Science Is Awesome!

I’m a little late coming to write this, mostly because I’ve been on vacation.  And to make matters worse, our hotel room didn’t have free wifi.  Really?  No free wifi?  Because your guests have no interest in the internet?  Even my dogs are equipped with free wifi, and they only use it to google “poodle” over and over again.

Anyway, it was while in our hotel room one Monday morning that I heard the latest news on the Mars Curiosity rover.  (It had landed just after midnight, while I was asleep.  I couldn’t manage to stay up for the Olympics, either.  I’m getting old.)

I looked at my daughter and said, “Do you know what happened while you were asleep?”

“What, Daddy?”

“While we were asleep, some people landed a car on Mars.”

"It's the red one.  No, the other red one.  Maybe we should stop and ask for directions."

 

I could tell immediately that she understood what this meant.

“Whoa,” she said.  “Does Mommy know?”

She thinks planets are pretty cool.

I like to think she gets that from me.  I’ve always been a sucker for space exploration.  I was born a decade too late for the moon landing, but I remember watching the first shuttle launch.  I even remember a family vacation to Florida where I watched a shuttle launch in person, from the parking lot of an IHOP.

And yes, I admit, sometimes science can seem boring.  Did you need someone to explain the Higgs Boson particle after the Large Hadron Collider announced they might (or might not) have discovered it? 

Did you manage to not fall asleep? 

The Higgs Boson particle is really important, and its discovery will change our understanding of the entire universe, but explaining WHAT it is and WHY it’s important is frankly dull to anyone without a PhD in quantum physics.

That’s the sad truth of a lot of science.  Very cool, if you understand it; very boring, if you don’t.  It reminds me of Harrison Ford at the beginning of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade explaining that most archeology is done in the library.

Bo-ring!

But every once in a while, science puts on its fedora, and sets off on a badass adventure of exploration and discovery that leaves all of us mere humans totally awe-struck.

And this time, they apparently did it with Batman.

That’s the only reasonable explanation for the bizarre method they came up with for landing the rover. 

Heat shield?  Standard issue. 

Giant parachute? Cool. 

Rocket powered sky crane?  Batman.  Totally Batman.

This is a big comeback for the space program, from retiring the shuttle fleet last year and the announcement that the next manned flight program would be cancelled.  That seemed like an end to NASA doing really cool stuff in the name of science, at least for awhile, and I was disappointed by the decision.  But then, it seemed that NASA’s gamble paid off, as private companies started competing to build rockets for the mostly mundane tasts of sending cargo and, hopefully, in the future, people, up to the International Space Station. 

That left NASA free to do other stuff, like building rocket-powered sky cranes!

By the way, that incredible feat of physics serves as the best answer ever whenever some child looks at the chalkboard during math class and says, “Why do I need to know this?”

Because when Apple launches its iRover, all that trigonometry is going to come in really handy.

Trigonmetry, calculus, quantum mechanics, relativity, all subjects sure to make the average person’s eye lids grow suddenly heavy, all matter because hundreds of years ago, Galileo decided to point his telescope up at the moon, at a time when no one really understood what the moon even really was.  Galileo knew that curiosity was the beginning of discovery, and tireless observation, experimentation, and relating solid facts without personal bias could reveal the truth of the universe.  

And he was tried by the Inquisition for doing it, and forced to never speak of his discoveries again.

It’s sometimes easy to think we haven’t come that far from Galileo, that science is still butting heads with religion.  It's easy to hang our heads in a long collective sigh and wonder if the human race will ever grow up.  But science and religion are two entirely separate things, and only one of them involves rocket-powered sky cranes.  (Unless the Pope is planning to upgrade the pope-mobile...)

As for me, I look forward to taking my daughter outside on a summer night, and turn her head upwards, to the stars.  And maybe we’ll even see a shooting star.  I assume her reaction will be something along the lines of, “Whoa.”  If not, maybe I’m not raising her right after all.  Because if a shooting star doesn’t elicit some amount of wonder, I’m not sure anything will.  And wonder excites imagination, and imagination inspires the future.

"Dad, that's just a flying unicorn, looking for a rainbow.  I've seen that, like, a hundred times..."

 

Maybe my daughter  will grow up to be a scientist, or maybe she won’t.  Whatever she grows up to be, I just hope she’ll live in a world where science will, once in awhile, put on its fedora and leave all of us awestruck, just like it did two Sunday’s ago.

And hopefully, it will do it with a rocket-powered sky crane.  Because that was awesome.

Sexy and I know it

I recently read an article on how sexy stay-at-home dads are.

And he’s right, we are sexy.

But I found myself at odds with some of the points in the article.

(Before I start, I really shouldn’t identify myself as a stay-at-home dad.  My wife and I tag-team parent.  We both work 40 hours a week, bring home a steady income, miss family events for work, and all that stuff, but just do so on opposite schedules.  It so happens that my job involves lots of nights and weekends, so when we talk about stay-at-home moms and stay-at-home dads, we’re talking pretty strictly about moms and dads who are home during traditional working hours, between 9 and 5, and that, more often than not, is when you’ll find me with my daughter.  I don’t consider myself the primary caregiver, because I don’t think of either of us as primary.  We raise her together.  But for the purposes of this post, I identify with many of the qualities cited in the stay-at-home dad.  Like sexy.  Especially sexy.)

And the article gets some things right, like that images and ideas of masculinity are rapidly changing.  Going to the gym, getting those perfect abs, having the coolest clothes, the nicest car, the biggest wallet, it might be that guys have miscalculated what in fact “sexy” really is.

Except for this guy.  This guy is sexy. 
Even my wife thinks so, and I really can't argue.

But the article’s author tries, as other similar articles on fatherhood I’ve read recently, to link the Rise of Dads with the recession, pointing out again and again that most of the jobs lost since 2008 have belonged to men.  So, you have point 1: Men being laid off; and you have point 2: More dads staying home and taking on childcare responsibility; and, most importantly, point 3: You can give it a clever man, like “mancession.”  Conclusion: Recession is causing men to be more responsible dads.

Pardon my French, but that’s crap.

As I have tried to explain elsewhere on this blog, there is a world of difference between a guy who has participated in the biological act to beget a child (kudos, by the way), and a Dad.

Having an unemployed father sitting around the house more often is as likely to turn him into a Dad as having lots of books sitting on a shelf is to make your kid smart.  Context is everything. You buy your kids lots of books, but never read to him.  Your argument is invalid. Put a stroller in front of a Dad Lite, and he’s still a Dad Lite.  Put a stroller in front of a Homebrew Dad, and observe him in his natural habitat.

"You know what the difference is between you and me? I make this look good."

Without a doubt, more guys are out of work, and more guys are choosing to work from home or stay home with the kids, which, for a Homebrew Dad, might be one of the few bright spots in an otherwise dismal economic situation.  But that doesn’t mean that being out of work equates to being a better Dad.  Interrelation does not equal causation.

No, the rise of my archetypal Homebrew Dad predates the recession by quite a bit.  It has many causes and many antecedents, but some of the ones that I’ve identified revolve around revolutions in childrearing that differ drastically from the way we Homebrew Dads were raised, and the rise of other seemingly unrelated movements, like homebrewing, Slow Food, organic foods, and the environmental movement, all of which share the common threads of challenging the previous generation’s way of doing things while consciously trying to do the right thing of the next generation, principles that helped pave the way to a different approach to fatherhood.

As fathers, we tend to reflect oour own fathers.  For some of us, we choose a straight mirror image; whether that is for good or ill depends on the kind of father you had.  Some, myself included, see our fathers and strive to be more of a curved mirror, reflecting back the same, but opposite of how we were raised, an inverted image of the old Dad Lite.

So, guys, if you’re still on the fence about this whole Homebrew Dad thing, if you think you can stick to the old Dad Lite social roles, buy yourself a nice sports car, and hit the gym rather than the playground, go ahead.  I’m long past the point where I’d even entertain the idea that I’m sexy to anybody, but for some reason, my fantastic wife has stuck with my old, cranky, graying, balding, stinky self for all these years, and it just might be because, at least to her, this Homebrew Dad is one sexy beast.

And that’s good enough for me.