Sophie

February 18, 2008

 

Meet my new baby. This is Sophie. I got her just this afternoon. I spent three months convincing myself I didn’t want her. The hub was not much help, however. He kept telling me I very seldom covet anything remotely techie, so I should listen to my acquisitive self when it tells me to get something that comes with wires and a charger.

Late

February 10, 2008

I was late today for a very absurd reason. I watched cartoons on YouTube. The little girl wanted to accompany me to the office for the third time this week. I bribed her with toons so she would stay home.

While combing my hair, I had this crazy idea to introduce my daughter to the old cartoons I grew up loving. Try heigh-ho, I told Allaine. The dwarves at the mines would amuse her.

They progressed from Snow White, Little Mermaid, to Lion King. By the time they were on to Following the Leader, I’d given up combing my hair and had joined them singing.

We used to sing this, my sister said, grinning. We used to march to this song, with you acting all leader-ly and important. We’d follow you from the living room to the kitchen and the whole time, you’d bang on a huge Nido can with a spoon.

Mama banged on a Nido can?

Yes, but that’s not all she used to do. She used to tell us the old mansanitas tree across the street is a fairy kingdom, and that if we climbed all the way to the top, we can eat all the mansanitas we want and grow silver wings.

Don’t tell her that story, I admonished. The story had ended badly. We’d clambered all the way to the top, and roughly ten minutes after, Lolo Ogie stood below us, threatening to lop our limbs off with the bolo he was holding if we do not make our way down instantly. At the time, I thought he over-reacted, but I understand him now. The mansanitas tree stood to the right of a very busy highway. Anyone who falls off a branch could only land on two places: the pavement or the top of a moving vehicle. In retrospect, dismemberment by bolo hacking is a more appealing alternative to certain death.

But I digress. I was late this morning because I watched cartoons on YouTube and ended up singing Following the Leader, Kiss the Girl, and Under the Sea. I didn’t want to go to work, truth be told, but I didn’t have much of a choice because if I could finish checking the payslips before noon, then it’s possible we could swing payday today, instead of tomorrow; and really, in the grand scheme of things, one girl’s love affair with cartoons is peanuts compared to the replenishment of almost 80 people’s personal coffers.

You Are Language to Me.

February 9, 2008

Some days, you are my mother tongue. On other days, you are crypt, more alien to me than a foreign language but no less wonderful and extraordinary.

Alex Gets Diagnosed

February 8, 2008

I am happy to report I have an intelligent daughter who has soaked up so much Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon slang the school agreed to admit her as a Nursery 2 student even though she couldn’t recognize a single letter in the alphabet. She has a sense of humor, too, and this - if nothing else - helped endear her to the woman who administered the diagnostic test.

What’s this?

A banana behind clouds!

Alex, no. It’s a moon in front of clouds.

No uy, it’s a banana. Sige baya ko’g eat ug banana. That’s a banana.

Okay. What’s this?

That’s an O.

Look again. It’s a number.

O bitaw na.

To give my daughter credit, the number zero does look like the letter O. And, the sketch was so crudely drawn the crescent moon could pass off for a banana.

The psychometrician said the little one shows quick, raw intelligence. She’s very chatty, creative, and observant, and she talks in a very adult way. However, she doesn’t know many things other kids her age learned a few months, even years, back. She doesn’t know how the letter J looks, for example, and wouldn’t recognize 7 even if it waved at her.

Wett and I burned with shame upon hearing the report. We’ve been neglecting Alex’s education, leaving her to do most of the learning on her own. The way we saw it, she’s quick on her feet anyway, so she’d be able to catch up with her peers once she starts school.

The woman probably understood how terrible we felt because she hurriedly added, Oh but she’s very amusing. She told me she could speak Spanish. She taught me the words Abajo, up, and Vamanos, hurry.

Great. So now, not only does Alex need a little home tutoring, she also needs an exorcism. Dora the Explorer has done and gone taken over her faculties.

Oh, and did I mention she turned four today? Click on the picture so you’ll see the proper welcome we gave her birthday.

Tesseract

February 7, 2008

Now that I don’t have to study it, Physics fascinates me. Let’s see if I can explain this thing without bungling it up.

There are five dimensions: the first, line; the second, shape; and the third, space. The fourth is time; and when you place a thing - anything, be it an object or a person - within a continuum, you give it a history and a destiny. The fifth dimension - and this is where it gets interesting - is called a tesseract, often popularly called a hypercube. In her novel A Wrinkle in Time, Madeline L’Engle had Meg Murry and her companions walk in and out of planets and dimensions using a tesseract. In the television series, Andromeda, tesseract generators can manipulate space, but must be used with caution because they interfere with time.

It’s a simple idea, really, and one that is breathtaking for precisely this reason. You select two points in the space-time continuum. You "fold" the line between them so that the points, rather than being at opposite ends, now touch each other. You cut a hole through the fold so that you can pass through. This hole is the tesseract, literally your wrinkle in the fabric of time.

Isn’t Physics beautiful?