Sleeping Outside the Box

The air is humid. I run and the wind screams passed my ears like a whistle full of steam. There is no direction but forward, like I’m shot from the belly of a plane, face-first and fearless. There is no turning back, no resistance to the inevitable. My legs begin to feel fluid, elastic. I fold into my torso, triggering the wheels in my kneecaps, elbows and wrists. Bending lower my kneewheels hit first, followed by my banded and wheeled hands. The elbows catch the ground simply as a navigational aid, bouncing on and off as needed. The ground flow is slightly uneven and the momentum of my fall leaves me with the need to continue rolling over onto my back. With a simple twist of my shoulders, I tilt and the sensors in my body armor eject wheels out from my shoulder blades, moving my kneewheels down to the heels and projecting a ferrofluid bearing helmet over my scalp. I always feel like closing my eyes for a second or two when I enter this position at such velocity. It’s a long time pleasure that I grant myself every chance I get. Just feeling the motion of the road under my body, I almost drift asleep. But the momentum continues. As the road approaches a right hand turn, I rotate and shoot my left hand out at the ground, gripping tight, pushing off, my legs go over head and for an instant I’m gliding with so much speed, upside down, watching the pedestrians in there civil suits, scornfully bemoaning my invasion in their walk space.
“Watch it there Insect!” One shouts.

After reading this Marginal Revolution post on the male and female privilege checklist, I noticed a few things the following lists were missing:

• Amptoons Male List
• Feminist Critics Female List
• Women in Higher Education Female List

First, let me say, I oppose assigning values to this items and comparing whether it’s better to be one sex over the other. Once someone tallied up and said “ok, the score leans to side X”, it’s going to start an endless battle of finding another thing that one sex has over the other. And really, what makes what list and what gets which value, is preposterously arbitrary.
Also, I consider myself a feminist. My additions are not intended to skew to one side or the other. Comment if you like with your additions. Mostly this is just a humorous but honest observation on some inequality in modern day USA culture and in nature. These lists do not include racial or sexual preference advantages.
I avoided mentioning things that are obviously benefits and hinderances at the same time (e.g. men are expected to be better drivers than women–this is sometimes to the benefit of the male and sometimes to the benefit of a female).

anyway, here are my additions:

Male:

• I can pee standing up, which allows me to pee just about anywhere without pulling my pants down (e.g. in a bottle on a road trip)
• I don’t have to deal with monthly bleeding
• If I rise high in my career, I can be comfortable that people will not think I got there through supplying sexual favors to my superiors
• I can run without worrying about long term damage to pectoral perkiness
• Video games are more likely to be tailored to my interests and playing style
• I can compete in sports without people questioning my sexual preference
• I can have a child without damaging my body in labor
• I don’t have to get routine pap-smears
• As I get older, my attractiveness increases (to a point) to younger members of the opposite sex.
• I am not pressured to feel guilty about what I eat (until I get old)
• In a crisis situation, someone from my gender is likely to be given (or to take) command

Female:

• Public restrooms for my gender are likely to be cleaner, some having couches and other luxuries
• If I am caring for a baby in public, my restroom is more likely to have a changing table
• I can receive student financial aid without having to ‘volunteer’ for Selective Services (the Draft)
• If I am moderately attractive, I can advance my career (or begin one) by emphasizing this quality
• When on a date or with a friend of the opposite sex, it is likely that I will not be expected to pay for anything–regardless of my income level
• I can display the uninhibited enthusiasm of a child without people questioning my intelligence or sexuality
• I am not expected to be athletic, lest my value as a member of my sex be questioned
• when sitting on any splayed-legged object (horse, bike, unicycle, etc…), I don’t have to worry about getting ‘racked’
• I am not expected to have to deal with spiders, snakes, worms or anything else that may be dangerous or gross (with the exception of snot, vomit, and poop in regard to my own children)
• Bars and clubs frequently have a weekly night where I get in free. If not, I can probably get someone from the opposite sex to pay for my entrance anyway (and likely some drinks as well).
• I can dance anywhere with a low probability that people will question my sexuality or sanity

Shimmy-down the syntax.
Print-out a verbal fax.
Dish-out the dealy-O.
Spit-cast the buffer overflow.
Out-cast the PC lingo.
Bypass the verbal underpass.
Make way for the super-flyway.
Pepper-spray the secret-sauce.

I’m up in a skyscraper that scrapes the ionosphere. It’s mostly under construction on the bottom of the tower but it’s all finished and full of people up top. There are escalators everywhere and I’m running down them. My Heely skate shoes come in handy as I round the corner and glide down one of the special wheelchair ramp escalators. It’s totally flat but it moves me faster than I can run. When I hit the bottom of the ramp I grab hold of a metal bar encircling the next escalator and I jump up through the opening that separates the pedestrian walkway from the pedestrian freeway. Now I’m flying. My feet tap every fiftieth step on the electric stairway, just enough to keep my momentum but the angle of descent is enough for me to nearly free-fall down dozens of floors.
Although I’m going fast, I know they are not far behind me, Yakuza, gokudō, but not bōryokudan–this group isn’t violent by nature. I think they just want to question me, why, I don’t know but I’m running anyway. It’s not that I mind answering questions, I just like to answer questions with all my fingers intact at the end of the conversation.
In almost no time at all, I’m nearing the underdeveloped part of the tower. The are no longer any escalators and I must take one of the large elevators they use to cart equipment. It also carries a lot of people on sometimes, like tonight, where countless tuxedo and gown clad citizens celebrate on the roof, gazing at the less distant stars, getting drunk off of the high altitude.
For a second, I worry that they may have someone stationed in the lift. Luckily, they had flown in and landed on the roof. They must not have had anyone come from the ground, yet. The elevator takes me all the way down to the basement level, my ears popping all the way. In the lowest level of the building, there are even more people than on the roof. They are getting ready for a Cirque performance of some kind.
I grab a seat, trying to be inconspicuous. The show starts and immediately I am unimpressed. They have giraffe unicycle magicians catching fine pieces of cloth, which are being projected out of thin air, but I can see a black gloved hand throwing them from behind an even blacker drapery. The contortionists are weak and the jugglers falter.

After much debate between the Sony A700 and the Canon EOS 40D, I’m leaning strongly to the Canon.
Here’s my current dSLR plan:

Camera: Canon EOS 40D, 10.1MP, 6.5fps continuous shooting
http://www.adorama.com/ICA40D.html?searchinfo=EOS%2040D&item_no=1

Lens: Sigma 30mm f/1.4 EX DC HSM AutoFocus Standard Lens
http://tinyurl.com/4g9hwm

And/OR: Tokina AT-X 35mm f/2.8 PRO DX Macro Lens
http://www.adorama.com/TN35MEOS.html

Memory: 8GB CF 40MB/S rw
http://tinyurl.com/2wy5ec

I just need to go play with a Canon 40D a little to solidify my choice–and I’m still looking for a great lens or two. I definitely want a macro lens but I’m not sure if that will be enough.

I’m climbing the rooftops, spray-painting anchor points–rectangular boxes with arrows in them. These points are programmed with Nanos to link to each other over distances of up to 500 meters. After I draw the second of a set, it stretches out a thin line to the first box and creates a barrier. No other artist can paint this wall now. The arrows communicate with a strange, sub-microscopic sentience. I stand back, proud. This rooftop is huge. It has layers of paint, over which the years have layered more and more paint, more and more untamed art. But now it’s mine.
Downstairs is a hospital. I take a peak inside and everyone is bustling. The sun is rising and I must go to work. The office is in there today. We are meeting in the cafeteria.
My boss, who seems to be alternating appearance of gender as frequently as David Bowie, is giving a slideshow demo. He sees me come in and begins pointing his questions toward me.
“Watch as I scroll down the code to the middle here. Everything looks fine until we get to this little blue cloud.”
The page scrolls down and reveals an intensely colored cloud, thinly stretched from the left margin to the right. below it is an arrow, pointing in the same direction.
“Yeah,” I say, “The problem is that the cloud is the end of the page in this instance.” Everyone turns to look at me. “We fill in the whole template, regardless of the situation, but we’ve got all this conditional logic to figure out if we should even show all the stuff we’ve already filled in. We really need a better templating system.”
“Ah, see that’s what we expect.” Bowie triumphantly declares.
“Ah, I see.” I agree.

Down the corridor of the hospital, I see an old woman getting a scowling look from one of her peers. She walks away and soon another nurse drills down on her with visual malice. She ducks into a room with glass walls and a glass door. I can see her sitting there, head slumped. Outside, her co-workers gather. All of them grimacing and shaking their heads. They bare down their brows and scrunch up their jaws pointedly. Nobody is saying anything, just looking very angry. The woman in the room closes her eyes and leans back in her chair. She has had enough. She will not give them whatever satisfaction they seek. She folds up her arms around her torso, leans back, and dies.
It’s only a matter of seconds before everyone realizes she will never come out alive again.

Sunday, 5am, I awaken to Lena moaning loudly. It’s never been this loud and tense. I pull myself up to look at her. “Is it time?”, I ask.
“Oh, it’s been going on all night.” she replies, eyes clenched, hands on her torso.
I slump out of bed and meander to the shower. It’s been a while since I’ve woken this early.
Downstairs, I make some eggs and a bagel with Toffuti cream cheese. It’s a filling breakfast that I will later be quite thankful for making. Lena only has a bagel.
Not long after we start timing the contractions, it’s obvious the time has come. We call our midwife and she agrees that we should meet at the birthing center at 7:30am.
“OK, let’s pack it all up.” Everything is already ready so their isn’t much to do but call people.
My mother becomes 15 again when she hears it’s time and rushes out the door of her house in California to start a 12 hour drive to meet us. Lena’s step-mother is flying in and her biological mom lives in Seattle and plans to meet us at the birthing center.
“It’s a 30 minute drive so we should leave now.” I gather up all the stuff, everything we will need for 24-48 hours. I feed the cats extra. We drive.
At the birthing center, things start slow. We put on some music and make Lena comfortable.
After about 5 hours, she’s gone from 4cm dilation to 4.5cm. I try to sooth the moment, “remember our classes? It starts slow, you’ll get up past 5 or 6 and then it’ll shoot up to 10 in only a couple of hours.”
Lena is not entirely convinced but she agrees anyway.
The labor continues. Lena’s step-mother arrives and soon my mother as well.
Many hours later, we get Lena up to 9cm, with only 1cm blocking the head from pushing its way into the birth canal–one little lip of a cervix, stubbornly holding the baby in.
At 7am Monday, 28 hours after the onset of labor, we face a decision. Lena is exhausted. She’s been pushing harder and working more than anyone could believe. The last cm is unmovable. Lena can barely even stand anymore.
We can try to continue and hope it works or we can go to Evergreen hospital down the road, get an epidural, some Pitocin and let Lena rest while the drugs do most of the work. Lena jumps on it (figuratively, she can’t jump worth beans at the moment). “Yes, I want the epidural. I can’t push anymore.”
At the hospital, I’m wary (and weary). The doctors are kind but I still don’t trust them off the bat.
The nurse asks us which shots we want to get and we tell her, “none”. We have it all arranged with our Pediatrician.
“Ok, do you want the Vitamin K?” she continues.
“No, we have that covered.” I sigh, “Basically, if you can just get the baby out and put it on mom’s chest, you guys are done.” The nurse laughs. She’s sympathetic to our plan.
They start telling us what we already knew they would say, “The epidural is on the way. We’ll start the Pitocin and you’ll have a couple of hours but if we don’t see progress, we will need to get the baby out through Cesarean.” We agree to try. We want to do this as naturally as possible. I’m tired. I need a nap. I lay down and about an hour and a half later, I wake up to the doctor’s voice. He’s telling Lena she has to make some progress. I get up and get the details. We need to have contractions that are 2-4 seconds apart and go up to 60 on the seismic scale. I tell Lena to take deep breaths and not to fall asleep. The graphs dip when she rests and get bigger when she breathes deep. I get excited after an hour of this. We are getting there. Some of the contractions are making the mark, others are still lagging a bit.
I get a little hungry and head down to the cafe to get a hard-boiled egg. When I return, the doctor is in the room, explaining how the C-section will go. I guess this means we didn’t make it. I’m disappointed in what appears to be a lack of faith in the progress being made. Every time I see this doctor, I’m walking in or waking up to the conversation already happening.
We consult our midwife (who has been with us the entire time) and she agrees, “we should have seen that last cm go away by now. With the Pitocin, they should have gotten some more progress.”
Before I know it, I’m putting on scrubs and heading into the operating room. It’s brighter than I imagined, not like in the doctor shows where they have special lights shining down at certain spots. The whole room is lit from the ceiling.
The anesthesiologist is very helpful, he directs me and Lena’s mother around the room to the place we can sit. I am right next to Lena, holding her arm and talking to her. Mel stands next to me, with a view of the operation. With Lena, I’m sitting behind the protective shield, with only a small window to peer out at the spot the baby will show up when they extract it. I tell them that I want to announce the gender because it’s a surprise. They are all excited. Surprises like this are uncommon these days.
The operation is quick. and before I expect it, I hear a cry and look up through the opening.
It takes me a second to realize that I was right. I had been starting to believe everyone else’s assurance that the baby is a boy–everyone to their own superstitions and old-tales. I stared for a second to make sure I didn’t announce the wrong gender, how embarrassing would that be?
“It’s Ilya! It’s a girl!”
Lena tears up and they usher me over to the heat table where they wrap Ilya up with bracelets and clean her up. The weigh her and prick her heel to test her blood. She’s 9lbs 3oz, which requires the extra glucose test. She thrashes around and cries loudly. I can’t do anything and feel terribly helpless, like Ilya. I still have my scrubs on, mask and all when they finally let me hold her. I bring her to Lena and they begin to cart her out. “OK, you’ll need to follow us, the baby is tagged to the mom.”
Alarms will go off if the proximity is broken.
I walk out, mask and hat over my head and my mother is standing outside. She doesn’t recognize me or hear me say, “we have to follow them” but I don’t pay attention. I’m staring down at my baby girl, trying to keep an eye on the bed being wheeled around in front of me.

We stayed at Evergreen for 2 nights, my mother and I taking nap shifts to watch the baby while Lena laid recovering from the operation. Evergreen was way better than we expected. They were continually apologetic for our situation, going against our birth plan, but all the while, they were more helpful than we could have hoped. Everything went perfectly. We have a perfect baby.

OK, that’s not nearly detailed enough but it’s the general story. 34 hours of labor, ending in a C-section, we wanted to go natural with a water birth but ended up trying every birthing option available.

Anyway, gotta go check up on on the wife and kid

I’m meeting with a guy from Google. He enters the board room and starts to talk to me about the long flight he just took from San Francisco. There’s something strange in his voice and I don’t quite believe that he just got off a plane.
He quizzes me with a few programming challenges but they are all elementary and I suspect he’s toying with me.
“Well, give me the answers to your questions in a week and I’ll start the evaluation. Then you can take part in whatever project you want or start making whatever project you can imagine.” He says.
“I’ve got some great ideas for Google Calendar,” I exclaim. I’m an eager little puppy. “It should be able to log your life, like sleep and work hours and generate a report for you of what you spend your time doing.” I give him an eyebrow raise, hoping he’ll agree vehemently that I should start modifying the calendar code right now. Instead, he begins to cough.
And cough. And he stands, walking toward the door, coughing more violently.
“I need to call in an engineer!” He says, hurriedly. “I’m sorry for this.”
He heads out the door and around the corner. I follow him and point him the way to the Men’s room. As he rounds the circuitous pathway of the building in search of respite, he continues his expulsion of airy fluids. Even through the walls and back in the conference room, I can hear him. It sounds viscous and hoarse, as if he’s on the verge of exploding his insides out onto the floor. I worry that I didn’t respond quickly enough to his needs. Perhaps he would hold that against me. Perhaps he would not be OK.
Minutes later, he returns with an engineer from Adobe Labs. The engineer is talking to him in a language I don’t understand and looks up at me with disapproving eyes.
“You can stay, but this is confidential.”
“Um, ok, sure…” I’m not really sure to what ‘this’ is alluding.
“Ok, let’s take of the helm…” The engineer says, pulling at the Google man’s chest.
The chest comes off, clean and with a few delicate clicks.
“A robot! AI? But then… He passed the Turing test! I didn’t have a clue!” I’m in shock and I’m mumbling and stuttering.
The Adobe engineer holds up his hands to me. “Don’t freak out, he’s a robot but it’s not AI.”
“I’m actually still in San Fransisco.” Smiles the Google man. “This is a prototype, I thought I give a try. It’s called a Mobile Avatar. I have three of them in different cities around the world. Makes arriving to meetings a bit more bearable–saves fuel, and I get to stay at home :)” He actually draws a smiley face in the air, two dots followed by a swoosh. It’s not the first time I’ve seen a gesticon. It’s the new trend with kids these days. Evidently, Google man wants to be hip.
I marvel at the smoothness of movement and the realism of the robot.
The engineer tinkers with the inside of the Avatar’s chest as he explains, “We realized it wasn’t worth making the AI to go along with our bots, but we could market them as vessels for people to be halfway around the world without actually going anywhere. Our clients, stay at home, step into a suit that picks up on every movement and transfers those signals to this machine.”

I am trying to be quiet, hiding between some thin trees in the forest. There is a lion somewhere around here and I have evaded him with great care. Just when I start to get comfortable, this giant Turkey-Dog™ growls at me from only a few meters away. I stopped eating mammals years ago. The genetic similarities with humans are too great and it feels too much like cannibalism. Something about meat growing hair and having live birth just doesn’t taste right to me anyway. I’ve wrestled with the notion that these lab grown Turkey-Dog™ types are not really mammals. Even though they have a head of a dog, they still lay eggs and are covered (even on the head) in feathers.

While I’m pondering if my hunger is great enough to attempt to eat this thing–assuming I can stop it from eating me, the beast starts to dig in the ground with it’s thin, sharp talons. Everything in this forest is ravenous. I can hear the sweet little birds in the trees, muttering to each other and placing bets. They would be frothing with hunger if they could.

Time is up. The Turkey-Dog™ runs at me and I have no choice but to scamper backwards through the loud autumn leaves. They crunch under my feet and I am certain the lion will hear us. Maybe I can outrun my pursuer and leave him to the lion.
I turn, facing the direction of my departure and notice a shallow but frantic stream. Wading into it, the water attempts to topple me over. I’m too big to succumb to the furious but diminutive rapids but the Turkey-Dog™ is not. He follows me in and is quickly and unwittingly pulled in by the stream. He isn’t drowning but he can’t fight away the water, which is carrying him swiftly away from me. I trudge after him. That’s my meal. It’s been decided. That beast is mine.

Now we are at the bottom of the river, which ends abruptly next to a large granite rock. There are sharp granite stones all around my feet and I grab one the size of a grapefruit, with the intent to lob it at my meal’s head. The Turkey-Dog™ inches out of the water, tired and beaten by the force of gravity. He curls up next to my feet and whimpers. I heave the rock firmly, aiming straight for the head. It misses. It misses by almost a meter. The thing is right next to me and my arms are weak and useless. That’s how hungry I am. I pick up the rock and try again several times. Each time, the rock flies over the beast’s head by such a distance as to make me seem incompetent. Meanwhile, the animal just lays there, looking at me, as if I’ve saved it’s life.

Before I’m ready to give up eating this thing, I realize that I’m not alone. A woman is here at the bottom of the river and she’s laughing at my attempts to kill the creature at my feet.
“What are you doing?” She snickers.
“I’m trying to eat this thing.”
“If you are that hungry, we have food.” She says, sincerely.
The Turkey-Dog looks up at me with wide obedient eyes. It seems I have a new friend.

Had to take a break from working all night to pause before midnight and think a bit about Matt, Ellen and Ella who all lost a loved one today, Emma.

If it weren’t for the countless array of blogs, videos and twitters to remind, report and reflect, I don’t think even my overactive imagination would have fathomed the depth of today’s tragedy. I don’t often cry for people I don’t know well enough to call close friends. Usually, I save those tears for unexpected footage of nuclear explosions and bad things happening to kittens.

But for this, knowing Matt very little and never having met Ellen and Ella, or Emma when I had the chance, I can’t keep working all night, pretending that it doesn’t have an impact.

Lena is 36 weeks and 3 days today. Our midwife checked us out today and everything looks great. Every now and then, I worry about something happening. What if we lost the baby somehow? What if something happened to Lena? What if something happened to both of them? What would I do?
I’ve been thinking about these things a lot lately. Not just even about the baby but suddenly, what if my brother died? What about my mom? or my sister? Would I be able to keep working? Would I move to Thailand and become a monk?
Some part of me (the tactless, villainously selfish portion of my brain) thinks, “at least they still have Ella”. How they would be able to hold together and remain human if they didn’t, I hope will remain a mystery.

I am amazed at the strength the Kowalczyk family has managed to muster and praise their close friends and relatives for keeping them sane. If it weren’t for the strange property of blogs, which allows a person to speak without really speaking out, I would not be able to form words on this subject. I don’t shed tears when I see pictures or videos of Emma. I only shed them when I think of standing in front of Matt and Ellen, trying to formulate something to say. There are no verbal algorithms for this.

Recent related posts:
Matt’s blog
Maislen: Goodby Emma
5 things Stephen Toulouse Learned from Emma