Taiwan

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dad from day one: The Magical Mystery Tour… For Babies

Week 3.


In the aftermath of four baby showers, it’s easy for me to see that Jack has been well cared for by friends and family.  One of my favorite items of his is his pair of “vitamin socks” (featured above).  Maybe they’re supposed to look like little capsules from Dr. Mario; I don’t know.  But the fact that they have the word “vitamins” on the bottom of them makes them so classically random that I wouldn’t be surprised if they were designed in Taiwan.  My favorite part of his vitamin socks is that we have no idea where they came from.  We pull just pulled them out of his drawer one day and had them on Jack’s feet before we realized how hilarious and mysterious they are.

My parents recently bought Jack a swing, which is best for helping in to take long afternoon naps.  It has these three bears that fly around in circles over him.  Sometimes I feel that the things that work best for making him happy are the ones that make him feel like he’s tripping through the outer space of an alternate baby universe.  It doesn’t help that as he is swinging back & forth and up & down that “Sun King” from The Beatles’ Abbey Road album is playing in the background as I speak to him in a low voice right into his ear, “Jaaaack… I am your fah-ther…”  And when he’s not in his swing, it’s still so natural just to pick him up and fly him through the air like he’s Superbaby.

With some of his toys, I have been surprised at how they actually do what they are supposed to do.  We regularly use a Sleep Sheep that along with music and rain sounds, also has a “whale button”.  The harmonious conversations of actual whales at sea do indeed soothe Jack, even if they sort of freak me out.  There’s also this star we received that displays ocean scenes on the ceiling while playing our choice of either lullabye music or makes water sounds.  I never would have thought it to be the kind of toy we would actually use every single day, but it is: It works.  When it’s time for him to settle down for the night, we turn on the star and Jack becomes both mesmerized and hypnotized.

Being a baby must really be a trip…  I mean, what would you think if everyone talked to you in a high-pitched, slow motion voice and when you looked down at your feet, you realized they had turned into puppy dog heads?

 

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Some Picture Examples of the Weird Houses I Dream About

From “mirror mazes” to “crazy mansions”, it’s often the wacky building itself that is creepy with its peculiar layout, strange placement, and whatnot.

In between bad dreams and good dreams are the ones that are just plain weird.  And while all dreams we have are a least a little strange, some of them specifically can not be classified as negative or positive; for me, I’m specifically referring to the dreams where I’m at an odd location.  It could be a dream taking place in the Swiss Alps (I still remember a dream I had in the 10th grade where I was greeted by a mountain goat on the top of a mountain in Switzerland- it wasn’t significant in any way, but I will never forget the randomness of it) or a remote village in Thailand that I barely remember driving through on a motorcycle from back in 2004.

But I would have to say the most subtle weird dreams are where I am in an unusual house, where it is so odd it’s almost spooky.  Like when I dreamt that 250 townhouses in the development were all attached: The only way to get to mine in the middle of them all was to crawl through hundreds of other people’s living rooms and kitchens, because evidently there were no front and back doors on everyone’s townhouses anymore- just two hidden exit doors for the entire 250 connected homes.

When we think of “spook houses”, our minds often go to some cheesy place we pay $10 to visit around Halloween called Slaughter House! where ultimately a subpar Jason Voorhees, Freddy Krueger, and gorilla with a chainsaw (with no blade) jump out at us in the same quarter of a mile stretch.  To me, those obvious caricatures of villains are not scary, because they’re so predictable and anticipated.  Take away the men in costumes, the motorized mummies that pop out from the wall, and the eerie sounds effects streaming from an iPod somewhere.  What’s left is a building.  That, to me, is where the potential lies for spookiness.

And I’m not even taking this to the extreme of an old abandoned house that is rumored to have spirits and ghosts.  I simply mean that the place has a weird layout in which the exits are not obvious.  It’s the idea that I could be lost- and I guess for me, being lost in a strange place is still scary, despite the fact I’m no longer an 8 year-old boy.

 

If you’ve ever dined at a Buca di Beppo restaurant, you know exactly what I mean: all the kooky black-and-white photographs on the wall, the spumoni type colors of the interior of the walls, the random LP records glued to the ceiling featuring unheard of Italian singers from the 1950’s.  The place is a maze; the first couple of times I went to the restaurant, I got lost finding the restroom, but I had trouble finding the table where I was sitting.

 

Much less scary than the reality of demons dwelling in abandoned buildings or even the cheap thrills of popular Halloween spook houses, there will always be the kooky and creepy dreams where I’m in a weird house and I don’t know how I got there.  And as for Buca di Beppa- though their Italian food is good stuff, man, their restaurant buildings give me the heeby jeebies.