amit.asaravala.com

1998: Having told my British, German, Italian, Portugese, and Czech flatmates that Mexican food is the finest food on the planet and that surely they must try it, we head out that night to what must be the only Mexican restaurant in Edinburgh.  It is run by a Spanish family.  When giving the waitress his drink order, Dave, unknowing that the Tequila we speak of is meant to be served as shots, asks for “a bottle of Tequila.”  I’m pretty sure we talked him out of it. Still, I don’t quite remember the rest of the evening, except: the food was bad, or at least not Mexican; and once we got back to the flat I used the phone in the hallway to call a national park in Costa Rica to find out why a certain girl hadn’t called me first. She wasn’t there, and she didn’t get the message.

2008: I wake up late to find that my wife and son have let me sleep in.  In the living room, the kid is playing in his little chair and smiles when he sees me.  My wife is making birthday brownies.  We open my present, which is both a surprise and what I wanted.  Later, we pack up and head off to lunch at a local restaurant specializing in barbecue.  I think that barbecue might rival Mexican food for the title of finest food on the planet.  The kid falls asleep in his chair and we have one of the first leisurely lunches we’ve had in a long time.  The grilled tuna sandwich is incredible.

The new design is courtesy an entirely new content management system under the hood.  Also, most of my technology-related posts will be over at returncontrol.com from now on.

For those who are interested, I’m now using WordPress, and like it much better than Movable Type 4, which was a nightmare after the upgrade from version 3.  Will write up more on my experience making the switch later (and post it to returncontrol.)

Is everyone allotted a finite number of strange coincidences? If so, I feel like I should be running out of them soon.

For instance, the other day I got a message on the answering machine from an old friend and colleague. I didn’t have time to call her back because I was finishing up some work and then running off to a dublit event in the city. Then, on my way home that night, guess who I ran into at the BART station?

Weird.

Need to find all the squeaky spots in your floors? Simple: Just walk around the house with a baby you’re trying to put to sleep.

As I was shivering at the pool today, I realized that I haven’t had a true, warm, sunny summer in a decade — literally, a full 10 years! In 1998, I spent the summer working in Scotland (more on that later). And by 1999, I had moved up to San Francisco, where all the tech startups in the world can’t solve the problem we’ve got with miserably overcast and chilly summer weather.

Maybe it’s time for a long vacation someplace where the people wear shorts in the summer and worry about tracking sand in the house. Where do you go with a two-month old?

Some friends are doing some cool stuff this week:

Ben, who runs Virtually Blind and is an expert on legal issues in virtual worlds, has had an op-ed piece about the future of the Internet published in the Wall Street Journal.

Maggie, of Mighty Girl fame and a former colleague at Web Techniques, has launched Mighty Haus a new shopping blog focused on cool stuff for your house. As the tagline says, hooray for stuff!

Jeff, who runs the Digital Camera Resource Page, one of the top digital camera reviews sites, got to play professional sports photographer for a day at the Bank of the West Classic tennis tournament at Stanford. Love the photo of the flying braid.

Clearly, I’ve had a few things on my mind lately. So it’s no wonder I completely forgot about jury duty. That’s right, I completely blew off my civic responsibility and simply did not show at the courthouse on my appointed jury duty date. I, my friends, am a criminal.

And I’ll tell you, when I finally realized what had happened — on the day after I was supposed to be at the courthouse — I got that feeling in my stomach that I sometimes get when I eat the leftover Chinese food from the cartons at the back of the ‘fridge. And I imagined a frightening scene in which I would have to do the drive-of-shame down to the courthouse and turn myself in to the bailiff, who would proceed to handcuff me and haul me off to spend a night in jail, where there would be no Chinese food, just bread and water. An alternate scene had me on the lam in Mexico, occasionally sending the wife and kid some pesos and a letter signed with my pseudonym, Nacho; but I quickly dismissed that as a bit melodramatic (and plainly quite difficult to pull off given border security these days.)

Fortunately, when I called the courthouse, the world’s nicest clerk answered and let me reschedule. I didn’t even get a scolding.

A lot of people say exercising helps them relax and takes their mind off things for a while, or else it helps them focus on a problem a little more clearly. When I jump in the pool, there’s none of that. Instead, I’ve got two voices battling it out from the moment I break the surface (squealing like a frightened pig at the sudden temperature shock) to the moment I crawl out (flopping on the deck like a prehistoric fish taking its first evolutionary steps on land.)

The voice of Lazy Amit is saying, “Dude, you’ve had a busy week, everyone will understand if you just swim a handful of 50s and get out. Take your time.” The voice of Type-A Amit cuts in, shouting, “Stop hanging there on the wall, you barnacle! You’re doing 200s and you’d better keep moving. That 80-year-old in the Speedo over there is kicking your ass!”

And so it goes on like this for the first several hundred yards or so: the voice of Lazy Amit gently urging me to skip the flip-turn and hang on the wall to catch my breath; the words of Type-A Amit pushing me onward to the next lap. Then, as I’m seriously contemplating getting out and taking Lazy Amit with me in search of a slice of pizza, Type-A Amit pulls out this line: “You can only improve if you push yourself to do so.”

Well, ok, sometimes he phrases it a little less gently. “You suck,” he’ll say, “and if you get out now you’re always going to suck.” Either way, it keeps me in the pool every time. And then, when I eventually do finish up and get out, completely exhausted, I keep hearing those words (the kinder version). I hear them even when I get home and when I get back to work. You can only improve if you push yourself.

I’m not saying Type-A Amit always wins. I’ve bought Lazy Amit plenty of beers and dude owes me one sweet party one of these days. But the other guy’s got a pretty convincing argument. When I think of it, I can’t come up with a single thing I’ve done well or do well that just came to me on its own; there was always that push.

They asked about the peeing at the pediatrician’s office. But they didn’t ask whether he can also shoot poop a foot in distance.

We’ve since learned that the answer is yes.

Aren’t you glad you know that now? Enjoy your breakfast!

I was not expecting to be so charmed by the minutiae of infancy. I mean, he’s small and that’s cute, and I get that. But watching his eyelashes grow little by little? Noticing that he stares just a second longer at the green frog dangling from his play gym? I’m fascinated. I could launch an entire blog just about the shapes his belly button has gone through in the past few weeks.

I think this is why it’s so hard to explain what being a new parent is like to our friends who don’t have kids. In conversation, it’s the big, obvious things — the negative things — that get discussed: He kept us up all night; he wants to nurse all the time; we’re so exhausted. Or else, it’s the funny-but-poor-us stories that we tell — like how he woke us up with his cries at 3 a.m. the other night, and how, when I went to pick him up, I realized that he had somehow worked his diaper down in his sleep, and then crapped. All over himself. And the blanket. And the bassinet sheet.

“That sucks,” my friends respond.

But the thing is, it doesn’t. Not at all. Because when I picked him up that night, he opened his eyes, looked at me, and smiled. Not a big smile, just a quick moment of recognition and then back to crying.

That may seem like a small thing in comparison to standing in the dark with shit on one hand and a crying infant in the other at three in the morning. And when the story gets told in the following days, it’s the exasperation of the whole scene that gets the most attention. But secretly, I loved every minute it took to clean that kid up that night.