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Sam's Story: Week 79 July 31, 2005
Back a few years ago, before Sam was born, a friend of Geralyn's came to visit us. She brought along her husband and one of their children, a boy somewhere around 1 year old. I remember very clearly when we went out to dinner how amazed Ger and I both were over how easily her friend could simultaneously ignore and pay attention to her child. The kid was constantly squirming, grabbing at things (steak knives, glasses of water, etc.), and shouting, but this woman somehow managed to corral him, yank things away from him, and otherwise keep him in check, all without breaking stride while holding an adult conversation with the rest of us. It was like someone was remote controlling her arms and hands while the rest of her stayed in this world.
Out to dinner last night, Ger and I realized that we had come to possess this same incredible gift. We were sitting there talking about what books we had been reading while Sam snatched, threw, yelled, and generally spazzed out like a little tempest in a tea pot. Sure, Sam may have thrown a wadded up napkin in Ger's cream of mushroom soup, but Ger never batted an eye as she picked it out with one hand and pulled a crayon out of Sam's jaws with the other --all without any kind of lull in the conversation with me. It was bizarre, but I guess it's a good thing. If only I could split my being like that at work, I'd be running the place by now.
Look, this week's pictures:
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Of particular note is the following sequence of images, which is currently my computer desktop wallpaper (click for a larger version):
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In other news, Sam's vocabulary seems to be backsliding a bit. She understands more than ever, but her predilection for "No" (or, on occasion, "No-no") has squeezed out other words of late. Here's a chart to show what a typical day's uttering amount to:
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Unless the SATs of the future feature only questions to which the correct answer is "No!" things need to improve.
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This is the book that Sam is obsessed with. Specifically, the part with the Little Red Riding Hood story. She will demand that it be read to her over and over and over again. Often while holding it right-side-up.
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I'm not sure why I haven't mentioned this before, but in the last few months I've been fortunate to be part of a small group of people who decided to create a professional association of industrial/organizational psychologists working or studying in the San Diego Area. Starting an organization like this was both weird and banal at the same time. The idea had actually been bouncing around between myself and a few people at work for over a year, and we eventually worked up to just picking a date, calling a meeting, and contacting everyone we knew. The response was pretty astounding --over 100 I/O students and professionals showed up. We chatted a bit about what we should do and then chatted about how often we should meet, and then --presto!- We had ourselves a professional organization.
The only thing we really had to argue about was the title, which turned out to be "San Diego Industrial/Organizational Professionals" or "SDIOP" for short. There was some rancor over the "P" standing for "Professionals" or "Psychologists" as the vast majority of us (maybe even all of us) were not technically licensed to call ourselves psychologists. Having had all interest in the name game ground out of me in the course of naming products at GameSpy, I didn't care as long as we didn't come up with anything that abbreviated as "NAMBLA."
Over the course of the next few weeks we organized our first meeting and I got myself elected as an officer. Not president, though --that went to the very capable Ben Schneider, who is about as an experienced and noteworthy a guy as we could have hoped for to be in charge of the thing. I ended up as Secretary/Webmaster, which worked out pretty well as one of the first things I did was bang out our website:
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Kind of fruity, I know, but I like it. It was fun to design a website for once that wasn't a blog. I actually would have linked to it earlier here but it was kind of ...fundamentally broken in one spot and I didn't figure out how to fix it until yesterday. Sorry. Nobody complained in the meantime, though, so maybe it wasn't as bad as I thought.
At any rate, if you're an industrial/organizational psychology professional or student in the San Diego area, we're meeting again in August. The specific place and date are still being worked out, but should be posted on the website if anybody can get that lazy webmaster to do any work.
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Sam enjoys a slice of watermellon the size of her head. I liked all 3 pictures so much I decided to use them all.
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Speaking of Harry Potter, this kind of made my mind boggle. TalentSmart, a company specializing in leadership and employee assessment, wrote a white paper about the different displays of Emotional Intelligence in the Harry Potter books. It describes one dramatic exchange between Harry, Ron, and Hermione, then shares the following wisdom:
I still can't figure out if this is silly or a brilliant move to bring one part of I/O psychology closer to the masses (and market your product in the meantime). But at any rate, wonder if examining emotional intelligence in the context of a pissed off teenage wizard is the kind of thing that will rack up the credibility for a construct that's already kind in a lot of people's "iffy" column.Let's stop here a moment and notice that Ron is highly disconcerted by Harry's suggestion and Hermione feels anxious. Harry's friends know him well enough to realize that something major is upsetting him. Harry jumps to the conclusion that their respected schoolmaster has doubts about him. In response, Ron focuses on Harry with "don't be stupid," while Hermione focuses away from Harry on to Dumbledore: "Of course he doesn't think that!"
Those familiar with the story know what happens next: Harry becomes intensely bitter and shouts at his classmates. They are left to watch his frustration "pouring out of him, his frustration and lack of news, the hurt that they had all been together without him." Once Harry's feelings burst out this way, there is nothing to hold them back. A painful summer cumulates in an emotional explosion directed at his schoolmates."
Then again, this is a company that offers a pop culture fueled training film called BRAINS! apparently for use in teaching zombies about the wonders of emotional intelligence. I'm so confused.
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One of these days I should record a soundtrack to go with the pictures of the day. What you'd hear in the background would be a minute or two of things like "Sammy. Sammy! Hey, Sammy, look over here! Look at Daddy! Sammy. Sammy!"
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She has so many, yet chooses the same ones every time.
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I'm sitting here about to lose my mind, mainly because I can't get the freaking Elmo's World theme song out of my head. Sam has been watching a lot of Sesame Street lately, which means I have been watching a lot of Sesame Street lately. The show's cross-generational longevity is pretty amazing, as I remember watching it as a kid in the 70s. Elmo (or as Sam calls him, "Ella!") didn't debut on the show until around 1985, though, so I was largely ignorant of that little red-haired freak until recently.
Actually, I give the little guy a hard time, but I actually kind of like him on balance. The Elmo's World segment is kind of cute if overly predictable, but I guess that's a combination kids love. I do hate, however, the bit with those vaudeville rejects Mr. Noodle and his brother, Mr. Noodle. Every day Elmo has a question about something and every day he thinks it's a good idea to ask Mr. Noodle. This is surprising, given that all available evidence suggests that Mr. Noodle is substantially retarded. Yet Elmo insists on asking simple questions like "How do you wash your hands?" or "How do you hop on one foot?" And every day the mental midget on the other side of the window proves incapable of answering even these simple queries. So every day I stand in front of the television and scream at him until Samantha bursts into tears.
Other things I hate about Sesame Street include the song that finishes off every visit to Elmo's World. Basically he takes the name of the show's theme and just repeats it to the tune of "Jingle Bells." Here's the lyrics to the show about fish: "Fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish. Fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish. Fish fish fish fish fish fish fish, fish fish fish fish fiiiish!" God, I hate that. Let's see, what else? Oh, I hate Baby Bear, because he pronounces all his Rs like Ws. I especially hate the segment where he does "Hero Guy" --excuse me "Hewo Guy"-- bit. Stupid bear.
Sorry, this is supposed to be about Samantha, isn't it? Look, here's some pictures.
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Not much else to report on the Sam watch. Her vocabulary is growing and she seems to recognize colors, as she will usually point to them correctly when prompted or return with the correct ball when asked to "get the green one" or somesuch. The other day I had a collection of multicolored shapes --green, blue, yellow, and red-- and I asked her to point to the black one to see what she'd do (there was no black one). She looked at the shapes, looked at me, looked at the shapes, then curled up her lip and gave me the biggest "hey, screw you, pal" look I've seen yet. I'm so proud.
The discipline thing I described last week has been going just about as well as it was then, except that I think Sam is figuring out how to game the system. If she thinks that we're not paying enough attention to her, she'll often run over to the couch and start endangering her own life by standing up on it and teetering around. She does this, I think, because she knows it's a sure-fired way to detach my butt from the recliner and say her name really loudly. As soon as I get up, though, she plops back down to a safe position, a big grin and a "this is easy!" expression on her face. Maybe I'll start telling her that if she stands on the couch that Elmo die. See if that works.
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The book was pretty fun --fast paced, imaginative in places and charming everywhere else. My only complaints are that there' snot much of a narrative thread tying this one together so that it's just a kind of jumble of events prefaced with mysteries and with a big event at the end. It also retread on a lot of the same themes that have been pretty thoroughly covered in past books: friendship, loyalty, trusting authority, distrusting authority, honesty, puppy love, and general teenage angst. At least there's only one more book in the series so those can't get driven much deeper into the ground.
Of course, the big hype around this book is that some major character dies between its covers. And indeed he/she does, and it's not some minor character like "Buck the Janitor" who gets introduced on page 300 and greased on page 302. I won't spoil anything for you, but if you've read the book or don't care, this is pretty funny.
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Non sequiters like those aside, though, there's this kind of loose narative running through most of the book talking about growing up in the 60s and how Black developed his short-tempered views on authority in general. These parts are more like "Lewis Black's Standup Comedy: The Blog" in that they're pretty disjointed and hop around in time and space with pretty much complete impunity.
Black's comedy here is pretty raunchy at times (e.g., he describes deficating on the television when it told him that Nixon had won re-election), but every now again he'll inject it with some witty, more cerebral remark that makes you think for a second. For example, he quips that "if the United States Postal Service hadn't already existed, Kafka would have created it." The book doesn't have as many laughs per minute as his "Back in Black" segments on The Daily Show, but I did get quite a few good gufaws out of it overall.
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Sam with her stuffed Skull from PvP.
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I think, however, that this is one of those cases where the movie (the 1971 one, anyway; I haven't seen the new one) is better than the source material. The book lacks several key devices that I thought gave the Charlie Bucket character a lot more depth. In the book, for example, Charlie is not tempted to steal Wonka's secrets by a spy from other chocolate factory. Thus he's never faced with the ethical dilemmas around feeding his starving family by stealing the Everlasting Gobstopper and selling it to the competition, the result of which earns him ownership of the factory. In fact, the book's Charlie earns Wonka's largess just by being the last man standing in a game of "Just Stand There and Don't Do Anything Mind-Blowingly Stupid."
Still, good book, and I think I'll pick up the sequel.
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Sam in her watermelon dress. Notice the collar. Very chic.
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St. Gerardo, patron saint of backyard gardens. Or something.
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Apparently, discipline is a laugh-out-loud riot, at least according to Sam. We've been doing the whole "time out" thing for the last couple of weeks, fully aware of the fact that Sam is too young to completely understand, but wanting to get into the habit and curb certain behaviors through the reward-and-punishment mechanisms that any drooling dog could grasp. Unfortunately, Sam thinks that standing in the corner is the height of hilarity, as she laughs whenever we force her there. She's even turned it into a game where she tries to run off before we're done counting down the length of her sentence, which means that we have to practically sit on her to keep in her place. Which is apparently even funnier. I can't wait until Sam is older so I can give her privileges that I can then take away to punish her. I think I'll start right off the bat with eliminating her college tuition if she keeps touching the television screen.
In other news, Ger and Sam have been going to this "Mommy and Me" class each week, where they do fun and wholesome things like singing in a circle, making crafts, and painting with pudding. The whole thing only cost like thirty cents for a couple of months, so I was kind of suspicious at first. I told Ger that if they shave Sam's head and ask her to pass out literature at the airport, then it might be some kind of cult. So far the worst they've done is to sing a song about sharing, but even that is pushing up against the line in my book.
Pictures!
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As you can see, I bought a cheap plastic wading pool for Sam to sit in. It's a poor substitute for the real thing, but she enjoyed it enough and we didn't have to focus every bit of our attention on keeping her from walking into the deep end. Because the deep end was like three inches deep.
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The other day Sam found the closet where we had put her old Kick & Play bouncie seat. Long-time Sam Fans may remember that she used to sit in this all the time. And apparently she remembered, too, because she plopped herself down and had a good old time. Can a 17-month old feel nostalga? Is that allowed?
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Even our cat if fascinated by Baby Einstein videos.
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Sam hanging out at the Farm.
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I just completed my registration for the San Diego Comic-Con to be held this weekend. I'm actually only going one day, Saturday, but I'm going by myself --sans Sam and Ger as was agreed upon last month as a belated Father's Day gift.
I know what you're thinking: "NNNNEEEERRRDDSS!" You're probably screaming it while standing on top of the cafeteria lunch table and doing your best Ogre impresination. And I probably deserve part of that, despite the fact that I haven't bought a comic book in 10 years outside of the occasional graphic novel. But on the other hand, while comics is the beefy main dish of this particular feast, it's also surrounded by many side dishes related to other areas of popular culture.
For example, there's a panel on Saturday afternoon where Matt Groening, Al Jean, and others involved in The Simpsons television show talk about the upcoming 17th season. There's also a premeir of the upcoming Family Guy feature-length movie, which should be awesome. And while I couldn't care less about some presentation on what Superman is going to be up to in the coming months, there are a bunch of interesting, higher-level symposiums and round tables like how to write for comics, how to write for video games, voice acting for cartoons, and the like. Add in the people watching from the exhibit hall and it shuld tally up to a worthwhile day.
Nerds.
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Sam and cousin-at-some-level Molly letting loose with some Barnyard Bingo.
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Not sure why Sam was so interested in these, but she must have taken them out of the box and put them back in like a dozen times.
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Sam isn't even 1 and a half years old yet and I thought I was supposed to get a little more time than that before she settled on "No" as her favorite word. Foul! She hasn't adopted any of the hallmark tantrums of the "terrible twos," but that single, two-letter word has definitely shot to the top of her play list. Funny thing is, she's not just parroting Geralyn and I, though Lord knows we say it often enough. In fact, she usually uses it appropriately, like saying it when she pushes aside the remainder of her meal when she's full, rebuking an offer to change her diaper, or in protest over changing the TiVo from Sesame Street to Sex in the City (Ger's offense, not mine). She even repeats "no-no-no" back to us when we use other words to the same effect, like "Those Chinese throwing stars aren't for Sammy." So she gets it, hooray.
In fact, her vocabulary is flowering more every day and is moving out of the realm of animal sounds. Recent additions include Elmo ("Ello"), Cookie Monster ("Gookie" no racial slur intended), bath ("baa"), boo-boo ("baa-ba"), and epistemological ("buh"). The other funny thing is that Ger and I have inadvertently taught her to yell to other people in different parts of the house. Any attention-getting shout of "JAMIE?" or "GERALYN?" while Sam is around will automatically elicit a shriek of "EEYAAAH?" from Sam, which is kind of cute.
Anyway, our week this week actually started off in St. Louis with the tail end of our trip there. In many ways, this was the BEST part of the trip, because it involved llamas during a visit to Grant's Farm. This is scientifically proven though the following formula:
Grant's Farm is kind of funny because it's a really family-friendly place, but it's owned and operated by the Anheuser-Busch company, which brews beer and wants to make sure you're aware of that fact. The guided tram ride through the animal habitats is narrated along the lines of "And over to our left, you'll see some African Elephants. If Elephants could talk, I'm sure they'd tell you that Anheuser-Busch is beachwood aged to achieve that crisp, refreshing taste." But then when we got to the main zoo area Sam got to feed some goats, so it's all good.
The plane ride back from St. Louis was a long one at over 3 hours. Fortunately for Sam and everyone around us, I had the foresight to once again invest all our hopes in technology. I had picked up one of those portable DVD players for as cheap as I could find, and even played on just a 7-inch screen, Baby Einstein still mesmerized Sam for as long as the batteries lasted. Worth every penny.
Pictures!
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I sometimes get compliments on my photo-taking prowess as evidenced by these kinds of shots by Sam, but it's worth noting that the pictures you see on this blog are taken by both myself and Ger --maybe even primarily Geralyn, as she's the one who spends the most time with Sam. Such is the case with this picture, which is now among my favorites to date, along with this one from last week. Both are picture perfect shots that luckily captured just the right instant in time.
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Zuchini. That's a funny word.
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What I love about digital cameras is that you can take a dozen shots of something with impunity in the hopes of getting a single good one. That was the case here, with Sam feeding the goats at Grant's Farm in St. Louis.
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More of Sam playing in the water at the Magic House in St. Louis. I wish I could find the water toys they had there --I'd buy them in a second.
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One good thing about having a kid: They make gueling, aggrevating, hot, crowded, and overpriced events like the San Diego County Fair a little easier to tolerate. Put that in the "Pros" column.
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You can still ask for your money back if you want, but what this week's update lacks in timeliness it will make up for in long-windedness and aww-inducing pictures. We're late, of course, because we just got back from a week-long trip to St. Louis to visit friends and family. This was a fun trip because Sam was finally old enough to show off beyond just pointing at her and saying "Woo! Look at her sit there!" It was revealed to me, though, just how much of different person I am now by how difficult it was to leave Samantha out of any chit-chat. We met up with Gary and Jennifer, a currently baby-less couple, and this is how a typical conversation went:
GARY: Yeah, the new Busch Stadium is coming along. It should be ready by next season.
ME: Samantha can say "Moo."
And that's actually one of my longer Samless stretches. Sometimes I'd interrupt them in the middle of their sentence and talk about how Sam once crossed the Arctic circle with just a dozen good men, one bad woman, and a raft made of walrus blubber. Fortunately they were good sports.
We have a lot of pictures this week, so let's take them in chunks. Chunk #1:
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This right here is one of my new favorite pictures of Sam. As you can see from the other pics, we spent one day at the pool --Ger's godparents' pool, in fact. One new thing I've learned about my daughter is that she doesn't fear the Reaper. In fact, she laughed in Death's bony face every time we put her in the water, trying her best to wiggle out of my grasp, capsize her floatie ring thingie, and walk off into danger that was three times as deep as she is high. She absolutely loved the water, though, particularly underneath a fountain in the shallow end. We wrapped up the evening with a romp through the godparents' ample estate and playing in the swings, where I nearly clocked her when she suddenly decided to push me. Obviously, danger is a foreign concept here.
Okay, next chunk of pictures:
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Next stop: The Magic House, which is a kind of weird amalgamation of science museum, playground, and general ruckus room. Many of the exhibits were beyond's Sam's ability to enjoy, though we did get to find out what would have happened if we hadn't covered all the electrical outlets, and Sam got to reaffirm her love of water by getting a big cup of it and then dumping it down the pants leg of an unfortunate passer-by. We wrapped up the visit with some time in the ginormous outdoor sand box, where Sam immediately shoved sand in every orifice she could get to with her clothes on. She was so filthy that we took her back home and just set her in front of the lawn sprinkler for a few minutes (which she LOVED) before taking her inside.
Last chunk:
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Finally, we spent the weekend out at "The Farm," which I've mentioned a time or two before. It's not really a farm in that it doesn't grow anything but a few tomatoes and wild flowers, but it is a thoroughly rustic set of summer homes that Ger's family owns just outside of Podunk, Missouri. It's a great and beautiful retreat, though, and although Sam had been there once before she was too young to really do anything fun. This time she got to run through the woods, chase dogs, and go swim in the disturbingly opaque lake. We were pretty nervous about the latter, though, fearing that some kind of catfish or water cougar would swim up and drag Sam to the lake's muddy bottom. And maybe we overcompensated some with the life jacket, but it made us feel better that Sam would be harder to sink than a battleship.
The Farm isn't a place for schedules or, surprisingly enough, peace and quiet, so Sam's naptime and bedtime routines suffered to the extent that she couldn't sleep through a bunch of Ger's family shouting to pass the baked beans or beer (or sometimes pass both the baked beans and the beer at the same time), but she adapted pretty well as usual and got through the mornings like the rest of us. I think that she's starting to miss her own toys and bed, though, as was I.
Next week: the rest of our St. Louis trip, including goats, explosions, and llamas.
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Belated Happy Fourth of July to everyone. This is a shot from where we saw the big fireworks display in St. Louis over the 4th. I like how you can see the St. Louis Arch only by how it blocks the view of the fireworks.
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For the life of me I can't remember where I heard about this old, rather obscure book or what prompted me to track it down and buy a used copy on Amazon.com's Marketplace. But I'm glad I did. One topic that has always interested me and prompted me to study psychology in the first place is how people take advantage of little kinks in the human thought process to further their own ends. This can range from advertising to religion to claims of psychic powers, and it's obviously this latter topic that's covered by this book.
One part scientific report on controlled experiments testing for psychic powers and one part script for CSI: Psychic Crimes Unit, the book is a facinating read. The authors, two researchers from New Zealand who are hopeful about psychic powers but still rational enough to demand proof, conduct rigorous scientific studies that could lend evidence to famous psychics' claims. They fail. The book also follows a couple of these psychics from the 70s (one by the name of "Uri Geller" and one just called "Kreskin") and systematically debunk their supposed powers using simple magician's tricks: sleight-of hand, substitution, and good old-fashioned peeking.
The book also focuses on those psychological foibles that magicians and stage psychics capitalize on, including things like subjective validation (finding corraborating evidence for beliefs you already hold and ignoring evidence that conflicts with it) and even more obscure tricks. For example, did you know that if asked to imagine ANY two geometric shapes, one inside the other, that the VAST majority of people will choose "circle inside a triangle?" Take this little bit of knowledge, combine it with a room full of people already predisposed to believe in you, and suddenly you're a psychic. Great book.
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