On the highway to Duluth, passing through a forest: “Mommy, Daddy, are the trees for decoration?”
All posts by Andrew
Who will play with me?
After nearly four hours at the park with two playgrounds, a pool, and friends, we return home and Griffin immediately says, “Momma, will you play with me?”
“No, sweetie, I have to make lunch.”
“Well, then who will play with me???”
Book Review: “The Awakening” by Kate Chopin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Kate Chopin is one of my favorite authors of short stories, so I wanted to read one of her novels. Chopin had me with her opening words, pulling me into the late nineteenth century Louisiana setting. The story revolves around Edna Pontellier, a woman who, by the standards of the time, appears to have it all: a devoted, wealthy husband and two young boys. The family spends summers at a beach cottage and the rest of the year in a palatial New Orleans home. As the title suggests, Edna slowly becomes aware of the web of social conventions that imprison her and demand that she exist only in the service of others (primarily her husband and children). She chafes and rebels, in increasingly scandalous ways, culminating in a poignant and satisfying ending.
It was a quick read, and certainly worth re-reading. (I reread the first chapter immediately upon finishing the book and found much to admire in how it sets up the eventual conclusion.) The primary theme is a bit dated, and is delivered bluntly at times, but there is still much to think about. I particularly enjoyed how Chopin highlights the tension between the mindless emptiness of strict social conformity and the potential selfishness of resistance. Edna is compared to a child on more than one occasion as her actions become increasingly self-centered: like a child, she is not considering the impact of her actions on those around her. This question of how to harmonize your duty to yourself with your duty to others is, of course, as relevant today as it was in 1899—relaxing gender expectations cannot magically resolve this for us.
Ultimately, although I thoroughly enjoyed the book, I was not as impressed with Chopin’s craftsmanship here as I have been with many of her short stories. If you’ve never read any Chopin, she can pack a powerful punch with very few words. Check out “The Story of an Hour” and “Doctor Chevalier’s Lie” for two great examples.
Aging Rapidly
Two age-related conversations with Griffin today:
“I want to go to Kindergarten soon.”
“Oh, why?”
“Because soon I will be a teenager.”
Later, while climbing some rocks:
“Daddy, why did you almost fall?”
“Because I’m old and clumsy.”
“Well, you are not clumsy, but you are very old.”
Ready Player One
Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
A delicious romp through ’80s geekdom! This is the sort of book I could have read in a single night, wrapping up before breakfast (as I once did with Ender’s Game some twenty years ago). Alas, sleep is at a higher premium these days, so I paced myself.
I was immediately taken in by the setting: a dystopian future where people spend their happiest hours immersed in The Oasis, a virtual reality where you can be the superhero/knight/wizard/jedi of your fantasies. (Think of a global, genreless World of Warcraft with infinite scalability and no lag.) The public schools have even gone virtual, since simulated schools have better facilities, stellar libraries, and no bullies (the school zones don’t allow physical contact between characters and you can mute anybody you don’t want to listen to). Meanwhile, the real world crumbles into islands of urban slums separated by Mad Maxish no-man’s-lands. The setting was painted in broad strokes leaving plenty of room for my piqued imagination to fill in the gaps. Vivid scenes gave the basic flavor. I reveled, for example, in the image of a public bus that traveled between cities (a la Greyhound). Fully armored, with a defensive gun deck up top, the passengers jacked into their VR rigs as soon as they boarded and spent the entire trip lost in another world.
The plot is built around an epic quest within the Oasis to locate the late lead-programmer’s Easter Egg, a deeply hidden golden ticket worth a dazzling real-world fortune to whoever finds it. The programmer built his puzzles and clues around the obsessions of his youth: 1980s geek culture (movies, music, video games, and classic role-playing games). To say more will lead to spoilers, and half the fun is applying your own knowledge to the puzzles, but I will say that there were many joyous epiphanies along the way as treasured memories of Atari cartridges and D&D adventures were given new life.
When I first rated the book I put four stars, but I’ve been considering the line between really liked it and amazing ever since. After writing this review, it’s clear that the overall reading experience was in amazing territory. With that said, the novel was not without flaws. Characters were often two-dimensional, and there were a number of relationships that didn’t quite gel. Foreshadowing was of the un-subtle variety. The plot was predictable, though a dash of cyberpunk toward the end was a pleasant surprise. In short, I kinda wish this wasn’t Cline’s first novel. In defense, one might argue that the source material suffers from all of these flaws in spades, but I think that’s a copout. Better writing would have improved the depth of immersion. Despite this, however, Cline easily managed to dunk me deep enough to have a blast. I want to read a book like this every summer.
Corn Weeder
He may have been born in California, but Griffin is definitely Minnesotan now. When I asked him about the cool lego train he built today, he explained that it was a “Corn Weeder.” Further discussion revealed that he was talking about a combine harvester. I didn’t even know what a combine was until a few years ago when Sarah explained that she drove one for a summer job long ago. Griffin is way ahead of me!
Strong Head
“I don’t have a headache because my head is very strong and tough.” — Griffin
Multilingual Laughter
After a particularly insane laugh at dinner tonight, Griffin announced, “I was laughing in another language!”
Double Meltdown
I was solo-dad last night. It was my first time attempting to manage Griffin’s bedtime routine while taking care of Maggie. At one point it got so ridiculous that there was only one thing to do: record it for posterity.
Origin of Maggie’s Name
How did Maggie Wren Stocco Roy’s name come about? As with Griffin, the root reason is that Sarah and I think it is a beautiful name. Wren, in particular, has no special meaning. We love it’s sound, but “Wren Roy” didn’t quite work. So Wren became her middle name. We wanted one of her names to have a connection to her ancestors, so we weighed that while considering possible first names.
My paternal grandmother was Margaret Crutchfield Roy, oldest in a large family (eight siblings survived childhood). She was born in 1902 near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and had little notion as a young girl that she would spend much of her life in China, including turbulent years during World War II and the Chinese Civil War. She and my grandfather married in 1928 and moved to China in 1930. They lived there, except for a few years of furlough, until they were expelled in 1951 after the communist revolution. Margaret died in 1992, not far from where she was born.
Although as far as I know Margaret never went by the nickname Maggie, we love the shorter form so our Maggie is simply Maggie, rather than Margaret. But we were thinking of grandma Margaret when we named her, and trust that Maggie will adapt to the adventures and adversities of life with as much grace as her namesake.
As with Griffin’s name, we did a bit of research to see how popular the names “Maggie” and “Margaret” have been. Like any father, I plugged the info into a spreadsheet and graphed it. The graph below includes data for Maggie, Margaret, and Griffin (for comparison). The source of the data is the Social Security Administration.
Popularity rank zero (or one, really) at the top of the chart would be the most popular name for that year. Thus, “Margaret” was very popular (top ten) until 1950 when it started slowly descending in popularity. When I first researched “Griffin” in 2009, I didn’t push the search back to 1880 so I didn’t know the name had scattered appearances before 1910. Then it faded to obscurity until the 1980s.
The name “Maggie” follows an interesting trajectory. Quite popular at the turn of the century but then descending steadily until a sudden resurgence from 1970-1990. The early popularity might be partly explained by steady immigration from Ireland at the time. (The biggest surge in Irish immigrants was after the potato famine in the 1850s, but it remained relatively high until the end of the century.)
Immigration can’t explain the 1970s surge. We’re open to hypotheses. Some explanations we’ve bounced around include Rod Stewart’s 1971 hit, “Maggie May” (or less plausibly, songs by the Beatles and the Doors in 1970) or Maggie Smith’s acting career (she won her first Oscar in 1969). The name’s popularity stabilized in the ’90s and has hovered around the 200 mark for the past decade.
In reality, of course, none of this data (or our pop-cultural musings) had any real impact on our naming decision. We had chosen Maggie as our top girl name before Griffin was born, before doing any research. We’re thrilled that little Maggie is here to inhabit the name (which fits her perfectly). We’ve had fun already with various unexpected nicknames that pop up: Magpie is my favorite, though I also like to call her Mag-nificent. Because she is. And we hope she knows it.