One of the most important things that I’ve learned as a first-time dad is that whenever you feel like you’re getting a grasp of raising a baby, behaviors will inevitably change and then you’re back into a position of knowing nothing all over again, and feeling helpless when your baby is reduced to crying and finding great difficulty at what may be causing your child distress.
When my baby is crying, it could be a variety of things that could be causing it; might be hunger, even if it might be improbably because she ate a full feed just 80 minutes ago, but a growth spurt could be in play, meaning she’ll want to eat pretty much every single hour. Maybe it’s indigestion, to which there are only a few things that can actually bring her relief, like pressing her up against the warm body of a parent, or medicinally with gripe water or newborn anti-gas drops. Maybe she needs to be burped more. Maybe she’s cranky because she needs to take a nap. Lately, she’s become cognizant to the discomfort of having a soiled diaper, something that hadn’t been the case in the first five weeks. And sometimes, she just wants to be held by mom or dad.
The point is, there have been numerous times where I feel like I’ve identified a behavioral pattern, only to rely upon the knowledge of yesterday for today’s problems, and find out that everything has changed all over again, and then I’m left feeling dumbfounded and useless that I can’t figure out how to bring comfort to my own child.
I never once discounted the difficulty of parenting, for the first time much less, but as I expected it would be, parenting is not easy. This does not deter me in the least bit, but I am just confirming that it’s about as difficult, and occasionally frustrating as I imagined it would be. There’s nothing like changing a diaper, only for the kid to rip a wet fart and soil it seconds after being put on, only for an after shock to hit two minutes later, and make me throw my hands up at the frustrating of changing three diapers in the span of 120 seconds.
Ultimately I wouldn’t change a thing, and I’ll change a trillion diapers if I have to in order to raise my little girl right, but damn can I at least say there are times when I just have to say, what the fuck man?
As for the rest of the world, it’s pretty much business as usual. I turned 38 a week ago, in a birthday I wasn’t really thinking much about because I’m 38 and I don’t really get pumped up or overly excited about birthdays anymore, and there’s nothing like a pandemic to really put the brakes on any sort of activities, plus the fact that my life is more or less dedicated to raising a kid instead of trying too much to indulge myself.
I’m getting a lot of enjoyment out of the train wreck that Georgia is going through with Bubba Kemp drawing the ire of not just tons of Georgians, but from his own lord and savior as well, the living Baked Potato in Charge. It’s not often that I agree with the words that come out of his mouth, but I’m taking a lot of sadistic pleasure in seeing the way he makes a point to constantly refer to Bubba by name to express his displeasure and disagreement with his choice to reopen Georgia in the midst of a pandemic, and it’s basically like watching the shithead and the asshole you dislike, at each others’ throats.
My hair is growing to quite unattractive lengths currently, exposing just how much white hair I have as well, but no fucking way I’m going out to get my haircut in the midst of all this. It is not worth the risk of getting ill just to satiate my own vanity, especially when I have the most important thing in the world relying on me to stay healthy and keep my wits.
One thing that I have gotten back into over the last week or so, is that I’ve begun running again. I dusted off our treadmill, and got back on the hamster wheel, because I hadn’t run in literally over a month after my kid was born and the rise of the pandemic, and it’s a shitty feeling knowing that I can’t lift weights, and I don’t feel comfortable outdoors enough with the legions of people all getting cabin fever and going out on walks fucking everywhere. But by running on the treadmill, I can at least know I’m salvaging my own physical stamina, and it’s at least one way to counter all the crap food that we sometimes eat.
What really sucks is that this year, I was all ready to go super gung-ho tryhard with running, and I had a big list of runs that I wanted to sign up for and do, in order to amass medals, because I’ve apparently got a collector tendency, and want to rapidly collect things when I get into them. Like bobbleheads or Riot figures, when I start wanting to amass, I start becoming a tryhard about it, and right now it’s medals from runs.
I’ve already signed up for several, but it looks like some of them might not even take place given the state of the world. Many others have already postponed or cancelled, and in some cases, they’ve gone virtual, which at least allows me to run at home and still collect the medals, but it doesn’t seem likely that I’ll be able to add to my online Athlinks profile of organized races.
Ultimately, the good thing to come out of this is that I’m at least back to running, and as I’ve often said about doing it, is that there’s never time wasted, when you’re running, because all exercise is good exercise, and I never want to be in a position in my life where I would be incapable of being able to run at least a mile at the drop of a hat.
Anyway, I end this blog about life and life being a dad, about how over the last few days, I’ve taken the time to catch up on some television and among it was the second half of Netflix’s Hi Score Girl. I enjoyed the hell out of the first 12 episodes that were released, and upon finding out that there were 24 in total, I restrained myself when they released only half of the second chunk of the show, until all of it was available.
Now that the series was complete, I finally found some time in the evenings to watch a couple of episodes at a time, while at the same time spending some time with my daughter, and having her fall asleep on my chest while I kicked back and watched anime like it were 1999 all over again. It was basically some of the best time I’ve felt I’ve spent in a long time, like that.
Either way, I was just as pleased with the second half of Hi-Score Girl as I was the first. It was a nostalgic trip down memory lane in gaming titles, and I’m still fascinated how a single show managed to get the rights to so many licenses and titles to use throughout the series. It was a cute and enjoyable show that both had a simple yet sweet plot, yet was a fun trip into the past with titles that didn’t just bring up names, but actually touched on some really specific and granular aspects of certain games that really show that the people who made the series really knew their gaming shit.
The best part of it all was that, when the series ended, the ending was not rubbish. It doesn’t sound like that big of a deal, but considering how much anime is out there where the ending completely sucks, it’s actually a major accomplishment to have an anime where the ending isn’t trash. If anything, it’s neat with a little bit of a bow on it, but the series was never so complex that there was anything other than the ending that was given, was to possibly be expected.
And in the end, it’s simple things like that that make life nice at times, even when it’s pandemonium outside the house: a one-off anime series and relaxation with a warm baby on my chest.
