Now, some people might think three years is a long time to be remodeling a house that was perfectly livable to begin with. And those people are right. And they can stop talking now because they are not making me feel good about this at all.

There is a very long story behind the gap in time between our purchase of the house and finally moving in. The story is so long, in fact, that it resulted in our “temporary” apartment being the place I’ve lived the longest in my entire life.

But because the apartment was temporary (it was temporary from the day we moved in four and a half years ago) we had a strange sort of attitude toward it:

“Ah, no sense in hanging those pictures. We’ll be getting a house soon.”

“No, no sense in buying a mattress for that frame. We’ll be getting a house soon.”

“No, no sense in buying a crib for Erin. We’ll be moving into our house soon; we want to decorate her room first.”

“No, no sense in buying a crib for Adrian. We’ll be moving into our house soon; who wants to assemble then disassemble a crib that closely together?”

The apartment was always temporary, and we treated it as such. We had temporary solutions and workarounds to problems (tacking up a blanket on the window in the bedroom to make the room darker for the baby instead of installing a blackout shade) and we saw no point whatsoever in organizing our lives, especially after the kids were born: why organize what they are going to thrash and that you are going to be moving in a few months swear to God it’s only going to be a few months now please.

It was temporary, and impersonal, and weirdly home, and weirdly alien. We lived in that complex for four and a half years and it took two of those years to meet our downstairs neighbours. We never really met anyone else, either. Why bother, when you are only going to be there for another few months.

It was always just another few months.

But now, we’re in the house. We hadn’t even moved into the house and we already knew the people who would be living on one side of us; we met the other couple the day after we moved.

Pictures are being hung, postcards are being tacked to walls, mirrors are going up, books are being organized, rules are being instituted for the preservation of the order and maintenance of the house.

Being in the house is also saving the environment. While in the apartment, see, I’d separate out the recycling into a different trash can, but it’s not like we had a bunch of room for receptacles: it was trash, and recycling (vaguely), and that was it. I had some naive idea about sorting the recycling every week down at the dumpster where the paper/can/cardboard containers were. But it never happened. Since most of our recycling was in the form of plastic bottles and aluminum cans I used to just haul that load downstairs and toss it in the “cans/bottles” container and pat myself on the back for being such a good environmentalist.

Ha.

One day I received a passive-aggressive note on my door from the trash company (how they knew it was me still eludes me) telling me that I was recycling badly and to start doing it right or else. They thought they were helping the environment, I suppose. But they didn’t reckon with The Most Stubborn Man In The World.

See, The Most Stubborn Man In The World sees a note like that and says “Oh yeah? Well you and you’re damned environment can go to Hell, trash man.” And then instead of one can for trash and the other for recycling, all of a sudden The Most Stubborn Man In The World has two trash cans. Bonus.

At the house, though, I have my own recycling sorter, with one side for paper and the other for cans/bottles. It’s right outside my kitchen door. And the trash can is so small that I have to recycle or I’ll get charged extra for not being able to fit all my trash in the rollaway can.

See? And now The Most Stubborn Man In The World (who was also the Worst Member Of The Green Party In The World) has no excuse. World saved.

Thanks, house.

Erin has her own room now. Adrian has his own room now. The cat has his own room now. We have a garage and it’s surprisingly already full of crap we need to get rid of (and I have no idea how we fit it all into a two-bedroom apartment in the first place). I now understand garage sales.

I’ve been taking power tools to things, and getting propane for the grill (why bother refilling the propane tank when we’ll be in the house soon?) and finding out the dryer doesn’t work and figuring out that having laminate and tile floors throughout the place is much harder (and colder) on my toesy-woesies than carpet. I had to buy slippers to place by the front door.

I’ve also been a little stunned at how quickly dirt shows up on hard floor surfaces like laminate and tile. And then I realized that it’s not that they get dirty any faster than carpet, but that carpet just hides it all deep down to jump out at you when you are rolling around on it. And then…ew. Hard floors forever, mommy-huggers. I like to see my enemy.

The house is warm, because it’s insulated and doesn’t have a big gap under the front door to let all the hot air out (or the hot air in, if it’s summer), and why would we go to the trouble of sealing windows and doors in the apartment when we won’t be here for another winter/summer, right?

There’s an apricot tree in my backyard. And my neighbour has lemons dropping into my yard for me to steal. There’s a shed out back that’s full of spiders and an old washing machine. Do you want an old washing machine? I also have a gas dryer that may or may not work (and an electric one that definitely doesn’t).

My lawn is gone to Hell. The weeds took over long ago. Three years ago we said “Why do landscaping when they’re just going to be tearing the house up and ruining the yard anyway during the remodel? We’ll be done in a few months, so it can wait.” And then, every spring since we’ve had to do some serious weeding at a house we didn’t live in because the city would leave a little note saying “You aren’t allowed to grow your own rainforest in your front yard. Especially one that only has dandelion trees. Get on it.”

There are many projects left in this “finished” house, because it’s not so much “finished” as it is “as done as it needs to be for us to sleep there”. We’ll be working on it until we move again. We’ll never get out of it, financially, what we’ll have put in. There are a lot of reasons for that, in the long story, and only part of it is because of the housing market crash.

But Erin and Adrian finally have a neighbourhood, one that we envisioned three years ago.

It will take a while for this new place to feel like home, especially with all of the strange feelings I have about it. During the past three years I’ve hated that house. I’ve fantasized about burning it, about accidents making it unlivable, about natural disasters and acts of God. It’s been the most draining experience. The house is the cause of “if only” thoughts and wishes to go back in time and stop ourselves from buying in the first place. Sometimes it felt like standing at the edge of a cliff with a badly made parachute on your back being given the option to jump to my possible death, or to have the parachute taken away and be pushed to my certain death.

As I hang things on walls that sat in storage for three or four years in our “temporary” apartment I can forget about those old, dark thoughts for a while. The house starts to feel like home.

Soon it will feel more like home than even the place I barely lived, though for four and a half years.

I need to get my lawn in order. Anybody know a guy?

(Not pictured, above, House.)

**********************************************************

Sophie

My great fear as a parent is that I will fail. No, that’s too trite. My great fear is that despite an intellectual commitment to raising my children in as thoughtful, respectful, joyous and diligent a manner as possible, I will instead harm them with those thoughts and beliefs that remain hidden from the world, and even from myself; the submerged opinions formed in my own childhood that have long since been consciously rejected, but which perhaps persist, infecting my healthy parenting with a malady of anachronism.

This is Sophie:

My wife and I call her "Sophie the twenty dollar giraffe", because even though she is a fairly inexpensive rubber toy in her native France, once imported her price skyrockets.

One cannot be a good (read: slightly snobby and keeping up with the Joneses) parent on the San Francisco Peninsula unless one has purchased Sophie. She is an excellent teething toy, and babies love her. Erin loved chewing on Sophie so much that when she lost her at dinner we immediately purchased another.

That’s Sophie, the forty dollar giraffe.

We spent the money in part because it helped when Erin was teething, but we also spent the money because Erin liked Sophie. I want to give Erin the things that she likes. But sometimes giving her the things she likes makes me feel guilty. For instance, she loves to push her own stroller around. And this is wonderful, and adorable, and also not always a possibility. But in those instances when I’ve taken her stroller from her, for whatever reason, she has grown very upset with me, and she shows me this face:

Which breaks my heart. And so occasionally I’ll give in, and let her push it anyway. This always makes me feel guilty. As though I am spoiling her by letting her have the things that she wants so desperately. And then I wonder about this feeling of guilt, and whether it’s legitimate or not. And I trace it, correctly or not, to a chapter of Rousseau’s Emile that I remember reading in the 9th grade. It’s an Enlightenment treatise on education that devotes only one chapter to educating girls (an oversight Mary Wollestonecraft was very quick to criticize). In this chapter Rousseau introduces Sophie, and discusses the proper way to educate a girl who is destined to be Emile’s companion, wife, and servant. And one of the key elements to raising this girl, doomed by her sex to the life Rousseau imagines for her, is to create her as a passive companion:

"It is necessary that the one [Emile] have the power and the will; it is enough that the other [Sophie] should offer little resistance."

My deep fear is that my guilty feelings about possibly spoiling my daughter are influenced by some archaic notion that what Rousseau is saying is true: that women need to be raised differently than men, because they have some nature that differentiates them in a relevant way. This passage from Rousseau has stuck with me for 16 years, peering down from my shoulder like my own devil; stalking me like a mad killer of dreams:

"Girls should be vigilant and hardworking, but this is not enough by itself; they should be accustomed to annoyances early on. This misfortune, if such it be, is inherent in their sex, and they will never escape from it, unless to endure much more cruel sufferings. For their entire life they will have to submit to the most continual and most severe annoyances, those of proper decorum. They must be trained to bear constraint from the first, so that it costs them nothing, to master their own fantasies in order to submit to the will of others."

And every time I think about taking Erin’s stroller away I wonder if I am just buying into Rousseau’s line: that I need to raise my daughter to be accustomed to disappointment; that I need to make her docile in the face of my authority, even when I exercise that authority whimsically and arbitrarily. And yet, even knowing that this might be the reason for my guilt, I cannot help but think I might spoil her. And that is the real, damning, myopic legacy that I cannot shake.

So, I fear that at the end of the day I am not the man I claim to be, that I am not the father I intend to be, and that I am not the parent I ought to be. Because I only have a one child, and that child is a daughter, I have the fear that I would raise my son differently. I fear that if, in the end, I have a son that I am going to make a choice, a horrible, terrible, and frightful choice. One that will save one child and doom another, because I am entirely within the power of some other entity.

While William Styron’s Sophie has to face this choice because of a sadistic Nazi doctor, my fear is that I will be forced to make my own choice because of some lingering, traitorous, and anachronistic ideas about differences between men and women. What I hope is that as much guilt as I feel about indulging her I will likewise feel about indulging him, giving the lie to this entire fear I’ve now spent ages and pages articulating. But until I have a son this can never be put to the test. And if I never have a son I don’t think I will know for sure that I am anything better than the misguided, bigoted figure that I fear I will turn out to be.

***********************************************************

It’s still too early to tell.

When I say “no one is too fat to fly” I don’t mean that every person of any size can travel by any plane and sit in any seat. But the phrasing of the question “How fat is too fat to fly?” implies that the only thing of importance is the size of the person…not the size of the seat.

Bigger seats are possible. I have one. I have a big comfy chair in my living room. I have a couch in my living room. I’ve seen many places to sit that are bigger than modern airline seats. So the issue surely isn’t that the people are of the wrong type or kind to be able to travel by air. The issue is rather that the seats are the wrong type or kind to transport anyone outside of a certain body type.

But blaming the seats also isn’t fair. I mean, the seats didn’t do anything. They were just sitting there, waiting to accommodate a nice, slim ass. Why are they the only seats on the plane? I think they’re lonely. I think they want to be around seats of all stripes, creeds, and colours. They tire of homogeneity.

Someone has decided that airplanes shouldn’t carry seats that are large enough to accommodate passengers above an arbitrary size limit. Someone made that choice. They may not have been thinking “Screw you, fatties!” when they did it, and in fact they probably just thought “More customers!!” But we are allowed to ask if the airlines are doing the right thing in addition to asking if they are doing the profitable thing.

The airlines might feel that so long as the chosen path is the profitable one there is nothing left to discuss: if some people are not, therefore, customers then so what? Who said a business has a responsibility to make it possible for every single person to patronize their business? Is it a problem if a business says “We do not offer a service that suits your needs?” Bars don’t cater to babies, but we don’t cry “foul” over that. The grocery store generally doesn’t sell cars. How ridiculous is it to imagine that the grocery store is saying, venomously and contemptuously,“If you are looking for a car, take your business elsewhere, driver.” Why is there outrage over the business decision to not install larger seats on airplanes? It’s capitalism: be an innovator and start a business that caters to larger people; make your millions! See, the airlines have no responsibility here.

But…many people kinda, sorta, somewhat feel like the airlines do have a responsibility to accommodate larger passengers. Why? Isn’t the argument-from-capitalism enough to show these Apologists for Obesity that they haven’t a chubby leg to stand on?

Well….look. Bars don’t cater to babies because there’s an overwhelming public interest involved in keeping babies sober. They have no off-switch, and if you let them drink in public places they’ll definitely be the ones hitting on your girlfriend and throwing up in the peanut bowl. So, although in a way bars have to say that babies are somehow “less than”, we choke back our moral outrage for the sake of the public weal. We do not, except in very extreme and douchey cases, think that the airlines are doing some kind of public service by not installing bigger seats: we don’t think that by kicking Kevin Smith off the plane Southwest has contributed positively, importantly, and most of all intentionally to a conversation about public health.  (Note that this is different from the view that the airline is doing a public service by not permitting passengers of a certain size from sitting in the seats that are already installed. That can arguably be considered a safety concern. But the decision not to install larger seats, have wider aisles, etc… is not a safety concern. It is a profit concern.)

In the case of the grocery store, the businesses aren’t actually saying to people who want to buy cars “You are a different kind of human being, and it wouldn’t be profitable to cater to your needs, driver.” They are instead saying “Cars are a different product than the ones we’d like to sell.” Do you see? In the airline case it really isn’t the product that varies, and has determined the attitude of the airlines toward a group of people, it is the people, something about them as persons, that has determined the attitude of the airlines: customers are people of a certain size, because catering only to those people maximizes souls on the plane. But we can, should, and have said to businesses in the past that they need to consider people the same as far as their money goes: a Black woman’s money is as good at the lunch counter as a white man’s, we say, and we don’t care what accepting her money along with his does to your bottom line (if, for instance, the rest of the customers stop coming because, *gasp*, the place is integrated.) We have familiarity at least with a principle that permits us to vote with more than our wallets when it comes to discriminatory policies that, we think, unfairly select a portion of the population as non-customers. We can, have, and should compel businesses to place dignity before profit.

The real question (the one that needs to be asked of the airlines) is “What is it about your profit-policy that makes it different enough from the lunch-counter case (or other cases of unacceptable discrimination-for-profit) that you can consider dollars ahead of dignity and exclude the overweight segment of the population from your customer base by not equipping airliners with some bigger seats?”

This question puts the responsibility for justifying discrimination squarely where it belongs: with the airlines. The other question, “How fat is too fat to fly?” places the responsibility for excepting oneself from a policy on the shoulders of the larger-sized consuming public.

Maybe the answer to the question won’t be one that most people will like. Maybe there is more than an arbitrary or feckless reason to not install larger seats on airliners or design the seating layout so that aisles are wide enough to safely accommodate larger passengers. But at least we’ll be asking the right question, and one that respects the dignity of all, even if we don’t like the answer.

Asking “How fat is too fat to fly?” is the wrong question. We need to be better than that, and we need to demand that the businesses that serve our practical needs are doing so in a way that also reflects our considered, genuine, ethical standards.

Emily and I had known each other for a little over a year and we’d been living together, baby nineteen-year-olds, since August. This was our first Valentine’s Day as a serious couple, the previous one having passed just as we were getting to know each other in an IRC chatroom. (This was before Twitter, when you had to go into a virtual room on a server to type inane things and song lyrics to strangers instead of just opening TweetDeck. It was way cooler.) This was our first gift-giving Valentine’s Day.

So, being nineteen the obvious, most sensible place to look for a gift for my love was the mall. Maybe I could get her some bath crap and an Orange Julius. Maybe she would like a Victoria Secret bra and some terrible grass-smelling perfume from The Gap.

Or….what’s that shiny place? The Sharper Image?

There was a life-sized Yoda facing off against Darth Vader and there was a replica lightsaber and….too many cool things to list off in that store. It was 1997, the year of Lucas’ Special Editions of the Original Trilogy, so Star Wars merchandise was all over the place in anticipation of the re-release of the films in Spring.

What to buy? What could I afford? I told myself not to spend more than $20, being a minimum wage employee and having already been through a Christmas and birthday. Everything jumped out at me so much that nothing did. But then my eyes alit upon a glass case containing objects with pieces of paper with words like “authenticity” and “numbered”.

I quickly paid for my small, but awesome, package and hustled out of the store. I picked up some other things, things I can’t even recall anymore, it’s been so long. But my prize, that I remember.

I could barely contain myself, aching to show Emily and to have her agree with me that yes, it was pretty cool, and special. When she arrived home from work I sprang it on her immediately.

Her reaction, as I recall, can most charitably be characterized as nonplussed. It can most accurately be characterized as pissed.

I can’t remember if we talked about The Rule right then and there, or if we waited until after Emily came back from a sudden trip out the door, and down from a rage-cloud.

The gist of the one-sided discussion, though, was something like “Yes, yes, I do think that limited edition, numbered copy of the Star Wars soundtrack arranged in film order rather than recording order is very very cool. Yes, I am amazed that you just so happened to come across it at the mall and, on the spur of the moment, decide to buy it for yourself while you were out shopping for me for Valentine’s Day. And yes, you are in the goddamned dog house. Because that spur of the moment, random awesome purchase you made precisely duplicates the considered, deliberate, thoughtful purchase I made for you weeks ago. So, happy Valentine’s Day: here’s a Matt Groening cartoon book. Enjoy your CDs.”

And so, The Rule: Thou Shalt Not Buy Things For Thyself For A Period Of One Month Prior To A Gift-Giving Holiday. Dumbass.

I did love that soundtrack though. It would have been a great gift. I think Emily received, from me, some kind of grassy-smelling perfume from The Gap. Neither she nor I remember.

I think I’m better at this stuff now. Now we don’t do gifts for Valentine’s Day. Star Wars CDs for everyone!

They put the sun at their backs and wound along the cliffs of Highway 1 toward Stinson Beach.

Slight cloud coverage in the late morning promised to burn off by the afternoon, though rain was in the forecast for the day, as it always seems to be of late. But our explorers were not deterred.

Erin the Dauntless began the ascent of Mount Tamalpais by crossing the first of many wooden bridges along the Matt Davis Trail. Who knows when these bridges were last trodden by tramping toddlers?

Soon our Heliotrope Heroine began outpacing her retinue, and marched off into the green heights.

A brief pause in front of the cascading creek was all the Pig-Tailed Pioneer would permit before she was off again.

Cliffs dropping off sharply worried the Denim Daredevil not at all. Had her father been there he might have yelled “Away from the edge please!!” more than once, each time a shade more frantic.

But the pater familias was down at basecamp trying to fend off Grabby McGrabbersons, the skepper* of french fries from plates not his own.

And so Erin Burns of the Menlo Park Burnses scaled Mount Tamalais alone, happily. Her companions were the rocks and the trees, and the birds in the sky.

More bridges were crossed, and stairs climbed.

Erin climbed all the way to Table Rock. She would like to rename it “skerger”, because that’s what she calls everything. Except for the things that are “skeegoo”.

She returned to basecamp to regale her brother and father (and the waitress at the Sand Dollar restaurant) with tales of her adventures. “I saw a goat! An’ four mooses! And now we goin’ to Disneyland!” They weren’t sure how much credit to give these reports.

The day ended much as it began, with a winding drive along the 1.

And the rain held off until sunset, when the adventurers were minutes from the warm, dry comfort of home.

You should have been there.

(Editor’s Note: No pictures were taken by the driver of the vehicle as it was underway. Erin was driving, and she doesn’t know how to work the camera.) 

*to skep: verb. 1. to covet the possessions, primarily food, of another. 2. to steal, grabbily. See also “skepper” (one who skeps) and “skepful” (the look on a skepper’s face while he is skepping).

That was the first week of January. Then it rained. And rained. And rained.

For nearly a month now every weekend or day that I don’t normally have to be on campus has been either genuinely rainy or threatening to do so. The hiking was at an end before it really began.

But I have an addictive personality; I got a bit obsessed with all the hiking and climbing, and seeing Erin handle herself on steep hills and long walks and seeing Adrian enjoying his rides. Frustrated obsession means not being able to think about doing anything else on those rainy days (except for a trip to the Jelly Belly Factory one Monday afternoon in the rain). And so, nothing gets done.

It is nearly a month now since our last hike, and the forecast for tomorrow: rain.

I remembered the old Nintendo games I used to play. And I remembered that there are Nintendo emulators out there that will allow you to play classic console games on your computer. So Glass Joe has suffered my wrath and I’ve totally retrieved the TriForce and Jason took a torch to the face when he went after the kids in the cabin by the lake and Dr. Wily was destroyed by my amazing Bubble-Power attack and Mario took to the skies with his raccoon tail.

The kids. My kids. Erin would ask if we were going hiking whenever we were brave enough to go outside. We found a place called The Jungle in San Jose/Santa Clara that provides some amusement for kids: the indoor climbing structure has an arcade sitting on the top level, and giant twisty slides, and ball pits. No hiking for me, but at least Erin was getting exercise.

Adrian, sweet boy, spent two weeks at home with me. He caught a viral infection, a nasty RSV strain going around, which led to congestion, and bronchialitis. Then, being more than a bit asthmatic, his oxygen level dropped low enough that we spent two nights in the hospital until he could be treated with steroids and albuterol at home. Of course, since along with the virus he developed an ear infection he refused to eat once we got home and we nearly had to bring him back to the hospital to stick an iv in him to keep him hydrated. We switched his anti-biotic and his ear began to clear up on Monday.

Unluckily, Erin also developed an ear infection over the weekend, and hers came on so suddenly that she suffered a small rupture of her eardrum as a pressure relief. She was not happy about it. It appears healed now, and she isn’t complaining anymore. But Jesus.

So, after beginning the year on a mountain high we spent a couple of weeks dealing with rain and cold weather, then everyone got sick.

Oh, and the house we’ve been remodeling for longer than Erin has been alive passed its final inspection today. We gave notice on our apartment, which was “temporary” in 2005 and has now been the place I’ve lived the longest for any stretch of my life, and we will be out by the end of the month.

Do you know what 2010 has been so far? The year I did no work on my dissertation. Blame the hiking, the video games, the sick kids, the remodel, the packing.

But I can’t blame this blog or Twitter now, can I?

Objects in motion continued in motion unless impeded by other forces or objects.

Rainbows happened.

We are once again spending Christmas at Disneyland.

It’s easier than cleaning pine needles out of the carpet.

Merry Christmas to all. Except for you Disney haters. You can bite my churro-eating, Star Tours-loving Imaginarse.

Thank you Baby Jesus. Bock Bock.

A joke.

As a philosopher, I need to take on XKCD and all of its wrongness.

First, widely-believed theories are not only overturned on occasion by simple thought experiments, they are overturned every day by simple hacking of e-mail accounts: Global warming is a myth; someone wrote an e-mail about it. Look it up. Polar bears don’t even like snow.

Second, my philosophy degree does not equip me to ask interesting questions, it equips me to drive taxis and annoy internet trolls. I’ve never asked an interesting question.

Third, as a philosopher, I would never wait as long as an hour to overturn a theory I had just learned. That smacks of modesty, which is for the ordinary folks: I call them Small-Brains. They work at MIT.

Fourth, the “Racecar on a Train” idea not only overturns Special Relativity, but also Gravity. And “Twin Earth” overturns Evolution. Suck it, Twin-Darwin.

Face it, Science: You were Philosophy’s bastard child and you thought you could inherit the Kingdom, but the Philosopher King knows what’s best and he’s sending you to bed without supper for your own good.

Because he said so.