More Will Be Revealed

I took the last few days off...that may become a habit in and of itself, especially with the baby coming. I didn't mention that yet, or did I, in a tangential way? Ms. Baby Peanut Taggart is scheduled to arrive on or around Feb. 19, 2005. That means in about 3 weeks, my life...err, our lives are going to change dramatically. Not for the worse, at least not in the big picture sense, but I know from experience how it can feel like that. The first 3 months are baby bootcamp -- sink or swim, figure out a way to handle it or go nuts trying. And they are amazing months, filled with surprises and delights and mysteries and love like you never imagined.

Back after dinner...

OK, now to complete my thoughts on Peanut. I think the impending birth of my second daughter is one of the main reasons that I've started this blog. The nagging thought that I don't remember as much about Ella's birth as I should (what happened in what order? what did it feel like to cut the cord? what did it feel like to hold her for the first time?) or more accurately as I want to has subconsciously prompted me to begin an online journal where I can record these thoughts, feelings and observations.

Yes, I expressed other motivation in previous posts, and I'm sure the reasons are all of the above and more. Tonight, 19 days away from the Blessed Birth, with Nicola poised to become a mom, with us as a couple poised to realize this dream that we shared...to build a life together and raise a family and live wide awake and full of purpose and meaning...well, we've got the family just about. The rest of it is a work in progress, as any relationship and most lives are. But a work in progress at least holds the potential of moving forward by virtue of that word progress. A work in regress would more accurately describe me and some of my previous relationships.

I love being a dad. Ella is the most precious, amazing, phenomenal blessing in my life. The other day she says, as we are driving home from school: "I have too much love in my heart. I just have to give some to the baby." Christ -- the genuine excitement and passion, that's what it's all about. Leave to Ella to say it so succinctly and to be the one to show me, yet again, how the seemingly complex can be so ridiculously simple. I love that kid more than simple keyboard strokes can express.

I'm here in California to share that love with her, to show her that a relationship gone awry between her parents doesn't mean she has to feel less loved or cheated somehow. The sins of the father have been visited upon me in several ways, but as Sean Connery says in "The Untouchables": "Here endeth the lesson." I am not my father, and the relationship I will have with my daughter will not fit the mold I've dealt with since 1977. And the relationship I have with my wife, for that matter, and with myself, for that matter, represent the break I've made from the Taggart Man Myths and Mistakes. Nicola...sweet Nicola...my star and my guide to a life full of love and truth and honesty and purpose and passion and happiness.

As I drift back from the psychoanalysis, let me say that I will digress from time to time into a rehash of the past and what I mess I made of it in certain places. But it's my mess, and I'll rehash if I want. And I'm doing my best to clean it up, including with this blog, I suppose.

So, Peanut, an early welcome. Your Dad's working on It, and he promises to treat you like the princess I'm sure you will be.

Future topics:
Shitty phone calls I need to make but don't want to

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What I'm listening to: Best of Morrissey

So I just wrote a fair amount of stuff here about developing habits. And then it goes away, because I fucked up in trying to figure out how to spell "petitte" using the spellchecker. Never use the spellchecker. And save -- this is a habit I will work on, along with the habit of writing in MWBR everyday.

Crap. How frustrating.

OK. Back to petitte or petite or pettite or whatever. I was just about to spin an anecdote about 9th grade typing class at Chatham Township Junior High (the one year they had 9th graders in limbo). Mrs. Millman was the teacher -- small (nee petite), dark hair, fluorescent makeup, polyester slacks, smelled faintly like Marlboro Lights, which she was probably grabbing between classes out on the loading dock with Mr. Cole.

After I took typing, I had this weird habit of "air typing" -- I would think of sentences and paragraphs and words in my head and I would move my fingers as if I was touch typing them. Over and over again. I suppose it was practicing, but this habit became something I would do all the time. I would try to think of the longest words that you could type using just one hand or just one finger. "Deeded" -- all using the middle finger of the left hand. So is "ceded"...and I'm sure I thought of others. Never told anybody about this habit, don't think it was a noticeable thing. Just kind of a weird thing I kept to myself.

So, I can develop habits. The last version of this post (FUCK! that is so annoying! I've been doing this lately -- screwing up and then getting so mad at myself. Like when I accidently erased the last five pictures on the digital camera -- the ones of me and Ella and Nicola in the snow off I-5 on the way back from our Xmas trip to Oregon. Probably not even good photos, but I was furious for like 2 days that I'd done something so careless) spelled out the positive habits I've failed at keeping in the past year, and the negative habits that flourish and thrive.

Instead of recapping that depressing BS, how about instead I focus on the good habits/patterns of behavior (same thing? fine line) that we are working on around here: writing here, following our budget, stashing the credit cards, getting a handle on the financial stuff, dealing with household clutter, telling my sister "I love you" when we get off the phone, letting go of frustration over my Dad's crap, talking through emotions and life's pecadilloes and not letting them get built up, playing "what was your favorite thing today" at the dinner table with Ella.

Nicola informs me that my typing things was perhaps not a habit but a quirk. To-may-toe, to-mah-toe. Aren't all quirks habits, but not all habits are quirks? In junior high math, this would be represented by a small circle with "quirks" in it, encompassed by a larger circle labeled "habits."

Going to go. New habit: hitting the sack before 9:30 on weekend nights. A new habit in preparation for having a baby.

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What I'm listening to: Everclear, Songs from an American Movie, Vol. I

At first, I wanted the name to be clever...I have a cleverly named blog, therefore I am clever. But then it became more about meaningfulness, if that's a word. I thought the title should mean something to me, and perhaps be thought provoking to others. Whatever.

I ended up with "More Will Be Revealed" because that is a phrase that has been bouncing around my head for a few weeks, after Nicola introduced me to it. A friend of hers says it.

I guess there are lots of ways to read, and I'm intrigued by the possibilities it seems to offer as an outlook.

• More will be revealed...meaning we don't know everything about every decision we make or action we take
• More will be revaled...be open to the outcome, not attached to the outcome. There's some freedom in that, certainly. I'm one who tends to focus on the outcome, I think, and spend some mental reserves pondering all the things that could go wrong.

Trying too hard, perhaps. This is how I used to write my diary -- very subconsciously, like someday a class of 11th graders would be reading it during third period English and puzzling over the meaning. I also used to be so freakin' literal and detailed in my diary or travel journals (that one time I did that) -- what I ate for breakfast (the Count Chocula and Frankenberry made available at my father's house were symbolic of so much of that situation), what specific things I did that day, what kind of day it was ("this was a pretty good day"), and so on. In excruciating details. That diary may be helpful someday if an anthropologist needs to document the life of a 9-year-old dealing with divorce, repressing his emotions, obsessively copying lists out of the World Book and shoplifting candy, paint by numbers sets and Hot Wheels cars. Otherwise, not so good.

So I would like to aspire to more here -- not write for anyone else, at least initially, but write for myself. Flex the left (right?) side of my brain that has atrophied a bit as I absorbed info about dry skin, bad lungs and eyeballs.

• Observe what's around me
• Take note of interesting things
• Think about my life, my surroundings, my path..but not too focused on the future and the path. Because...why? That's right -- More will be revealed.
• Focus energy not on OCD-like musings on the many commuting options before me, but on other things
• Document (but not in ridiculous detail) the next stage in my life. Why is this important? I feel like I've recently turned some kind of corner and around the bend I've found Me as an Adult...making grown-up decisions that feature others in the center of the world, instead of myself. Boise is an example -- I'll miss going, but at age 35, less than 30 days into my daughter's life, for God's sake, should I be in Boise, eating fried everything and drinking draft anything, or should I be here? No, the answer wasn't that obvious to me until about two weeks ago. So, there's that corner.
• I'm going to commit to writing in this every day for a month, and then I'll see where I am.

Bear with me (whoever the understood "you" is in this sentence) as I cover some basic ground over the next days/weeks, just to get myself oriented.

More will be revealed.

This is my first post to this blog.

I decided to create this to document what's going with me, my family, my world and all the rest during what should be a pretty cool time for the Taggart family.

Plus, I just feel like writing something that doesn't have to do with eyeballs.