Listen to the Rain

"Awake in the Night" icon during the day? What?

So last night, right before bed, sashagee took Laila's temperature and found that it was above the 38.6°C threshold for us to call into the hospital and so we did. After some deliberation on their end, they asked us to come in, so we hauled Laila out of bed and brought her to the Lurie's Children's Hospital emergency room.

At 8:45 p.m. we checked in.
At 10:30 p.m. they took her vitals and a respiratory illness swab.
At 11:45 p.m. they took us back to a room.
At 12:15 a.m. a doctor came and asked us what the problem was.
At 12:30 a.m. they took her vitals again
At 1:30 a.m. they they took a blood sample and a more comprehensive respiratory swab
At 1:45 a.m. she fell asleep.
at 3:00 a.m. a doctor came back and told us based on the blood sample and the swab...she had a cold and needed rest and fluids.



So we all went home and went to sleep, and sashagee woke up early to let me get extra sleep. Once I woke up, I tagged in and she went back to sleep...and so did Laila so here I am sitting and writing this. Laila has felt perfectly fine since around 10 p.m. last night and other than being tired, doesn't seem sick at all. I was skeptical before we went in that it would be anything, and it wasn't, but you really don't want to mess around with any infection on your head so it was worth getting checked out. But I'm definitely tired.

Laila and sashagee came downtown yesterday to go to a doctor's checkup, because Laila picked at her stitches one day due to being so frustrated with the restrictions that she's still under. But because they were downtown, we decided to go out to eat as a family. Also because it's Passover, we had to find a place that wasn't going to have tons of wheat in everything, so Wildberry Cafe--sashagee's standard choice, since it's right near the hospital--was right out. So I looked online, found a Japanese restaurant I had never heard of before called Cocoro (not 心, "heart" like I originally thought, but instead 香々呂, which I'm not sure exactly what it means but 香 means "fragrance"). I also found this blog post (in Japanese) talking about how good it was. So I thought, sure, we'll go there.

When we walked in I overheard the waitress speaking Japanese, which was a good sign. And then when we all got our miso soup and Laila accidentally spilled hers with how excited she was, the waitress didn't clean it up or even bring us any napkins, which was extremely weird. I have no idea what was going through her head. It didn't get on anyone but it was all over the table, but the trays with our meal just got put on top of it. It was really odd.

When my meal--saba shioyaki, salted mackerel--came too, I was also a bit skeptical:


Looks pretty basic, right? I paid $24 for this? And that was my main through until I took a bite of the fish and all doubt melted away. The fish had a crispy skin wrapped around a deliciously-juicy interior, with enough salt to complement the flavor without totally overpowering it. It was the best saba shioyaki I've ever had, so good that I forgive the kind of scanty offerings for the 三菜 and I'll definitely go again. It's only a ten minute walk from my work so it's not hard to get to either. sashagee and Laila both liked their food, so I bet we'll be back.

Need to try the bentō like sashagee got. It looked fantastic.

This year, because britshlez wasn't hosting her usual seder, and because sashagee didn't want us to host a seder what with everything that had happened in the last month, so I signed up for some of the household sedarim that Mishkan members were offering. One was on the south side in Hyde Park, and initially I was the only one going but when Mishkan got back to me and said that the organizers preferred that families attend, I signed up Laila too. The second one was just me.

First Seder:
I had never met the hostess or most of the people there, and Laila had also never met anyone there. The hostess had a five-year-old daughter and told me that she was excited to meet Laila, but in the end, Laila spent most of the seder just sitting on my lap and burying her head in my neck whenever anyone asked her a question, including when the hostess was trying to engage her. The other kids were mostly much more raucous--probably one reason Laila was a bit nervous--and the hostess would occasionally ask some questions about how the seder worked, which was the kids' cues to all yell over each other in the hope of getting candy. That really got Laila's attention.

I had to wrangle Laila near the end, when she wandered off to go find toys to play with, so I didn't get to talk that much to the other adults. But I did have a nice time. Laila even ate the karpas dipped in salt water! Now sure, she ate a ton of the potato chips too--apparently in Russia they used potatoes traditionally as the karpas--but she ate the parsley and I'm proud of her for that. I've never had to worry about her being a picky eater.

Second Seder:
This was a grown-ups only seder, and so it was a big more disorganized because there were no kids and therefore they wouldn't lever into that disorganization and shatter everything into pieces. The hostess had written up her own hagaddah...and we ended up skipping around three-quarters of it because we started late, people were getting hungry, and we wanted to get to dinner. There was more discussion this time, about what freedom means to me and more about our lives--it actually turned out there was another person there who had had infantile spasms as a children, so she was very happy to hear that Laila had come through without permanent damage. She also kept kosher and was similarly disappointed when a bunch of people had not read the hostess's email and brought dessert with butter in it.

These was not like the old sedarim I hosted, where we'd start at five and talk for so long that we wouldn't eat until ten. People at the first seder actually talked about how much they missed those old discussion-focused sedarim, and I miss them too. But it's going to be a while before we can do those again--the social expectations that let adults hold the sedarim the way they wanted to and the kids just had to deal with it are fading in modern America. So we have potato chips and quiz sessions.

I don't want to turn this into a big post about tradition (maybe that should be its own post?), so I'll cut it off there. Because we were rushed in both sedarim, we skipped some parts I really liked. We didn't do the plagues. We didn't sing Ḥad Gadya at either seder and didn't do the third or fourth cups of wine. But I had a lovely time at both sedarim. Hopefully next year I'll be able to host (in Jerusalem) but I'm glad these were there for me this year.

Yesterday, worldbshiny took me to see the premier of The Ally at Theatre Wit. Originally I looked up the playwrite (Itamar Moses), looked up the main character's name (Asaf), and thought "Oh, I see why she invited me." and then I asked her about it and it turned out I was completely wrong--she invited me because I had invited her to go get pancakes at Hanabusa and she hadn't been able to make it due to being on a Disney cruise. Oops.



The blurb for the play is:

When Asaf's student asks him to sign a manifesto condemning police brutality, he wants to help — until he realizes the petition says more than he's ready to stand behind. As the debate roars through his Midwestern campus and his ex-girlfriend takes the lead, Asaf is pulled into a political storm that tests his convictions and his sense of self. Will his fumbling entrée into activism help or hurt the cause?

...and really despite the framing, most of the play is about Asaf. He's the only character in every scene, he has a bunch of monologues about how he feels about things, and the way he feels is mostly "conflicted." Asaf has the classic affliction of the nice liberal, which is that he just wants to be on the right side and not really get involved in internal conflicts, and for most of his life he was able to do that. Even during his earlier activist days, he and his activist friends all agreed on their anti-racist, anti-surveillance state, anti-war objectives (his activist days were just during and before the 2003 US invasion of Iraq) and he never actually had to take a stand on something controversial. And when he does, it turns out you can't please everyone.

The play tries to cover basically all ground, sometimes to its detriment. If you've ever heard anyone use any argument about Israel and Palestine--right of return, Israeli territorial ambitions, Hamas rocket attacks, Mizraḥi voting patterns, land for peace, pinkwashing, the Damgana, the Nakba, whatever--it's in here, and mostly in a big argument scene in the second act where a bunch of characters get to make dramatic speeches opposing each other. Well, mostly opposing each other. Asaf is fond of saying he mostly agrees with other people, except for one small thing, and maybe we can talk about it and work it all out, you know?

Maybe. Not everything can be so easily worked out. There was what seemed like an intentional contrast between Asaf's interactions with his (non-Jewish) wife Gwen, who works as a community outreach manager at the college where he teaches, where they always start assuming the best intentions of each other and are willing to listen and hear each other's points of view, and his interactions with the other characters in the play which are characterized by a lot of misunderstanding (at best). There's a part near the end where Asaf confronts Nakia, his activist ex-girlfriend, and asks her to put in a section about antisemitism in her twenty-page manifesto that has room for police brutality, capitalist disinvestment, American imperialism, Israel, and French actions in Mali. Just a sentence, anything. And she says no.

After seeing the play I went and looked up some information about it because I had questions about the choices made, and it led to me to this article in the Forward about it which answered a lot of my questions already:

...how do I understand what new lens this will cause audiences to bring to it. A lot of the "rewrite" after Oct. 7, was me rereading through the eyes of "now." It was clear that the play has to take place pre-Oct. 7 because if it took place now it would be a completely different play, so then it was a question of how we experience it now. On a practical level, if someone says something that has been proven definitively wrong, is that intentional irony or foreshadowing on my part or does that seem like a mistake?

It was definitely the latter for me, though less so now that I know the play's context. Especially during the big argument scene, I was thinking that some of these people would probably not even be in the same room nowadays, much less be willing to talk to each other. That said, the part about tribalism--looking at the bad acts of our side and saying "Oh, those are just bad actors but we are basically good" and looking at the bad acts of the other side and saying "Those are expressions of your most fundamental beliefs, you monsters"--is true both now and forever, and the message that we function as the default enemy for Christian and Islamic societies (so, the majority of the developed world even now) delivered by a Jewish Ph.D student to Asaf is basically the main thesis of the excellent book Anti-Judaism: the Western Tradition. And I'm sure we can all relate to the guy who just wants everyone to get along.

The staging depicted above was static through the whole play, though for act two they moved the tables around. Location changes were depicted through lighting shifts, which worked for me but didn't work for worldbshiny. I thought the ending was fantastic, Asaf sitting in a synagogue and engaging in התבודדות (hitbodedut, "solitude") as he tries to work out his conflicting imperatives, and I looked it up and found that this was the second-to-last scene in the original. There was a scene where Asaf goes to the march organized by Nakia and his wife is angry with him for being late to it, but Moses mentioned how they rewrote the scene several times and eventually just cut it because at that point, all the important parts of the play were done.

It runs through May 3rd.

Laila had a doctor's appointment downtown today, so after their appointment they came to the office to see everyone. The last time she was here, she was still a toddler and we were trying to get her to walk. Now, she's in her shy phase and we were trying to get her to actually say something.

First, the good news--the doctor says that Laila is healing well and she's now cleared to do flips (but still no spins), and if she keeps healing like this she'll be fully healed sometime in May. Just need to keep on her to make sure she doesn't climb on too many things, because if she hits her head too hard she'll end up with a skull fracture.

Anyway, sashagee brought Laila to the building and, in contrast to how things were during the Plague Years, they just waved me in and took me at my word--though in fairness, I had given a nengajо̄ to the receptionist so they knew my family by appearance already. We went up and showed Laila around, one of my co-workers gave her an apple and another one gave her a little clapper toy. Laila's in her shy phase so she quietly said "hi" and "thank you" and waved at people. Unfortunately some of her biggest cheerleaders weren't in the office, but she'll be back in the summer for another visit!

After we the visit was done Laila was very hungry, so we went down to the lobby again. There had been a miscommunication between sashagee and I about when we were going out to lunch--she thought I meant today when I meant tomorrow--but I suggested going to the work canteen. Originally I thought I would have to go up there and bring their orders down, but I asked the security guard if I could bring them up and she just waved dismissively and said, "Sure," which is pretty convenient but definitely makes me feel a little less safe! We went up to the dining hall and I picked up my lunch I had already ordered, paneer from a place called The Clove, and sashagee ordered a pastrami sandwich and we sat down and ate. Laila ate all the toppings and none of the bread from her half of the sandwich, but she was happy when the man working the register gave her a free rice krispy treat that they had left over at the end of the day. My paneer was fine, not great, but fine, and I threw it in the "okay" category of the restaurant lists.

After that, I walked sashagee and Laila to the L and they went home!

Oh, almost forgot to mention--there was a "Tea Lab popup" at work today, which meant that I got to go into a room and make a few teabags that I can take home. I just made ones with green tea and added spearmint, rosehips, lavender, and dandelion in various proportions. I'm going to take them home and have them in the morning with my fish, rice, and pickles for breakfast.

We've been having an unreasonable amount of trouble trying to get Laila registered to the school for her new IEP.

We'd already lost one slot because when sashagee showed up, they only had her set for halfdays even though we were told that Laila would be started for full days, so they tried to contact Laila's home school to get the process started again. Well, the contact at Laila's school was slow so we lost our placement, but also Laila was in the hospital while all this was happening so I wasn't too worried. Well, they got her a new placement (at a much closer school, that she can even walk to if she wants), so we weren't very worried. Then things dragged. And dragged. And today literally right before she was going to go to school on what we thought was going to be her last day, we got a call that she needed to stay home because she couldn't be enrolled in a new school if she was already enrolled in an existing school. Then we got a phone call from her new school with the coordinator ready to start breaking things, trying to figure out why Laila had not yet been unenrolled from her old school (at 1 p.m. on a Friday) so they could start the process of enrolling her in a new school before spring break next week.

The case manager at her old school is completely incompetent, is what I'm saying.

sashagee managed to call the central office and get the deadline extended so that we have plenty of extra time to make sure that Laila will properly get enrolled at her new school and we don't have to go through all of this again (for an IEP that was originally decided back in January), but seriously? She's already missed weeks of school due to illness and you're telling me, "Oh, she has to miss even more school now." Come on.

We mentioned this to her preschool teachers and by their reactions they were also not particularly enthused by any prospect of dealing with administration. sashagee is done writing strongly-worded emails for today (hopefully) so now we just have to wait and see if the case manager can manage to locate the computer and push the few buttons necessary to release Laila instead of banging rocks together trying to discover fire or whatever they're doing in there.

I recently learned about "Stalin sorting" through my work on Cataclysm. What is Stalin sort, you ask?

Go through an array, iterating over the elements. Any element not in order is deleted.

Congratulations, mabown and alainamwhite!


The whole family received an invitation to the wedding, including Laila, but for obviously hospital-related reasons not all of us could go. We discussed it among ourselves and decided that I would go as the family representative, but it did mean I spent quite a bit of my catch-up-with-friends time explaining just why it was that my family wasn't there.

ping816 officiated the wedding, which consisted mostly of the vows. I admit that I was expecting some kind of reading, especially when alainamwhite showed up in a black wedding dress, but there was not. ping816 read the ritual about marriage being a sacred bonding of love, alainamwhite recited her touching vows about how mabown taught her that its okay to be excited for your passions and you don't need to try to lock in to some concept about what being an adult is like, mabown protested that he had to follow that and recited his own vows, ping816 pronounced them married, and they processed out. It took maybe fifteen minutes. Straight to the point--the bonding of two individuals in holy matrimony.

After we left and waited for the reception room to be prepared, I mostly chatted with shane.suydam and his wife meaghan.figg, and later with kati.smith.211, mostly about our respective children because that's what parents do when they meet up. It was mostly talking about Laila because everyone was worried about her, so I gave an update on her condition, mentioned that she was scheduled for surgery on Monday, and that the doctors were hopeful that the surgery would really help. meaghan.figg offered to buy us dinner when we all got home, which was extremely kind of her--Mishkan did something similar for us when Laila had her spasms--and I'll definitely take her up on that. Otherwise, we drank the extremely strong drinks that the bartenders mixed up and when the doors opened, we went in.

I did learn that shane.suydam and his wife meaghan.figg live in my parents' town, about two blocks away, so we'll have to drop by next time we're in the neighborhood!

I was not seated with any of the aforementioned people inside, though I was seated with MomoManLove and johanna.jones.127, so they're who I chatted with while I ate the fish and drank the (delicious) wine on the table. I ended up dancing with johanna.jones.127 as well, when she, starting with her boyfriend, went down the men at the table and all of them turned down her offer to dance until she got to me. sashagee was surprised that I was willing to dance, too--after one of our first nights out she told me she had never dated a man who danced. Then I told her I had taken swing-dancing lessons during the swing dancing craze of the 90s. Sadly, there were no swing songs at the wedding. The music during dancing was mostly pretty conventional, actually, which I was surprised about since the music during dinner was mostly chamber instrumental covers of horror movie songs.

Since it's a wedding and therefore there were dozens of people to talk to, I didn't really get to talk to anyone for very long, and a lot of what I did talk to people about was Laila, but it was really nice to catch up with everyone. I learned that seloy had gotten married and ran into smtemp for the first time since the Plague Years (she's moved up to Wisconsin). I got to see kati.smith.211's five-year-old use up her energy by running circles around the table she and her parents were sitting at, proving that it's not just Laila. And I got to speak briefly to both mabown and alainamwhite and congratulate them on their wedding! It was a lovely night, though I always had a bit of worry about Laila in the back of my mind.

When I left, two women got out of the Lyft that I was getting into and one of them said:

"You look like an Irishman at an Italian club.

Sidestepping the whole debate about what to call it[1], we went to the Lunar New Year parade and celebration on Argyle Street yesterday:


We left later than I wanted to--we didn't get out of the house until 11:45 a.m. and didn't get down to Argyle until 12:15 p.m. We put in our name at Immm Rice, but when it was only twenty-five minutes or so to the parade we decided that even if we did get in we wouldn't be able to eat in time, so we tried stopping in at a bakery for some buns. The first one we went to had a cash-only sign that had been hidden by the long line, so we had to duck our and search the rest of the street. sashagee spotted one on the way back run by an old Vietnamese man and got a couple buns for Laila and herself, and they ate them while we settled onto the side of the street to wait.

I wasn't expecting too many people to show up since it was -5°C with a biting wind, but the streets were still lined when the parade stepped off at 1:05 p.m. Laila had been complaining and wanting to go home for quite a while, but once the parade started all that fell away. She watched the lion dancers and the dragon puppets, watched the floats going on, and was very excited when one of the parade-walkers gave her a lollipop! She didn't complain once as we stood out in the cold, but we left a couple floats early so we could get into a restaurant. And a good thing too--we walked in, were immediately seated, and within ten minutes or so there was a giant line waiting for a seat. We ate--with a brief detour while Laila and I walked around outside because she was getting rowdy--and by the time we were done basically all the festivities had ended, so we just went home.

Next weekend is the parade in Chinatown, but we won't be able to go.

[1]: A few years ago there was a push to call it Lunar New Year instead of Chinese New Year, since more cultures than just China celebrate it. Of course now the problem is that e.g. the Islamic and Jewish calendars also have lunar new years since both calendars begin months on the new moon, so "Lunar New Year" is ambiguous.

Almost five! I can still remember when she was so small I would carry her in the crook of my arm while I was walking around the condo. Every parent says that, because it's true.

Laila is expressing more preferences and wants while also being more independent. On mornings when I get up and let sashagee sleep in, I go out with Laila and give her medicine, and I no longer just make her food and give her what she gets. I now ask her what she wants to eat for breakfast. And sure, the answer is always the same thing: "pickle AND cheese!", by which she means some pickles, a bit of cheese, some fruit (usually blueberries or strawberries), and toast with butter or jam. It's what she always wants, even when she wants something else--a couple times she's said e.g. waffles or eggs, and when I asked her, "You want eggs?" she'll respond with "Just pickles and cheese." Well, I can't blame her, since I have basically the same thing for breakfast every day too.

She's also getting more self-conscious. There's been a few times when she's tripped and fallen while running around the condo and she got so embarrassed that she immediately ran to her room and shut the door afterwards. It's not like we laugh at her or anything! We just ask her if she's okay, but she's grown-up enough to be embarrassed about it. And a few days ago, she had a coughing fit, looked up at me when she recovered, and said, "It's very frustrating!"

You're right, Laila, it is.

She's settled on her new interests and moved on from her old interests. A year ago, she was very into the Cars franchise and loved Lightning McQueen, but she hasn't wanted to watch Cars in months. A few months ago it was all Bluey all the time. Nowadays it's Hello Kitty and Friends whenever we give her the choice of what she wants to watch. She'll spend almost every free moment drawing and painting with the water markers and books we've gotten her, and painting with watercolors if we let her. The other thing she loves to do lately is have us read books to her, which has always been something she likes but it's more of an interest lately. She'll grab books herself and bring them over--her favorites lately are Sammy Spider's First Yom Kippur, Little Owl's Night, Challah for Shabbat Tonight, and You Are My Happy. I got her Sammy Spider's First Shabbat but she hasn't taken to it yet.

Unfortunately, tragedy has struck. When Laila was younger she had a habit of pulling her hair, but we had mostly managed to deter the behavior...until she spent a week in the hospital, which caused her enough anxiety that it started up again. sashagee saw how thin her hair was getting on one side and was worried she'd do permanent damage to her hair by pulling out too much of it, and so to deter further hair pulling, we gave her a haircut. A significant one:


Laila...doesn't like it. It has, however, helped stop her from pulling her hair--she'll reach for where she usually pulls and it's not there--as have my comments that if she keep pulling it we'll have to cut it even shorter. They're probably going to have to cut some of it for her upcoming surgery anyway, so it's not purely a deterrent measure. And we know that if she did give herself bald spots she'd be really upset about them when she got older, but seeing her look in the mirror and silent tears roll down her cheeks is really upsetting.

In happier news, she's fully become a fashionista. She no longer waits for us to pick out her clothes in the morning--if we wait too long, she'll go rummage through her drawers until she finds something she likes and change into it, all by herself! The only hurdles are that if she's wearing shorts as part of her pajama set she'll sometimes leave them on under her pants and, the bigger one, if we let her she would wear a half-dozen outfits throughout the day. She'll forget to roll up her sleeves when washing her hands, get the sleeves wet, and then go back to her room to change into a new shirt because she can't stand having wet sleeves. If we didn't stop her, she'd change her clothes a half-dozen times a day and sashagee would have to go laundry basically every single day.

I also make her carry her own food plate to the table. She may have issues focusing on things sometimes, but when it's her food, she can keep her mind on it. Though she does carry it at a very dangerous angle sometimes.

What other ways will she grow and change?

So I had been getting increasing WHEA errors and noticed that computers are much more expensive, but I bought one anyway and then I had to return it. That was where we left things off, and as I was trying to pack up my old computer's data for transit to the new computer I plugged in some of the old hard drives I had, which meant I finally plugged things into every USB slot I had.

That was two weeks ago and...I've had one crash since then, about two weeks ago. I've played games for hours, let my computer sit while I was out of the house, I've been idly browsing the web, and nothing.

Was it a bad USB controller freaking out while it was idle? Was there a short and by plugging and unplugging things did I jiggle the cables around? Did the new computer scare my old computer into good behavior? Who knows. I'll just ride the wave as long as I can.

Almost a week early. I thought, oh, cool, I'll just open it up now and help set it up, since I took the day off anyway since sashagee wasn't feeling well and I needed to watch Laila.

Well, I cracked open the packaging, asked sashagee to help me a bit since Laila's at school and get it out of the casing, and when I pulled it out I noticed there was condensation on the case. Oh, that's a bad sign, I said, and then when I opened up the case to take out the packaging they put on the inside I noticed there was condensation on the inside of the case, which is a really bad sign.

It did not post, of course. The CPU and RAM lights were both on on the motherboard, and when reseating the RAM didn't work I figured that if they can't send me a working computer I'll request a refund, so that's what I did. Just annoying that I have to walk through the snow with a 40 lb computer to the UPS store to ship it back.

Looks like I haven't been to one of these in two years, and this time both sashagee and I got to go! We did arrive late and miss the first two shows, but here's what I thought about the ones we did see:

( List of shows behind the cut )
The shows were categorized by another person in the group as follows:

1. Handholding Sakuga - (You and I are Polar Opposites)


2. “See, the Oligarchy DOES Care”-ass Propaganda - (Noble Reincarnation: Born Blessed, So I'll Obtain Ultimate Power)


3. Family (Selectively) Matters - (Journal with Witch)


4. Monkey See, Monkey School - (The Darwin Incident)


5. F/ACE Turn: I Can Fix Him - (Tamon’s B-Side)


6. Not All Heroes Worship Goddesses - (Sentenced to be a Hero)


7. Conquer Them With Cuteness - (The Demon King’s Daughter is Too Kind)


8. No Game, No Interest - (Shiboyugi: Playing Death Games to Put Food on the Table)


9. The Lover Formerly Known As Prince - (In the Clear Moonlit Dusk)


10. New US War Just Dropped - (Fate/strange Fake)

The first two shows there are the ones we missed. People really seem to like You and I are Polar Opposites, including sashagee--she's already watched a bunch of it.

I say I'll watch some of these, but I'm very bad at watching anime lately. We'll see if it happens.