Category Archives: Omphaloskepsis

Omphaloskepsis is a word you won’t find in all dictionaries. It refers to the practice of meditating while contemplating one’s navel. Stolen from http://www.gynob.com/contnavel.htm

Fatherhood

Sorry again, Dinah

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For as long as I can remember, when I’ve walked outside and its sunny out, I’ve sneezed. I can usually count on a good two or three sneezes. In the past few years, I finally was curious enough to do some research and found out that I have the condition called photic sneeze reflex.

Photic sneeze reflex (also whimsically called ACHOO, a backronym for Autosomal dominant Compelling Helio-Ophthalmic Outburst) is a medical condition by which people exposed to bright light involuntarily sneeze. It has been suggested that the photic sneeze reflex occurs only after someone has been adapted to the dark for at least five minutes, although this is not certain, and is not uniform amongst people with the photic sneeze reflex. The condition occurs in one-sixth to one-quarter of humans, with more common occurrence in Caucasians than other human races. The trait is passed along genetically, with a 50 percent chance of inheritance.

The probable cause is a congenital malfunction in nerve signals in the trigeminal nerve nucleus. The fifth cranial nerve, called the trigeminal nerve, is apparently responsible for sneezes. Research suggests that some people have an association between this nerve and the nerve that transmits visual impulses to the brain. Overstimulation of the optic nerve triggers the trigeminal nerve, and this causes the photic sneeze reflex.

Lately, I’ve noticed that Dinah has been sneezing when exposed to bright light. Looks like she inherited it from me.

Sorry, kiddo.

Fatherhood, Omphaloskepsis

Dinah’s name

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Many people ask about how we came up with Dinah Aeryn for the name of our daughter. We get a lot of “Is Dinah a family name?” Strangely, no one really asks us about Aeryn. Must be because its a middle name. Anyway, I warn you, its a tale of monster geekery. However, this geekery was perpetrated by my wife as well as me.

We had the name of Aeryn even before we were expecting. (The name is pronounced like the more common “Erin.”) Aeryn caught our attention thanks to the science fiction television show Farscape, specifically the character of ex-Peacekeeper Officer Aeryn Sun. Mostly what attracted us to the name was the spelling. We thought it was pretty. It doesn’t hurt that the character that brought us to that name is a tough positive ass-kicking female role model. Although, maybe she’s too quick to jump to violence.

My beautiful and charming wife, however, would not stand for having Aeryn as a first name, which I was lobbying for. Her reasoning: I have a first cousin named Erin, and the phonetic similarity would cause much confusion among people, specifically my grandparents. I think its silly, but as part of a marriage, and certainly as one half of a parenting team, one must compromise. Sarah said Aeryn would be a good second name, and I protested some, but eventually gave in.

So, how did we get to a first name? She was one of three Sarahs in her grade school class, and she didn’t like it. Also, we know about 10,000 people named Jason that we talk to quite often. Sarah was looking for something that was an older name and was less common now. She had proposed names such as Eleanor (“Gee, I think you’re swell” or “Rigby picks up the rice in a church where a wedding has been.”) and Audrey. (Audrey was the name of my Grandma, my Dad’s mom. For some reason, it just didn’t work. A long story, maybe, for another time.) Those are two I remember, but there were more. I vetoed a lot of them. Nothing really worked.

I’m a comics geek, I’m 29 and I’m still collecting. And when I say collecting I mean “I’m reading for the story and just not throwing them away.” One afternoon, I was sitting in the family room reading comics while Sarah was watching tv. I started to read the latest Birds of Prey from DC comics. (As an aside, I’d like to link to a DC page about BoP directly, however, DC’s web page sucks ass. That’s okay, Marvel‘s sucks ass too.)

One of the main characters of Birds of Prey is the Black Canary. The current Black Canary is actually the second one, but I guess that doesn’t really matter to this story. In any case, her civilian name is Dinah Laurel Lance. On the second or third page of that particular issue, Oracle (Barbara Gordon, the original Batgirl) had called her Dinah. I stopped and thought of the last time I heard that name. The only other Dinahs I could think of was was the late Dinah Shore (some thanks go to Adam Sandler) and, of course, the old campfire song of “Someone’s in the kitchen with Dinah.”

I turned to Sarah and said “Hey, what about Dinah as a first name.” Sarah said she needed a few minutes to think about it. As time went on, she become more and more attached to the name. I think after just 10 minutes, it was set.

We both felt good about it, but waited to tell people until it was closer, or at least the baby was here. As I said a few times, “Nothing is set in stone until we see her and make sure she looks like a Dinah Aeryn.”

I’m not one to believe in signs or anything, but there was a weird occurrence that I want to commit to the web for all eternity: About the same time we found out that we were to have a baby girl and we were deciding on the name, the rock band Live was getting a lot of air play with their single Heaven.

The lyrics to Heaven contain the following: I don’t need no one to tell me about heaven / I look at my daughter, and I believe. For some reason, these lyrics really resonated with me. (With how I feel now, I think I was already falling in love with my daughter, even though I hadn’t seen her. I definitely know that I’ve only been this enamored with one other person.) I decided that I needed to have this song, so I set about going to buy the CD.

I got to the story to buy the record and went to the Ls to look for the Live CDs. I knew the name of the song, but never took the time to look at/for the name of the album. Once I saw the name of the album, I figured it was a sign that Sarah and I were on the right track.

The name of the album is Birds of Pray. I loved the homonym of “pray” instead of “prey,” especially considering the lyrics in Heaven. And I figured, while not exactly the same as the comic where we got Dinah’s name, it was close enough. Close enough to give me chills.

In any case, this is the tale of geekiness that got my daughter her name.

Fatherhood, General

My father-in-law is amazing

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I have to say that my father-in-law is an amazing guy, for a number of reasons. The most important being he helped produce my wife, but there are other reasons why he demonstrated last week.

My in-laws were up here for a week and a half to watch Dinah during the time between Sarah returning to work and day care starting. Most of the baby watching was done by my mother-in-law, but my father-in-law certainly enjoyed spending time with his granddaughter as well.

However, to keep himself busy, my father-in-law did a lot of work around the house. In the time that he was here he 1) Put down a floor in our attic. A *nice* floor made of planking, 2) fixed the mounting of our bikes in the garage that was falling off the cieling, (looks like I missed the studs or something,) 3) Kept an on eye on the guys replacing our furnace and air conditioner, and finally (the reason for this post) fixed our dryer that stopped working. He really only knew the basics of dryers, but he took it apart, tested a few parts, and found that the thermostat was totally covered in lint. Cleaned out all the lint, put it back together, and boom, we had the heat.

<Time has passed since I wrote the above.>

While my in-laws were up for Dinah’s baptism, my father-in-law mowed our lawn and put in a electrical outlet. He was only here for two days!

In any case, I admire that he’ll just set to these tasks and get them done. I’m way too distracted on tasks unless its something I’m really interested in. I need more focus like that.

In any case, I’m enjoying this “fathers doing stuff for us” thing while I can. It’ll be my turn in 20-some years. Hopefully I’ll do half as well as my father-in-law and my father have done for us.

Fatherhood

Sorry, Dinah

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Its been said that our children inherit the best and worst of its parents. We know that a lot of it is thanks to genetics. With this in mind, I’d like to issue a formal apology today to my daughter when she’s only 1 month and 24 days old.

Dinah, I’m so sorry that one of the genetic traits you got from me was my supernatural ability to generate gas. I was hoping, that since you were a girl, it would skip you. I’m sorry it hasn’t.

Fatherhood

Dinah Aeryn Garner

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For those who haven’t heard. My daughter, Dinah Aeryn Garner, was born on May 7th, 2004 at 11:10pm. She was 19.5 in. long and weighed 6 lb. 5 oz. As of her doctor appointment this morning, she’s 21 in. long and 8 lb 4.5 oz.

I’ve put off posting about it until now for a number of reasons.

  1. I was kinda busy with Sarah helping Dinah get here
  2. I was adjusting to life with baby.
  3. I was waiting to have more organized thoughts to reflect on.

Now, just after the first month has passed, I think I finally have some thoughts…
Continue reading Dinah Aeryn Garner →

Omphaloskepsis

More thoughts on blogging

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Back when I went to UIUC it was the last days of USENET. (Not to say USENET is dead, but its certainly not the healthiest animal in the zoo.) The university had set up a number of local newsgroups to be used by classes, student organizations, and the like.

Of course, like any good local hiarchy, we had uiuc.general and uiuc.test. uiuc.test was a more or less underground forum for discussion. I hear its degenerated a lot since its haydays and when I started reading/posting it was already on its way down. uiuc.general is pretty much what it implies it was. I did a lot of writing to those newsgroups. Not all of them were pretty, not all of them were well written, a whole bunch of them were just plain stupid, but many of them were not bad. (A search of Google Groups can show you many of those or I’m sure you can ask Tim Skrivin, UIUC’s patron saint/wacko of USENET, for copies. uiuc.* wasn’t supposed to exist in the wild, but it made it out there anyway. )

In any case, I spent a lot of time doing somewhat creative writing. Most of the writing I do these days is either e-mail or more technical writing for work. I feel that I’ve let those skills atrophy. Those skills weren’t great in the first place, but its never to late to get them going again. I’m not sure I’ll ever just sit around and wax poetic like I have in days of yore, mostly due to the lack of time, but I think I’ll be more willing to do it now that I have a place to do so.

The only “problem” with the blog format is that its less inclusive of “the general public” than usenet is. To fully participate in everyone’s thoughts, I need to visited at least 20 sites, instead of those 20 people all posting in one place. Oh well, the world has moved on, and USENET has moved to the west, or something. 🙂