Humans are pretty egocentric animals. We often feel that all attention is on us and only us. We are Copernicus’s Sun (or Aristotle’s Earth) with all events and observations circling round our self-inflated heads. I’m not talking about narcissism, just that we have an innate feeling that all eyes are on us. Dane Cook talks about this in his crying routine. Driving in his car while crying, convinced that every other driver in the rush hour traffic flow is aware of this and fixedly mocking him. “Blue Honda – dude was crying…did you see that! Turn around; we have to follow that guy!”

To put it another way, even as adults, we feel that our experiences are unique. Armed, at least subconsciously, with the teenage rebuttal of you-don’t-know-what-it’s-like-to-be-me, we maintain that what happens to us has never happened to another person. A former writing professor attempted to dispel this inflated attitude with a blunt sentence, scrawled across the board on the first day of class. It read: All your thoughts are meaningless, all your feelings are banal. I try to remember this sentence when my artistic drives grow too haughty.

Parenting has hit me the same way. Despite the fact that people have been having and raising babies since well before the invention of glue (Sumerians - circa 5,000 BC), I constantly deny that people could know what we’re going through when Hazel is up all night or crying for no reason. Our experience is nothing special, even though our daughter is very special. Aware of the indulgent power of self-perception, I try to meter my nerves with the assurance that, whatever is happening to me as Dad has happened to countless other dads throughout history. Sometimes, that rationalization even works.

Then I found that damned lump on Hazel.

Please forgive me for the dramatic standalone sentence, couldn’t resist. It’s nothing serious. Last Sunday, while changing a diaper, I notice a little bump just below Hazel’s abdomen. I paused, investigated, conferred with Megan, and came to the unanimous decision (2-0) to monitor this. Later on, during another change, the lump had grown. So, I called the pediatrician who surmised that it is most likely a swollen lymph node, a reaction from some vaccinations she was administered a few days prior. Just to be safe, bring her into the office on Monday morning. After hanging up (a term that doesn’t work with cell phone functionality), I hopped on the Internet and search for other potential diagnoses. Almost immediately I found an article on inguinal hernias. Megan and I felt we had found the problem.

We were proven right the following day; the doctor came to this conclusion nearly immediately. The hernia doesn’t hurt Hazel at all and is not overtly dangerous but does require surgery. So we have a pre-op appointment on Monday to meet the surgeon that will slice open our baby girl. I still haven’t relaxed about this, but the procedure is routine and safe enough, so no need to get all worked up.

At least now I can satisfy my egocentric attitude because, scientifically, this doesn’t affect many female infants. See? Told you I was special.

Megan and I have a habit of living in tourist-y areas. Overlooking our multiple stints in Poughkeepsie, NY (Tree City USA), we have resided in places that most folks go for a weekend getaway or a week-long R&R session. To start, we started our married life as residents of New Paltz, NY – known for having some of New England’s best rock climbing and being the place where that blonde girl had her abortion in Dirty Dancing. Then we moved to Vermont and found the winter roads clogged with snowboard- and ski-laden SUVs and the summer roads full of people with second homes near the outlet town I worked in. Now we live in coastal Maine and summer vacationers can be found everywhere. You can always pick them out because they wear clothing with their current location branded across it, like their little cartographical labels or something.

My reaction to these harmless visitors is always the same: malice. I sneer at their out-of-state license plates and grumble behind their fanny-packed backs. I don’t know where this animosity comes from exactly. If anything, I should be happy to see tourists. Their very presence supports a commerce base that keeps wherever I live quaint and free of heavy industry. Without the tourist dollar, the bucolic places we inhabit would be rife with polluting factories or empty storefronts. I try to remind myself of this fact, but still, every time I walk over to the bank to make a work deposit, I get more than a little enervated by the bob and weave I have to do just to make the 40-second trip. Tourists are omnipresent, simply standing in the middle of the sidewalk, looking around, deciding where to have lunch, yelling into their cellphones that they’re “in Maine! Can you believe it?”. It’s called a sidewalk, people, not a side-take-my-picture-while-I-eat-ice-cream. If I were a camel, you could follow my trail by the sheer amount of spit I spat, a salivary deluge of ire.

Clearly I need to mellow the hell out about this. And it’s not like this attitude wells up inside me. No, no! I instant I move somewhere, I immediately become a xenophobic dillweed, despising any and all visitors (save my guests of course. Xenophobia is nothing if not self-serving). The territoriality must be rooted in my evolutionary psyche, but that doesn’t excuse screwing up my mojo with negativity. The worst of it is that I’m still driving around with my VT license plates. Oh the shame I swallow daily knowing that, if I weren’t me, I’d most likely loathe myself. Of course, the one benefit to the Green Mountain plates is that I can drive poorly, claiming that “I’m not from ‘round here.”

So yesterday, I whipped up my About page content. Believe it or not, I hate writing about myself, due to the fact that, the way I write comes off like I love writing about myself. I feel like my autobiographical writing voice is Dr. Fraiser Crane mixed with Jon Lovitz’s Master Thespian character from SNL.

Anyway, take a gander and critique the hell out of it. Also, for some blasted reason, I cannot get the second image to align right, an issue that makes me feel very stupid. Suggestions would be appreciated.

Since nuking my old blog a few months back, life has changed a bit. In list form, I:

• Quit my job.
• Sold our house in VT.
• Moved to Maine (therein living in one room at my gracious in-laws).
• Found a new job after months of interviews and tedium.
• Bought a new house in the coastal town of Rockland, ME.
• Had my first child.
• Eaten a cookie as big as my head.

Now, not to pooh-pooh the giant cookie, but having our daughter is the pivotal list item. Before May 15th, I was just some dorky guy. Post May 15th, I am now a dorky father. I don’t want to get into a dogmatic debate or anything, but parenthood starts once the child can cry and stands a good chance of jettisoning some type of bodily fluid on you with little warning.

Having weathered the first six weeks, Hazel is now a bit steadier and Megan and I aren’t in Bomb Squad mode. My leg has all but stopped bouncing and that eye twitch is much more under control. Fatherhood has strengthened my sense of hearing, but deadened the other four. I can now hear her beginning a “feed me” cry at 2 AM, but I’m so tired I can barely see and so rundown that I don’t feel all the furniture I bump into trying to reach her before she goes atomic. Food has become something to fit in between caring for her, so taste is out the window. The deterioration of my sense of smell, however, has proven a blessing during diaper duty.