Dad Image

Look Mommy, a hobo!

Mirrors are funny things. They show you yourself as the world sees you, which is not always how you see yourself. I age faster than the self image of myself. For a very long time my self image was me when I was about 13. This lasted into my early 20's when I was briefly able to see myself as approximately who I was, a long haired hippie looking rock climber. Comfortable with that, I developed a bit of self confidence that the 13 year old me didn't have, and promptly found a girlfriend and then a wife. Then work, then babies, and now I was stay at home dad that still looked like a hippie rock climber. Except when you are single and in your early 20's and you look like a hippie rock climber it's awesome and chicks dig it (some of them at least). When you are in your late 20's and are carting around two babies, you just look like a dirty guy who doesn't want a job. The guy who has his wife go out and work while he barely keeps everyone alive and just sits home and plays video games all day. Sometimes, not all the time, but often enough, people treat you like that guy if you look like that guy. That sucks.
I could let it roll off of me pretty well, but I wondered about my kids. What difference would it make to them if they saw people treat me poorly as they grew up? I'm a kindly well educated guy, I read, I'm better off financially then my laundry habits might indicate, and I'm well spoken after I've had my coffee in the morning. People who knew me treated me well, I'm likable after all, but people who didn't know me often didn't. This might be hard to digest for my kids. Added confusion in a confusing world. To top it off, I don't meet many stay at home dads. Lots of people say they know another one, but there are very few of us that are identifiable in the wild. The checkout ladies at the store and the ladies at the bank soon knew me as "the stay at home dad" indicating to me that I was the only one they knew. Was I representing stay at home dads for the whole world? For even part of a population? Were people developing a lower opinion of stay at home dads because of me? That's bad.

Would you trust this mustache?

So I cleaned myself up. My mother couldn't convince me to do it. The job market after school couldn't convince me to do it. For some inexplicable reason my clean and normal wife didn't even seem to have a desire to do it. But having kids and having societal expectations associated with being the primary caregiver for those kids did it. I shaved more often. I wore clothes that were cleaner and had been purchased new instead of second hand from old guys who had exceptional taste in plaid pants. I learned how to buy a shirt that fit. I learned how to tie a tie. I learned how to tie a bow tie and wore them quite often. I might have gone a little too far with the bow ties, but I still think they're awesome. I have a suit that is nice enough that I can't ever gain or lose enough weight to change my size. I will be a 38R until I die. I didn't cut my hair though. I was that rare animal, a clean cut guy with long hair. I had long hair until 4 years ago when I underwent an unintentional, extremely rapid combustion based exfoliation event. The hair that survived that ordeal was cut off to even up the difference between the areas of my head that escaped harm and those that looked like the rest of my face. It's a long story but it's enough to say that I'm very lucky to be alive and as normal looking as I am.
So here I am, a normal, mid 30's clean cut stay at home dad and my mental self image is about what I see when I look in the mirror. It feels good. I never quite get used to seeing myself with a beard, and my recent super awesome Sheriff Mustache made me giggle every time I walked into the bathroom. It's good to see myself in the mirror and see who I expect to see again. Except for the gray hair, that's a bit surprising, the guy in the mirror is getting old.

This guy seems legit.

Literally the morning after I shaved my awesome cowboy sheriff mustache, I learned about Movember. Movember is sort of like breast cancer awareness month, but for dudes. Instead of wearing pink, you grow a mustache. It's used to raise money and awareness for men's health issues, especially prostate cancer and other cancers that affect men. Our friend Jake is participating in Movember out in Colorado. Jake is a cool guy. My wife and I interviewed him at a bar while she was 8 months pregnant. I'll leave the details to your imagination, but he was hired as an intern and eventually as a full time geologist. He was the best intern ever. When we went on vacation we asked him to cat sit for us, and he did. What's that? You're not supposed to use your summer interns for cat sitting? Abuse of power you say? Maybe, maybe not. But I still contend that Jake was awesome even without the cat sitting and there is no better guy to donate money to for Movember. You can donate to him here: http://us.movember.com/mospace/1828512/  Why don't I participate if it's so awesome? Well, I just got out of a long term relationship with my mustache and I'm not ready for that kind of commitment again so soon. Maybe next year. Movember is still cool.

Books this week:
For the Love of Physics - Walter Lewin
Innumeracy, Mathematical Illetracy and its Consequences - John Allen Paulos
Oryx and Crake - Margaret Atwood

For the Love of Physics is written by a professor from MIT who has all of his lectures online. He's awesome. You should watch them here - http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/physics/ or on youtube. Do a search, he's awesome. I didn't learn much new aside from a few rainbow facts, but the quality of writing made it worth it.
Innumeracy is an interesting read. It's aimed mostly at people that are educated but for one reason or another suck at math. It give a lot of really clear examples of the problems that innumeracy causes and how simple math illuminates them. It also gives suggestions for teaching that would eliminate a lot of innumeracy in schools. The book was written in 1988 and a lot of his suggestions, story problems, estimating, real life solutions, I can see in my kids homework to a much greater degree than I had at their age. I suspect that Paulos, or others like him have had an impact.
Oryx and Crake - Fiction! I do read fiction, I love it. This was a post apocalyptic story. The basic story line was great actually. Separation of the haves and the have nots, increasing mucking around with genetics and creating new life forms, climate change, and all that those things together bringing about the end of man. The story was great, what was annoying was the back and forth between the present dead world, and the main characters semi crazy thoughts in it, and the linear story that got him there. I'm not sure that it was necessary or made the story better. I understand non-linear literary devices and how they can be used, I just think that good stories are often better told without them. Good enough book that I finished in in a day and a half and I'm going to get the sequel from the library.