The Life and Times of a Navy Husband

Ever since I bought Silversun Pickups’ latest album, Swoon back in May, I have not been able to stop listening to it, along with their previous album, Carnavas. Swoon rekindled my interest in the latter, which I’d downloaded on a whim from iTunes. Together, the two albums have dominated my listening for two months.

But I’ve been a little unsettled by the reviews the band has received. They’re the sort of “this band is competent and easy on the ears…but…” reviews that music critics love to write about popular bands.

Every review compares them to the Smashing Pumpkins in a dismissive way I find really annoying. The Pumpkins are an obvious influence, but all bands have influences. All bands—all musicians—build on the music has come before.

I find both albums really easy to listen to. Over and over. There’s depth and dynamism here. There are layers. And maybe it’s because they’re bringing back a sound I’ve missed in alt rock (namely, a grungy, buzzy, guitar-driven sound), but I can’t stop loving this music. It has none of the too-precious, ironic and inaccessible pretentiousness of the favorites over at Pitchfork.

So maybe I have mediocre taste in music, or maybe I’m just drawn to stuff that strikes a chord (sorry) in my fond memories of growing up grunge.

Or maybe this is just fucking good music, and maybe the critics need to get over themselves.

The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
This book is a classic. If you’re interested in the history of the computer business, you’ll really enjoy it.

Kidder follows a team of engineers at Data General as they design, build, and debug a new machine for the company. At the time (late 1970s), the biggest deal in computer tech was the mini computer. This was the stepping stone from the large IBM-style mainframes to the Apple and IBM personal computers that came after.

The book profiles Tom West and several members of his team as they compete against not only other computer manufacturers, like DEC and IBM, but also against another team within Data General to build a 32-bit “supermini.” It makes for a very compelling story.


View all my reviews.

Rabbit Redux by John Updike

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
Updike can be hard to read. You have to commit. But if you commit, you won’t regret. The plot of this book, like Rabbit Run, simmers slowly and builds organically to a very satisfying conclusion, and along the way, you get to experience whatever decade Rabbit’s experiencing.

In this case, that’s the Sixties, during the civil rights upheaval. I marveled at the tangle Rabbit gets himself into and delighted in his handling of it (Rabbit tends to just go with the flow of whatever happens in his life).

This is a great book. I highly recommend it.

View all my reviews.

Sean and I have been traveling this week and visiting Danielle, and the confines of a hotel room (actually a room in the bachelor officers’ quarters where Danielle is staying for her training this summer) have acted like a pressure cooker. I’m so much more aware of the bad habits he and I are developing.

Now that he can walk, Sean is becoming a lot more assertive and demanding. He doesn’t want to be held (except when he does); he doesn’t want to just sit in the stroller (unless he’s tired of walking); basically, he wants what he wants when he wants it. As he’s gotten stronger, this has gotten a lot more annoying. When I’m trying to make breakfast or wash the dishes or work on the computer, Seanzilla frequently walks up and pushes his way in front of me and grabs at me until I pick him up. To add to the urgency, he usually screams at me while he does this.

Danielle has helped me realize that if I constantly give in to his demands, we’re going to have a tyrant on our hands. So the travel crib has become a playpen. I can deal with the crying. I can’t deal with Pushy Mr. Grabby Hands.

I’ve also developed a couple bad habits of my own. I’ve categorized these into types of parents.

Smartphone Dad
Since I purchased a Palm Pre, I’ve become that guy: the guy who stops the grocery cart in the middle of the store to read an e-mail or takes a breather during a walk to look up the name of that one actor in that one movie. I used to be so judgmental of people who talked on their phones while pushing the stroller, and now I’ve become that kind of parent. I need to make rules for myself about when to use this thing, or it’ll take over my life.

Let’s see… No phone while driving, no phone at the dinner table, no ignoring my child in favor of shiny new phone, no playing with phone as means of ignoring world around me.

That’s a good start.

Sarcastic Dad
When Sean does something that would only make sense for a toddler to do—say, for example, when he dumps his bowl of Cheerios all over the back seat—I find myself responding with irony. “Oh,” I say. “That’s great!” What is it that drives us to employ sarcasm with our children? They don’t understand it, so it’s purely for our benefit. It’s a way of blowing off steam without directly confronting the problem.

“Oh, that’s just super, Anakin. I was hoping you would use the force to pull the arms off all the droids. Now I get to put them all back on!”

But at what age do kids start understanding that you’re not being literal, and that there’s something a little darker in your tone? And at what age does it become necessary to really confront these little misbehavings directly?

I’m guessing the age to start addressing them directly is about eighteen months, because that’s about how old Sean is, and if I don’t deal with his Seananigans now, I’ll be in big trouble.

It’s like getting addled, caused by spending too much time with a toddler.

I have a new post up at milspouse.com/blog: “Adult Conversation.”

The other day I was explaining to my wife Danielle on the phone that Sean (our 17-month-old) and I had discovered two new monsters in our presence. One was the Washcloth Monster, who feeds on the crumbs little boys leave behind, and the other was the Hand Wipe Monster, his cousin, who follows us around town and feeds on little boys’ sticky paws.

Danielle said I needed more adult relationships, ASAP.

The social breakdown started happening long before it was Tom and Sean Time, All the Time, however. During the Year of Bliss, we became aware of a downward trend in how much we cared about typical social mores. We called it our “desocialization.” I’ll spare you most of the particulars. Bathroom doors started staying open, I began to find it very funny to show off my belly button lint. Etc.

As you spend more and more time as a family unit, you become more and more comfortable with each other, more and more secure in the knowledge that, for example, passing gas is not going to sour the deal.

I don’t know if you can ever go back to the way things were before. Probably not. Nor would I necessarily want to.

Not that I was ever really worried, but I’m happy to be able to say Sean and I are doing quite well as bachelors. Danielle has been gone for three weeks, and we haven’t had a major catastrophe, yet—unless you count the surprise Sean had waiting for me in his crib this morning.

I try to avoid too many poo stories because I assume they’re mainly only interesting to me, but other parents will, I’m sure, be able to relate. I’ll relate this one in the second person, for added effect:

You’re awakened by the sounds of your toddler in the next room. He sounds content enough, so you lie in bed for a while longer, savoring the morning air coming in through the open window beside your bed, and before you know it, an hour has passed. You finally muster the energy to climb out of bed and pull on a pair of jeans and a t-shirt, thinking it would nice to walk down to the diner for breakfast. You drink a glass of water and swallow your prescription pill for the day and wander bleary-eyed down the hall to your child’s room.

Eventually, you put everything right, thank God (or your toddler’s precocious good sense) that he didn’t smear poo all over himself and fling it at the walls (you’ve heard stories), and then you finally walk down the hill, slowly, holding his hand, for breakfast.

That was how my morning went.

This is a draft of the first chapter of my novel Lithium which I am currently in the process of rewriting. This is part of my ongoing experiment with deadlines. You can read more of my fiction here.

“Have you decided what you’re going to do?”

“No. I don’t know.”

We were sitting on a blanket in the park listening to a free concert sponsored by a local alternative rock station. Mac and Wendy had gone on a beer run and Maggie had taken the opportunity to ask me the question that had been on her mind since Wednesday when the news of my mother’s death had arrived. It was now Friday evening and my father and I were booked on an early morning flight to Boston for the funeral the next day. That made it three days that I’d been avoiding this conversation, and now I saw Mac and Wendy coming with a pitcher and four plastic cups to save me from having it now.

I had been worried that my reaction to the news about Marianne was not severe enough. I had insisted on going back to work on Thursday. Mac and I had gone to the pub Thursday night. He had understood my unspoken desire to pretend nothing had happened, and we’d traded stories about work, talked about our respective girlfriend troubles. I’d kicked off work early to go to the concert, but other than that it was business as usual.

My mother and I had not been close. She and my father divorced when I was three, and he’d won sole custody when I was twelve after she’d left me alone in her Wilmington, Delaware, apartment for two days. She’d had a manic episode and disappeared for a week before they found her after a traffic stop in New Jersey. I was the one who called the police to report her missing. I didn’t see her for ten years after that. I thought for a long time she was punishing my father, refusing to come to Seattle to see me, but it could just as easily have been her disease that kept her away, the alternating mania and depression.

But I had a hard time understanding that. She was a prolific writer, a literary renaissance woman, publishing novels and short stories and essays and poetry. If she could do that, why couldn’t she swallow her pride and cross the Mississippi and the Rockies for a visit every year or two?

Marianne was never famous outside literary circles, never had an Oprah appearance, but she had one New York Times bestseller and had several stories anthologized in various fiction collections. She even wrote about me, once, in a personal essay in which she revealed, rather bluntly, that she hadn’t seen me, at the time, in over seven years. She didn’t justify it, didn’t blame anyone other than herself. It’s just the way it was, she wrote. This was in Harper’s. There was some minor outrage in the letters section.

I reminded myself of all of this to try to make myself feel better about not feeling worse, but it didn’t help.

Mac and Wendy sat down and passed cups around and poured beer for everyone, a summertime ale we looked forward to every spring. It was early this year, appearing at the end of April instead of May.

“If we drink this with enough gratitude and enthusiasm, I think we can ward off the rain,” Mac was saying. So far, we had been blessed with clear skies for the concert, but in the west, rain threatened. In Seattle, rain always threatened. We ignored it. Even if a shower started, we would stoically enjoy the concert, and the band, which was local, would stoically play on.

[Read more →]

Last month, the tire pressure monitor in the Mazda clicked on, warning me of low pressure in one of the tires. The rear driver’s side tire was about 20 psi low, so I had the shop take a look when I had it in for service and they found a nail. That was the second one in about six months.

So, yesterday, when the driveway was empty, I went over the driveway and found these:

Eight nasty little surprises just waiting for the right moment.

Our landlady had a new roof put on last year, and these were the nails (plus the two our tires found, plus a couple others I’ve spotted myself) they missed. Who knows how many others are hiding, waiting.

Well, we’re in the full swing of Danielle’s TAD (temporary assigned duty) in Virginia. She’s training for her next assignment, and Sean and I are training for…her next assignment.

The first week went pretty well, and we had a surprise at the end. My mom came out East for the week, and she and my sister came down to Newport. It’s been great to have an extra pair of hands to help with Sean, the only problem being that he’s exhibiting signs of separation anxiety and wants me to hold him a lot. And that’s fine, except when I’m trying to make dinner.

Before Danielle left she got a fancy new laptop with a webcam built in, so we’ve been experimenting with Skype. I think with some tinkering it will help with Sean’s separation anxiety and Danielle’s homesickness.

Our surprise was that Danielle had a four-day weekend for the holiday and drove home to surprise us. I knew she was thinking about it, but didn’t know for sure till I called her and she told me she was in New Jersey. Of course, then she ran into some trouble and had a bit of an adventure, but that’s another story.

The real test will be next week when Sean and I are on our own. Then we get to go on a trip to see Danielle again. This is the great thing about TAD, versus deployment.

Read my milspouse.com/blog post.

My buddy John and I have been chatting about building a community for military husbands for some time, now, and we’re finally taking our first baby steps: Milhusbands.squarespace.com.

The site is in its infancy, but we’re hoping it will grow as word spreads. The idea is that existing sites focus mainly on women, which is natural: most military spouses are military wives. We wanted a sort of virtual military husbands’ club. It’s hard to meet other guys in our situation since there are so few of us, but the Internet makes it easy for a small group to interact even over long distances.

So please check it out, and say “hi” in the forums.