Sleepless in Brookfield

We are a family of periodic insomniacs. My spouse has the most persistent insomnia -- he has trouble sleeping the majority of nights. My daughter can't sleep every so often, and will stay up watching tv or reading. Even as a toddler she would wake up and play with her toys on the floor in the middle of the night.

I'm a recent convert to insomnia. A few years ago, I started having "power surges", commonly known as hot flashes, in the middle of the night. I also started having heart palpatations that kept me up. Last night was warm for September -- a beautiful night in the high 70s. After tossing and turning for a while while my body temperature and heart rate soared, I moved to the living room and clicked on the tv. Yikes, what a shallow pool to dive into! One hundred channels avaialble, and all I got was late night talk shows and the x-files.

Today, I walk zombie-like through my day, reminescent of living through the Infant Years of parenting. Taking moment by moment, praying that God gives me strength. And He does. He reminds me of the classic prayer: "God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."



Sleepless Fact: Seventeen hours of sustained wakefulness leads to a decrease in performance equivalent to a blood alcohol-level of 0.05%.

Spooky

We put up our Fall/Halloween decorations this weekend. Although our family is not in love with the background and occult meanings surround Halloween, we like the autumn celebration of things. Halloween trick or treating is sometimes the only time we speak to our lesser-known neighbors. The kids have chocolate. The adults get to chat and connect.

I just finished reading William Gibson's Spook Country. I was introduced to this author in college, when I was required to read Neuromancer. Some dozen books later, I remain a committed fan. His latest is set in the present, like Gibson's last novel Pattern Recognition. Gibson created his own language for his earlier sci-fi-cyberpunk works, actually introducing the definitions cyber space and cyber punk into the English language. I've been trying to describe the style of Spook Country, and the first word to come to mind is dense. Gibson has an amazing handle on the English language. His intellectual abilities tower over my own. After a few chapters, I was afraid that I'd get lost in the maze of plot/characters/intricate descriptions. I stuck with it, though, and was satisfied when I finished the book. Not the best he's written, but still entertaining. A different kind of spooky, during these cooling autumn days...

Friday Fun

Oi, what a busy week. Too busy is not good for anyone. Time for some r&r aka fun:

Little known fact: A starfish does not have a brain.

They have a primitive nervous system that controls their actions. Sort of like me after 9:00 at night.

Friday Fun

Little known fact: Every time you lick a stamp, you're consuming 1/10 of a calorie.

I love exercise at the office...

Corn

I had a dream about Mexico City last night. Or at least a dream/mirror image of Mexico City. The dream city had the same maze of streets and houses as the real city. Everything coated with a fine film of dust from pollution. A group of feral kids surrounded our group, sitting in plastic chairs, touching our hands and faces. Their eyes huge and searching.

I woke up remembering the girl at the market in downtown Mexico City, weaving through our small group clutching an ear of roasted corn smothered in mayonnaise. Deftly she moved around us, placing stickers on our shirts. "A peso," she'd say, then move on, taking another bite of her corn. Coming back a few moments later, empty handed, to collect her sticker and place it carefully back on the plastic sheet. According to our guides, some mothers sent their children out begging, into the night.

Irish Fest, 2007, I bought an ear of corn dripping in butter and salt, and remembered that girl in Mexico City. Wondering what her life would be like, stretching out in front of her.

My grandmother, a product of the Great Depression, used to cut the kernels off of boiled corn with a sharp knife into a bowl. As a child, I wondered why she'd go to that extra work, when she could just get a bag from the freezer.

One of my favorite fall activities is to visit a corn maze with my family. Wandering throught the tall stalks, we hunt for clues and laugh as we run into other searching families. The corn towers above us, acres and acres of farm land stretching out under the warm autumn sun.

She speaks to me in the early morning hours, that small girl begging in the night, wandering through the maze which is Mexico City.

Trying to find her way.

The Girl Scouts in Mexico are actually called Boy Scouts, according to our guide and friend Mari. We watched this group of girls during our visit to Teotihuacan, just north of Mexico City. Their dress was much more like the Boy Scouts in the US -- matching uniforms, inlcuding socks, ties, and emblems. They were quietly listening to their troop leader as he placed a compass on the ground and they all looked to the north.

I thought of the girl's troop I helped lead back home. The children in Mexico, as a rule, were much better behaved and had better manners than kids in the US. We thought it might be because the kids get so much attention in Mexico, the culture being so family-oriented.

Kids crave attention, any attention. How often I've seen kids in the US get into trouble, and receive the attention they need. "I'm here!" their actions yell. "Look at me -- I'm here, and I'm important enough for some kind of attention."

I'm sure there's some kind of tight-rope balancing act for the "right" kind of attention. Helicopter parent vs absent parent. There's no magic compass pointing parents in the right direction. Or even Scout leaders.

"What a child doesn't receive he can seldom later give." ~P.D. James, Time to Be in Earnest

Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Six years ago today I was at the office when a colleague called and told me that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. I immediately tried logging into news websites, which were, of course, slow due to increased traffic.

Life was the same, at that moment. Bad things happened -- planes occassionaly crashed into buildings. People died tragically in all sorts of circumstances.

It was when I saw the smoke rising from the second tower that I knew our world had changed. This was no accident. A tragedy, yes, but not one born from a careless mistake or faulty part. Other human beings were attacking us on our own land. Human beings filled with enough pain and hatred to kill us.

There was silence on the radio after the first tower fell. I wondered where the federal building was downtown, and if I should pick up my child from school.

I must not forget that day, ever. The shock, the silence of the empty skies for days afterwards, the furtive glances as we boarded a plane to Florida several weeks later. I must never allow my pain to become so great that I would strike out at another person in anger.


“I have found the paradox, that if you love until it hurts, there can be no more hurt, only more love.” Mother Teresa