A Free Man

“I said, ‘I like Fidel Castro,
I think you heard me right,’
And ducked as he swung
At me with all his might.”

Z, at just shy of a year old, got in his first fight at day care yesterday. Unfortunately, it wasn’t because he was espousing his Dad’s (and Bob Dylan’s) socialist  notions. Nor was it because he’s taken to wearing girls’ sunglasses (thanks Arizaphale). Nope, he tried to steal some kid’s dummy (pacifier) and the kid responded, impressively, by going for Z’s eyes with his/her claws. I haven’t seen the other kid, but based on the scratch marks, I’m guessing Z came out second best. I’ve got no idea what’s going on in that day care, seems to be filled with battling feral children.

——————-

Z’s birthday is in just over a week, and we’re planning the party. First birthday parties are, in my limited experience, only tangentially about the birthday boys or girls. For me, it’s a celebration of my success in avoiding major catastrophe whilst in charge of another human being for 365 days. That, my friends, is something to celebrate.

You’re all invited, by the way. Nichole looked online and found that she and the family could get down to Adelaide on short notice for $34,000 (U.S.). So, I’m looking forward to seeing her and Alex again. Don’t worry about a present, Nichole. Can’t think of a reason that the rest of you won’t be there as well.

Speaking of presents, Z’s gotten his first birthday gifts from his Grandparents in Florida and as with kids of his age, enjoyed the box as much or more than the contents. Among the contents, though was a great little piece of childhood memorabilia, a Tonka ambulance that has been playing the role of madeline for me since last night. It’s amazing how much you forget about childhood and how much can be brought back with a little bit of metal and plastic. You know what else is amazing - those old Tonka toys. Just indestructible, and Z’s giving it a good go.

—————

I took today off to spend with my son and I find that when I do that my brain goes a bit abstract and I start invoking Proust and shit. But among the partying that Z and I did today, we had to go and get another in the endless string of childhood vaccines. All the researching and posting and comment fielding that I’ve done about vaccinations and autism really got to me. Not because I had a slew of Luddites chiming nonsense and even some nut job compare me to Hitler. Nope, it was the thoughtful and valid points that people like April, NATUI and Joe and others made about the number of vaccines that kids are sometimes given at once. Since then, Dr. O’C and decided that Z would be fully vaccinated but that he would receive one jab at a time with a few weeks between jabs to let his immune system recover. Before you point it out, I recognize that we’ve made this decision in a very unscientific manner. But I’ve been parenting largely on instinct so far and, as I mentioned above, the boy’s still around. (One year, woo hoo!)

At any rate, the slightly thuggish nurse tasked with jabbing Boy Z tried to bully me into having the MMR and two other vax today as well. I told her no and explained my reasoning. I anticipated, and would have respected, an argument from Nurse Ratched based on the extra monetary burden on the health care system. One of the things about a socialized health care system is that you sometimes have to try to minimize costs and high maintenance parents demanding deviations from standard operating procedures cost money. That makes sense and if she had made this argument, I would have offered to pay the excess. But her case was that the kids get more upset with the more shots that they have to go through so its better to do them all at once. Bogus. Z barely whimpered with this one, which is about his 14th, and I doubt that he’ll be fazed by a few more. I’m always willing to stand on principle and Z will get his shots one at a time.

“As his fist hit the icebox,
He said he’s going to kill me
If I don’t get out the door
In two seconds flat,
You unpatriotic, rotten doctor commie rat…”

 

 Bob Dylan - "Motorpsycho Nitemare" [4:34m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Popularity: 17% [?]

You’ve got to love happy endings. In what could be Dr. O’C’s final post here on A Free Man, we get just that…

At some point my attitude to motherhood started to improve.  I don’t know when that happened, but it did.  I am a better mum than I thought I would be.  For the first few months, I would tell Z that I loved him, over and over but I don’t really think I meant it.  I said it more to convince myself of that fact.  I know that I was meant to feel this unconditional love for him.  Instead I didn’t really feel anything for him.  Sure he was a cute baby and it was nice when he smiled, but it could have been any baby.

Initially we had planned that I would take 4-5 months off work, but when February loomed I couldn’t go back.  I couldn’t put this helpless individual into day care 10 hours a day.  I didn’t know how it would work.  How would I get up, walk the dog, get Z and myself dressed and out the door.  Plenty of people do it.  I just didn’t know how it would work for me.  It comes back to my fear of new things or a new way of doing things.  A fear I never knew I had before Z was born.  I walk the dog the same route every morning.  I get up, walk dog, shower, get dressed, eat breakfast, brush teeth, dry hair and leave for work. In that order, every morning.  I don’t think I ever changed it.  It was the most efficient way of starting my day.  But looking back, was I inflexible and stuck in my ways?  With Z, although it took a long time to establish, I was used to doing things a certain way and couldn’t imagine fitting work into it.  I also couldn’t imagine that I would be comfortable leaving him with anyone else.

The irony of the situation is that before I got pregnant and even during my pregnancy I worried if I was capable of taking a whole 4 months off work.  I thought that would be pushing the limits of my sanity.  I am a social person, I love to talk, interact with people and find out about them. But mostly I knew that I would go insane if I stayed at home with a baby (and I kind of did).  If Chris could have taken paternity leave, I think that we would have both jumped at the chance.   And now here I was, not wanting to go back to work because I was both afraid of the logistics of doing what millions of people do every day, getting themselves and a baby ready and out the door in the morning and I was getting attached to this little person, whom I had had very little emotional connection with so far.

Chris and I had been discussing a move to Australia for a while.  Well to be honest, Chris was ready to go, but I loved my job and had negotiated a promotion for when I returned from maternity leave.   Problem was this promotion almost certainly required me to travel internationally every month.  Not something that was going to work with a small baby.  I know my company would have worked with me and changed the job, but to be honest I was probably looking for an excuse not to go back.  An excuse to not change my finely tuned routine and put Zach in the care of strangers.  Pathetic I know.  Instead of getting into a new routine of going back to work, I embark on a trans-continental move, involving two adults, a baby and a dog.  What the hell was I thinking?

I was thinking that it would be nice to be home after 8 years spent overseas.  It would be nice that Z has family around. A Nana whom he adores and who gives him sups of tea and biscuits, who he goes crawling half way across the house to when he hears her saying ‘Nana Nana Nana’. (She is determined that they be his first words).  It would be nice to have someone to tell me how to do things.  Simple things like when it is safe to give Z a piece of bread and not choke, when he is sick enough that he needs to see a doctor.  Someone to baby sit so Chris and I could have a night out, go see a movie, have a meal.  Someone who cares and loves him as much as we do.  It would be nice to be around friends who are having babies who Zach will grow up alongside.

Don’t get me wrong, the move was incredibly stressful.  I was moving home, but Chris was moving to a place he had never visited, a place where I grew up, knew people, had extended family.  I didn’t really know what the job market was like for either of us.  I didn’t know if Chris would like it.  I felt like if it didn’t work out for us that it would be my fault, that we would have wasted the better part of $15K moving our life here and worse still, we wouldn’t be in the financial position to do anything about it.  Dealing with importation of a dog into Australia is not an easy thing, not to mention importing Chris!  It might actually have been easier in hindsight to stay in Oxford.

But things have worked out so far.  Chris has got two jobs, both in areas he wanted to explore and on Monday I started a new job, a good job doing exactly what I had hoped I could do when I came back to Adelaide.  The next few months aren’t going to be easy, getting up, walking the dog, getting myself and Z fed and dressed, and out the door.  Not to mention establishing myself in a job that is challenging and WAY out of my comfort zone.  But I have more confidence that it will be ok.  That I can do it.  That Z will adapt.

I really didn’t think that having a baby would teach me anything about myself, that it would reveal numerous faults.   And in those early few months, I didn’t ever think I would get to the stage where I would look at my baby, my son and say I love you and actually mean it.

Now, about that final post thing. I can’t convince Dr. O’C of anything, not for lack of trying. But maybe you all can. I’ll leave it in your hands to persuade her to keep writing.

———————–

Phantom Planet’s “The Guest” is available from and Amazon.

 

 Phantom Planet - "California" [3:14m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Popularity: 81% [?]

Dr. O’C is the latest member of A Free Man’s household to crack the job market. After what will be nearly a year in the purgatory of stay-at-home motherhood (she would quite possibly use a different word), Dr. O’C will re-join the ranks of the gainfully employed next month. This is the latest in a string of successes in our new Antipodean home and reflects one of the reasons that we came down here. And looking at things as a whole, and knocking exuberantly on wood, things are going pretty good in our new home.

A fellow American in Adelaide who stumbled onto my site wrote a post the other day that got me thinking about immigration. Her point is that most expats (and other people for that matter) relish and toss around the word ‘expatriate’ but ‘cringe’ at the word immigrant. ‘Expatriate’ carries with it images of glamour, worldliness, champagne on the Seine and first class round the world flights. ’Immigrant’ conjures images of huddled masses in steerage, midnight dashes over the Rio Grande and closed doors.

I prefer the word ‘expatriate’ myself but the Australian government, probably rightly, would use the word ’immigrant’ to describe me. Maybe it’s time I started to use that word as well. Both Dr. O’C and I come from a long line of immigrants and maybe it was natural that we followed in their footsteps. Dr. O’C’s family emigrated from Ireland to Australia when she and her sister were quite young in the hopes of making a better life for their family. My great-grandparents emigrated from Europe to Canada in the early part of the 20th century to escape a continent that seemed to be in a state of endless war. My parents moved from Canada to the U.S. in the late 60’s to ride the tail end of the post-war boom. And I emigrated from the U.S. through Europe to Australia in the early part of the 21st century in search of a life that I didn’t think was available to me in the U.S.

I suspect that all of the immigrants in our bloodlines had the same goal when they picked up and left their  home - a better life for our families. All of them achieved that goal - they succeeded beyond what they thought possible in the Old Country. Now, with the unemployment rate in the Free Man household reaching 0%* we’re well on the way to that better life that brought us Down Under.

—————–

* We’re going to give Baby Z a few years before including him in employment statistics. 12 or 13 maybe?

————-

Led Zeppelin’s III is available from .

 

 Led Zeppelin - "Immigrant Song": Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Popularity: 32% [?]

The normally reserved Dr. O’C speaks. This week, pregnancy…

So I am pregnant.  Without wanting to be.  I spend the next two weeks traveling around the U.S. for work.  I get back on a Wednesday, am expected in London for a meeting first thing Thursday, get out of bed, throw up, miss the train, go back to bed and spend the next 10 weeks feeling sick morning, noon and night.  This does nothing for my attitude towards impending motherhood.

My brain is programmed to eat when I feel nauseous. I don’t know why but it is. I found myself eating constantly. I would wake at 4 a.m., feel sick and go eat a banana or a biscuit. I called my sister, mother of two fabulous boys, told her my news (she was excited to be an aunt) and asked for her cure for morning sickness. The bitch (is that a bit harsh?) never suffered morning sickness.

I am still in shock.  I haven’t even been to see a doctor at this point.  It would somehow make it real.  When I finally do go she is a bit shocked I haven’t been to see her earlier.  Scans are booked and the pregnancy progresses.  My family is very excited by the news.  Some are shocked - one cousin said noone else getting pregnant would have shocked her more.  I am assuming she is excluding all male acquaintances and those well under child-bearing age.  We laugh and joke about this, and still the pregnancy doesn’t feel real.  We have the ultrasounds, see the heart beat, the hands, feet, head.  A little person on the screen.  The tears role down my cheek, but it isn’t joy, it is fear, a little bit of disbelief and realization that the pregnancy test wasn’t a false positive.

The next few months go by and I get bigger (at one point Chris uses the word huge, not something he will ever do again!).  I don’t really acknowledge the pregnancy.  Chris has started his blog by now and my friends contact him surprised at the news of my pregnancy.  It’s not that I didn’t want them to know, I just knew telling them would make the whole thing more real.  I continue to get up at 6:15 a.m. to walk/waddle the dog for 45 minutes.  I bike into town and back up the huge hill to our house whilst 6 months pregnant and nearly pass out as my blood pressure skyrocketed with the exertion. I work long hours and it becomes a struggle to fit my expanding waist line behind a microscope or a desk. Chris has to draw the line at me going on a work trip to Guatemala.  My mum flies in from Ireland to drag me shopping for the baby essentials. Apart from the pram, which cost more than my first car, I have no interest in pottering around baby stores and getting things like a cot or a car seat.

Chris dragged me to antenatal classes, and would bollock me on the way home for questioning the spaced out hippy who was conducting the classes in a ‘snarky’ way. When I made a ‘stork is going to bring me my baby’ joke, she didn’t even smile!I continue to push myself way too hard, ignore the fact that I am pregnant. Chris thinks I am trying to be a hero, one of those women who try to do everything just to show how hard they are.  I am not hard. I am in denial.  I continue to be in denial when my waters break walking the dog, 45 minutes after getting home from work, 9 days before my due date. Not sure how much longer this denial can last.

————-

Phantom Planet’s “The Guest” is available from and Amazon.

Popularity: 12% [?]

When I was a younger man I lived in Athens, Georgia and worked behind the counter of a popular coffee house. It was a wonderful job because built into it was the opportunity to meet and chat with the illuminati of the Classic City. One of them, the lead singer of a rock band who shall remain nameless, used to come into my coffee shop when he was in town. He was a shameless flirt and when I crossed his path, he would turn his twinkling blue eyes on me. I was well rooted into heterosexuality by that point in my life so I considered it little more than flattering.

OK, that’s not exclusively true - this guy was one of the biggest rock stars on the planet at the time, so flattery is an understatement. As for my heterosexual roots, I’m not sure how far my protestations and denials would have stretched.

I used to get teased incessantly by friends and co-workers about this incessantly. They would call me Mrs. Rock Star X, they would turn on some of his more suggestive songs as soon as he walked into the coffee shop and so on. One late Friday night I had been drinking in the way I drank, immoderately, at the bar next door. I stumbled over to the coffee shop to try and straighten up a bit. I came up to the counter and asked one of my coffee-slinging colleagues for a perk me up. My barrista buddy started giving me the business about my rock star paramour and, in a fit of frustrated drunken rage, I loudly proclaimed: “I will not fuck Rock Star X!”

The rest happened in slow motion. My friend’s face dropped and his eyes focused on a point behind me. I knew before I turned, but I turned anyway and saw not only Rock Star X, but his manager, lawyer, and another well known chanteuse of the day, let’s call her “Ophelia”. I couldn’t actually tell you the expressions on their faces as I was sprinting in shame out of the shop.

From that point on whenever Rock Star X came into the shop, I would dart to the back and swap with whoever was doing the dishes so I didn’t have to deal with my shame. I did that for months.

There’s a happy ending. One day, whilst I was washing the dishes, Rock Star X poked his head around the corner and said in his inimitable voice, “Hi Chris, long time no see. You OK?” That’s why I still buy their albums even though they haven’t done a great one since 1996.

—————

There is no point to this story other than to say that “New Adventures in Hi Fi”* is one of the all time best albums for travelers. It was written and recorded on the road and that sense of moving while standing still pervades the record. It is the perfect soundtrack for this drawn out circumnavigation. This morning, I woke up dying - in pain, voiceless except for the muscular contractions that forced out mucus and tore the lining of my throat. My slightly weakened physical state made my defenses just porous enough for that little germ called anxiety to slip in.

And, while my immune system is busy with other matters, that niggling anxiety has multiplied to full borne fear. If the truth be told, I am scared shitless. I mean what kind of idiot moves his family half way around the world with no job and no house. What kind of pater familias am I? Is this all going to crumble around us like an illusion? More importantly can I keep it together? It was one thing when I was flitting around the U.S. in a pick-up truck with a steamer trunk. Wandering the world with a family in tow - well that a whole different box of spiders.

“These corrosives do their magic slowly and sweet
Phone, eat it, drink
Just another chink
Cuts and dents, they catch the light
Aluminum, the weakest link…”

-R.E.M.* - “E-Bow The Letter”

R.E.M.’s essential “New Adventures in Hi-Fi” is available from and Amazon.

* This should not necessarily be taken to imply that Michael Stipe was Rock Star X. The pictures, of course, are just gratuitous showing off of my new toy.

Popularity: 18% [?]

More About Wordless Wednesday

Continue Reading »

 

 Duran Duran - "Wild Boys" [4:17m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Popularity: 9% [?]

“You get your Ph.D.
How happy you will be
When you get a job at Wendy’s
And are honored with employee of the month….”

-Barenaked Ladies - “Never Is Enough”

If just one more person gives me a skeptical, condescending or pitying look when I tell them that we’re moving to Australia without a car or a job or a house (or a clue) in place I’m going to go ballistic on them. These people clearly don’t understand that if we had anything sorted then there would be no real adventure.

Since my attack dog is currently doing time in Melbourne dog nick, maybe I can get Dr. O’C’s nephew Ollie (aka The Destructicon) to take on the bulk of the ass kicking.

On a less pugilistic note - check out A Free Man’s interview with Swedish indie-popper Matthias Stromberg of The Bell. Matthias is also a Daddy, and we had a little chat about one of my favorite parenting issues - kids and music. Check out the interview and some of The Bell’s tunes here.

 

 Barenaked Ladies - "Never Is Enough" [3:23m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Popularity: 5% [?]

“Weather man and the crazy chief
One says sun and one says sleet
AM, the FM, the P.M. too
Churning out that boogaloo
Gets you up and gets you out
But how long can you keep it up?”

-The Clash - “The Magnificent Seven”

The fact that we arrived in Sweden yesterday unbruised and still speaking to one another is testament to the strength of our relationship. Our last couple of days in Britain nearly pushed both Dr. O’C and myself over the edge. Packing, cleaning, yelling, selling, screaming, feeding, bickering and all the rest. Monday was the peak of the chaos and strife. We had to finish packing everything that would be coming with us on our extended trip to Adelaide. We had to turn the dog over to the livestock people responsible for getting him Down Under. We had to finish cleaning the house so our landlady would be satisfied enough to return nearly £1000 deposit money. We had to keep Baby Z alive and reasonably happy. We had to do all of that without killing each other. We nearly didn’t make it. Somehow, though we got it done and made it over to our friend’s who had offered to put us up for the night, where we promptly realized that we had far too much luggage. Scandanavian Airlines, our carrier for the first leg of our journey allows 50kg. I think we had about twice that. The chaos continued.

Then, early yesterday morning we were off to Heathrow - still with far too much luggage - for our trip to Sweden and a ten day layover with Dr. O’C’s sister and her family. Thing is we didn’t leave quite early enough. If you will, picture your underwhelming narrator sprinting through Heathrow Airport with a stack of luggage that would make a Hilton blush, Dr. O’C and Zach in tow. The Scandanavian Airlines clerk must have seen something in my eyes that indicated just how close I was to snapping because she didn’t raise the issue of luggage allowance. I plowed through security using Z’s buggy like an icebreaker. We made the flight, but my heart rate and mood has just started to return to normal.

But we’re here and even in a house with two young boys and frequently their friends, cousins and all the noise and mess that accompanies them - things are much more relaxed. Even in a house in which a virtual war can break out in an instant over whether or not one brother has the same Nintendo DS character as the other, there’s a sense of peace and quiet. This is just the first leg of what is going to be a long and stressful few weeks. There are going to be other disasters narrowly averted and challenges nearly failed. I’m going to have to learn to cope with them just a little bit better. Either that or maybe one of you, my readers, would volunteer to raise Z. I mean, chances are the authorities will probably take Baby Z away from Dr. O’C while she’s serving her sentence for murder.

 

 The Clash - "The Magnificent Seven": Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Popularity: 9% [?]

Today at A Free Man: The Real Deal

One of the several things that I will miss about working in academia is unfettered access to academic journals. The cliche of academics locked away in ivory towers is reinforced by the unfortunate fact that many, and certainly the most important, of our journals are protected by a heavy subscription fee. An annual personal subscription to Nature, for example, is $200 (US). It’s kind of a hefty cover charge to get into the club. Effectively this prevents the general public from participating much in the scientific discussion - particularly unhelpful for those lay people that are slightly suspicious of scientists and their work.

To counter this ivory tower attitude, groups of scientists got together in 2002 and 2003 to push for open access to scientific literature online. Currently about 10 percent of academic journals offer free access to all of their contents. The primary criticism of open access journals is financial. Because they don’t receive subscription fees, OA journals charge a higher publication fee to researchers. This is kind of a bogus argument as nearly all journals, OA or subscription, use a pay to play policy. Continue Reading »

Popularity: 4% [?]

I’ve always thought that the best way to get a real sense of a place is to spend a lot of time with the natives. When those natives are family, you the traveler have got it made. Not only can you get nice home-cooked meals, a comfortable bed to sleep in and, in a non-English speaking country, a personal translator but you get to see beneath the shiny, crowded tourist exterior of your destination. For these, and many other reasons, we’re lucky that Dr. O’C’s sister married a Swedish fisherman and now live with their two boys on the outskirts of Göteborg, Sweden. We get over there once or twice a year and have had the opportunity to “see” more of Sweden than if we had done the same number of trips with a Rough Guide.

This was our first trip with Z and it was fantastic to watch him starting to interact with his cousins (most of it pleasant despite some of the pictures in the slide show above) and to meet his uncle, with whom Z seemed completely enamored. We got the chance to do a lot more child-friendly touristing - ice skating in Frölunda, a wander around the grounds of Gunnebo Slott and swimming (and water sliding) in Mölndal. Z got to participate in more of the activities than you might think, though I’m still slightly hurt that his mother didn’t trust my skating skills enough to let me take him on a spin round the rink.

We jumped on the offer of babysitting from Z’s aunt and high-tailed it into town for our first “date” since last September. We went to see “Juno” at a wonderful old city-center cinema in Goteborg and had coffee and cakes afterwards. The film was great, and even though it’s a teen rom com, is entertaining enough for the old folks as well. It was subtitled in Swedish which made for interesting audience surveillance- I think that a lot of the punchlines were just lost in translation. How do you subtitle this, for example:

“Yea, you just take Soupy-Sales to prom I can think of so many cooler things to do that night. Like, you know what Bleek? I might pumice my feet, uh, I might go to Bren’s Unitarian Church, maybe get hit by a truck full of hot garbage juice, you know? Cause all those things, would be exponentially cooler than going to prom with you.”

I had heard two things about Juno coming in - it had a great soundtrack and a questionable message. The first is absolutely true - one of the best movie soundtracks since “Rushmore“. It features an outstanding singer-songwriter that I had not heard of in Kimya Dawson and classic tracks from Belle and Sebastien, Mott the Hoople, Sonic Youth, Buddy Holly and others. For this guy, a good soundtrack goes a long way toward my enjoyment of a film.

As far as the second preconception, I had heard that the film was strongly anti-abortion and kind of flippant about teen pregnancy. I don’t know about these criticisms. I tend not to look to teen comedies for my life lessons, but maybe some folks do. It is not the anti-abortion diatribe that some on the left and right have been bemoaning and celebrating. I don’t have the experience to know if teenage pregnancy is like a Belle & Sebastien song, but I reckon they might be glossing things over a bit. I just wanted to go out (without baby in tow) and have a laugh with my love and “Juno” was a great opportunity for that. Political and social commentary aside, it’s good fun and even though I could relate the most with Jason Bateman’s shady character, I came away from the cinema with a smile on my face.

It would make more sense to attach a song from “Juno” to this post, but I’m not in the mood for making sense (check this post out for one of the Belle & Sebastien tracks from the film). Instead, to finish out a week of Scandanavian music here’s one of my favorite Swedish bands Peter, Bjorn and John doing “Objects of My Affection”. Their 2006 LP “Writer’s Block” is available from Amazon, and eMusic.
“And the other day, this new friend of mine
Said something to me
‘Just because something starts differently,
Doesn´t mean it´s worth less.’
And i soaked it in, how i soaked it in,
How i soaked it in…”

 

 Peter, Bjorn & John - "Objects of My Affection": Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Popularity: 8% [?]