the tool shed
1001 Proven Methods to Turbo-Hack Your Toddler
Killer iPhone tip for working parents I learned from Merlin awhile back:
- Set your lock screen wallpaper to be a picture of your family. Preferably not a portrait.
- When you get home at the end of a workday, before you open the door, turn off whatever app is running, lock your phone, then bring up the lock screen again.
- Look at it for a full 5–10 seconds and say these words: This is why I’m here.
- Make sure your phone is ignored or turned off for at least the next two hours.
- You may check it while taking a shit. A real shit.
If you are childless and able-bodied, most of the mundane tasks of the day come as easily as breathing. You don’t trip over six difficulties on your way to the car. You can go to work, bust ass all day, leave all of your energy behind, and check out when you get home. You’re allowed to be grumpy. You’re allowed to eat dinner in front of the Internet or the TV.
With kids, it could be that the hardest part of your day is just starting when you step through your doorway. Even if they’re being well-behaved angels, your kids will want you to play with them. They will want you to be on. And that takes energy, energy you’ll probably have to dig for, as does shepherding them through their nighttime rituals.
My son’s favorite game? Jumping off of things and having me catch him, often without informing me that we have begun a game. I mean, come on. But you don’t have a choice, you are required to show up and dig deep. You have to be positive and constructive and fun. You are emphatically not allowed to lose your shit.
So I’ve spent the day wading through the hundred skeeter bites of being allowed to be only half of a software developer, the endless frustrations of working on government contracts, the drama du jour on my team, whatever—and for my kids, now it must be as if it never happened.
So I kill my podcast. I lock my phone. I hit the lock button again.
My picture is nearly a year old now. It is the picture we used on our Christmas card in 2010. It is a series of eight grainy, black-and-white snapshots of my family, crammed into a photo booth. In them, you can see my daughter looking on with the wide-eyed fascination you expect from a one-year-old. You can see my son trying to hog the whole frame to make faces. You can see me restraining him and, in the last shot, pretending to eat his head. You can see my wife, more smirking and laughing than smiling, as captive to the chaos as I, and you would not know that she was probably thinking about her dying mother. None of us are looking at the camera.
People see this picture and say, “It looks like you have a lot of fun.”
I’ll admit that for about half a second after I hear this, I’m partly surprised. Yes, we have tons of fun, but I have a full-time job and two children under the age of five. A lot of the time, what I am is tired. For my wife? It’s even harder.
So I look at that picture, and I remember. I realize it’s a better summary of What My Family Is than I could ever write. There is mess, there is noise, there is struggling, and we are laughing the whole way. I see that, and most days I can lay my burden down.
This is why you’re here, I think, and it’s just a long enough walk to the back door for me to hope that maybe today I’ll be a better husband and father than I am.
In Which Lemony Snicket Discusses Horrible Truths Yet Again
5. There may not be a reason to share your cake. It is, after all, yours. You probably baked it yourself, in an oven of your own construction with ingredients you harvested yourself. It may be possible to keep your entire cake while explaining to any nearby hungry people just how reasonable you are.
Go and Do Likewise
I don’t use them very much anymore, but I used to say a prayer of thanks every time I went through a fast food drive-thru. A literal prayer of gratitude that I was lucky enough to have been born into a life that kept me on the outside of that window.
I don’t scrub toilets for a living. I don’t pick up discarded condoms out of the backs of limousines. I don’t have to resign myself to the possibility of spending the rest of my life smelling the same floor cleaner every day. I don’t have to worry about shelter or fresh water, for that matter. A bad day for me is when my DSL connection goes down.
I feel fortunate because of this. I also feel guilty, sometimes, though I know it’s irrational.
Yet no matter how good the job, my most constant companion during the workday thus far has been a perpetual round-peg-square-hole sensation, that no matter how cohesive the team or stimulating the work, where I am is not for me, not long-term.
It’s not exactly a dissatisfaction, more a sense that it’s not what I was built to do, if you’ll pardon the determinism.
I met a woman in an Auto Zone parking lot once who claimed to be a prophetess. Mary was (and, I assume, still is) a die-hard evangelical Christian. She believed strongly that the Holy Spirit had given her the gift of prophecy. She wasn’t trying to proselytize, wasn’t insane or pushing an agenda on strangers. It only came up then because she felt what she believed to be a sudden stirring of the Spirit and began to use what she believed to be her gift.
I remember her looking me dead in the eye and declaring that I would one day help children. She fanned herself and smiled and shook just a bit and declared that she was feeling it strong that day.
I was in my early 20s, most of a decade away from having my first child. But she was adamant. Wouldn’t necessarily be yours, she said. But children. She was certain. It was strong that day.
Now, I don’t believe in prophecy, not as a magical psychic power. I believe a prophet is no more or less than a person who understands his or her own time and place perfectly, who sees what can and must change. That’s what John the Baptist was. That’s what Martin Luther King was. Hell, I could point to a long line of capitalists that fits the description. Certainly it wasn’t Mary, as she only knew my first name.
But what she said occasionally comes bubbling up from the depths of half-remembrance and I wonder if it will come true. What really pokes my poodle is wondering if it will because she indeed did have a gift, that of planting suggestions in perfect strangers’ respective heads.
My life and the Internet have taught me about one thing over and over again: my own privilege. I am white. I am a man. Damnable cruelty of aging aside, I am not difficult to look at. I am straight, I am thin, my gender matches my genitals, my parents could afford my college education, and I learn things usually much faster than the average person. I even attend a mainstream Protestant church, though my theology and ethics swerve pretty far left of the average Arkansan. Life, in short, is a goddamn golden goose for me.
Life owes me nothing. I owe life a debt of gratitude. Yet I do so little.
And then there are those people I am condescending enough to be grateful not to be. There are Mary’s words. And though I don’t believe in fatalism, there is that lingering question in my head: Is the sense I get with each new job that this will not be where I put down roots caused by this guilt? Can I even claim not to be a fatalist when I catch myself looking around an office where I am happy to work and thinking this is not where I am meant to stay?
To be dissatisfied with so much would be an unforgivable sin, were it not that I know that my real dissatisfaction is with myself, with my laziness and cowardice. I suspect I’d be happier if I did more. For all my liberal pretensions, I simply do not do enough for others, when the God I claim to believe in says it should be my whole life.
Anesthetizing yourself is much easier, of course. You merely start by saying the right sorts of things and getting angry at the right sorts of people. But the attractiveness of that option has faded, and my patience with myself is wearing thin. The trick will be finding something to do that doesn’t detract from my time with my wife and children, as I have so little to give them as it is.
Currently I work for a non-profit, trying to help doctors to provide better care for their patients. I believe it is very important work, good work. I’m going to start graduate school so I can become more of an expert in this field. Perhaps this will be the path to change. I hope it will, as I have no clue what to do otherwise. But more than that, I suspect (and hope) that this is only the beginning.
As for the children I was prophesied to help? Who knows. I adore kids, the smaller the better. I even made two of ’em, and for all my failures as a father, so far they’re all right, beautiful and brilliant little critters. I’d like to claim some responsibility for this. If I can help others as well? Name me something nobler, and I’ll do it.
Thanks, Steve.
The very first computer my parents bought for me was a Texas Instruments TI–99/4A. We really didn’t use it much as a computer, as I recall, mostly played games on it. By games, of course, I mean a glorious little piece of intellectual property theft called Munch Man. I got wicked good at that game, better than I ever got at Pac-Man.
But the first computer we got that we actually used as a computer? That was an Apple IIc.
Gorgeous thing. CPU and keyboard in one lightweight, portable unit that even had a carrying handle. It was the MacBook Air of its day, a clever piece of engineering on which I did homework, made Happy Birthday banners on colored accordion-fold printer paper, and enjoyed the closest thing I had to sex in those days: Leisure Suit Larry.
I remember seeing a demo of a IIGS at a local library and nearly soiling myself over how beautiful and fast and immersive the thing was. They let me play Karateka on it, a game I’d beaten a hundred times by then, and damn if the thing wasn’t almost too fast to play. To see such a work of art killed by lawyers was and is unforgiveable.
I didn’t touch another Apple product until 2008. I didn’t get Macintoshes in the early days. Tiny black-and-white screens, what kind of accountant wants that? You can’t play King’s Quest on that. I needed real estate and at least 16 colors to be immersed. So I stayed out, and I missed the Dark Times.
I moved over to Windows, and I stayed there through 3.1, 95, 98, ME (Motto: “What Is That, Hardware?”), and then XP. The last computer I ever bought was a Windows XP desktop that’s still running, the spoils of a bet my wife made with me to get me to quit smoking.
Then 2008 came and I got the first generation unibody MacBook Pro. I had to save up money for a long time, sell off a bunch of my old stuff, and have one of the biggest arguments of my marriage to get it, but it was worth it. I’m typing this on it now, two operating systems later, and the damn thing still runs like new, discounting of course the water damage my daughter wrought upon its undeserving internals.
It is a gorgeous piece of machinery. Solid, sturdy, modern-looking. Vibrant display, backlit keyboard, barely makes a sound. I thought I hated trackpads until I bought this thing, but the modern Apple trackpad makes a mouse seem like the computing equivalent of using Morse code.
I’m not going back. I use a Windows 7 computer for work, and to be fair, it’s a really good operating system, the first version of Windows I haven’t had to tolerate in over a decade. But it’s not the same. OS X manages to get the hell out of my way while still being quite literally delightful to use. It has, with no exaggeration, changed the way I think about and use computers and software. It is a daily reminder of the benefits of paying for quality, a reminder that cheap things are expensive and that science needs art.
Steve Jobs understood those things. His engineers used to sign the insides of the cases of the computers they shipped, as artists do their paintings.
You can duplicate an iPad, but you can’t copy that mentality. Not understanding that is why Apple’s competitors so often fail, even when following lockstep. We’ll see if Apple can maintain it without Jobs.
Steve himself was often regarded as a tyrant and an asshole. There is ample evidence to support this theory. But tyrant or not, he invented personal computing, then returned to push it out of an endless hell of beige boxes. He completely transformed the cell phone market, then created a tablet market that will again change computing forever and that nobody else (except perhaps Amazon) seems to know what the hell to do with. He created Pixar, quite possibly the best movie studio in human history. Everything he did in life, he worked hard to make sure it was beautiful.
Whether you like him or not, he has undeniably touched your life. Whether you’ve bought his products or not, you’ve bought his products.
He lived just long enough to see the fulfillment of his vision. Just long enough to cement his change upon the face of the developed world. I hope it was reward enough for him.
Thanks, Steve. Thanks for what you did and will continue to do for generations.
Hi.
Missed you.
No idea if things’ll stick with this reboot, but I couldn’t let things lie how they were, hacked and brought down, that godawful stylesheet I had before, all of it. Managing my Twitter addiction had me reclaiming some of my attention and pining for some longer-form stuff, so here I am.
Stripped-down stylesheet that still sucks because I don’t do web design, comments turned off, down to brass tacks. Clean slate. So.
So?
So I’m not ultimately decided on direction, and I think I’m just going to let things work themselves out there, or not. I’ve got a few things I want to talk about, but I’m not entirely sure I have much to say about them.
See, I’m a husband, a father of two, and I have a job that lately has gotten very busy. Thinking about these things has raised questions that I think are interesting—critical, as far as my identity and self-worth go, and I’m pretty sure I’m not alone here, so I’d like to discuss them. Then again, all of these things leave me with little energy and less time, so who knows if I’ll stick it out. No promises or apologies will be forthcoming.
But I hope I stick it out. I hope I do something worth reading. And I hope you read it.
I want to talk about parenting. I want to talk about work. I want to talk about priorities. I want to talk about doubts and fears. I want to talk about falling short and giving up. I want to talk about things that are awesome. And yeah, I want to talk tools and workflows.
Comments are off because. Because I don’t want to monitor a blog, I just want to write something and move on.You’re welcome to give me one-on-one feedback (in fact, I encourage it), but this is not a community. This is a place for me to write in public and be terrible at it until I get to be less terrible at it. So I’ll stick my fingers in my ears and shout before running back inside.
Soon enough I’ll spin the Wheel of Topics and see what comes up. Probably we’ll start broad.
Stick around, okay?
