thoughts

EV is getting better every day at communicating with words, but her primary language seems to be the language of music and dance.

Last night she did a lot of sly smiling and edging around Liz and Patrick while they were over for dinner. That is, up until I asked if she wanted met to put the music on.

“Shake It Off?” EV queried?

“Really, do you want to use your one daily listen to ‘Shake It Off’ right now?”

“Michael Jackson?”

“Sure!” I replied.

She proceeded to boogie down to “Bad,” and then her second-favorite song, “Shut Up and Dance With Me.” After that, she was more like her normal, chatty self. It was the same when Gina paid us a visit last month. EV was all coy shyness until we had a dance party. Then, full silliness and reciting the periodic table of elements.

I never really understood how toddler shyness worked before. I’d meet a shy toddler, and her or his parent would say, “Oh, s/he’s just being shy,” and I’d kinda just shrug my shoulders and think, “Well, yeah, I’m a big loud stranger, that make sense.” I had never been on the other side of a toddler – the side where they are completely comfortable and at their most chatty and performative. I think I assumed those things were a polite fiction or exaggeration.

(Common Theme Alert: Getting older and being a parent has made me realize a lot of my flip judgments of people aren’t really fair. Maybe the J in my Myers-Briggs is finally ready to flip back to a P?)

Then I met EV. EV who speaks in whole sentences and sings entire songs when she’s in the house with E and I, and then clams up when a new person comes over to visit right up until we break out the music. It makes a certain amount of sense, I guess, since the friends of ours she knows best are Ashley, Jake, and Zina, because they come over to play music almost every week.

I guess she just associates trust with seeing people move their bodies to sound.

I can’t even begin to express how satisfying this is to me. I’m passing down one of the most important things my parents gave me, which is that unabashed, unfiltered, sometimes unhinged love of music. I spent so many hours rocking in a rocking chair singing along to Glass Houses and The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, and desperately trying to ape my mom’s moves as she broke it down to Michael Jackson and Rufus & Chaka Khan.

Hhere I am, doing the same with EV, to a lot of the same music, plus music I’ve grown up with, and even Taylor Swift, who I suppose is going to be her Michael Jackson.

That’s another post entirely.

I can’t decide if my age is beginning to show through my experience with electronics or if everything is now cheap and has terrible user experience design. Maybe both.

Around this time last year I got my first phone without a physical keyboard. I told myself, “All the kids are doing it – you have to live in the future sometime.” I’ve survived with it, and I can write emails with it in a pinch, but there’s no instance where I think to myself – “oh, let’s write for pleasure by swipe-typing.” That’s not a thing. If for some reason I do come up with an idea for a song while I’m on the go, I desperately paw through my belongings searching for a pencil. That I could commit the words to the screen with my fingertips rarely occurs to me.

I sit on the El with my laptop out and I realize I am now that demographic of older professionals with their outsized laptops on the train. Of course, I’m one of the only ones with blue hair, but that’s only a surface-level difference. I used to be the only person in all creation with a laptop on public transit, and that was my teeny netbook of old.

I felt that way today in the Verizon store. That phone with no keyboard has been gradually declining to accept a charge for its battery, and yesterday it finally gave up. “0% 0% 0%,” it flashes at me hopefully when I plug it in. That’s it.

That lead to longer than I like to spend in a retail environment spent on a physical, corded handset in the Verizon store, because no one at the store could even troubleshoot a one-year-old handset that won’t charge. It was sort of embarrassing – I felt like I was being punished. EV came with me, and she could not understand how I could be on the phone and need to stand in one place. After three levels of support, they decided I was telling the truth about it not charging no matter what I tried.

I remember some point in the past where I would hear about other people with their randomly-crashing computers and iPods that weren’t up-to-date and phones with bad charging ports and laugh a little laugh to myself. “They’re not using their stuff correctly,” I’d think, “or they just aren’t willing to understand how to fix them.”

Yet, here I am.Everything’s broken – blue screen of death on one laptop, deadly whirring on my MacBook, iPod won’t play songs all the way through, phone won’t charge. I expect my things to be pretty durable, but I’m not careless. I’m not the guy with cracked screens and missing keys (except that one EV pulled off my last MacBook – rookie parenting error, that). My relative care doesn’t seem to matter – I’ve gone from constantly connected and in-control to constantly on the risk of going completely incommunicado and at the whim of a bunch of circuit-boards.

All of that feels troubleshootable. If I had more hours and more time to try clever solutions I feel like I could fix half of those things, maybe more. But troubleshooting is a younger man’s game. Or, at least, a less busy man’s game. I don’t have time for that, and I don’t actually have time for any of these things to be broken, either.

I’m just afraid it’s going to make me that guy, who keeps buying the newest gadgets so he never has to deal with having an older one. It’s not my style. I’m a creature of habit and comfort. I don’t even like typing on a screen. I just want things to be as reliable as they were five or ten or fifteen years ago when I’d use them until they were just too slow to bear before upgrading.

Maybe I’m that guy already.

Not too much to say today, except our winning RJRetreat team enjoyed a victors’ lunch at one of my fav lunch spots, XIX at the Bellvue.

Why is it a fav? Aside from the view, the weird echo-chamber created by their domed ceiling, and the consistently good (and appropriately-portioned) prix fixe entrees, there’s that dessert bar…

(This particular outing also involved a supermarket-sweep style last-minute run to Banana Republic for respectable-looking clothes, because I made this big deal to my team (who had never been to XIX for lunch before) to “dress well” and then I showed up to work in a t-shirt and baggy jeans and got super-self-conscious which resulted in a 10:40am wardrobe change and a new pair of gray stretch jeans, mmmmm.)

Tonight I brought EV to a party with more or less the complete collection of college friends I regularly attended parties with in the summer before I met E – sans Erika in Boston and Jack, off being a turtle doctor somewhere, or doing whatever a turtle doctor does in cold weather when the turtles are presumably moving more slowly than normal.

(I’m sure Jack would tell me that’s a turtle misnomer, but Jack is not the topic of this post.)

The difference between college and today? We’re now all married (well, one re-married, two divorced), we drink less by an order of magnitude, and between the eight couples we have eleven children with another incoming.

(No, not from us. For heaven’s sake, get a hold of yourself.)

It is moments like these that remind me that I’ve never seen EV spend time with other children. Not by design, really. None of the children in the neighborhood passing my extensive background check to make sure they won’t tell her about Disney or princesses, she’s not exactly hanging out with babies.

(Just kidding – none of the neighborhood kids have even passed the qualifying verbal and potty exams to get to the background check.)

I set that chubby baby down on the floor and a fascinating thing happened. She had no interest in the other kids running and whooping all around her except for briefly babbling with another baby around her age. Instead, she wanted to explore, examine things, and smile at the adults.

(She also signaled for and used the big girl potty four times, because she is the best baby ever. In case you were wondering how that was going. Because you were.)

Effectively, it was like watching a young me exploring a social space. I never had any interest in other children – almost disdained them for their running and whooping. I never lacked for creative play ideas, but if I was at a party with adults I typically wanted to enjoy their company. Even now, I am not an extrovert at a party unless I am the host. I wander from conversation to conversation, sharing a laugh or a smile, and then I settle down in a corner regardless of if it is inhabited.

For a few hours tonight, EV and I both did that – sometimes together, sometimes independently.

I don’t mean to project that smaller me onto EV. She will be the person she will be, and that doesn’t have to be a reflection of me. Nor would I want it to be, honestly – I did plenty of great things as a child, but there’s a lot of things I could have handled better.

I suppose that’s the point of parenting just as much as it’s hard not to see yourself in the behavior of your child when they already look half the part.