Man Up

I was not sure if I was going to post anything about this, because it's a lot more personal than most things I put on this blog, but I feel like I'm performing something of a public service, so here I go:

Dudes: get a vasectomy.

B and I have always been 100% sure that we were going to have less than or equal to one kid, and with Plan C seven weeks old, happy and healthy, we have succeeded in that goal. B was on the pill for a long, long time and it contributed to unhappy feelings in a very unequivocal way. Then she had to have a cesarean. So having a vasectomy is, really, the least I could do in the context of my marriage and life in general.

I'll spare you the details, but the whole thing took less than 20 minutes. Recovery takes a few days. That's the whole deal.

It pisses me off that so many men are so defensive about this and similar issues. Women have to submit to uncomfortable and, let's face it, kind of humiliating examinations every single YEAR. They're often expected to be the ones worrying about birth control, they (obviously) have to deal with the lion's share of pregnancy issues, and comparable sterilization surgery (i.e. tubes tied) is far more intrusive than the male equivalent. From my perspective, this is a no-brainer; if you and your partner know that you don't want to have any kids or any more kids, the dude should go and get it done.

For me, this is an aspect of sadly-neglected masculinity: being responsible and being willing to make uncomfortable decisions when they're the logical ones to make. The whole idea of "manning up" seems to mean being able to, say, survive a season crab fishing in Alaska, rather than, say, being a responsible father and husband. That, my young friends, is horseshit.

Doctor of Philosophy

My adviser and me at the UCSC grad commencement on Friday.

Just to make it official, I have completed my PhD in history. This last term has been pretty bizarre. I was furiously editing and (more to the point) formatting my dissertation up until a few days before the little croc was born and I've been firing off e-mails and paperwork since then to insure that the degree actually showed up on time. Commencement was stressful, wrangling logistics for visiting family and worrying that Plan C was going to go ballistic (she didn't - she slept almost the whole time), but it ended up being very nice and we had delicious pizza afterward.

Now I'm in a funny position. I have three reasonably well-known scholars advocating on my behalf and a couple of publication pseudo-opportunities. That said, once I'm done teaching this summer, I have precisely nothing waiting for me - no teaching jobs, no postdocs, nothin'. Over the next 12 months, I will either land something and remain an academic, or I won't and I won't.

Either way, I am happy and relieved to finish the degree. I know a lot about modern European intellectual history now.

Great Personal Anticlimaxes

1. Moving to Eugene, Oregon. I was a kid. I spent the preceding weeks sick as a dog with something my family called "Christopher Disease" (bear in my mind that my dad was a doctor.) I woke up one day and we lived in Eugene instead of the little logging town in which I had grown up.
2. Playing a concert at the WOW Hall in Eugene. As a high school freshman, I had thought that if I could just be in a band that played the WOW (that would be "Woodworkers of the World," a former union hall converted into a concert venue) Hall, my 14 year-old punk rock fantasies would be fulfilled. Thirty minute sets go quickly, though, and it wasn't quite the underground rock n' roll fantasy I'd dreamed of.
3. Freshman year in college. For some reason I thought there would be more cool people at the giant idiotic sports school I went to. In the end, all of my friends were through the music scene; some were also college students, but that was just a coincidence.
4. My year in England. It turns the two-tone ska and street punk stuff I loved was a generation out of date by 1999.
   
5. Quitting all of my jobs in Portland. I hated those fucking jobs, but every time it was just "have lunch, receive a pat on the back, leave."
6. Finishing my PhD. Plan C overshadows the doctorate, to begin with, and getting a doctorate is such a cumulative process anyway that by the time you end, you've been almost done for a long time already. Also, having precisely no academic prospects puts a bit of a damper on earning a highly specialized degree that only lends itself to academic prospects.

Happily for me, getting married and having a kid were both wonderful, climactic things. It's weird to think that my major accomplishments fit so neatly into the standard script, but there you have it.

Ow. I Am a Redneck.

One of the advantages of having a lot of tattoos is that it keeps you out of the sun, thereby dramatically reducing the risk of skin cancer and keeping your complexion youthful and vigorous.

When you're as white as I am, however, all it takes is a few minutes. The above happened, and all of a sudden I started thinking of voting for republicans.

Babies and Jobs

This is a two'fer...

1. Plan C sucks at sleeping. You hear this a lot from parents, because pretty much any time a baby isn't asleep, he or she is probably crying or about to start crying. In our case, she sleeps at night reasonably well (praise be to Allah), but she spends many long hours every day letting us know that she's very tired but failing to make the cause-and-effect connection between that and actually going to sleep. We get one, maybe two decent naps out of her per day, and by decent I mean "about an hour." She is a cutie and I love her, but damn.
2. So, just to make it official: it is almost certain that we're moving back to PDX, almost certainly in early September. I've officially started applying for jobs at the various community colleges in the area; it's tricky right now since my PhD isn't official until the end of the month, but I'm doing it anyway (officially). I don't have much to say about this right now, except that I expect the job hunt to officially suck and that I don't really care because I'm so excited at the prospect of being back in the best city on the planet, in which officially 60% of my favorite people live (I've had six official years to meet the other 40%.)

(One side note on the job part: I have such a weird resume. I have the IT background, random teaching jobs [SAT prep courses, anyone?], and the full-on academic thing, all mixed up in a frothy brew of dubious employment prospects. If it works out, I'll either be teaching history as a temp adjunct or land some random corporate gig. I don't really give two shits right now; I just want a steady income at some point by the end of 2010.)

Sith Lord Throws the Horns

I am very proud of my one month year-old daughter.

Obligatory End-of-Lost Blog Post

So long, Ben.

It's been a long haul. B and I have watched all six seasons of Lost since its inception. We started a little way into the first season and stuck with it all the way through, including the stupid and awful third season. Sunday was the finale, during which they finally killed the stupid smoke monster, various people got off the island, and everything ended on a reassuringly confusing note. I guess...the alternate time-stream thing was actually the pan-denominational afterlife?* But they really had been on a magic island together, maybe up until the nuclear blast at the end of last season? I dunno.

The thing that kind of pissed me off was that, of the various questions they did answer (the whispers were dead people!!!), they did not, in fact, explain what the fucking island was. One of the earliest theories floating around the internet was that it was a kind of purgatory, that everyone died in the initial plane crash and they were all working through their respective sins. That theory seemed to be debunked, but there was clearly some kind of already-dead shenanigans going down.

Anyway. It's a relief. I find watching shows like Lost to be pretty stressful. Interesting and fun, hopefully, but tiring. One of the reasons I love True Blood so much is that it's just 100% pure uncomplicated good times, while most other "really good" shows (i.e. Mad Men) make me very nervous while I'm watching them.

I am very happy to never have to watch Sawyer and Jack argue ever again.

Ben and Desmond were the best characters.

* The cheeseball "all religions are the same" stained glass window thing at the very end: groan.

P.S. Here's a decent attempt at a big explain-it-all write-up.

Babies as Fashion Accessories

She wants to rock.

The baby croc has been throwing us a few curveballs lately; where she had been sleeping all night, waking up for feedings then happily returning to bed, she has now decided that sometimes she'd rather scream for three hours in the middle of the night. These things happen.

That noted, I wanted to talk about a different baby-related phenomenon than banal old sleep deprivation. On my return from France back in January of 2009, I called attention to the fact that the French are wonderful about ignoring each other in public, a skill Americans really need to work on. American men invariably stare each other down as they walk / drive / bike past, a stupid and pointless behavior pattern that is a leading cause of kungfuramones hating Santa Cruz.

BUT, with a BABY, this doesn't happen to me any more!

It turns out that if you have a baby in public, you vanish! I mean, middle-aged women walk up and coo and ask questions, but dudes just glance and then get kind of confused and embarrassed and promptly ignore you. I think it's because no man with a baby can possibly be looking to engage in a manly contest with other men; he is clearly preoccupied with transportating a tiny, harmless and helpless creature and has no time for fisticuffs, drinking tequila, or world's strongest man competitions. For dudes like me who have no time for so-called mad-dogging, this is awesome.