That’s where the two thugs who attacked me are going, I found out today. I don’t know for how long yet. I hope to be able to tell you more in the coming weeks. But that much I do know. I guess it’s something.
But I can just imagine them, indignant pouts on their faces. Angry, cursing me, cursing the police, the attorneys. Not changed at all, not feeling sorry for anything they’ve done, just feeling embarassed for having been caught, feeling wronged for being punished by an authority they don’t recognize. Nothing is really different. If anything, they’ll probably only come out worse. I could be wrong, but I doubt it.
Tag: personal
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Jail
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Peace
In DC, I earned a master’s degree in political management, interned for a major network’s news operation, worked on a historic presidential campaign, and ran the communications operations for two national nonprofits. I performed in children’s theatre, and even got to compose songs for a new kids’ musical. I discovered my political calling in the atheist movement, and made friends I plan on keeping for a lifetime.
Also in DC, our car was broken into twice in the space of a couple of weeks. In an earlier residence, our downstairs neighbors’ apartment was broken into twice, and gunplay was sometimes heard across the street. In our current place, a rock was thrown that shattered the glass in our door in order to “case” our house, and later that same night, I was assaulted, severely beaten by two thugs for no apparent reason, inflicting injuries to my body and my psyche that I’ll be dealing with for years to come.
In a state called Maine, I married the love of my life. I met a new family of in-laws who welcomed me and loved me like I was their own before I even learned all their names.
In DC, my wife and I had our baby boy Toby, who I love more than I can possibly describe in words.
That boy needs to grow up in a place where he’s surrounded by love, has the space to play, and can go to good, safe school. My wife needs to live in a place filled with family and support. I need to get away from the hostility that flows through the very veins of the nation’s capital, I need peace.
Next month, we’re moving to the Portland area of Maine. We’ll be with family, we’ll get away from the madness of the beltway and the violence of the city streets. I don’t know exactly what we’ll do once we’re there, but we’ll start a new life. It’s overdue.
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One Personal Consequence of Violence
I still intend to write in more detail about my recent assault, but what’s most on my mind about it in my day to day life has to do with my kid.
You see, in the attack, I was knocked down face-first by the thugs, and braced myself each time with my hands. Then, as I tried to stagger home following the attack, I fell at least once face-forward and again braced with my splayed hands. So now they are strained very badly — the first few days after the attack, I couldn’t lift a glass of water or can of soda to drink. I couldn’t adjust my pillow or blankets in bed. And of course I couldn’t pick up my baby boy.
Almost two weeks later, I’m improved, but I still can’t do many things like open my prescription bottles. Simple tasks like pressing buttons or adjusting my kid’s high chair, a very simple device, take two hands and a lot of effort, and there are many other moment-to-moment compensations I have to make with different muscles in order to get through the day. I now wear two wrist braces when doing just about anything.
And I still can’t handle my kid. Not really, anyway — not without doing some very creative hugging/scooping wristless and fingerless baby-fu so as not to hurt myself. I can get him into my arms, but it’s a huge effort, and he is a heavy, powerful kid for his age who likes to squirm and play, and I can’t keep up like I did. So usually, I have to call for my wife to wrangle him when he’s heading in a dangerous direction or getting into some trouble. We have to bring a babysitter over — while I’m home as well — just to do simple things like dress him and unscrew his milk bottles. But the point is, I can’t pick him up like I used to. I can’t play with him like I used to. And my hands and wrists might be like this for a while.
God damn them. Those fuckers separated me from my baby boy.
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My New Career: Full-Time Daddy
In 2004, I decided to begin to move away from my life in theatre to one in professional politics. I was tired of being on the sidelines, feeling unable to take part in what felt like was “the important stuff” while doing Shakespeare around the country (which I also think is very important, but I’d been doing it for years by then). Coming off a life of a touring actor, I was, in effect, following the lyrics of Mike Doughty:
My circus train pulls through the night
Full of lions and trapeze artists
I’m done with elephants and clowns
I want to
Run away and join the officeIt took some time, but by January 2007, I had dragged my then-fiancée to DC so I could begin work on a master’s degree in political management and dive head-first into the political industry. I didn’t know quite what I wanted to do with that education, but that I wanted to be in the fight.
I worked in a lot of different jobs since then. By the close of 2008, I had figured out that the battle I really wanted to join was on behalf of my identity group, atheists. Eventually, I scored a job doing just that.
But something else happened. The wife and I had what my Twitter followers know as #babyfidalgo, my beautiful son Toby. We assumed that we were supposed to do what most other families are forced to manage — maintain our jobs while finding day care for the baby, and somehow make ends meet.
Something about that arrangement, commonplace as it is in contemporary America, seemed grossly out of sorts with the cosmos. At my core, in my heart, the idea of a paid caregiver essentially raising my son through most of his waking hours was simply wrong. (By the way, our nanny is wonderful, loves Toby, and takes wonderful care of him.) I would find myself tearfully apologizing to my uncomprehending baby son, asking his forgiveness for not being there during his babyhood.
Nothing I was doing in my professional life seemed to compare even remotely to the project of cultivating and caring for my son. I’ve gone through a lot in recent years to build a career that would provide fulfillment as well as pay the bills. Nothing I’ve done has made very much money, I should note, working mainly for small nonprofits, and I even took a pay cut to join the secular movement professionally. But more to the point, “work” has failed to serve as something that can define me. Being a father, however, has meant so much to me that it is sometimes overwhelming.
So my family and I did some heavy deliberating, and we’ve decided to change things up. I’ll soon be leaving my job, and starting in November, I’m going to be a stay-at-home daddy.
How will we make that work? It’s something of a patchwork solution; I’ll be doing some part time retail work on the side (and I hope to find some freelance writing gigs), and therefore I’ll see my wife a little bit less than I do now. But in the aggregate, the hope and expectation is that I’ll be happier, and as a result, my family will be happier.
As far as the relevance to this blog, I expect my lack of a connection to any particular issue-based organization will free me up even more to honestly offer my views on the issues I care about. I also expect that “daddyhood” will begin to creep in more and more as one of this blog’s main topics. Depending on how good of a napper Toby is, I may be able to blog more often as well. I can’t promise that, of course, especially given Toby’s unwillingness to settle down this week (big time teething, folks).
So after running away from the circus, I’m now running away from the office, and running toward the play date. I am lucky in that I have so many ways to find creative fulfillment outside of my job. I will still work on my music, my writing, and hopefully more so down the line, on theatre as well. But most importantly, I’m going to be there for my little guy, not just to get him up or to put him to bed, but to see him through his day — to see him through the beginning of what I know will be a wonderful life.
I think he’s waking up from his nap right now. Time to get to work.
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Toby Meets His Great-Great-Grandma Fidalgo
This was such an important moment for me: my 8-month-old son meets his 96-year-old great-great-grandmother, with his great-grandma (as well as her cousin), his grandpa and his mommy and daddy all there to introduce the two.
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In Which I Am Flummoxed by a Reverse-Charitable Act at Burger King
I was at a Burger King near my office (stop glaring, wife!) and they were collecting donations for the charity Jerry’s Kids. If you donated a buck, they’d scribble your name on a construction paper shamrock and stick it up on the wall behind the counter. I was happy to donate the dollar, but I felt very odd about having my name scrawled up on the Burger King wall, a kind of semi-permanent reminder of all who came through that I had suffered yet another moment of fast food weakness.So I asked not to have my name written on the shamrock. I considered telling them to put my baby son Toby’s name on it, but hell, he didn’t donate any money, so why should he get Jerry’s Cred? So I politely refused the shamrocking altogether.
But then the cashier did something I did not expect. Rather than let the whole thing rest, and remain content that someone had donated to a charity without need of public acknowledgment, she took her at-the-ready Sharpie and wrote her own name on the shamrock, and stuck it on the wall.
Now wait a god damn minute. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but I was sure there was something wrong, unethical, immoral about that act. She hadn’t given a dollar, but then again, who cares? I didn’t want my name there anyway. But wasn’t it a kind of lie? A kind of utterly-inconsequential-yet-weirdly-disconcerting act of dishonesty surrounding the act of helping needy kids?
Likely, she was simply checking a box, as it were. Some manager was probably going to check the donation total again the number of new shamrocks on the wall, and she didn’t want to have anything look amiss, so now knowing what else to put, she wrote down her own name. Yeah, that’s probably it.
So, I should have put Toby’s name on it.
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Hypoliteracy
I am not reading a book.
Washington, DC is shut down today, and besides doing some catch-up work here and there, I essentially have a bonus day off. Hooray! What a rare and often-wished-for opportunity to do some quiet, relaxed book reading! Visit my Goodreads page and you can see that I am juggling several books that I have yet to complete, and I have a list a mile long of “to-reads” as yet un-attempted. The baby is sleeping (scratch that, back in a second…)
[Two hours later]
Anyway. The point being, on this snow-blanketed day, there’s far more time than usual to engage in some literary imbibing. But here I am on the Web, blogging, tweeting, Facebooking, poking around the RSS reader, etc. I know that the act of reading doesn’t require a herculean effort, but lately the energy, attention span, and patience it requires has eluded me. And I love reading (once I’m into it)! It’s that kick-start that is so difficult, particularly if I’m not totally enthralled by my current book.
There’s just so much *other* reading to be done! Not only is there blog and article reading online, but there are tweets (that lead to more blogs and articles), my various magazine subscriptions (which, since I am paying for them, I feel obliged to read), and since I do communications for a lobbying organization, I have to step up the pace on regular news consumption (major newspapers, aggregators, etc.). The latter one alone takes whatever quiet time my rain ride to work allows me.While I genuinely love the act of reading, books are falling by the wayside. I own a Kindle (which I adore), I have a slew of books in my library I’m dying to get to, myriad Christmas and birthday-gifted books that others thought I’d enjoy, so I have to get to those, plus the backpack-full of books I’m still in the middle of. Meanwhile, I read about people who read several books a week, and my friend Ryan is doing a blog project on reading 100 books in a year. Another friend I have through Twitter is doing only about half that, a book a week for a year. I could never do that!
Part of it, I imagine, is that I don’t read much fiction. Anecdotally, I hear that fiction goes by more quickly than nonfiction, but I can hardly put that to the test, as I have as my current fiction selection War and Peace, and I’ve resolved, for no other reason than the novelty of it, to read it entirely on the iPhone—I wanted to really see if there was truth to the iPhone-as-e-reader cliché that says, yes, the iPhone is great for reading, “…but you wouldn’t want to read War and Peace on it!”I’m getting off-track somewhat. Even when I do get to reading a book, it’s sparse. Too often, I read 10 or so pages before I get too sleepy, or I’m distracted by email/baby/life. And let’s be honest, even those magazines often don’t get the attention their subscription prices deserve, and the newspaper is often merely scanned and discarded. I think that in terms of word count, I read more from blog posts and articles about reading, ebooks, and publishing (a recent but I think enduring fascination of mine) than I do from actual books themselves.
One might think, well, Paul, you just don’t like books that much. But I know that’s not true—I know that good books move and enrich me more than just about any other medium I consume (perhaps tied with music, something else that has suffered since I stopped being a twenty-something). Perhaps part of the problem is the commitment of time necessary to complete a book, but I mainly mean those books that turn out to be only okay. I recently read A Tale of Two Cities for the first time (part of my attempt to catch up with all those books I was assigned in high school and fobbed off due to my shameful degree of laziness) and I couldn’t put it down. It was one of those moments in life when a piece of art truly changes you and affects you at your core. That’s not happening with any of the books I have in the pipeline right now, but nor should I expect so. Some books—most books that I pick up, thankfully—are “just good.” And that should be good enough to keep me at it.
Which, of course, still lands me into conflict with the realities of how many hours there are in a day and all the other text-based commitments I already have.
I’m not like those who lament the “shortening” of certain types of discourse through technology. Mark Ambinder of The Atlantic (one of those aforementioned subscribed-to magazines) recently explained to Michael Kinsley what his reading day is like, and it rang familiar to me to a certain extent. Though I don’t rely on Twitter nearly to the degree Ambinder does, I still understand how valuable it has become, and I certainly value the relationships—new kinds of relationships—that I have developed on that platform. As I noted, Twitter is not really about short bursts of blather for me (though it is also that), but the tweets serve as little windows into deeper reading I would otherwise miss, and a chance for me to share with my 1000+ followers the work I am doing and writing by others that I find compelling enough to warrant others’ attention. Facebook is similar for me, though more lighthearted and social in nature. [Follow me on Twitter here!]
But maintaining these gardens takes time, it takes thought. I enjoy the back-and-forth flow of information so much that I have felt compelled to start a Tumblr blog just to catch the things I don’t know what else to do with (a quote that is too long for Twitter, an article that doesn’t suit my blog or my Facebook audience, etc.)—and on this, I am essentially copying Text Patterns’ Alan Jacobs and his use of Tumblr, or somewhat mimicking the short-burst blogging style of Andrew Sullivan.
So I heartily embrace social media, social reading and social writing. I’m extremely fortunate to be alive and of the age to participate at such a time as this. But it must be said that it only enables one of my pre-existing conditions: laziness. My dad, a voracious reader himself whom I can only dream of matching in terms of quantity, is befuddled by my use of the word “lazy” in this context. Reading is the fun part of the day, he says. There is no effort involved for him; it is always the
path of least resistance and the greatest return.But my personality, my attention span, my physiology, my habits have not developed that way (all of which, almost, is my own fault). Books suffer, which really means that I suffer, depriving myself of what they hold. I should be reading right now, but instead, I’m sitting here writing about how I don’t read.
Perhaps my only avenue to mitigating this concern is to learn speed reading. Hm. Now, when would I find the time to do that?
Oh, and I want to learn French, too. Can we please just add an extra day onto the weekend?
Would that even help?
Near-Earth Object 