I got my ass kicked in court this morning.

Oh, and I wrote another story for the blogfathers, this one titled: "I have seen my future, and it’s either really pink, or kind of slutty."

And here is a still life I'd like call Highbrow/Lowbrow: Sunday Night Dinner:

Guess who ate the Kraft Macaroni and Cheese? Here are two hints: it wasn't me, and it wasn't the baby.

Every day it seems like we watch the world form itself anew in her eyes. Synapses crackle, patterns emerge. Cresting Lone Mountain the other night on our way home from the Haight, the fullish moon emerges from its spot low on the eastern horizon and she is in the crook of my arm, pointing at the moon between some blunt apartments and St. Ignatius, and she says "ball" in a voice that is startlingly sure of itself.

That's right Juniper, it is a ball. So is the circle I draw in the condensation obscuring our favorite window every morning when we look out onto the quiet street. Just like the globe on the shelf at the coffee shop, and the stemless cherries in the last book we read before I let you turn off the light at night. Sometimes you see a ball when we're out walking somewhere, and I can't tell what you're talking about, your eyes filled with whole worlds I cannot see, though you still find words to define patterns; describe memories; create metaphors.

The barbaric yawps of your infancy have given way to words. No longer content to passively howl, begging for warmth and attention, you are finally able to control your world a little by naming the things you know. You coyly grin when you say something that makes sense, seeking acknowledgement and hugs.

The Greeks had a word for those who could not speak Greek: βαρβαρος (barbaros). It is often said the ancients listened to the languages of other tribes dragging their wares for trade from beyond the Caucuses and could discern little but the sound "bar bar." It came to mean "foreigner" to the Greeks, and came to us later as barbarian. But it all boils down to the Proto-Indo-European root "ba ba," a word "imitative of unarticulated speech," and also the root of our word baby. And babble. The Greeks were snobs. They believed anyone who didn't use their alphabet spoke like an infant. A word itself that comes down to us from the Latin infans, which means "incapable of speech."

Roman Jakobson once wrote that the sounds all babies first make to form words across all cultures arise from nursing, which is often "accompanied by a slight nasal murmur, the only phonation which can be produced when the lips are pressed to mother's breast or to feeding bottle and the mouth is full." With time, that phonation is repeated and expanded as a manifestation of any desire. I think that makes sense considering the frustrating early declarations and demands that Juniper articulated as mmm-mmm-mmmms and nnn-nnn-nns. But now we are in new territory; Juniper has officially moved even beyond the bilabial plosive. Desire does not fully explain the tangible pride she gets from expressive speech, which seems to me less driven by desire than by self realization. Juniper has recently learned the word, "eye" and I can't help but wonder about its homonyms, both for affirmation and identity.

New words fall neatly into place in her burgeoning lexicon almost every day. Light. Hi. Bubble. Nouns make way for prepositions (up) which she also manages to use as an adverb, an adjective, and an imperative verb. "Up!" she barks at 6:40 a.m., seated between Wood and I in bed, banging her tiny fists against our bellies. "Up!" she orders, with her hands reaching into the air. "Up!" she exclaims when we climb stairs. Before we bring her to our bed, we hear her in her crib talking to herself, running through the list of words she knows like a college sophomore before a French quiz. She wakes to muted daylight and the desire to speak.

It is so exciting to watch Juniper brush aside the confusion and chaos of infancy. What a responsibility we have, in teaching her to communicate, in helping her to overcome frustration and express her desires, emotions, fears, and hopes. After so many months of speculating, I can't explain the joy that speech provides as a window into her untapped little mind.

But it is terribly frightening also. It is easy to gauge the progress of her expressive speech, but her receptive comprehension is more elusive. What does she understand about what we say? When Wood and I argue and she watches us, how much of the timbre and strange levity in my voice does she pick up as anger? Sometimes we'll say a word that sounds like frog and she'll dart her tongue out rapidly like we have taught her to do. If we say horse she bucks her body like a redneck on a mechanical bull. What an awesome responsibility it is, suddenly, to speak.

She is still very young, and there is so far to go. And yet the limits of her speech also show just how much she knows. The moon is a ball. The sun is a light. She sometimes calls our window dada because it is through that glass we wave goodbye each morning, over and over until I've crossed the street and disappeared, and it is through that glass that she watches, waiting for me to walk home from work in the evening, waving to her as I approach.

Since this is apparently my week to come out of the closet, I might as well admit my love of modern furniture. Through a connection at Herman Miller, I was able to procure a fabled Eames Lounge chair and ottoman for a third of the retail price. Along with my loving wife and darling child, every evening I come home to the warm, leather embrace of my iconic chair. Yes, it does happen to appear in the title sequence for that show where the four gays make over a straight loser with bad hair and a booger wall into a closeted homosexual with a clean apartment. Nonetheless, I still love the chair.

I don't love it enough to tattoo a picture of it across my forearm or anything even crazier than that, but I will put it on a t-shirt and force my child to wear it while getting photographed in front of a graffiti-covered wall. Again, instant hipster. And she totally gets into it.
After I did my last post about the Hipster Baby Shirt project, a lot of people asked if I would sell the shirts. At this point I'm still just using ink-jet iron-ons, and I wouldn't feel comfortable selling shirts unless they were actually silkscreened. Plus, what I'm doing with the project is putting things that I love on shirts in order to create some truly unique clothes for her, and that is something that everybody can do. It really is so easy just to take a picture with a digital camera (or "borrow" an image from the web) and then manipulate it with photoshop to look cool (use the "piant bucket" function to white out the background). Then all you do is print it on t-shirt transfer paper and your kid's got a shirt that no one else has. Someday I plan on commissioning some silkscreened shirts, and when I do I'll advertise them on the blog. But until then, I can't encourage you enough to go out and make some for yourselves. It's a lot of fun.

My dad is a real manly man. He repairs cars for a living, and there are all kinds of ways that his manliness stands out in my mind: the way he drinks like half a gallon of milk every day; the way he takes his shirt off to mow the lawn even when it's not all that hot out; the way he's had several of his fingers cut off in work accidents and then sewn back on.

His brother on the other hand, well, the first time Wood met him she was like, "Dude, your uncle is gay."

For the record, he's not; he just kind of talks like he is. There's a certain unmistakable effeminate lispiness in his voice when he says certain things, so I can see why she thinks so. He lived with his parents into his late twenties and then spent some time living at a Manhattan Y.M.C.A. in the mid-seventies, but the guy is straight. He has tons of kids. When I was younger it was like they had a new baby every time we went over to their house. But I think it was all those kids that made him talk gay. I remember him changing diapers at the Thanksgiving table, and peering over and looking into the plastic he peeled away from my youngest cousin's ass and with a snarled face saying in the gayest voice possible:

"Ucky-poo!"

Ucky-poo? I guess that's what having four kids will do to you. By the fourth you're changing diapers at the Thanksgiving table and saying ucky-poo about what's inside, or saying ucky-poo when your four-year old is eating something he found on the floor. I can still hear his voice saying ucky-poo. It haunts me.

I'm not the manly man my father is. I don't work with my hands or know how to apply bondo to a dented fender. I don't watch sports and I read poetry and watch movies where everyone speaks in French. There are fathers who speak to their children in deep, sonorous bass or baritones. My voice when talking to Juniper migrates a few octaves north. Up to woman territory.

A few weeks ago a colleague and I were taking a job applicant out to lunch at Boulevard and on the way back a dude walked past with two lovely weimaraners. I instinctively turned to watch them pass and said, "oh, look at those pretty doggies!" My co-worker and the interviewee gave each other a knowing glance.

It's not just the pitch of my voice, but the way I say things. When I talk to Juniper, it's like I'm suddenly a ventriloquist dummy controlled by a guy who works at the makeup counter at Nordstroms. Everyone hates the way they sound when their voice is recorded, but I have hidden the videocamera because I can no longer stand listening to the crazed homosexual urging Juniper to "make the sign for horsey" or "walk towards me, sweetie!" I pray that the guy subletting from the crazy South African woman upstairs can't hear the way I talk to Juniper in a voice suited for selling Qing dynasty wedding cabinents in an antique store on Castro Street or announcing the contestants in a tranny fashion show in the Tenderloin. Sometimes I even find myself thinking in my gay voice when I'm out in public, when a lady dropped her cup on the floor at the coffee shop I think, uhhh-ohhh! When we walk past the giant globes on the bridge in Golden Gate Park I tell Juniper to, "look at those great big balls honey!" I get so excited talking to her, I just can't restrain myself.

I've watched my father talk to Juniper, and he somehow manages to still be a manly man down on his elbows excitedly helping her stack those various-sized rings on a pole. I am totally going to have to nip this in the bud or someday my sister's kids are going to speculate about what their Uncle Dutch was doing all those years in San Francisco.

The plan is to start talking exactly like Randy "Macho Man" Savage, that paragon of masculinity, every time I have something to say to Juniper: "You want some more peaches? Ohhhhh Yeah! You wanna go to the swings? Ohhhhh Yeah. When I get done with you you're going to have had so much fun you won't know what hit you. Ohhhhh Yeah. . .In the great green room there was a telephone. Ohhhhhh Yeahhhhhhh!"

Excuse me while I go listen to Macho Man's rap album for inspiration.

I love the San Francisco bus system, known as MUNI. When we no longer live here, I think I will miss MUNI more than anything else about the city. A lot of people complain about MUNI for breaking down all the time or being smelly, but I love it. MUNI really serves everyone from the homeless to the high-powered stock broker who doesn't see any sense paying $28 for a day's parking down in the financial district. If you have a MUNI pass, you don't need a car in this city. MUNI is to San Francisco what the subway is to Manhattan: essential for getting around on the cheap. And you know I'm cheap.

To me, there is no greater bus to exemplify all that is wonderful about MUNI than the 38 Geary. I've heard that it is the most heavily-used bus line on the planet. A bus comes every 5-7 minutes. It goes all the way from Land's End at the western tip of the city to the TransBay terminal at the heart of the financial district. So it goes through Russian and Chinese neighborhoods, the Fillmore, Japantown, the Tenderloin, and Union Square. Along the way it picks up some unusual characters. There's an Asian dude on it all the time who wears knit caps with holes that allow two very prominent antennae to pop out from the top of his head. They are technically his hair, but they look as stiff as pipe-cleaners. The day Alito was confirmed as a Supreme Court justice, I heard the following very-typical MUNI conversation between two elderly black homeless ladies on the 38 Geary:

"I would want a range rover if I had a car."

"Girl, don't you know a land rover is much better than a range rover?"

"What'you talking about? Range rovers are better than land rovers."

I stop listening for a few moments, then I hear:

"Girl, you don't know what a filibuster is? That's when they just keep on talking and talking and talking so no one gets to vote."

I really wish I knew how they got from the Range Rover/Land Rover debate to a discussion of democratic cowardice on the Senate floor. But I'm sure it was very MUNI.

One of the greatest features of the 38 Geary is the bus itself. It is extra-long, and the middle of the bus bends like an accordion around corners. And you can stand in the bendy part! It's almost as cool as that place where you can stand in Utah, Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico all that the same time. The front of the bus is on Market Street while the back is on O'Farrell. Pretty cool. Wood and I love to take Juniper on the 38 Geary, so I made her this t-shirt where a photo I took of the bus goes across the middle, but at the accordion part it bends on the body:
Just throw this shirt on with some orange baby legs and set her down in front of some orange-colored graffiti. That's a recipe for a color-coordinated hipster baby right there. I am trying to teach this kid the word "bus" so that whenever she sees one she yells "bus" the same time she yells "ball!" everytime she sees something round or yells, "da da!" everytime she sees her mother. She can say, "up," "ready," "ball," "bubble," "apple," but even though I have repeated the word bus in her ear a thousand times while strangers look at me like I'm nuts, she still won't say it. So I'm going to dress her in bus clothes until she gets it right.

Remember, a custom-designed (by me) hipster baby t-shirt is one of the prizes in the First Annual Sweet Juniper Weird Search Hit Contest, which ends Monday night. There are already some hilarious entries there, so check them out if you haven't already.

When Jonathan Swift was 32 years old, he jotted down a list of resolutions that he entitled "When I come to be old." I copied these resolutions from a book when I was young, typed them out and have kept them above my desk ever since:

When I come to be old, I swear. . .

Not to marry a young Woman.
Not to keep young Company unless they reely desire it.
Not to be peevish or morose, or suspicious.
Not to scorn present Ways, or Wits, or Fashions, or Men, or War, &c.
Not to be fond of Children, or let them come near me hardly.
Not to tell the same story over and over to the same People.
Not to be covetous.
Not to neglect decency, or cleenlyness, for fear of falling into Nastyness.
Not to be over severe with young People, but give Allowances for their youthfull follyes and weaknesses.
Not to be influenced by, or give ear to knavish tatling servants, or others.
Not to be too free of advise, nor trouble any but those that desire it.
To desire some good Friends to inform me which of these Resolutions I break, or neglect, and wherein; and reform accordingly.
Not to talk much, nor of my self.
Not to boast of my former beauty, or strength, or favor with Ladyes, &c.
Not to hearken to Flatteryes, nor conceive I can be beloved by a young woman, et eos qui hereditatem captant, odisse ac vitare.
Not to be positive or opiniative.
Not to sett up for observing all these Rules; for fear I should observe none.

When I was a serious 19-year old scholar at Trinity College in Dublin, I spent hours trudging through the cavernous archives of the old library, searching through the ancient tomes and blowing dust off manuscripts by the light of a candle held aloft, quaffing mightily from a flagon of port and wiping its essence from my lips with my shirtsleeves. While in such nocturnal study, I once stumbled upon a small collection of books that were originally from the personal library of Dean Swift, and while thumbing through a leather-bound copy of the Elegiae of Propertius, out fell the handwritten draft of Swift's earlier resolutions, herebefore unknown, written in 1686 when he was just 19 years old. I now present them to you, dear readers:

When I come to be twenty-nine, I swear. . .

Never trust a Fop in a powdered Wig or a Dandy with a tightly-cropped Head. I swear I shall manage these locks in the style of Henry Purcell for as long as I shall live.

Not to enter some field of Employment that I do not enjoy, purely for the sake of half a Guinea in my Pocket.

Not to be driven too slowley in my equipage, nor own any but the sporteyest Phaethon.

Not fail to attend the Balls and Revelryes on Saturday Eve, nor miss any meeting of the Royal Stag Society, by reason of falling asleep at an early hour.

Not to forget that it is better for a Belly to burst than good Liquor be lost.

Not to retire to my own lodging from the exotick entertainements of the chocolate cofee-gaminghouses, the drawing-rooms, ale-houses, operas, levees, or the balum rancum &c.

Not to complain of the young lads at Oxford and Cambridge, or say they do nothing but drink ale and smoke tobacco.

Not to marry at all, but instead be a Batchelor all my Life and enjoy a diversity of Bunters and Doxies without the yoke of marital Bondage.

Not to dock in any Harlot without protecting my Thomas with a Cundum for fear of the curse of Venus or worse: a chit.

Not to get any short-heeled wench pregnant, for fear of a malingering chit howling for a wet-nurse and disrupting my study and pleasure with his babbling and paw paw tricks and his mouth full of pap.

But if I do sire a babe, not to hire a French tutor or any other wretched Pedagogue to teach him Latin or Greek, nor refuse to allow him to play with other boys, nor be wet in his feet, nor daub his clothes, nor allow him to spend too long poring on his Book, because he is subject to sore eyes, and of a weakley Constitution.

If I do end up with a suckling before I am thirty, I vow never, never, never to make him the subject of my writing, or bore others with tales of his soiled pantaloons as if he were the omphalos of the Galaxey.

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Tomorrow is my twenty-ninth birthday. At least I've still got my hair.