All right, so it seems I will now be doing work with the child directly on my chest. He doesn’t like to be placed anywhere. I suppose that’s fine. I’m sure this whole thing is confusing and frightening to him. I’ve worked out how to get the MOBY wrap in place, and he fell asleep in it quickly the first time. The second time he squirmed so hard I thought he might actually push himself out of the wrap.
I’m not sure if all children are quite as powerful when they’re born, but I have zero experience with a baby outside of this one. And man. I had no idea how assertive these little gremlins could be. For example: I am holding my son, and I have to use the restroom. I place him in his comfy chair, sprint to the toilet. Already I can hear pterodactyl noises, grunts, displeasure. He’s getting pissed. It has been three seconds. At about 25-30 seconds, he’s full-on crying. And if I let it go to two minutes or so? Hoo boy. It’s something else.
As long as he’s close, he’s fine. Took him to the doctor yesterday for his two week checkup. All is well. He’s just…a baby, I suppose!
Here is a roundup of links, things I’ve read recently that I think are worth your time:
ANTI-CRINGE by Udith Dematagoda:
By this point, we have surely come to the realization that the ‘innovations’ of Silicon Valley are merely novel and amusing ways of disguising rapacious asset stripping of the most egregious kind. Yet some of those nerds actually believe in their missions, as we can gather from a cursory glance at Cringe’s modern day High-Church, the TED talk, and the pronouncements of one of its High Priests: Elon Musk. Behind the laughably naïve desires of the libidinal engineers of Tech Capital to make things more “open,” “welcoming,” “seamless” (and not “evil”) is the persistent anxiety of the outcast who desperately wants to be included but would rather the whole world changes to accommodate them. The text message was invented by maladroit Scandinavian engineers who sought ways to ask women out on dates without speaking to them in person. This entirely surmountable insufficiency has now been transposed onto all of us, creating a false universalism which cynically pretends to liberation. But the value of the outcast never derived from their eventually coming into the fold, but through the sublimation of their experience and ultimately through its transcendence. Instead, we have all been transformed into outcasts – and as result none of us are.
“Is Covid Moralism Forever?” by Freddie de Boer:
These are the people who, when the vaccines first began to trickle out, stood around saying “you know those vaccines won’t help against the variants, and those variants are already everywhere, and if you think you’ll ever sit inside and eat at a restaurant again, you should have your head examined….” This particular psychology I find both utterly simple and totally mysterious: simple, because people love judging others like they love the sea, the sun, and the sky, and mysterious, because it’s such an oddly specific set of tics and slogans that have been communally developed, as though shitty virus meme talk is being injected into their skulls through the apparatus from The Matrix.
That’s it for today. Have a good one!
Broken River Blog 