Eddie is reading, Marianna is walking and Zoriana sleeping in her own bed. The battle over narratives.

2021 08 14

Eddie and I finished reading "Up Front" yesterday. We immediately got into Roald Dahl's biography, "Going Solo." Chapter 1 has him leaving London in 1938 on a small steamboat bound for Mombasa.

Zoriana is more or less settled into her own room. As you will see from my YouTube channel she is learning the Ukrainian and Latin alphabets. There wasn't any good video for teaching ordinal numbers so I made one up.

Marianna crawls everywhere and she stands up for longer and longer periods of time. She says dada and mama sporadically and unpredictably, rather like a parrot, though I think she knows what the terms mean.

Lily Tomlin said "I try to be cynical, but I just can't keep up." It's hard to find anything fresh to say. Here's an interesting thought game – compare the results of Google and DuckDuckGo searches for India and the drug that rhymes with "I were 'spectin."  You get two radically different perspectives. In this case I think you have to go with the authorities, who have been so right about the origins of the virus, flattening the curve, masks, social distancing, lockdowns, the efficiency of the vaccines, the dangers of the off-label generic drugs and everything else. How could you doubt them?  'Scuse me, Lily, for trying to keep up.  My bad.

Not many of you have been writing. I don't know if your mail servers are shunting mail from an encrypted source such as ProtonMail into the bit bucket or you are simply getting older and more detached. This is a natural phenomenon.  Just as children's worlds grow a layer at a time, we old folks seem to abandon old activities, habits and friends a layer at a time until we are reduced to our lonely rooms in hospice care. I'm afraid we don't many of us "rage, rage against the dying of the light."

I find less and less time to pursue my own activities as summer winds down. Eddie is enthusiastic about reading and he absolutely takes priority, even when I have something else I'd rather be doing. While I would like to find a way to leverage automation to help him learn reading – let text to speech teach him how to pronounce words, for instance – there is tremendous value in working in person.

Eddie leans against me as we read, with my finger following the words in the book and pausing to give him time to get it right when there is some uncertainty. Eddie has learned a great deal about the Army. With the end of the draft, the Army ceased being a universal experience a few years after I served. Most Boomers have a decidedly different perspective on war, weapons, and even organizations than we do. Eddie is being exposed to a worldview that that is five decades out of fashion.

I look for reasons why these three children so love to crawl all over their father, be picked up and be read to, and are so willing to accept correction when they don't do what they're supposed to, throw tantrums or otherwise misbehave. It is a pleasure to observe that it is vastly different with this my second family. Nothing compels me to figure out why, but it is very curious.

I give the matter some thought as I am quite resoundingly and quite frequently canceled these days. I am sure I bring it on myself. I am impressed that Reed College even published my brief squib in the Class Notes section of Reed magazine:

Graham Seibert spends most of his time with his three children, aged four months to nine years, in the homogeneous backwater of Kyiv, Ukraine. He notes that the Ukrainians' slavery also ended at the time of the US Civil War, the slaves having been the Ukrainians themselves. Following that, the country was ravaged by several Bolshevik-led famines, most notable being the Holodomor, followed by which it was repeatedly devastated by armies of both the Soviet Union and Germany. After the three and one half remaining decades of communism, during which the people continued to repress their curiosity and inventiveness, they were wholly unprepared for economic and political freedom. Graham comments that the legacy of corruption continues, but surprisingly, the country enjoys more freedom of expression than the liberal democracies of the West. Graham's children are getting an education relatively free of indoctrination. The people remain traditional. A search will locate the articles that Graham periodically publishes on the pleasures of living and raising a family in a country not riven by diversity issues facing the West.

I have to give the college credit for publishing it in its unredacted form. I am confident that many classmates wish they hadn't previously canceled me so they could use this occasion to do so with gusto.

That's the news from Lake WeBeGone, where the women are good looking in their summer clothes, the men are strong, and the children are delightfully average in ways that are more and more uncommon.