10.13.07
Heading Home(?)
Nowadays my blog entries tend to read like streams-of-conciousness. Take it or leave it—I’m not really into writing accurately these days and I’m not into going over my posts and weeding out the bad parts, checking for typographical errors, and so on.
My adoptive father, Robbie, has recently developed some health problems. We (the four of us) will be heading home in December to see him.
On the topic of home, I’m kind of pissed off at some of my friends from high school. Maybe they read this blog, who knows? They’ll know who they are. They’re the ones who don’t (or hardly) answer my emails or letters. You know, it takes effort to maintain a friendship. That’s one truth I’ve come upon in the last few years. I have been trying to write more (especially letters, which I feel count for more than email, for a variety of reasons). And maybe I should write my friends and loved ones more. But I feel in particular that my friends aren’t putting much effort into our relationship. I don’t know…yeah, they’re busy, they have their own lives. We all do. But I feel like things are too one-sided. I am thinking of just sending emails to some of my old buddies and saying something like, “I’ll be in Vancouver between these dates. You know my phone number. Call me if/when you feel like it.” I mean, don’t get me wrong. I really click with my friends and we have a great time together. But I don’t want to be the one putting in most of the effort. I feel different about things now, probably because I’m a busy father. I’ve got plenty of priorities.
Next on the agenda: Should I even call Vancouver home anymore? No need for me to answer—that’s a self-posed rhetorical question. To paraphrase the character Furio from The Sopranos, I feel like a visitor when I go back. I feel like I don’t really belong there. Paradoxically, I feel like I belong here in East Asia. Even though I’m white (well, being of Jewish stock, I’m not really white, but that’s another story). And even though I’m a cultural iconoclast—yes, I do a lot of things that don’t fit into the culture here, such as taking off my shirt in parks or when running at the university track in summertime (gotta have that tan). I think my iconoclasm comes from both my Westerness and my lifelong antiauthoritarian streak, something I’ve had since I was a teenager.
But, anyway, despite all these countercultural tendencies, I think I may have been an East Asian in a past life. How else can I account for my affinity for the culture over here? Basically, I like it better here. Canada scores better in terms of fresh air, bigger landmass, more wilderness and so on. But Japan scores better on so many other counts. Such as the fact that there is a strong sense of tradition here and a solid cultural grounding. Vancouver is a place where people from all over the world have gathered to purse the human experiment; the city has a very weak sense of cultural values, of what is right and what is wrong, which can be explained by the atomized nature of its demographics. Of course, too many foreigners like me in this island nation would fuck up their sense of cultural integrity.
On the kid front, a few stories to relate.
1. We sometimes buy whipped cream in these charged metal canisters. You just push a button and you can dispense sweetened whipped cream. Mickey and Milo (especially Mickey) have developed a taste for the stuff. I first showed them what it tastes like when I was having pancakes. On occasion, each of them likes to grab a blue plastic spoon (the ones that come free with each can of baby formula) and come up to me saying, “Daddy, please!” Except with Mickey, it sounds more like, “Daddy, pleh!” Well, the other day we bought donuts at a Mister Donut shop. Mickey was eating this whipped-cream-filled donut ball and when he chomped through to the center, he blurted, “Daddy, pleh!” Hilarious.
2. Sometimes the kids put on a show and mock cry when I try to tuck them into bed or cuddle up with them. It’s really hard to tell they’re crying for real, at least it was until I developed this strategy. I do some pretending of my own and start crying, making a face, and looking rejected. That invariably makes them smile and then they give into to my demands. Quite the role reversal—they’re usually the ones doing all the crying. Anyway, it seems like the capacity for empathy begins early on?
3. For the last several months, Milo hasn’t wanted to sleep in my bed and instead wanted to be close to Mummy. So I was surprised two nights ago when, at about four or five in the morning, he opened the sliding door between our bedrooms and curled up next to me. That was cute, and very comforting, since I’m very touchy with my kids. I love constant physical contact—and my wife is not that way, but the kids want to sleep with her. I guess it’s only natural that they’ve gotten closer to her, since she’s at home all the time with them. Still, Milo is sometimes closer to me than to Mom.
4. Every day is a wild ride with the kids and whole days spent at home reinforce my personal adage that work at the office is a helluva lot harder than being at home. When the kids are at home with you, you can hardly ever concentrate on something for more than a minute or two. You always get interrupted—like sometimes the kids want to get attention and make eye contact when I’m eating but I’m too goshdarn hungry and irritated to make sincere eye contact—or there’s some work to do—like changing poopie diapers in the middle of a meal. I really think it’s a mistake for families to live as they do in these modern times. The kids do not like being cooped up in the apartment, and they make us suffer for it. Grab things off the shelves, climb high and grab yet more things, play with forbidden things, pour water on the carpet, and so on. They’re going nuts and they want to make us nuts. Yes, they do get their walk every day, but it’s not enough. If this were a farming village in the 19th century, they would be running around all day, peering in neighbors’ huts, hanging out with the other village kids, overseen by the village grandmas—you get the picture. Kids are simply not meant to be cooped up like this. And so they cause trouble, causing us to scold and shout at them. All this unnecessary strife, when they should be running in a meadow or giving the village grandmas a run for their money. Well, it’s great that we have been able to spend a lot of time with them and that Shiho and I have been able to do most of the childrearing. Still, this lament. Sorry we didn’t have a backyard for you, kids.
