But, for the last week or so, the first half of July, it’s been calm. My work has felt more balanced, I have no music performances to prepare for, and my social calendar was mostly events with other couples in the same stage of life, so I’m not over-extending myself.

And it mostly sucked. After I get home from work, I have less than two hours with Remy before we need to get her into her bassinet for the night and for those two hours I’m all action.1 But the minute Remy goes to sleep, I’m bored. I can’t think of what I want to do, so Elizabeth and I have been watching TV. We’ve watched season two of the live action Avatar: The Last Airbender series. It’s a great show and I don’t really have anything against watching TV, but unless it’s a big series, watching TV is a sign that I’m dependent on passive activities.

I’ve noticed this pattern before, when I have a period of high-intensity activity followed by a vacuum of responsibilities. This was common in college and during my time in consulting, when I would spend weeks moving on from one thing to the next, using what a less-busy-version-of-myself would see as an impressive level of self-control to stay on task and get things done. Then, a project phase would end, or a series of exams, papers, and other commitments would come to pass. Ahead of those end-dates, I would look forward to being done. “After I get through this, I’ll play guitar and work out and read in the sun.” But then the day would come and I would find myself stretched across my bed staring up at the ceiling and waiting for sleep to find me.

Doing things in general becomes difficult, both the things I want to do and the things that I need to do. Parkinson’s Law kicks in, and I never really find the free time to do the things I was looking forward to, in part because I didn’t make the time when I could have, and then because I don’t want to do them the time comes. The list of things that I want to do is always the same, some activity that I genuinely like to do but it still dependent enough on extrinsic motivation that I’m never intrinsically motivated enough to do it in this state. Getting better at jazz guitar, getting through the pile of books on the shelf, learning Chinese, etc.

The things I want to do become hard to want to do, but the few small things that I need to do feel impossible. For example, I like to make iced lattes using the espresso machine in our apartment, which is a nice short ritual, but I’ve known for the last several weekends that I need to replace the filters and run the descaling cycle, so the calm morning ritual is shrouded by guilt, the fact that this is not the time when I’m going to take the 15 minutes to complete that need. Or another example is a baby book where Elizabeth and I have been recording updates based on certain dates or milestones in Remy’s life. I have a few pages that I need to fill out, and it stresses me out. I like writing, and I love my daughter, but for reason the act of filling out a page is something I need to mentally psyche myself up for.2

I recognize that this is just part procrastination and part depression. In the past, I would have started the Wellbutrin prescription that I’ve cycled on and off a few times. But, this time I don’t want to do that mostly because I feel guilty. Why would I need anti-depressants when I have a daughter that brings me so much joy? (and a lovely wife, too!) The fact that I don’t really feel this way so intensely until after Remy goes to sleep makes me feel a little less guilty, but not enough for me to really consider drugs. And even with the baby-book-stress, I don’t think I have anxiety and have no “issues” to work through. I just need energy and renewed interest.

Elizabeth wants me to do something about it, but I think I can ride out the next week before I get busy again and then see where I shake out come August. In the meantime, I’m curious if this is all caused by gut bacteria. Maybe I’ll increase the kombucha budget and be miraculously healed.

When I’m writing, I’m writing for myself. You have to. So, what I try to write is some form of non-fictional prose or romanticism in the literary sense, which I could get around to on the NYC essay but probably not on musical talent. I don’t want to write fiction, but I do want to write in a poetic, descriptive way and it’s sometimes hard to do that without putting too many words on the page. It’s easy to take for granted that you can do that with very few words. You can resort to writing real poems, like these two haikus and one not-haiku:

I love listening
to the singing yogis while
they harmonize ohm.1

Or,

The guitar man’s hand
And a heavy slammed door
Half step melodies2

And the not-haiku.

I’m sorry about all those dollars
you spent to show your love,
pushed to the back of the attic.3

Those are barely poems, but you don’t even need to be that structured. A simple phrase is enough to say something meaningful, beautiful, and sometimes funny. In the last few weeks, I’ve been in some situations that have made me think of a few Palmer-isms that either come from my Dad (that he probably stole from somewhere) or that I’ve stolen from other people and made my own, too.

The first phrase that keeps coming up is one we used when talking about Teaberry Rock and is “There’s pumas in them crevasses!” It must be said with a Southern or Old-Timey accent, and is apparently a Smothers Brother’s joke but I’ll still claim it as a Palmer-ism since I heard it from my Dad first. There is something forewarning about unknown risk behind it’s comedic presentation.

Elizabeth and I have also been talking about money, given our impending childcare costs. It’s made me reflect on how I’ve missed every major wealth building opportunity in my adult life. I made little on the crypto craze, I didn’t buy property before COVID-19 (not that I agree with rent-seeking behavior anyways), and timed the post-COVID / pre-AI hiring poorly, and the list goes on and on, complaint after complaint. But, Elizabeth wants us to still have the mindset that we can make it big and jump the crazy compensation band required to raise a family comfortably in New York City. My stress about it has gone down a little bit by remembering that my parents would say that I constantly “fell in shit and came out smelling like roses.” I think I was more bold as a teen, because I don’t as often find myself in unlikely situations that resolve themselves beautifully anymore.4 I’m setting myself a goal to try to take more big bets.

Those are the two Palmer-isms that I’m remembering the most right now, but a few more stolen Palmer-isms from my father’s era are:

• “It’s been so lonely in the saddle since my horse died,” which is from a Highwaymen song but I’ve heard it and said it hundreds of times. This response works 100% of the time anyone says something about a horse or a saddle.

• Growing up, it was quite an honor to be called “Insiglius, purple, and clairvoyant,” which is a misheard take from Steve Martin’s Grandmother’s Song. Insiglius is not a word, but obsequious is.

• If you had a fresh haircut, you might be both “Suave and Debonair” (pronounced “dee-boner”) and I think this may come from The Gong Show.

• As someone who has listened to hundreds of hours of Buddhist dharma talks (mostly while asleep), my favorite koan is still an old Palmer-ism that “Wherever you go, there you are.” It’s less of a joke than it seems, because I also read a book with the same name in college when I first started reading about mindfulness, though it’s not one of my favorites.

I’ve stolen my own Palmer-isms, too, like:

• “Some walk in the rain, others get wet” which this philosopher believes is saying something about outlook on life, but I’ve just used it as a double entendre. Not a perfect success rate on this joke, but usually worth putting out there.

• Every college and MBA weekend usually heard me say “You can’t drink all day if you don’t start in the morning” and I think Drake actually stole that one from me given the timelines.

• Lastly, for years, I’ve followed every shot or bottle-pull of whisky with the satisfied sigh of “Mother’s Milk,” which I stole from this song and only once have been caught on it. It depends on your definition of success, but I think it works 100% of the time.

So, like how family recipes all secretly come from the back of cornbread boxes, nothing is really a true Palmer original. But that opens up anything, even a single word, to become a Palmer-ism and that’s beautiful. Palmer-isms come and go. All things that have the nature to rise also have the nature to pass away.

I hope you reap what I’m sowing.

There were only maybe two weeks a year when you could weave past what little car path existed across the road and down into the woods around the creek. We owned the land, so we could have theoretically gone any time we wanted to, but we took advantage of the days in early spring when it was warm enough to play in the creek, building dams and tossing rocks, before the poison ivy and thorns grew in and made it hard to get through.

When I was very young, the barn still stood in the woods across the road and it would occasionally get attention. We’d have to call the cops to tell them that someone had pulled into the grassy drive and was likely exploring our barn. Eventually, we had the volunteer fire department do a controlled burn on the barn. After that, you couldn’t see the cinder block foundation from the road, and people stopped exploring.

The whole city is hills, the only history book about the town is called “The City Of Hills and Kilns.” Our property stretched a few acres, from the top of some local apex all the way to the creek at the bottom of a little valley. We weren’t positive of the property lines because the creek moved, the water is a living thing. But, when we climbed over the big troughs from the long gone cows and the cinder blocks from the only recently gone barn, you could get down to the water. I remember falling into a swollen pond with my first cell phone, I fried it in the water. But in the early summers before I had cell phones, I’d scramble across the shale on the other side of the creek and make it to Teaberry Rock.

I didn’t name Teaberry Rock, my Dad did, at least I think he did. He had also grown up playing in these woods and I suppose now that maybe one of his older brothers named the rock. Teaberry was a gum brand my parents chewed when they were young. At some point in the early days of online shopping, they bought a big pack of it from an online retro candy store. My Mom joked that teaberry was what you chewed to hide the smoke or drink on your breath from your parents. My parents were pack-a-day-smokers back then, but I don’t remember the smell of teaberry gum.

Teaberry Rock wasn’t a single stone, but a collection of stacked slabs left behind by the glaciers as they shaped what would one day become the now-former Palmer estate. To this day, you can get my Dad going about those glaciers with vivid descriptions as if they were still crawling over the land in the late 1970s. But, they weren’t there, just Teaberry Rock. The fun thing about it to me was that those rocks were all much larger than “the big rock” over in Thompson Park. People who thought they knew big rocks didn’t know shit if their only experience was with the big rock. They hadn’t seen Teaberry Rock.

Of course, I probably only saw it three or four times as a kid, because a few of the times I went into the woods across the street, I got in trouble for it. It was for good reason, given the barbed wire from the cows and the barbed branches of the thorns that would grow in full by late spring. When I ruined my first phone in the creek that one time, it was even more justified.

More of my childhood was spent in the back yard. The property was mostly on a 45 degree angle, only manually landscaped flat for the chip-and-seal road called Christian Place that separated the wooded property from what my Dad mowed, then by the house another 100 yards off the road, and then by the pole building and half basketball court another 200 yards behind the house. I say behind, but given the incline, the house was above the road, and the pole building was above the house. The driveway was yellow fire brick, bricks my grandfather had gotten for free. Piles of extra yellow firebrick were stacked behind the garage that was detached from the house. The original garage before the detached garage was part of our orange brick ranch house, and you could tell in the long living room where the wall had been that had separated the original living room from the garage. The floor creaked where the ghost of the old garage began.

Behind that pile of bricks above the garage, our dog had been on a runner, which was a chain on a long cable that ran from the massive oak that always dropped its leaves a month after every other tree each fall, up to some other bunch of trees higher up in the yard. I remember once Shaylee (I don’t know exactly how we spelled her name) had puppies and for probably just under a year we had 4 dogs chained in the yard. Shaylee was broken by then and didn’t use all of the space available to her in the runner, but it would have been a long oblong shape if she had. She had room to roam. Unfortunately for them as poor outdoor animals and for the state of our yard, the other dogs wore perfect 20 foot radius circles out of the grass.

I remember those circles turning into muddy messes, but I loved the rain that brought the mud. I can remember watching the rain out the screen in the window in the bedroom I shared with my brother. In the summer you could see the giant locust tree with the dead busted branch that never fell off, year after year, because a locust is such a strong tree even when half-dead and coiled with poison oak vines. But, you could get up to that window and look at the tree and smell the hot summer rain. That smell was something so thick and comfortable and accompanied by the thunder in a way that it commanded attention.

Luckily, some animal group was able to find homes for the puppies. The biggest dog was a mostly black scaredy cat, with the strong internally rotated front legs that so many big dogs have. His name was Wrangler, and he and I held the duopoly on denim western wear.

Those mud circles eventually refilled with grass, restoring the big empty space between the dogwood tree that I spent so much of my childhood in1 and the basketball court higher in the yard. Before the puppies and the basketball court though, the yard had these big pine trees. I barely remember the trees, because I was too young and because they mostly served to form the top-most perimeter of my yard. But then one day my Grandfather came and helped my Dad cut down all the pines and the perimeter of the yard expanded, doubling the space back to a line of walnut trees. The fallen walnuts would turn the ground black and damage mower blades.

I do remember playing between the fallen pines and the burning of the brush heap. We had just gotten Shaylee then and she was still sleeping as a puppy in the basement, and in her fearlessness she ran into the bonfire of those pine branches. She was mostly fine but had burnt some of her soft underbelly.

The bonfire was not too far from the big oak behind the garage. At some point, I took an acorn from that oak tree and planted it in front of the garage. Even protected by a surround of yellow fire brick, the neighbor mowed down the sapling a few times that my Dad got help mowing the lawn. It eventually got tall enough to avoid being weed-whacked, and when I drive by the house on visits, I see “my” tree at over thirty feet tall.

After the pine trees were gone, my grandfather took a summer to remove all of the rusted farm equipment from the pole building. I wanted to build a robot with the scrap metal, but instead it was hauled away and we poured blacktop under half the pole building and then again into a half basketball court near the building. I only played basketball three seasons of elementary school, but we’d stand on the basketball court in the summer and launch water balloons down over the house. We put in a used above ground pool. My Dad engineered the deck around the pool, which was level with the grass on the top side and level with the top of the 4 foot deep pool on the other side. There were a few summers when we’d come home to my uncle’s ex-wife floating in our pool. Those summers there were lots of other little kids around, and we’d go to the creek, or catch toads in the gaps in the driveway, or swim until exhaustion. Then the lightning would flash and we’d head under the cover of the pole building and inhale the smell of that hot summer rain.

My parents moved out of that house when I was in college, coincidentally out of the house my Dad grew up and into the house my Mom grew up in. But, when I think of my childhood, I think of the trees in the back yard, of Teaberry rock, and the smell of rain. The rain in Manhattan doesn’t smell like that, and the rain in the city of hills and kilns doesn’t smell like that to me anymore, either.

Remy is eleven weeks old as of yesterday1, which is not “almost three months” if Elizabeth asks. Thanks to TikTok, Elizabeth is acutely aware of developmental milestones. The algorithm knows our daughter’s age, thanks in part to the nine months of pregnancy content Elizabeth watched preceding Remy’s birth. Elizabeth has gone back and forth in how she thinks about all this content, which is so successful because of the strong emotions that it creates. Everyone knows that rage on the internet drives strong reactions, and that’s why news feeds from the New York Times to Reddit all have such click-bait and emotionally coded language. Rage drives attention and keeps eyeballs engaged, which is what is truly important for the internet’s main customer: advertisers. But the pregnancy and “fourth trimester” content that Elizabeth is served is aimed at driving sentimentality, which isn’t exactly the same as rage, but it still helps sell artipoppe brand baby carriers.

There are many variations on these kinds of videos targeted at young parents, mostly to young mothers. Imagine a woman 38 weeks pregnant holding her belly and then cut to 38 weeks postpartum with the same woman holding a bouncing babe. Or picture a toddler hesitantly making their way through a hall at one year old and then excitedly walking through that same frame at two years old. This is the tip of the iceberg, because there really is so much that new parents can be sentimental about. Normally, you wouldn’t even know that something your child is doing today is only going to last a few weeks, unless you had a lot of experience around children. But, thanks to the algorithm and the power of short form vertical videos, you can be made aware that that milestone is going to come and go, and you’re also gently informed that you better capture it on camera because you’ll never see it again.

This struck us the first week with newborn “chirping,” which is extremely hard to capture because it’s just a little sleep sound. You need to be filming the baby before the chirp, which you will have no warning is coming. There is plenty of b-roll of Remy, just sleeping, with Elizabeth and I silently off camera hoping to capture this chirp. We each captured one, and there is debate that either of us really got the “right” sound. Elizabeth was adamant that we record it, which to her credit was smart and timely, because the two noises we recorded were probably among the last ten total chirps before Remy outgrew that specific newborn behavior.

Similarly, people are obsessed with the “newborn scrunch”, when the baby keeps their legs and butt curled under themselves when they are picked up, a phenomenon which goes away once they’ve spent enough time away from being curled up in the womb. Elizabeth and I in particular are fans of this little gag that newborns make. It’s a smaller niche than the scrunch but we’re solidly in some market for it. TikTok knows people like us are out here. Elizabeth sent me a video of another baby making the little gagging face, which was something Remy did a lot of in her early days, and I unfortunately don’t think we have footage of it.

As I said, Elizabeth recognizes that this level of awareness and the stress induced by it aren’t exactly normal. Multiple times she’s stated that she refuses to be caught up in this commercially reinforced sentimentality, but she and I are both afraid of what Remy will soon stop doing. Before Remy, I wouldn’t have been able to guess at what age a child is capable or is not capable of doing something by broad strokes. Can a six-month-old talk? Can a six-year-old read? No idea. Our friend sent us a picture of their child’s first solid food, which was scrambled egg, but I assumed based on shape and color2 that it was cheese popcorn. When is the appropriate time for baby’s first cheese popcorn? I won’t know it until I see it.

This lack of awareness is one reason I feel slightly guilty about my past reactions to hearing that friends were pregnant or that they had their first child. I knew to say “congratulations”, but my social skills really dropped off after that. I didn’t know what a new parent needed or wanted to hear. Now, with our first child, I am so much more excited for friends when I hear about their upcoming new family members. This is the same for weddings. Our first wedding anniversary is today. For friends married before us, a wedding was a party where two very popular people had a free pass on PDAs. After our wedding, I recognize the weird sense of being surrounded by love and how people are there just for you. You are the center of attention but there is no pressure to perform. There is a gravity to getting married, or having children, that is hard to understand until you go through it.3 I’ve always cried at wedding ceremonies, but for the last year the waterworks have been much worse.

Usually at the same time we talk about not getting caught up in all this “parents, just you wait and see” commotion, Elizabeth and I talk about our own parent’s sentimentality about us. For me, being born was just like any other day, but it was one of the most important days in my parent’s lives. Elizabeth comments that how we look at Remy, as this little person we adore and love, was how our parents looked at us. We stare all day long. Of course, Remy is just now able to really look back at us, but we’re just “Milk Lady” and “Diaper Man.” One day, I will graduate the same way my father did, on to a new role as “Weather Man.” The sentimentality goes both ways between parent and child, but it’s different.

I hate essays that provide definitions, because I feel like it’s just trying to hit some word count, but I liked how Wikipedia defined sentimentality as “a reliance on shallow, uncomplicated emotions at the expense of reason.” That is a pretty brutal description and one that I would have openly and blindly applied to my parents for my entire life until around eleven weeks ago. The generation to which my parents belong is broadly sentimental, so it’s not some personal character flaw. I have been a big fan boy of “reason”, so I have sold things like my two of my first guitars, both at a loss just to offload stuff. No expense of reason here, but for most people, there is a logical fallacy called the “Endowment Effect” that means we assign higher value to things we already own than we would if we were looking to buy that same thing from someone else. We value it because it’s ours. You can call that “a shallow emotion at the expense of reason,” or you can recognize that the profundity is in the eye of the beholder.

Flying in the face of all my feelings about my parent’s sentimentality over old stuff, I know there is a onesie that I selfishly do not want to gift as a hand-me-down to the next expecting couple. So, knowing that several of the times that I’ve moved I’ve just left the majority of my stuff behind, and though I’ve murdered most of my darling journals, poems, and drafted essays, I will be keeping a small gray onesie with a Teddy bear stitched in the front. I think I’ll have it framed, and I hope Elizabeth makes a TikTok about it. And I hope you cry when you see it.

The first alarm went off at 5:20am, which was, as it always is, quickly disengaged and ignored. I try to wake up on my second alarm, which was at 5:40 this morning. I usually have a third alarm, but I must not have been on my A Game last night and missed setting it. Instead I woke up from some dream, already forgotten, around 6:03. The blinds were open and the neighbors’ windows were throwing light into our room. I set a timer for five minutes and rolled over to try to cuddle against Elizabeth. She immediately got up and ran to the bathroom.

As she tiptoed back into the room, she snapped shut the blinds and crawled back into the bed. She asked, “What time is it?”

“Six. I have a timer set for five more minutes to cuddle.”

At this point I knew it was closer to only three minutes left, but I had actually started with five minutes and two seconds. I had accidentally scrolled the seconds wheel a few days ago cooking something and kept meaning to roll it back to zero. The alarm went off and I reset us another five minutes and two seconds of rest.

I was at this point now awake. With less than forty seconds left on the alarm, I rolled over and disengaged it. I stared at my email, reminding myself of some of my work for the day. On my way out of the room I heard “look at you.”

I said back, “Doing the thing.”

The original plan, the usual plan, when I set the alarm was going to the gym. I am normally able to commit. I had not gone Sunday morning, to prepare for a rehearsal, and I had not gone Monday, because I was tired. Monday was a notable morning because Elizabeth was out of bed before me, and had actually come back in to try to wake me up after she was almost ready for work. We joked about it later that night. Tuesday morning I had just been lazy, so Tuesday night when I set the alarms, I announced, mostly to Elizabeth but really to anyone that could hear me, that I “must go to the gym tomorrow.”

So, at around 6:15 I was out of bed and packing some gym clothes. This was already later than I would have preferred. Though, if I showered at the gym, I could still get a good workout in and get to the WeWork without rushing. This is the largest personality difference between Elizabeth and I. I never rush. I leave early to get places and get frustrated with people and objects that prevent me from getting where and when I need to be, but I don’t put myself in situations where I have to hurry. My slow departure from classrooms was noted in my middle school parent-teacher conferences. There were no late arrivals to note.

So, with the time I have this morning, I believe I can go to the gym. After packing my bag, I went into the kitchen to fill a water bottle for my creatine (always two scoops) and some vitamins. One is a fish oil, one a turmeric. Both are vaguely joint, heart, or brain health focused. The last pill is GABA, which is supposedly for mental clarity. GABA levels are apparently low in people with depression, so I take one pill. This is common advice on the internet. I take only one pill, even though the container says to take three. When I’ve taken two, I get a wild head rush and need to breathe too deeply for a few minutes. I have a feeling the dosage is inconsistent. It’s fun sometimes at the gym, that little rush, but I normally stick to one.

But, after I finish filling the water bottle but before I can get to the vitamins, I encounter the kitchen as we left it the night before. We joke about a ‘night crew’ and ‘morning crew’ but the night crew had a volleyball match late that night. The night crew is also fourteen weeks pregnant. So, I resolve to doing the handful of dishes in the sink and cleaning the two pots. The only food that has touched anything is a white chicken chili, so it’s relatively quick work. I was also ecstatic that the dishwasher was dirty and only 15% loaded. There was no risk of overfilling.

As the dishwasher started, I saw the clock at 6:40. I could still be at the gym by 7:00. I put on my gym clothes, located a hat. Before throwing my laptop into my backpack, I remembered one administrative work task that I needed to do earlier rather than later. I sat down, cleared the task in under fifteen minutes, but then I saw the clock and the pile of recyclables from our recent IKEA purchase still strewn about. We have another shipment from IKEA coming today, so I knew I needed to get the big cardboard out of the way. Elizabeth had promised me that she would show her appreciation for me assembling the furniture by taking care of the boxes. When she offered that, I told her that I’d rather have her put all her bagged up clothes into the new furniture.

So, I tackled the next task. I gathered up the cardboard, and some of the milk boxes stacked beside the trash. We had gone through three half-gallon boxes of the Grass-Fed milk, partially as a result of my lattes and protein shakes, and only minimally by Elizabeth trying to eat cereal with high calcium milk.

The longest card board box is long enough to be awkward. I had been impressed when the delivery person brought it in, because it was heavy and awkward. Now it was just awkward, and even more so when trying to drag out a bunch of folded milk cartons along with it. I spent a few minutes in the front of the apartment building, tossing hangers from the dry cleaners along with chopping up the cardboard into bin sized pieces with a small box-cutter.

Coming back inside, I had given up on the gym. We were backed up on laundry, since our dryer had seized and had filled our apartment with the smell of melted plastic. When I came home and smelled it that day, I was worried Elizabeth had passed out from carbon monoxide poisoning. Luckily the worst of it was that we had to hang dry a few loads of laundry, which we were still ignoring on the rack by the window. My goal with the laundry was to catch us back up, so I threw the top few handfuls of clothes into the machine.

With ample time to get ready for my day now that the gym was off the schedule, I shaved my face and trimmed my nose hair. I hate to shave, but it had been long enough that I needed it. I shower after I shave, because I always cut my face. Usually the bleeding stops in the shower. In the shower, I had a radical thought “What if I deleted the email app on my phone?”

I thought about Jack White, the musician in the White Stripes. I am not crazy for his music, I don’t dislike it but I almost exclusively hear it blasted at stadiums instead of through my AirPods. He doesn’t have a cell phone, so he just texts or emails through a MacBook. He’s a rock star so he can get away with it, but I feel like he probably has more urgent emails than I do. Maybe I can try It. I haven’t had access to Reddit in two months and don’t miss it. Maybe losing access to constant emails would feel the same in two months.

After the shower, I pulled a pair of socks off the drying rack. The Ohio State laundry bag full of socks was out of any that one would actually wear in public, so the drying rack was the last option.

Dressed and out the door, I knew I wanted to make it to the WeWork with enough time to attempt getting a reservation at 4 Charles, a nice steakhouse where we once saw Liam Neeson, for Elizabeth’s birthday. I had enough time to walk one step into a deli by the uptown train station, only to decide I’d rather wait to buy a drink and a protein bar at the Whole Foods by the Harlem WeWork.

Before the 180 in the deli doorway, I noticed the way the light hit a local grocery store. I usually walk past it earlier in the morning, when it’s still shaded by the buildings across Broadway. But by 8am, it looked like what I imagine when I think of Parisian fruit mongers. Somehow the buildings of the Manhattan skyline and the celestial bodies had aligned to cast a golden few minutes on Barzini’s overripe fruit.

On the subway platform, I started to record my day, retracing from when I got out of bed. I definitely wanted to record the line about the celestial bodies and how they transformed the usual “Ratzini’s” into something appealing. I then remember that the dream I woke up from was somehow back at Ohio State, conversing with a woman for whose child I had made balloon animals for at a birthday party. The conversation was about how Elizabeth and I had our first on the way. That had to make it into the story, too. I had six minutes on the platform, which is usually torture from the humidity. But it was a cooler morning and I had skipped the gym, so I avoided the sweat and tapped away to journal my morning.

Off the train and through the Whole Foods checkout, I was at the desk by 8:45. Reservations for 4 Charles open at 9am, twenty-one days in advance, and today was that day. Wei was also in position at 9am, but we ultimately failed. It was worse than US Open tickets, just trying to get a table at this restaurant on a random Tuesday in October.

At 9:01, with the excitement from the frenzied attempt at booking settled, displaced by disappointment that I had not solved my ultimate task of the birthday dinner plan, I logged onto my first call of the day.

Let’s take sports for an example. I have never really enjoyed watching sports, live or on TV. I say that without any condescension or to be antagonistic of those who do enjoy watching sports. I just find it challenging to pay enough attention to feel invested in the play. You need to hold a lot of different pieces of information in your head simultaneously. You need to know the score, you need to know how much time or how many turns are remaining, who has the ball, etc. Watching and enjoying sports is not a passive activity. But, as I’ve spent more time thinking about sports, what you get to enjoy by paying that much attention is that same sensation of tension and release. When the team you care about is 3rd and long with minutes left in the game, that singular snap carries with it tension that you can palpably feel in a room of fans. The release comes with first down, or not. The sentiment or emotional color of the release isn’t always positive.

Framing watching sports this way makes seeing the tension and release more obvious, but that still doesn’t explain the popularity of watching sports clips without all of that in-game emotional context. I can remember seeing the same Sport Center’s Top 10 plays clips on my college house’s TV multiple times a day and my eyes would just glaze over. How can people enjoy sports clips from teams they’ve maybe never even heard of? The obvious answer is that one can admire impressive athleticism without having an emotional connection to the outcome of the larger game. But what does that really mean?

I think that the admiration is of the lack of tension. We don’t see any tension in something impressively athletic, but we can recognize how much tension there would if that athlete had not physically prepared. Watching an outfielder catch a fly ball is really only impressive once we recognize how much time that outfielder would have spent pushing in that transitory time between tension and release in their practice running and catching balls. The play is impressive because it is devoid of tension.

I recently read The Score2 and one of the themes that the author C. Thi Nguyen covers is the idea of ‘process beauty,’ which runs counter to our idea of beauty as something we see or hear. Nguyen is a rock climber and uses the example of the beauty one can feel through moving elegantly up the face of a rock, specifically after working through the path until it progresses from feeling like an impossible challenge to feeling like a flow state. One of my own parallels would be in yoga, which I’ve been putting a higher level of effort into over the last 18 months. I started attending an “upside down” yoga class and it took me a few months to get to the point of being able to comfortably get into a supported headstand without falling backwards, and then the ‘tripod headstand’ eventually felt natural. I’ve been able to get in and out of a tripod headstand pretty gracefully for probably a year. I almost always still need a wall for my handstand, and I’m currently at this really fun stage working on forearm stand. Only in the last few classes have I started to feel comfortable getting into and holding a forearm stand without relying on the wall, but I’m not even close to being as comfortable with it as a I am with headstands. That challenge is the tension, and I feel a moment of release when I find myself suddenly holding myself in a forearm stand. But, I’m still always impressed by my yoga teachers effortlessly pressing into handstands, which I think is in part because I know from my own practice how challenging it is. I am nowhere close to being able to pull it off and seeing someone do it without any visible tension is hard to believe.

To go back to musical examples, there is the obvious tension and release I talked about before, but there are also the more subtle moments when a musician is doing something technical that is impressive to musicians, but is otherwise ignored by more casual listeners. In that musical moment, the artist is effortlessly playing something that would take a less-trained musician a lot of time to learn, and it’s possible that it’s even being improvised live. To me, playing something somewhat technically challenging off the cuff is more impressive than playing some extremely technical piece from rote memorization.

So, I was wrong all of those years ago to derail the rehearsal to present my then-theory of tension and release, because now I recognize that there are valid transitions between tension and release everywhere. Even when the obvious transition isn’t there, the lack of tension that makes something feel so fluid is the appreciable part. The lack of tension is predicated on the time spent getting out of that tension previously. Flow state then feels like a kind of meta-release, a sensation after all of the tension has been controlled for in advance.

So far, the tactical parts of parenthood have been easy. We were lucky in that Remy’s birth was easy for both her and Elizabeth. Just a few days after getting home from the hospital, Elizabeth and I walked Remy in the stroller to and from her first pediatrician appointment. It was too far of a walk for Elizabeth that early and we learned our lesson, but the fact that we tried was a testament to Elizabeth’s strength through the entire process. We had concerns over Remy’s size before she was born, but she has quickly erased those fears. A newborn has basic needs and by paying close attention, one can even figure out which of those needs is the highest priority at any given moment. She sleeps fairly well, she took to breastfeeding (in large part to Elizabeth’s determination and hundreds of hours of TikTok research on the subject), and I’ve picked up some cool diaper tricks.

What has been more challenging is adjusting to what is important and possible. There have been studies that show that parts of men’s brains shrink as a result of starting parenthood. I feel like I felt that shrinking in real time. We took Remy on a stroller walk to Riverside park near our apartment (a shorter and easier trip for postpartum Elizabeth) and sat on the benches during one of NYC’s several false springs. She asked me what I was thinking about, and I completely failed to articulate the sense that I had run out of time for all the things that I needed to do before becoming a parent.

Some of those feelings were the sense of dread at the passing of time that I have always had. When describing myself, I always included the word “musician”, but I’m embarrassed by the fact that I haven’t written a complete song since high school, and I’ve never written a good song in my life. If I were to die tomorrow, I’d leave no lasting legacy of recorded music outside of bad unplugged takes from my iPhone. Even those will disappear once Apple stops charging me $1.99 a month for iCloud.

The more pressing fears were all the things that I had not done to prepare for Remy. Outside of covering roughly twenty hours of work during each of the first two weeks of my paternity leave (which fairly caught the ire of Elizabeth and was a less easy part of early parenting), I spent probably 10+ hours trying to build a better note taking app so that I could begin documenting my own take on the classics of literature and philosophy for Remy to use as a guide when she is ready to take that on. This is ignoring the fact that I have read an infinitesimal portion of the classics of literature and philosophy and was stressing too that I had had only a few years to complete my own classical education before I’d need to start hers.

In a similar stressed vein, I’ve been playing the classics of bebop on repeat, trying to get ‘Round Midnight drilled into her brain so that it comes as naturally as Mary Had a Little Lamb (which I also plunked out on a mini electric keyboard on the floor during a tummy time session. I read the audition requirements for second graders at a Manhattan musical elementary school and figured waiting to start lessons until month two was probably too late.) Even thinking about starting Remy’s music lessons made me feel behind on my own musical education, because if I was asked to take a chorus on Round Midnight right now, it would be one of the worst solos you’ve ever heard. How can I teach her to take musical approaches to jazz standards if I can’t execute on them myself?

The good news is, I think I’m over it. I am now feeling that many more things in life are not precious. I am not precious about where whatever amateur thoughts I have on Hobbes and Rousseau end up. For years, I’ve kept all my notes and past writing from the first iteration of the Palmer Press in markdown files on my computer, because it avoids the ‘vendor lock in’ of more popular and accessible note taking tools, because I was afraid I would ‘lose’ them if something happened to Notion or Evernote. The fact that I have chosen to publish here today versus the standalone blog I barely managed for the last 6 years is proof that I am choosing to do something easily in the here-and-now versus vainly preparing my words for perpetuity. I am not anxious about trying to record some proof of my existence as a musician. Even though a copy of The New Lifetime Reading Plan arrived this week, I am not going to pretend that my scribbles in the margins of the world’s great books will mean anything to Remy or to anyone else. Besides, I had always known that she might not give a damn about jazz or philosophy anyways, but it still felt like a failure to not have something prepared. That feeling has passed.

It is instead much more clear to me what is precious. The time spent laying on the couch as Remy sleeps on my chest is more important and meaningful than all the other things that I could create or work on that would have always disappeared in time. The experiences of shared moments with her, or Elizabeth, or any of my friends or loved ones are what is truly rare and precious. That has always been true, but it feels more obvious. I only have 18 years where I can really be an overly involved father, and I’ve already burned through one month of that time and regret that I haven’t used it as wisely as I could have.

“Now all them things that seemed so important, well, mister, they vanished right into the air” - Bruce Springsteen, The River

As a closing note, why then, if this is all so much less important, choose now to restart a blog or whatever this is? Well, for one, newborns still need naps and writing my thoughts down is a lot quieter than practicing guitar. Secondly, writing things down helps me make sense of the world, and making sense still seems like a good trait to look for in a Dad.