miserable.
I rarely have any occasion to remember this, though, since I have been out of academia for so long. It's occurring to me now because I got an email that my dissertation adviser was speaking on a panel about the future of conservatism. (My dissertation adviser is, according to his new updated bio, a "leading public intellectual of the New Right." Insert puking emoji here.)
I was quite intrigued! The man I knew was hardly so political. Would he actually talk about politics as a representative of the New Right?? Or would he give the same talk about Tocqueville that I have heard him give a hundred times to every type of audience (grad students, freshmen, faculty, the general public)?
And it was the latter, of course. A talk remarkably similar to one I heard him give for the first time in a graduate seminar 15 years ago. He even opened with the same story about reading Democracy in America for the first time as an unemployed graduate student and realizing he would work on the book for the rest of his life. I have heard that story at least 20 times, and he is still telling it.
I remain a big fan of my adviser, notwithstanding his insane politics. When Josh and I were first married we had him over to dinner and it is likely to remain the best dinner party of my life. (There was no small talk, he did not even ask about our recent wedding. We talked about ideas from the first minute to the last.) And his talk about Tocqueville is, believe it or not, still interesting! I watched the whole panel when I definitely should have been doing something else.
I am not saying there is anything wrong with having a few good ideas and then refining and repeating them for 40 years. I'm just really happy that I don't have to.
As all three of my readers (hello, friends!) are already aware, someone in my family (we'll call her Hannah) has been trying to get pregnant for a couple years without success. She has done IUIs, she has done multiple egg retrievals for IVF. The only time she actually got pregnant was the old fashioned way, with her now ex-boyfriend. She lost that baby. She is still trying, now single.
This situation is complicated for me and I have a lot of feelings about it, none of which are helpful since my feelings make no difference to Hannah. But the saga has given me a lot of opportunities to think about what it means to create a human being. Making a person (twice!) will forever be the coolest thing I've done. The fact that people create other people all the time doesn't make it any less amazing to me.
And for being the coolest thing I have ever done it was astonishingly simple. I had sex, and then nine-ish months and some physical discomfort later, I had a baby. I didn't track anything or eat anything or prepare myself in any way for the important business of conception.
And I did absolutely nothing to make the baby. The feet and the eyes and the brain were created without my knowledge or input! To this day I look at my children and I am amazed. Where did they come from? It can't possibly be me. I didn't even try.
My experience, which is how most people in the world are made, seems to be the antithesis of fertility treatments. People try and try and try for years. This is obviously deeply unfair. Why should it be so easy for me and so difficult for Hannah?
Freddie DeBoer recently wrote about his own experience with fertility treatments and I was struck by his description of how it changed his views on abortion:
"Before [IVF] I saw abortion rights as merely a matter of individual autonomy, which of course is still the core issue; the only question one must answer, to know where they stand on abortion, is “Who owns the human body?” But now I also think that abortion is, ultimately, a reflection of nature, of the nature God made. It’s a reminder that there is something fickle at the heart of our most basic animal reality, and the chaos of human desires is not some unfortunate mistake but rather a reflection of the fact that we are nature and are in nature."My department is the only one on campus that has a DEI staff person. Most departments can't afford them, so they typically work in school-level offices and central administrative units. Alas, my department is the biggest on campus so we have our very own assistant director of DEI.
There have been DEI staff at every job I've had since I left grad school, and they've mostly been very nice — good ambassadors for their mandate of belonging. One has a Ph.D. in psychology and was previously a therapist, which fits well since DEI on campus is a deeply therapeutic exercise. They want people to feel included, they want people to feel they belong. Kumbaya.
Personally, I think DEI practices are antithetical to the actual business of a university, where we exclude people by design based on the quality of their academic work. Should we give everyone who does excellent work an equal shot? Yes! Does that mean we can discriminate based on race or gender? No! Discrimination is distasteful and, you know, illegal.
But I try and get along with my colleagues and I know most people here don't agree me about DEI. In all my previous jobs, I have worked very well with the DEI staff. They are nice people who need to pay their mortgages and I don't get any say in what they do so we all muddle along.
The exception is my current job, where the DEI person — let's call her Tina — is, frankly, scary.
Tina has a doctorate in education, and she will tell you she has a doctorate in education during every interaction she has with you. It's also in her email signature. (As far as I know, she's not aware that I have a Ph.D.)
She is belligerent in emails but will be very sweet to your face. Every compliment is somehow also a backhanded criticism. ("The website looks good. Wasn't it supposed to be ready a year ago?"). I had a virtual meeting with her and the chair of the department in which some minor issue was decided in my favor and she exited the meeting immediately without saying goodbye.
Were she given the power to do so, I'm certain she would fire me.
I just had to sit through an hour-long DEI session led by her, where she first told us about her Ed.D. and then told us the department needs to admit more Black and Latinx students. Then she went through all the DEI initiatives supported by the department, before asking us to chat with each other about how we can support diversity in our roles. "What power to do we have," she asked, "to make others feel as though they belong? What's our sphere of influence?"
Everyone of course fell over themselves to agree with Tina, to point out how great her work is, to come up with innovative ideas about how they can be nice and kind to everyone who they cross paths with. To be a safe space for anyone who needs it.
I'll admit, I was fascinated by this performance. Why exactly do we have any responsibility to fix people's feelings? Tina, for example, is never satisfied — is this somehow my responsibility? Are anyone's feelings my problem at work? I am not a therapist. If a graduate student isn't getting along with their adviser, isn't that something they should talk about with their adviser? Apparently, this is not inclusive.
And of course there was no mention of other views. The legality of the assertion that we need to admit more Black and Latinx students was never questioned. The fact that most people in the department are not white, but Asian, was also conveniently not mentioned. Everyone agreed that we need to support each other, to be kind, to belong. Welcome to a world of endless meetings, where everyone's voice is heard, no decisions are made, but lots of cookies are served.
I understand many people do not enjoy being the visible outlier in a classroom. I have been in lots of classrooms where I was the only woman. But I have never felt more uncomfortable at work or in school than I did at this DEI training.
I am not pleased about the outcome of the election, but it is what is and I am not surprised. My post from four years ago still rings entirely true.
I am surprised by how much other people are surprised, though. A friend I haven't seen in ages wrote to me to ask if I was doing ok despite the obvious and overwhelming racism and sexism now running rampant. I was somewhat stumped on how to reply.
If I were being honest, I'd tell her that I'm doing amazing. This is the best time to be alive in the whole history of the planet, and this is one of the best countries to live in! It's definitely the best time and place to be a woman, the best time and place to be a (quasi) Jew, the best time and place to be someone who likes to read indoors with central heating. So, yeah, I'm doing ok, thanks.
Do I like Trump? Absolutely not. I am as Democratic as you can get — I've never voted for a Republican in my life. And yet, unlike most people who have never voted for a Republican, I know lots of people who have. I know people who voted for Trump. And I understand why they did it! I know they aren't racist or sexist.
But if, like my friend, you don't know any conservatives and only read the New York Times, it would be very hard to know what Trump voters are talking about. It might even be easy to dismiss them all as fascists.
I'm trying to be sympathetic to this view of the world, but honestly I find it very tedious. How can you be so uninterested in why millions of your fellow citizens freely voted for a man you think is a demagogue? Why aren't you curious about their decision, considering it will determine the future of the country you profess to care so much about? Why don't you want to take their opinions seriously, so you can win them over next time?
Really, how is it that Democrats are so uninterested in winning elections? If you want to win an election you always need to convince people who don't already agree with you. You need to make a case that speaks to people outside your party. If you insist that anyone who disagrees with you is a racist, sexist, and fascist, how exactly does that help??
Again, I'm very much not a fan! Trump is a raving nincompoop and I dislike him intensely. But telling everyone who doesn't like Democratic policies that they have to vote for a Democratic candidate because otherwise they are racist, sexist and fascist is pretty much the worst campaign strategy ever.
Is no one in the Democratic Party friends with a Republican? Do they not talk to anyone who disagrees with them? They should probably look into that before 2028.
Sometime around 2018, I stopped reading the news. This was kind of a big deal, because I was raised in a family where not reading the news is a kind of heresy. Being informed was our version of being godly. I am amazed to remember that not very long ago I had the Sunday New York Times delivered in print (!) to my house.
My father always told me that his father, who is credited with getting the family out of Germany, read the newspaper every day. Being informed about the Nazis gave him insight others didn't have, I was told. Reading the newspaper could save your life.
This is not true, of course. No amount of newspaper reading could have saved my grandfather's life, especially since newspapers in Germany in the late 1930s were not reporting the news. What saved my grandfather's life was that he married my grandmother, and she had a distant cousin living in Ohio. That cousin talked the Fleischmann family (of margarine riches) into sponsoring my grandparents. They left Germany in August 1939, less than a month before the invasion of Poland. No one else on either side of the family survived.
I have no doubt my grandfather enjoyed reading the paper — he had three kids and got up at 4am every day to bake bread. Thirty minutes of quiet reading time every day was probably lovely. (I'm guessing. He died many years before I was born.)
Anyway, while my Opa John may have disapproved, I've been a lot happier since I stopped reading the news. It's been very freeing. The best part is when anyone tries to engage me on some topic of current events or policy, I can quite honestly say that I don't know much about it. People sometimes bloviate past this statement but in general my sheer ignorance on, say, the rate of immigration, takes the wind out of their sails.
I'm surprised at how much I haven't missed, honestly. I read articles people occasionally send me and Josh tells me breaking news, like when Trump got shot. I've never felt embarrassingly uninformed in polite company, though I did only recently learn who was running for Senate in my state.
Though, come to think of it, I do now read the hyper parochial news religiously. I am extremely well informed on the 10th anniversary of a nearby crepe restaurant and the contentious local effort to turn a caution sign at a busy crosswalk into a traffic signal (the township wants it, the borough does not!). I find this kind of news extremely useful. I knew that a Cava was opening near me at least 2 months before anyone else. This is the kind of news I can use.
I had a favorite teacher in college. I took a class with him winter of my sophomore year where we read Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau. It was awesome. Then I took his class on Machiavelli, then his class on the Roman Republic, and then he "advised" a thesis I wrote on the Florentine Histories. Advised is in quotes there because he didn't really give me any feedback — a wonderful grad student patiently did that — but he was still technically my adviser.
I did not exactly like this professor. In order to like him I would have had to overcome my fear of speaking to him. (I was shy.) But I was definitely a fangirl. I never wanted to email him but I also really wanted an excuse to email him, if you know what I mean.
I was 19 when I took a class with him the first time and he was a distinguished older guy, which is how I still think of him. He wore nice suits to class and had gray mixed in to his hair. I considered him entirely middle aged, and I still think of him as being middle aged.
It was today when I realized that he was 38 when I took that class with him. And I am now 39.
The baby is turning one on Wednesday. I don't feel like this year was short, but the days (and nights) were definitely long.
Two kids has been a much higher degree of difficulty than one. I'm still not quite used to it. Maybe it's because my second one arrived just as my first was turning into a feral three year old? The house is just so loud now, and there so many butts to wipe! And it feels like someone is always crying. (I really hate the crying.)
The baby is seriously adorable, though — way cuter now than he was as a newborn. Big blue eyes, sandy colored hair, and he makes the cutest babbling sounds. He's very expressive. When someone he likes walks in the room he will kick his feet and wave his arms and yell something that sounds like, "hi!" He absolutely loves the dog and his big brother and is constantly laughing at them, but hasn't figured out how to play with them yet.
In the past month he's become easily scared by things, which is not something I remember from the last time I had a one year old. He has decided, for example, that he is absolutely terrified of the bath. He used to love it, but now screams his head off if I try to put him in there. To wash his hair (which often has food in it now) I have to hold him like a football and put his head under the sink faucet. He also hates this, but less than going in the bath. He has serious stranger danger, too, and will scream his head off if you try and hand him over to someone he doesn't know.
He is crawling everywhere and can move quite fast. He's standing and cruising along furniture but isn't quite walking yet — I'm guessing he'll walk in a couple months. It's amazing how much they change in a year!
And now that I know how annoying two and three year olds are, I'm trying to fully appreciate how how sweet and happy one year olds can be. I guess I should take this approach to my almost four year old as well! I just don't know yet how annoying five and six year olds are.
Next Tuesday marks the 10th anniversary of my dissertation defense. I find myself uncharacteristically verklempt about this. I think it's because, contrary to popular experience, grad school was one of the happiest periods of my life.
It sounds super cheesy, but grad school was really fun. Not all of it (not the paycheck!) but intellectually I really miss having half a dozen people around all the time who want to talk to me very intensely about super esoteric stuff. I miss being able to mention Plato in casual conversation. Turns out, most people don't appreciate a casual Plato mention.
I think part of me is also sad because I didn't expect to never work in political theory again. It's not that my academic training hasn't been useful — it has, both personally and professionally — but I thought I'd be able to do something for work that was at least adjacent to political theory. Looking back now that was a very silly expectation! Work that is adjacent to political theory is political (even at a university) and I don't like politics.
And on the other hand, I have no regrets about leaving academia. And no regrets about getting a PhD. So I'll try to be grateful for the lack of regrets. I would also say that I'll attempt to find more friends who want to talk to me about Plato, but that seems like it would severely limit my options and I don't have many friends as it is.
The baby crawls now! It's an army crawl and appears to take a great amount of effort, but he's getting where he needs to go. And where he needs to go is always, always over to his brother so he can try to grab whatever toy he's playing with.
Despite being a younger sibling, I never appreciated how different it is to be the second kid until I had one myself. Gabriel reads Jonah's books, he plays with Jonah's toys, he watches Jonah's shows. He has skipped right over almost all the baby things. When you're second, you live in your sibling's world right away. They're very cute together. Gabriel loves Jonah so much and laughs at anything he does. Jonah lays down next to Gabriel on the floor and crawls with him.
When Jonah was eight months old we were just moving to Princeton. The previous couple months had been super stressful — we had been kicked out of our rental house in Michigan and I got a new job and we had to find somewhere to live on extremely short notice. Seems insane I was doing all that with a baby! Very grateful we're not in a similar situation now.
I remember that the first thing I did after accepting my job at Princeton, even before signing a lease, was secure a daycare spot. I remember being so relieved when I found a place that would take Jonah on the date I needed. I was thinking about that when I read this essay in The Point, where the author seems to think that daycares are even worse than McDonalds: "A Big Mac tastes the same from Orlando to Omaha, but fast-food chain equivalents of McDaycare vary dramatically."
I have a feeling the writer hasn't been to McDonald's in a while. Possibly ever. But she's not wrong — not all daycares are alike. The first daycare I took Jonah to was insane about covid — they made me wear gloves to drop off my baby, even though I wasn't allowed to enter the building. Every time I handed him over I wondered if they knew that he was a human being and not a piece of sanitized plastic.
But the McDaycare my kids go to now is very nice. The same ladies who take care of Gabriel took care of Jonah when he started. I may be raising them in a "collective" but everyone on staff knows my children's names. The teachers get paid vacation and sick time, and I get to have reliable childcare every day except for some federal holidays. When we are not all struck down by norovirus, it works.
The writer of this essay seems to live in New York City, where apparently McDaycare costs more than double what I pay. This sucks for her, but I bet her rent is double what I paid, too. New York is expensive: is this breaking news? And like all essays about childcare, hers throws a lot of stones ("We were just back from the better part of a year abroad that had spared us the rigged American childcare market") but provides no actual solutions.
Actually, that's not true. Her solution is that instead of making baby Big Macs, you should consider parenting her way: with a part-time Portuguese nanny. This would be lovely, really, if only my work were part-time and my house did not double as my husband's office. Basically, it would work great if my life were entirely different.
I love reading parenting essays, though, because everyone who writes them seems to think that parenting is somehow a shared experience. It's not. It's shared in the same way as, say, puberty. We've all been through puberty, and the steps were similar, but the actual experience is singular. No two puberties/parentings are really the same. All we can do is trade stories and commiserate.
So here is my parenting essay/haiku: If you love your child and do your best to keep them safe, you are doing a great job. Congratulations.
Baby updates: we have a rolling boy! He started going from belly to back a couple weeks ago and then on Monday he just decided it was time to start rolling back to front. So he did! Now he's obsessed with rolling and hates being held or put in any kind of contraption. He just wants to be on the floor, rolling free. Even when he should be sleeping (sigh). Amazing how these transitions just click one minute and then you have a baby who won't stop moving.
I'm slightly dazed by this development, actually, because Jonah didn't start rolling until he was almost 8 months old. Looking back on it now, that is sort of incredible! For 8 months I could just set him down and be confident he wouldn't move — how amazing! Not going to have this luxury with Gabriel, alas. But on the plus side the doctor won't be vaguely concerned about motor delays this time. Though I'm sure they'll find something else to worry about.
I'm back at work and generally happy about it, apart from the regular annoyances of working with other humans. I think I'd be able to withstand the day-to-day annoyances with more grace if I was getting more sleep — Gabriel may have mastered rolling but he's not quite mastered sleeping. Last month was awful. Last night was also awful. He's started slowly improving but it's not consistent enough to be of much help. I hate this part of parenthood. Sleep deprivation is torture.
The baby sleep accounts on instagram are stalking me. I'm trying to ignore them! I still think it's quite cruel to promise a sleep deprived person that if they just figure out their baby's nap schedule everything will fall into place. That's telling someone if they learn to fly they'll get places faster. No shit! If I knew my baby's perfect nap schedule and actually had the power to execute it I'm sure my life would be perfect. Unfortunately, I live in the real world where my baby goes to daycare and I'm thrilled if he sleeps for 40 minutes at a stretch.
