JulieLeung.com: a life told in tidepools

Gnomedex 5.0 has been announced for June 23 – 25 in Seattle.
I’ll be there – will you?

The two blogs I am checking first this week whenever I sit down at my desk are Jenny’s and Lenn’s. Both are bloggers, both are friends of mine and both are expecting babies to arrive in their families any day now. (note: Jenny headed to the hospital early this morning – wow!) Somehow I feel in the midst of a baby boomlet in my life: a number of neighbors and friends seem to be waiting for a little one.

I can remember how the last days of pregnancy can drag, hours filled with anticipation but also frustration. It’s a heavy time, physically and emotionally. When I was in labor with my third baby, I was in denial, unable to believe it had finally happened.

The best advice Ted and I received when we were pregnant came from a Lamaze teacher. She encouraged the parents in the class to enjoy every day while waiting for the baby to arrive, even when the child is overdue. Do something special, she recommended. The waiting, although tiring, is a special time, especially before the first one, a time that won’t happen again, a time to celebrate the last days of being a family of two before becoming three.

More on babies…

Last Sunday I enjoyed an informative and entertaining Seattle Times article on The Baby Brain which covered the stories of the research as well as the scientists conducting the studies, a married couple who are both professors at the University of Washington and have a child of their own.

The questions: What do babies know about language, when do they know it, and what’s the best time for them to learn it? Can babies learn from television? Can we know something about who we’re going to be by looking at a little baby? “That’s as fully important as sending rovers to Mars,” Meltzoff says.

A friend of mine recommended The Scientist in the Crib : What Early Learning Tells Us About the Mind, the book written by the researchers. I never got to it and I should have.

Rod Kratchowill again found himself in that wonderful half conscious state of the new parent that only spent a very short time sleeping the night before

Scheherazade decided to read a bestselling book on pregnancy: I have a friend who’s pregnant, and another two who are trying very hard to conceive, and I figured it was about time for me to inform myself about what’s on the other side of the great divide. I couldn’t resist commenting and sharing what happened to the book in our home: Ted forbid me from reading it.

Particularly precious to me was Ilona’s essay on Post-Partum Penciling

I have had ten different births, in different circumstances. Some were very different from the others, one had severe postpartum depression, one had none. I can’t compile any sort of “finding” from this, I can just share some of what I think.

Ilona’s experience and suggestions speak powerfully to me.

What I know, from my years of babyhood, is that the days of waiting can take forever. Acquiring the right knowledge, sustaining the necessary emotional fortitude and finding the proper equipment to take care of your baby can seem enormous. Sleepless nights can seem endless and bring you to tears with the frustrations of first time parenting. But the babies grow. They grow and grow. And soon, like me, you may find yourself reluctantly saying goodbye to the baby years (and the baby things so carefully collected) with only memories remaining of the breastmilk smells, newborn cries and midnight feedings.

Monday night I wasn’t able to attend Malcolm Gladwell’s reading at Eagle Harbor Bookstore on Bainbridge Island, but Chris Holmes provided a number of posts and pictures for others to enjoy. My apologies for my delay: Chris posted his reports that same night.

I had heard beforehand that it might be crowded .

Malcolm Gladwell must have been mesmerizing. I’m amazed there were no tough questions.

There were no tough questions put by the audience who were clearly eating out of his hand.

However, Malcolm did say he’d been criticized for not going into greater depth on the workings of the sub-conscious. To this, his reply was that not even Freud could have come up with a comprehensive study on the subject.

[…]

Incidentally, one of Gladwell’s ace traits is his meticulous courtesy in summarising each question so the rest of the room can hear. In some of the cases, the summary was clearer and better phrased than the original.

He even answered the big question I would have tossed at him after seeing different headshots of him used in publicity.

Someone even raised the question of his hair which he explained thus

* He’d originally cut it short to please his mom. When he realised he was older and no longer needed to keep her happy in quite such detail, he let it grow out.
* The incident with the police involved being pulled in for his resemblance of a rapist.
* As Gladwell told us he pointed out, it was only the hair he had in common with the suspect: in all other respects, he was more slender, younger, and better looking.
* Gladwell also explained that, back in the days when his hair was short and mom-pleasing, he was called a dork. With his bushier frizz, he is regarded as ‘cool’, a heady experience MG is unwilling to bring to a premature end.

Hmmm…an interesting personal experience on market research…

The details Chris shared added flavor, helping me imagine how cool and relaxed Gladwell was in person.

MG looking particularly relaxed and cool in a track suit top with orange piping.

His public speaking voice has an abrasiveness which lends to audibility, and he’s enough of a showman to modulate tone, mood and changes of pace as well as spot when a joke is working and milking it to full effect.

I read the book but I somehow wasn’t aware that Gladwell saw intuition separate from rapid cognition. I agree with Gladwell’s opinion that polling is a waste of time and I think Chris did too.

As one who has worked in market research, I was struck by Gladwell’s pointing out that such polling is largely a waste of time since getting a “truthful” answer is a “cognitive impossibility”.

[…]

I’ve not finished the book, but I wonder if I’d have spotted that nowhere does the word “intuition” appear. Gladwell does not believe it has any connection with snap judgments or “rapid cognition”.

How well can we know ourselves? Can we tell the difference between our own intuition and cognition? I understand from Chris’ posts that the author wanted only to start a discussion and claimed that the observations in his book could not be explained, even by Freud. If we can’t understand it and it is unreliable at times, then how can we improve this blink?

Regarding Gladwell’s next project, Chris reported that it has something to do with ketchup…

Chris’ coverage was so thorough that I only found one sentence in the newspaper’s article that was new to me, the last sentence in this description of his hair.

It’s heady celebrity for a guy who said he only stopped being considered a dork when he let his afro-style hair grow longer. The attention hasn’t all been positive, he said. He was stopped by three police officers because they said he looked like a criminal they were seeking.

That experience, however, hasn’t diminished the shock of suddenly being considered “cool.”

“This kind of mid-life transformation is so intoxicating I just can’t give it up,” he said.

Mid-life transformation stories encourage and inspire others too. I do believe – or hope – that Mr. Gladwell is referring to more than the change of his hairstyle. Going from dork to cool is intoxicating at any age. Maybe he could write a book describing these powerful transformations. Or maybe he could describe the power of trying to please one’s parents and its impact of mother’s hairstyle opinions on society…

The author of Blink is now in Austin at SXSW. I won’t be seeing him there either but I can use Technorati to find a wacky picture of him at a party. Since he will be giving a keynote, I imagine he’ll be receiving more links this coming week.

This week I also discovered that Chris is an talented poet. I love his Waiting for the Ferry which begins:

Killing time waiting for a fog-bound early ferry
I saw a heron on the Eagle Harbour flats.

He also sings and performs with his guitar.

Perhaps Chris will be doing his own tour someday…or appearing at SXSW…

When the girls saw my old toy excavated from the closet during a recent cleaning expedition, they asked: “Do you have any more CDs for it?”

Last year, I gave the kids the boom box I had bought for college. It’s now 17 years old and finally stopped playing tapes this past week. The loss of my college stereo highlighted the changes I’ve seen in my lifetime. When I was my daughters’ ages, my siblings and I danced and sang along to Mr. Rogers and Sesame Street tunes spinning on the living room record player. Next came cassettes I collected in adolescence and then passed on to my kids for them to enjoy as toys. Soon all my girls will recognize are CDs. I had to tell them what a record was. I wonder what stories they will tell their children. Soon they will use CDs as toys too, along with these plastic records and cassettes. I feel old.

Our family has entered birthday season. Considering that a year has twelve months and 365 days as potential possibilities, we five were born relatively close to each other on the calendar. Mine comes first but Ted’s follows a few weeks later. We have a break until the girls birthdates which mark the start and end of Seattle summertime.

On my birthday morning this year I slathered my face with extra Oil of Olay in a vain act of resistance. I feel old. Why is it, I wondered, while examining the contents of my medicine cabinet, that teeth whitening and skin whitening are accepted, even desired in our society, but hair whitening is not?! (Okay, replace “whitening” with “bleaching” and both teeth and hair are acceptable, only the coiffure is then blond instead of gray.)

I’ve now lived long enough that I’ve known Ted half my life. When we met I was a teenager. I was a first year student at college the year our friendship started. Life had begun.

Now I find myself wondering if life is half done. Of course,we do not know when our last day may be. However, statistics tell me that I may not live past 80 or even 70. Death is waiting. Half of my days, or more, may be past me. Where am I going? What’s left of my life?

This year also happens to be the year our passports need to be renewed. I look at the Julie who had her picture taken ten years ago. She looks younger and thinner. Compared to me today, she looks like a model: imperfections invisible. Her hair is styled differently with long bangs covering her forehead and the rest bundled into a braid. This Julie looks calm and carefree and Californian. She’s preparing for a trip to Italy with her husband who got out of school and got a job. Life in Cupertino is sunny and sweet so far. Yes, I can remember. I can read it in her eyes.

My new picture has a strange expression. I look startled because I was. My long hair is loose, the way I wear it now, except tucked behind my ears so the photographer can see my face. I look like I didn’t comb my hair. I look like I’m about to speak my mind. I look like I tried to get my passport photo taken while my three girls were playing with toys in the ten minutes before my eye doctor appointment. I look like I’ve lived through battles.

I wish I still resembled the 1995 me. But that seems silly. After all, shouldn’t I look like I’ve lived another ten years? Since that first passport picture was taken, Ted and I have moved three times. We’ve bought two houses and sold one of them. Cars have come and gone. So have jobs. And some relationships. We went from living in the middle of the maze of Silicon Valley to living in the middle of the Pacific Ocean’s Puget Sound. Journeys have started and ended. We exposed ourselves spiritually, emotionally, physically to others, sometimes retreating in tears. We submitted ourselves to the infertility doctor. We’ve let our insides be scrutinized by specialists. The Julie in the old passport photo had never held her brother while he was dying. That Julie had never held her baby, first inside her and then outside on her chest, in that miraculous moment of meeting someone you already know.

Ten years from now I’ll renew my passport and take another picture. I wonder what that Julie, a decade older than I am now, will think of the Julie who posed for a photo last week. Where will she be in life? What will she be thinking? What song will she be singing?