"daddy" is the loneliest job on earth. It basically means that you are uninvolved, unloved, disconnected, tired, and good for money, mostly—and even then you have to be careful that people don’t think you’re too proud of being a provider, so the only thing you’ve got has to be kept to yourself. Your job is to support everyone else. Everyone. It’s nobody’s job to support you.

Some days you’re not quite sure how you can possibly survive the heartsickness of working on nonsense while your child grows up outside of earshot and learns not to want to be held, fed, talked to, or read to by you.

Insurance Company Rep: "Hello, can I help you?"

Wife: "Yeah… Can you tell us why we've just been billed $2,000 instead of the expected $500 deductible for our labor and delivery?"

ICR: "Um, it's because the over-under on the quantification side of the underwriter of the reinsurer had a split policy double-writing the underwiring of the semi-deductible non-deductible deductible, which effectively doubled the cost ratio for mitigated cases, of which this is one based on the non-underwitten nature of the reinsurer's semi-deductible metapolicy. So you owe at least double."

Wife: "But $2,000 isn't double, it's quadruple. Where did the other $1,000 come from?"

ICR: "It's what you owe."

Wife: "But I'd like to understand WHY I owe it. Even with that other stuff that I don't understand, this isn't double, it's quadruple."

ICR: "Please hold."

(Tap, tap, tap… Wife looks at husband.)

ICR: "Okay, I'm back. There may have been a mistake, we'll look into it."

Wife: "Well if there was a mistake, I don't want to wait while you look into it, I don't want to owe it. You're telling me double, and that's quadruple!"

ICR: "Okay, so you don't owe it. It was a mistake."

Wife: "So we only owe $1,000?"

ICR: "That's right, based on the non-underwritten quantification of the reinsurer's double ratio underwritings, which doubles the deductible for all non-excluded cases."

(Husband to wife: "Give me the phone.")

Husband: "Hi. Can you tell ME, in plain terms, why we thought we owed $500 and now you're telling us we should feel great for 'only' owing $1,000?"

ICR: "Oh, that's easy, it's the deductible on your policy. The one in your wife's name. You probably haven't seen the policy details since it's your wife's policy, but it's a $1,000 deductible."

(Husband to wife: "They say we have a $1,000 deductible and that's it, period.")

(Wife to husband: "No, we don't, and that's not what they told me just now! That's totally wrong!")

(Husband to wife: "Do you have the policy somewhere?"

(Wife to husband: "Here you go! See? $500. Spelled out right there.")

Husband: "Insurance lady, we have the policy right here. It says we have a $500 deductible."

ICR: "Oh no, that's not correct."

Husband: "It's in my hand."

ICR: "Please hold."

(Tap… Tap… Tap…)

ICR: "Sir? Yes, your policy was changed on 10/1/2010 to a $1,000 deductible policy."

Husband: "By whom?"

ICR: "You. Or your employer. Not us. Not our responsibility, sorry."

Husband: "Wait, it was changed on 10/1/2010?"

ICR: "Yes."

Husband: "You mean THREE DAYS before induction, AFTER the pre-authorization paperwork was submitted and approved? When we were already on maternity leave and preparing for the hospital?"

ICR: "Roger."

Husband: "Okay, who do I sick the lawyers on?"

ICR: "Sir? Oh, I see. We do have an appeals address. Do you want it?"

Husband: "Yes, please. Oh, and I want some kind of confirmation also for that $1,000 'mistake' you say you're going to correct that reduced the original amount from $2,000 to $1,000."

ICR: "I gave a tracking number to your wife."

(Husband to wife: "Did you get a tracking number?")

(Wife to husband: "No, absolutely not!")

(Husband to wife: "Insurance lady says she gave you one!")

(Wife to husband: "And she seemed so nice!")

Husband: "Insurance lady, give ME the tracking number, too."

ICR: "Okay."

Husband: "And where can we follow this tracking number?"

ICR: "In the online system."

Husband: "Okay, I'll log in and check."

ICR: "Oh, well, it takes five days."

Husband: "Okay, I'll log in after five days and check."

ICR: "Sometimes it takes ten days."

Husband: "Okay, I'll log in after ten days and check."

ICR: "Sometimes it doesn't make it into the system at all!"

Husband: "Then I'll call."

ICR: "You do that. We're always happy to talk to you again. Have a nice day."

So we bought an iPad just as we were going into the hospital to deliver our little one, and it did prove useful in that context… We used it the first few nights with hospital WiFi to do on-the-fly research about all the things we were worried about, needed help with, and so on in relation to our new baby. Being able go do Google searches and watch YouTube videos on offering breastfeeding advice right inside the hospital room really made the initial transition to parenthood much easier than it might otherwise have been.

Now the kid is home, however, and so are we, and life is moving forward and it’s been just over two months with the iPad. So what do I think of it now?

In one way it’s like the crack cocaine of gadgets. You can have a fairly complete, desktop-like web reading experience just about anywhere. It becomes something that yu simpl carry with you out of habit almost all the time so that if you happen to have the need to, you can look anything up "on the fly," and even when you have no particular need of this sort, you constantl find yourself browsing one or another site online that you frequent and read, since with the iPad it’s so effortless.

For anything interactive or productive, however, the iPad basically sucks. The basic reason for this is that it is impossible to get data into the damned thing. On a real keyboard I type well over 110 words per minute with no errors. On the iPad screen I think I get about 25, and that with tons of errors, and to even accomplish that I have to actually be looking at my hands and the keyboard. It’s not, first of all, a standard keyboard; even basic things like numbers and quotation marks require the use of the Shift key (which has a nonstandard size and position), and when pressing Shift the resulting key layout is unlike any real keyboard you’ve ever seen. Combine this exceedingly and relentlessly nonstandard layout with the glass-smooth screen that provides absolutel no tactile feedback or hand position cues and you have a touch-typist’s worst nightmare. To type on the screen is to feel totally awkward and constrained. Almost worse is the lack of arrow keys, making navigation for serious text enterers tremendously clumsy, slow, and almost impossible to accomplish.

You can, of course, connect a bluetooth keyboard, and I have two of them, one of them being te vey nice Apple model. This works great for touch typing, but it requires that the user enter the settings menu to enable it, then connect to it each time a typing session is to occur. So it is that if you plan to type on your iPad using a bluetooth keyboard, it takes about 90-180 seconds to get to the point where you can enter text, thereby eliminating the instant-on/instant-off benefit that is one of the main reasons to use a mobile embedded device like the iPad. Aside from this, the addition of an external keyboard recreates the extra bulk that is the primary reason for choosing the iPad over a netbook in the first place. In fact, it’s worse because with the iPad and a keyboard, the two are not connected physically to one another and you must thus manage to handle and find surfaces for two stand-alone devices instead of only one.

I have a capacitive stylus on the way from Amazon Prime and will try to use it with the iPad PhatWare handwriting recognizer once it arrives. Perhaps handwriting recognition is the path to the nirvana that would be efficient iPad data entry, but at the same time I somehow don’t think it will. Thanks to Apple’s overzealous desire to lock the platform down, they’ve made it impossible for programmers to do things at the system (abstracted) level, like, say, add a new input method in a generalized way that will automatically work for all apps. So even the and writing recognition angle will bew hamstrung by the limitation that it can only be used in one "note-taking" app, then copied from there to other apps’ entry fields and boxes if handwriting is to be used everywhere.

Aside from input methods, there are some other teething problems with iPad 1.0. It has the same limited amount of RAM as early iPhones and iPods, which often isn’t enough for the way that developers have built their (often much more complicated) iPad apps, which means that apps crash (exit abruptly to the desktop) quite regularly, really the worst way Apple could have handled an out-of-memory condition.

As a result of this limitation, many apps are much more watered down than they would otherwise have to be, and are thus much less useful than their desktop/laptop versions. Examples of this problem include pretty much every suite of "office" apps for the iPad, as well as Apple’s own Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. All simply pale in comparison to their desktop versions, omitting vast swaths of critical features that could instead have been redesigned to be touch-friendly if more memory had been available to developers to port them.

Overall the net effect is of a device that is fabulous (and fabulously addictive) when used like the new media version of a television (for consuming content and information produced and entered by others) but that is really quite poor (and poorer than was really necessary) for actual work or entering data or information of any kind.

With that said, this entire post has been touch-typed out (albeit with many dozens of mistakes and backspacing followed by re-typing) on the iPad’s on-screen keyboard, so it is possible to create with it, just not efficiently.

So all in all it’s a mixed bag, pending the arrival of a stylus and my following attempts to use it for sandboxed handwriting recognition. The iPad isn’t a device you "love to hate" so much as it is a device that you "hate to love" and that you feel guilt for not being able to get enough of, given that it costs twice as much as a netbook but doen’t help you to be as productive in many ways. Quite the opposite, in fact, if you’re not careful.

are here. Tensions are growing; differences in culture and perspective are showing, and because the stakes are very high (as all new parents are warned), things that could in the past have been solved with a drink and hands thrown in the air now become the critical foci of full-scale diplomatic incidents, with all of the seriousness that this implies. Beneath the veneers of anger that hang in the air lie deep reservoirs of regret that all of this somehow can’t be made to go away—for the child’s sake.

Everyone wishes at one time or another that reality was much simpler, that people were really all exactly the same, that life was a totalitarian system that left one with now choices and alternatives, so that no moral ambiguities ever sat in judgment of the well-intentioned.

But of course life simply isn’t like that. 

of the academy pushes me very near the precipice.

Too much of the working class critique of the academic is spot-on. There are indeed an awful lot of people in the academy that lack completely any kind of common sense, and that apply this lack of common sense to a broad variety of problems and tasks in the least helpful of ways.

Why? Here’s why.

The top strata of the system, the wellspring of university resources, lies in the marriage of politics, accounting, and consumerism, not in the arts and letters. At every successively lower level, instrumental rationality carries the day, complicity in the interest of continued employment being the cardinal virtue. The only other virtue is uniqueness—possessing a set of "skills" so very specific that there is absolutely no competition, and so inapplicable that no clear quantitative measurement can be made about their value.

The result is a system in which those that are most able to pursue, in rational and totalitarian fashion, maximally esoteric skills with minimal real-world applicability, are able best to secure their positions. Such a state of affairs is rational with respect to the market, but completely incompatible with any common-sense understanding of the purpose of knowledge or of the academy.

The bizarre irrationalities of the market and of government thus carry over into the world of the academy and infect it, the result being a system in which students are often left unserved, underserved, or having been encouraged into debt with the mistaken idea that they are making a rational cost-benefit calculation, and in which nobody (including myself) is willing to see, comment on, or try to change this, because to do so is to become an immediate financial and political liability and to thus be put straight out of work.

We can’t afford to do that, because after all, we’re the products of this very system; we have our student loans to pay back as well and are counting on its continued operation in order to do so.

And so we continue to specialize, to become ever more political and bureaucratic, and to learn to repress anything resembling a common-sense critique of the system within which we work, lest we immediately find ourselves out of work with years of university debt to repay.

the old blog and opening this new one, I’ve finally fixed some basic links like the links in the tag cloud to the right and the posting mechanics from my mobile devices. In the meantime, the blog was connected to Twitter, then to Facebook, then disconnected again, and a massive internal database infrastructure of books, research projects and notes, papers, reference materials, project management tasks, drafts, publishers, and so on was built, enthusiastically adopted, and then abandoned in favor of Evernote, from which I am now posting this.

In short, it has taken a year and a half and about 98 percent overhead to get to the point that this blog basically works after the departure from Leapdragon.net, and most of the massive amount of work that was done is now purely vestigial and completely invisible to anyone but myself.

That’s emblematic of life right now, somehow.

—

There is not a single facet of my life in which I am caught up or mastering tasks well. I am completely, radically, ruthlessly behind schedule and failing to fulfill my obligations at the level at which I’d like to do so, and the situation seems to be getting worse rather than better. I don’t quite know what to do. The term for this state of affairs is "overloaded" and the trouble is that all of it absolutely must be done.

I suppose this is simply what happens when one becomes a parent.

—

In just under two weeks, the semester is over.

In just under two weeks, Ania goes back to work and I will be the sole daytime care provider for our kiddo.

This is a bit of a terrifying prospect, to add to everything else. I’m already not up to all of these other tasks, apparently. I’m just hanging on by my teeth. How will I cope with adding this new and massive one?

—

I’m meant to be compiling data tonight for a research project I’m involved with, but due to some measure of miscommunication and mismatched assumptions, I’m not continuing until I hear back from the principal investigator.

Once again, the notion of data coding seems to me to be a methodological minefield.

—

That was, of course, apropos of nothing in particular.

I think it’s time to walk the dog and go to bed. The grading of the remaining 150+ papers, the collection of a dozen or more hours word of coding data about video, the writing of articles, the writing of dissertation components, the learning of languages, the reading of relevant and forthcoming literature(s), and certainly anything that is actually related to myself or my interests in an unalienated way…

…these will all have to wait another day, it seems.

Tricky thing is, they can’t wait too many more days—any of them.

and what that means in practice is:

• That I spent over four hours on email
• And the entirety of the last 10 hours staring straight ahead at a computer screen
• Seeing my wife and daughter almost not at all
• Despite their being just a few feet away

A very strange, late modern notion of "productivity" indeed.

I am quite sore from this.

No, the evernote module isn't quite working. Or rather, it's pulling some things and not others, and the things that are being pulled are being made accessible to authenticated users but not to non-authenticated users, despite permissions settings. I don't know.

I'm starting not to care.

It feels as though the blogging thing is over. I used to do it because I liked having a web diary. I read the thing myself, referred to it the way any person refers to their journal of activity. But in recent years I've written in it less and less, and meanwhile now this kind of online personal textuality has become a definite signifier in its own right, one that's beginning to haunt me.

We'll see.

—

All throughout my childhood, at every educational level and in every setting for socialization, I was told that knowledge is the key to success, the key to achievement, the key to the fulfillment of life goals and personal desires.

Whatever it is you're after, the answer is to learn. In learning you will arrive at where you want to be, and so long as you feel you aren't there yet, it is because you haven't yet learned enough. There is more knowledge to be had, clearly. Study harder. Study hardest. Enroll. Read. Read again. Read another.

And so I do. Today I read. I buy more and more books and read through them. I read online. I read constantly, about a whole host of topics.

Troubling thing is, I find myself reading more and more books about productivity, about "how to get things done," and it begins to dawn on me that there is an unresolvable paradox here. One cannot get things done by reading about them; when one's deepest desire is to get things done, the key is no longer knowledge.

The key is action. One actually needs to put down the damnable book and do something other than reading. This is proving to be an incredibly difficult concept to pound into my unconscious mind, which continually seeks out new tools, new methods, new experts, new chapter and verse on how to act, how to make things happen, how to get things done, how to stop being so bogged down in knowing and start doing.

And on and on I keep reading.

Stupid.

Okay, so it’s looking like I finally got the Drupal<->Evernote integration working out okay, thanks to the Evernote module but also thanks to my stumbling across a ZIP file on the Evernote module’s author’s blog containing the necessary library elements to be installed to the Drupal tree on the host.

There’s a bunch of stuff I could play with in relation to this dyad—formatting of various kinds from bullet lists to colors, for example, to see if we could make it all work (it’s not clear to me just what the limits, imposed or inherent, of either are at this point), but I think for now I have better things to worry about.

The goal was to get Evernote chucking out blog entries as I switch away from Drupal and toward Evernote as my data storage system for all things in life, professional and personal. Making it pretty will come later.

For now, however, it’s off to Costco and then back home to grade and post for the rest of the day. Fulfilling my teacher obligations right now is pretty much taking all of the (tiny amount of) time left over after parent obligations.

are so powerful that they turn every scholar, thinker, and intellectual into a secretary.

Ever since the building at 65 Fifth Avenue closed and our lives became happier and much more domestic, I've been trying—with very limited success—to work at home. Now Mirai is here, and she is the most beautiful thing in the universe, a thing that nonetheless requires rather a lot of attention, and as a result of the changing dynamics that this represents, "work at home" now becomes honestly and entirely "no work at home."

But of course since I have no other place(s) in life to be these days, "no work at home" quickly becomes "no work."

Between the needs of the baby and the needs of the rest of our little family and the easy access that I offer when I'm at the house (no matter whether I'm sequestered in a particular and separate room or not), there is simply no way, no chance, no how to get any work done within the framework of social norms, mores, and relationships that are the central structural pillars of my life.

Home is happy and home needs me and home is full of distractions and home owns me when I'm at home and these things are all the problem.

I am a thousand times less productive when I am at home. But of course, now that home holds so much value for me, I am fabulously miserable when I'm not at home, meaning that I'll likely increasingly be less productive when not at home.

Solution? I don't know. I think I need to find a way to set up a home office with boundaries that apply to it—hours during which I am (or am not) available, a door with a lock that is inviolable, etc. The problem is of course that we live in a tiny one-bedroom apartment in Queens. Someday when we have a nice, large estate this sort of "office" or "study" as a separate room or area in the house where only dad goes might make some kind of sense, but right now?

My workstation is right next to the nursing center, which is right next to our bed. I can't roll up and down my desk because the rocking chair (a wonderful and necessary thing) is pressed right up against the back of my desk chair. The living room is not ideal because of course my PC is in the bedroom. I could move the PC to the living room, but this would require a furniture and lifestyle shakeup that would take a week's labor, likely a certain additional volume of dollars, and so on, and these things are really simply not possible when there's a new baby in the house and so many things need to get done. How can I take a week off right now to renovate/redecorate? There's not a piece of furniture in that room right now that could hold a monitor and a keyboard, much less the rest of the PC.

And of course all of the books, office supplies, and so on are in the bedroom. Moving all that stuff to the living room would indeed require a wholesale remodeling of the house, given how many books I have and need. And in the meantime I'd have to relearn my entire workflow, not a great thing to be doing mid-late semester as crunch time approaches.

Basically, I'm freaking panicking and just can't seem to be productive and now with a baby here I feel twice the pressure (if not four times, or eight times, or sixteen times the pressure), and a sort of paralysis is creeping in around the edges that's more frightening than anything I've encountered in my entire adult life.

This has to be fixed, but I don't know how to fix it.

Academic politics is a devastating thing. My career was harmed and continues to be harmed by academic politics, and real relationships that I valued and that were tremendously helpful to me were lost in the process thanks to the negative intervention of others.

—

One of the things told to me by a faculty member I no longer get to talk to because of academic politics is that there is a limit to the usefulness of career strategy at this stage of the game. In fact, it's counterproductive, he said.

A young, starry-eyed would-be academic can quickly exhaust themselves trying to prematurely build up the CV. "Opportunities" (read: CV-worthy titles associated with random bits of sometimes menial, sometimes senseless labor) abound at this level and for the student emerging from grunt "nobody" status into the light of "serious potential scholar" status, it's tempting to want to seize each opportunity that comes along. Carpe diem, after all.

Certainly one hates to turn anything down—particularly with the keen awareness that one has of the tremendous competitiveness of this profession and the depth that one wants to be able to show on a CV. But, warned this person, likely the largest intellectual influence on me in some years, to think about the CV at this point is to risk embroiling oneself in entanglements that absorb every bit of one's time and energy, leaving nothing for the one component of the CV—the disseration—that is actually mandatory for an academic career.

Scheme too carefully and/or adopt too many titles too early and the Ph.D. begins to recede into the future… just a few months at first, then a year, then multiple years, and soon one is a hack: an M.A. with years of middling experience and mid-level titles and no doctorate—and hence no tenure, no professorship, no job stability, and no real CV growth. It's a trap.

Yes, earn the income that's needed to complete the Ph.D., but try not to rely on mid-level academic work, and certainly don't do anything at this level solely for the CV. Get the Ph.D. instead, then worry on credentials inflation afterward. The Ph.D. is the first, fundamental, gatekeeping, and most elusive of all credentials.

—

He was right. And I have failed to listen to him. It is time to clean house and reorganize life a bit, I suspect.

I'm going to reflect on this for a few days, but the problem is at this point that I am working for everyone in academics except myself right now. I am doing favors for everyone except myself, helping with everyone's work other than my own. My own dissertation progress has been stalled since spring. And that cannot be allowed to happen.

has severely complicated my productive life. I’m just not getting things done; I am in all honesty completely bewildered a good portion of the time right now about what I ought to be doing or what I should attend to next.

It’s not that I’m not busy—in fact, I am very busy most of the time. It’s just that it all seems to amount to nothing in thre end, to be directed toward myriad ends about which I have no particular set of priorities. Everything seems fragmentary, invariably behind schedule, essentially an afterthought, if not an after-afterthought, hassled, and distant, unreal.

I am full of fervent hope that this total unfocusing of fatherhood doesn’t represent a new normal with which I am expected to function until my child reaches adulthood. If that is the case, I suspect that I will be far less productive in the years to come than I have been in the years thus far passed.

Whereas I used to spend my days planning and executing in relation to career, degree, and hobby/interest progress, I now obsess from sunrise to sunset about reading to my child from Peter Hessler travelogues before bedtime.

It's damned hard to get yourself to do anything when you've just become a father. Everything else seems to be of cosmically lower priority than spending time with the small person you've just come to know.

Complicating matters is the fact that time disappears entirely just as your baby makes its first appearance in the world. Not only are you not working; you are not working and you don't notice it because everything from birth through present seems like one long day in your new life—a life in which all of the things that you used to value are now far less important.

Meanwhile, fall is clearly here in New York. On the day grandma's left us, it's windy, cold, and grey. If there is a smell that can be attributed to the decrease in distance between afternoons and darkness, that smell is everywhere tonight. It carries with it the promise of Thanksgiving and Christmas to come, but also portends the end of the college football season, which is now more than halfway gone once again.

Life moves so damned quickly one almost doesn't have time to catch one's breath.

I'm sure the kid will agree someday, when she's able. Should be in about five minutes, at which time you'll see me, wizened, wondering what the hell happened and how 1984 got to be 2064 while no one was looking.

This morning I've killed the RSS feeder that was taking all of my posts here and automatically posting them on Facebook as well. The reason for this is simple: after I implemented automatic Facebook distribution, my posting dropped off precipitously. The knowledge that I was also posting to Facebook became a kind of filter; I was suddenly beset with an awareness of my audience and it influenced both the things I wrote and the frequency with which I wrote them.

Basically, I miss blogging, and turns out that I need to do it more or less anonymously. I suspect this is because blogging my own little corner of the world (if you can even call it blogging) basically takes the place of a personal diary and of daily free writing for me. Both of these things are sorely needed in my life, and since the Facebook connection (and related slowdown in posting), I've struggled to reimplement them in other ways. It hasn't worked.

—

With fatherhood now in full swing, I need a place to write more than ever before. I am keeping a "baby diary" of sorts, a place where I write to my little one, but I without my blog space I have no place in which to write about my little one and my experiences with her, or more simply about my state of mind. Writing has always helped me to cope with my state of mind; this place has been a dialogue first and foremost with myself since 1999, and I need it to be that once again.

I'm actually struggling as a father to get myself to do real work right now, or to think reflexively at all. Every bit of my attention is directed much more simply toward the prospect of interacting with my daughter. Only now as a father do I understand just how much is aligned against fathers in our political economic system. I don't get family leave of any kind and am expected to be working again full time more or less immediately after birth. The result is a kind of dogged hypnosis that carries one along haplessly. There is no waking up, no coming to attention; these things entail risk—the risk of realizing just how alienat…