The Blog of Many Hats

Now that I have a new baby, I'm learning all kinds of things.

I'm also understanding things that I've never understood before. Stuff about how parenthood changes you.

One thing I now understand that I never understood before is Selective Parent Deafness.

Selective Parent Deafness, or SPD, is the ability of a parent to stop hearing the screams and wails of their own child. The wails and screams of other children can still be heard, but their own children are effectively mute.

Before becoming a parent, I was dumbfounded at parents who would let their children have meltdowns in public and subject the rest of us to the concomitant high-decibel caterwauling.

Now I get it. Now I understand that the parents know their child is screaming, but they don't perceive the screaming to be all that bad. They perceive it to be at a much lower level than it actually is.

Armed with this realization, I have decided to do my part to keep public places free of screaming children. I have decided that I will react to any extended crying in public (i.e., more than 30 seconds) as if a klaxon horn was going off right in my ear.

This decision came before I realized that my wife has a much worse case of SPD than I do. Last week, we went to our chiropractor's office and brought the baby with us. All of the doctor's patients are over 18 and, as such, his office is definitely one of those places where screaming children do not belong. Typically, my daughter began having a meltdown as soon as the car was parked. I wasn't about to bring her inside, so I told my wife "Go in, do what you gotta do, then come out, and I'll go in. That way she only cries outside."

I was very proud of my resolve...up until the moment my wife looked at me like this was the dumbest idea she had ever heard of.

"Why do you want to stay outside?" she asked.

"Because the baby is crying like it's been stabbed in the leg by a jagged piece of glass. Nobody wants to hear this." I replied.

"It's not that bad." she said, trying to take the baby.

"NO! Go inside. I'll be here waiting when you get out."

"I don't understand what's wrong. Why do you want to stay out here?"

"JUST GO!"

After shooting me one last glance to let me know she's nominating me for the Moron of the Year Award, she went inside. She was gone for 10 minutes or so. The baby did not shut up the entire time. And she wanted me to subject all of the doctor's patients to that! I realized then that my wife has become one of the insensitive bastards that I used to bitch about.

Then, when my wife got out and it was my turn to go inside, she took the screaming baby from me and followed me in. At that point, I gave up. There was no sense arguing. She was determined that the entire waiting room was going to hear the fortissimo movement from the Baby Concerto.

I'm going to keep fighting this as much as I can but, like any good husband, I can already smell the losing battle. I may be doomed to insensitive bastardhood.

William F. Buckley should get sick more often.

Today's column, which can be found on TownHall.com, contains the following gem:

...It is the responsibility of men and women who seek an audience for their writing beyond the family to instruct or entertain, or to die trying. The ratio is not definitively established, between skills disposed of and weight of literary production.

The grand meaning of this lesson being that eminent people can write eminently awful books and get away with it, and that medical science falls short of shielding us from bad books.

Buckley is writing about Henry James's novel The American, but this quote applies to the blogosphere more than it does to century-dead novelists. Every blogger who wants others to read his work -- and let's face it, that's all of us -- should "instruct or entertain...or die trying."

That is an insanely tough challenge to live up to, but I feel equal to it. How about you?

Now that I've got a little girl on the way, I find I spend a lot of time thinking about teaching.

I'm going to have this whole little person to mold and teach. I didn't even have to apply for a license or anything.

I want to make sure I get it right.

So I spend a lot of my free time just imagining interactions between Eliana and me. I try to imagine things I know she needs to know, but that school will never teach her. I thought about interactions in which I taught her about personal responsibility, self-reliance, the importance of private property, and so on.

Then I started thinking: what things have I learned in my life that absolutely shocked me? What things did I encounter that I was absolutely unprepared for? And how could I best prepare my daughter for those things?

And then I remembered The Light Bulb Incident. And it occurred to me that it will be impossible to prepare my daughter for all the bullshit that will come her way. Because new bullshit is being invented all the time, even while old bullshit never goes away.

The Light Bulb Incident involves labor unions.

When I left home, I was only peripherally aware of the concept of labor unions. I had seen Norma Rae, but all seeing that movie had done was give me the idea that labor unions are good and people who oppose them are bad. I had never actually interacted with one, or with the members of one.

But there came a time, when I was working for the University of Florida, when I happened upon a burned-out light bulb.

I went to my supervisor, and said "Dr. X, there is a burned-out light bulb in the other room. Please tell me the location of the spare light bulbs in order that I may replace it and bring illumination back to those of us who toil for you."

That's when Dr. X informed me that replacing light bulbs was a union job and that not only was I not allowed to change the light bulb, but I could actually be fired for changing it.

I was 18 years old at the time and, of course, thought that I knew everything. I began to argue with Dr. X about the absurdity of not being able to change the light bulb. I pointed out that it was inefficient, that it kept me from doing my job until such time as the bulb was changed, etc., etc. Dr. X, having worked for bureaucrats for many years, just smiled and told me that every young lab assistant that came through his doors had the same reaction whenever they encountered a sacred union job for the first time. He told me that it wasn't worth thinking about and that I should simply put in a request to get the bulb changed and forget about it.

Head hung low, I went to the office and filled out the form that requested a change of light bulb. Then I took Dr. X's advice and tried to forget about it.

Unfortunately, I had to work in the room with the burned-out light bulb, so I was reminded of the whole incident every time I walked in there.

Three days later, I got another harsh dose of reality when the crack light bulb changing team showed up to change the light bulb. I'm sure that, somewhere, there's a joke about "how many union members does it take to change a light bulb?" At the University of Florida, apparently, the answer is "3". One to climb up the ladder and perform the actual changing, one to hold the ladder, and a third to observe the whole process. It took the team 15 minutes to change the light bulb. First, they had to identify the bulb in question. Next, they had to test the bulb -- by flipping the switch on and off -- repeatedly until they were satisfied that it was, indeed, burned out. Finally, they had to set up the ladder properly and perform the changing procedure.

I count at least seven people involved in light bulb changing in this story: me, Dr. X, the girl in the office with whom I filed the light bulb change request form, whoever the form went to after that, and the three crack light bulb changing team members. And I'm probably missing 2 or 3 entire levels of bureaucracy in that count.

I hope one day I get a chance to tell this story to my daughter, but I can't really conceive of a situation in which it might be relevant. But I really hope I find one so that I can inoculate her to one more thing before she has to go out into the big bad world.