Nobody Knows Anything

There’s an article in the LA Times today (yes, I still read it) about the proliferation of “life coaches”: color consultants, spiritual gurus, personal trainers, feng shui experts.

Makes me nostalgic for Posse-town, it do, it do.

Okay, maybe I’m the last on the block to have heard of Mark Walker, but this is ridiculous. Unless my three-year-old can do it. Then it’s really, really cute.

Dude, I don’t know. More serious reviewers than I have analyzed this movie in-depth. You want discussion of the philosophy behind this flick, be my guest. Maybe this is the most amazing presentation of Gnostic philosophy ever. Maybe it’s all commentary on reality and corporate hype.

All I know is, during the very long and technically marvelous action scenes, my main thought was, “I wonder how they did the CGI for this one.”

Probably not the reaction they were looking for.

Also: tired of the whole black trenchcoats and sunglasses thing. But maybe that’s me.

But I did notice the same makeup of the population of Zion that this guy did. Gotta mean something. Guess the next movie will explain it all.

By the way, you totally need to refresh with The Matrix before seeing Reloaded. Took me a little while to get with the program (heh) and figure out the rules.

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We were able to see The Matrix Reloaded because Darin’s brother Scott and his girlfriend asked to babysit on Friday night. Yes, you read that correctly. They told us they’d like to babysit.

Maybe we do live in the Matrix…

I don’t know if it’s hayfever or if we’ve all just run into a batch of a spring cold or what, but we’re all sick. I’m stuffed up and have a headache, Darin’s got a sore throat, Sophia’s got a runny nose, and poor Simon: he’s thrown up twice in the past two days. (And this is a kid who’s never thrown up.)

I’ve decided to concentrate instead on how many days left until escrow on our new house closes. On how many more nights we sleep in the temporary housing (8, in case you’re wondering).

On getting a new supply of tissues from the drugstore.

You’ve seen it and you hate it. You swear you’re never going to do it. When you get right down to it though, you can’t help yourself.

You always compare your kids against the other ones.

The other day we visited my sister and her kids, and they gave me a birthday present for Simon. (He’s a year! An entire year! How did that happen?) The card was signed with the cousins’ names, and Madeline, the almost-4-year-old, had written the names. An ungainly, wobbly scrawl, but legible.

Sophia’s written a couple of letters on her own, but mostly by accident, I think. I told myself, she doesn’t need to write yet. But still…I got a little flicker of “Does this mean anything?” down in my stomach.

Then today we ran into a mom and a 3.5 year old in the park, and the two girls played together some with Simon while I talked to the mom. (Another adult. Whoo hoo.) I asked her about her daughter’s preschool and she told me how impressed she was with them: her daughter could count up to 13, she knew all her shapes and colors, and she knew most of her letters, although sometimes she didn’t recognize one…

Ha! I thought. Sophia counts up to twenty all the time and she’s doing rudimentary addition and subtraction (particularly when it comes to figuring out how many cookies everyone gets). She not only knows her letters, but one of her favorite activities at P.F. Chang’s (if you give her half a chance, Sophia is happy to tell you that “P.F. Chang’s is my favorite restaurant”) is to take everyone’s chopsticks and form letters with them.

This comparison thing is not only a bad idea but it’s lethal. Lethal and endemic. Constant testing, constant comparison. “You’ve got to do better in school! You’ve got to keep your GPA high! You’ve got to make a lot of money!”

Of course, I’m lucky enough to have gotten the two best kids ever, so that’s okay. But what if I hadn’t?

According to weather.com, it’s 75 in Cupertino right now. According to me, weather.com should get out of the weather business. I took the kids to a park this morning and thought we were all going to get heat stroke. I put Simon in the sand under the jungle gym (where there’s shade), and instead of running off like she normally would, Sophia stayed right with us. In the shade.

This has been a tough week.

We finally got air conditioning in the apartment (on the third day—if they hadn’t fixed it by then I was going to check into a hotel and let Darin work it out with Apple). But the apartment is on the third floor of the building with no elevator (haven’t these people heard of the Americans with Disabilities Act? it’s a new building!), and lugging my 25-pound sack of potatoes (named “Simon”) up and down the stairs multiple times a day isn’t going to happen. So when we leave the apartment in the morning, I have to find stuff for us to do until we go back in the late afternoon and wait for Daddy to get home.

This has turned out to be somewhat harder than I was expecting it would be.

For one thing—I know this is minor, but it’s indicative—where do I take the kids for lunch? If it weren’t for that three flights of stairs (six, actually, because each flight is divided into two sections), I might take them home, but I’m not doing that. So I have to find restaurants, and after a while the idea of giving your kids chicken fingers and french fries again begins to turn your stomach. So that’s been an adventure.

Haven’t found a preschool. Haven’t found a babysitter. Haven’t even gotten together with one of the groups of mommies I know is in the area (my fault—I lost the numbers and have to get them again).

We’ve had majorly ugly escrow-fu this week that I will discuss once the doctor says my blood pressure has regularized.

So, it’s been tough. I know that overall it’s worth it and in a few months I’ll be saying, “Yes, yes, I remember that slight hiccup in the road, nothing major.” But right now—things are hot all over.

(Oh, I forgot one thing: Simon has started walking! And now we’re in a place with no babyproofing. He careens all over the place, inordinately proud of himself. I can’t wait until we’re in the new house and he can learn the fine art of walking on grass!)

I just ran into a little snafu today. We checked into the corporate apartment, finally (a day later than we had originally planned, which is a long, excruciating, and ultimately not very interesting story) and discovered our Internet connection wasn’t working.

So today, after arranging to get someone to fix the air conditioning (which wasn’t working, so the place was 80 degrees last night at 10pm, which is especially exciting with two kids), I called to find out about the Internet hookup.

Short answer: $150 for the two weeks we’ll be in the apartment…and they can’t install it until the middle of next week anyhow.

So: no Internet on hand (quick: sign of the Apocalypse or no?), and I’m currently logging on by parking outside my brother-in-law’s apartment and hopping on his bandwidth. Which I can do maybe twice a day, with kids in the back screaming, “Hey! We want your attention right now!”

I’ll work on a few extremely exciting entries to make up for this shortfall.

So the movers showed up on Monday and boxed up our house:

(That guy, over on the right? That’s Darin, working throughout the chaos. He has focus.)

The movers came back on Tuesday and took everything:

Sophia, Simon, and I were not there through this hilarity. We were at Disneyland:

Darin stayed at home and—yes, you guessed it—worked through the entire nonsense of movers taking all of his stuff away. How he does that, I have no idea.

We’ve spent the last several days working our way up the coast, stopping in Santa Barbara and Monterey. Now we’re in the Bay Area and I don’t think it’s quite sunk in yet. As in, we’re here now. Every so often I find myself on the verge of crying and I find myself shaking it off. Crying about what? Yes, we’ve left a lot of friends and a great area to move to a great area with a lot of friends.

I’ll save the crying for after a few days of having the kids all to myself with no breaks.

I also saw the house today—Darin drove me around the neighborhood and then we stopped at the house. The owner was there, washing his car, and he gave me a tour while Darin stayed with the kids. (The guy’s a career cop, and he’d noticed us driving by before, on a day when there were lots of cars driving around because of the incredible number of yard sales. Spooky.)

I love the house. I love the neighborhood. Darin did good.

But I’m completely knackered and this is the easy part, because Darin and I have gotten to tag-team the kids all week. What happens on Monday, I ask you, when it’s me and two kids and Darin’s off in the office taking it easy?¹

Well, we have plenty of errands to do, that’s for sure. I just have to remind myself that this is a big adventure.

¹ For some definition of “easy” that encompasses “Suddenly becoming a manager of a giant, high-profile project at a high-profile company.”

A few weekends ago Michele and I took a one-day course at UCLA Extension entitled “Finding and Working with the Right Literary Agent for you.” Since the total amount of novel-writing I’ve done in the past three months approaches zero, I looked at this primarily as a reason to get together with Michele and think about writing some. I didn’t expect to learn anything.

One of my nervous tics during a class like this is to observe other people in the class and do character sketches of them, describing their persons and personas. I always focus on the Loudmouths, the ones who believe they’re in a seminar of one and try to hog the teacher’s attention. And the prime Hog this time was a character all right—at one point, while the Hog was going on and on about something in her nasal, grating voice, I leaned over to Michele and said, “Do you know the character Pat from Saturday Night Live?” (Sadly, she doesn’t.)

Anyhow, as I was attempting to observe “Pat” surreptitiously to write down her description, I realized that I couldn’t see her very clearly. The only way to see clearly enough was to squint, and there’s no such thing as surreptitious squinting—go ahead, give it a try, I dare you.

I guess moving has been good for me. I’ve woken up and smelled the espresso about needing to get back into shape, and that day I got a wake-up call about my eyesight.

Which was disappointing to say the least, given that six years ago I had LASIK surgery. Now, it was something of a medical miracle that my eyesight could be corrected in the first place, because I went from -12 diopters with astigmatism (which is the technical term for “blind as a bat”) to 20/20. Well, 20/25, but close enough for government work.

I went to the optometrist (where I haven’t been since 1998, it seems) and got my eyes checked: they’re at -1.25. I got myself a new pair of glasses yesterday and yup, I was in serious denial about how bad my eyesight had gotten. I must have been straining my eyes really hard to see clearly. I could read signs a block and a half away, whereas before I had stopped trying to read them.

All of my old psychological wounds about wearing glasses have resurfaced—I got called “Four Eyes” more than a few times. I suppose I can get contacts again, even disposable ones this time, which I certainly couldn’t get with a -12 prescription. My inner moppet is screaming, “NO! They said no more glasses and no more contacts and I don’ wanna!” I look at Fia and Simon and wonder if I’ve cursed them with my eyesight. If in a few years they’re going to have to start braving the Four Eyes label.

Evidently Apple covers LASIK now, but do I really want to have that procedure again, if my eyes are just going to keep changing? Is this just vanity on my part? Or should I just get the contacts and be done with it?