My daughter Lyra was born last night, 1 May 2007, at 8:33pm. She weighed 9 lbs 2 oz at birth, and 4140 grams after instinctively going metric as her first official act. Her birthday is exactly 27 days after mine and 27 days before B's, and 27 is three to the third, and she is the third of the three of us, so you see that her well-being is numerologically preordained.  

I have changed the first (two) of a million diapers (and have not quite yet lost count).  

We are no longer waiting.

You're not formally due until Thursday, so you're biologically entitled to spend a little while more inside, but we're ready to meet you, so, you know, don't feel obliged to stick it out just to make the number.  

Meanwhile, people keep giving us "helpful" advice on how to lure you into the world. "Chinese food", they say. You're probably not old enough to understand why that's funny, given that you're not old in a technical sense. And yet, almost old enough to suspect that a billion Chinese people probably aren't all giving birth at 32 weeks.  

Presumably they don't all methodically eat fortune cookies after each routine meal, either, although I admit that I haven't personally verified this. (Nor that they do not, in fact, eat fortune donuts after hamburgers.) (As you'll find out, people have ways of small-mindedly oversimplifying culture, and then of expansively and imaginatively recomplicating it.) (We'll go investigate once you're, you know, eating food without using your navel.)  

Anyway, we got three fortune cookes with our last order. Mine said something about happiness. And fish, I think, or maybe the moon. B's dealt, somewhat evasively, with the subject of change. But yours I quote here verbatim: "If you wish good advice, consult your mother."

B points out that along with her Swedish last name, she's actually contributing more Scottish genes than I am, so in a sense our Scottish-name-less daughter will actually be more Scottish than I am. (And explaining what's mathematically and genetically wrong about that "sense" only emphasizes how imaginary our claimed notions of "lineage" are to begin with...)

My daughter will not have my last name. My sister no longer has my last name, my aunt's daughters and their children never did, and my uncle has no children, so this looks likely to be the end of that streak. There was a solid old Scottish clan somewhere way back in my lineage. Too bad their perfectly good name got hideously co-opted by the misguided belief that food most pressingly needs to be fast.  

When B and I got married, it turned out that we both already had a full set of names we were accustomed to using, both for ourselves and each other, so neither of us changed any of them. At some point later, long before we actually decided to have a child, the question arose of what last name we would give them if we did. I proposed that we give any boys my last name, any girls B's. There's no particular moral logic to this (unless you think gender is inherently moral, which I don't), but it seemed to be both fair and deterministic, and unlike hyphenation it could be adopted as a general social practice without imploding abjectly one generation later. When we found out we were having a girl I quickly reaffirmed my support for the idea, and barring some alternate inspiration in the next week or four, that's what we're going to do.  

While we wait for the new system to sweep the planet, I guess I'm probably in for a few years of patiently explaining that yes, she really is my own daughter, created by my wife and I merging our personal genes using the oldest traditional technique available. Our daughter's merged genes will be whatever they are, no matter what name we give her, or who I have to explain it to. It was always wildly inane to think that anything complex enough to matter is carried in names. My lineage is more Sicilian than any other one thing, and probably more German than Scottish, and certainly none of those things in any culturally meaningful sense.  

My daughter will have everything I can figure out how to give her. Or, more precisely, I will offer my daughter everything I can figure out how to offer. What she takes and rejects and keeps and cultivates will be her decisions, so what she will end up having, I have no idea. I've been to the Clan Donald Centre on the Isle of Skye, and in fact I bought my first Runrig CD there, so there's a fairly literal sense in which I found a piece of myself in Scotland. But I've found bigger pieces of myself on street corners in London, and along leaf-cutter-ant trails in Costa Rican rain-forests, and in scaffolded churches in Barcelona and Paris. Even the most mundane pictures of cats or noodles or wires in Tokyo make me ache wildly like I'm absent from part of my self. I want to learn Korean and relearn Swedish, and I want our daughter to learn Spanish and Chinese, or to at least have the opportunities. I want her to have the opportunity to find pieces of herself at the ends of the sky, or hidden behind the goodnight moon, or in other people or new truths or old trees.  

Nothing is ending. Or a thousand things are ending, both huge and trivial, like they do while you're waiting for anything new. It's weird that we're in charge of picking our daughter's name at all, weird that we're going to be making command decisions about another person's life, weird that it will be so long until she has the powers to which she's inalienably entitled. Weird to be sole guardians of such a tiny, squirmy piece of the future, but I guess no weirder than being stewards of our family histories, or of other people's histories we adopt for our own joys and dismays, or of ourselves. No weirder than the idea still is, even after we've been there ourselves to see, that the sky doesn't end there where it disappears with such an emphatic glow.

Today we hung Cory's vines above the closet doors in your room, and wound little light-up butterflies through them. We also have a turtle that makes stars shine out of his back. There are small parts of your world that we can control, at least for a few moments at a time, for a little while, and they should be wonderful.  

Bellatrix: Jediwannabe (1.3M mp3)  

A solidly interesting album with one eminently iconic pop anthem ought to be enough to earn you a few more albums, or at least a few more years. Bellatrix got neither. Please pause for 2:46 today to reflect on the tragic insufficiency of genius.  

(While reflecting, you may wish to jump around.)

Several years ago, when the Orange Line in Boston was moved underground, the MBTA solicited poems from grade-school kids about where they would go on the new line, and had them printed on the walls in various stations. While going through some old notebooks today I found the one that I copied down, verbatim, from a wall in Haymarket station:  

I took the Orange Line to the stone age family
The colors are white in the land
Their houses were made with stone
They have only Rock 'n' Roll music
They have bald heads
When it rains it breaks the city
The food tastes awful
I don't want to go there again.

 

No attribution was provided. If you wrote this when you were 8, I hope you're still writing now.

Puressence: "Traffic Jam in Memory Lane" (1.5M mp3)  

I don't know why this came to mind today, but I had an album-length drive to make, so I grabbed the CD as I went out the door. The trip ended up lasting longer than the album, so I played this song two extra times as I neared home. I liked the world a little better when there were more people who sang like this.

If you find statistical decomposition and recomposition of music-critic polls interesting (and I'm not saying you should), here's what I have to offer you:  

Critical alignment ratings:
2006 Jackin' Pop
2006 Pazz & Jop
Merged  

Album clusters:
2006 Jackin' Pop
2006 Pazz & Jop
Merged  

Leaderboards:
2006 Jackin' Pop
2006 Pazz & Jop
Merged

I don't know appreciably more about the state or history of Latin pop than I did a couple months ago when I came back from Puerto Rico feeling curious. But I've found some things I like. Here, if you're curious about my curiosity, is a short summary so far:  

(follow along in my Latin Intro iMix if you're iTunes inclined...)  
 

1-3. Belinda: "Lo Siento (I'm Sorry)" from Belinda, "Bella Traición" & "¿Quién Es Feliz?" from Utopía  

Shameless teen-pop, but either the language disarms me somehow (they can't pander to you half as easily if you don't know what they're saying), or else the production is just far enough behind the domestic state of the art to sound like somebody actually loves what they're invoking, or else it's just catchy and for once I'm not overthinking it. (Or I'm over-overthinking it...)  

4-5. David Bisbal: "Silencio" & "Torre de Babel (Reggaeton Mix)" from Premonición  

Big and sentimental and soaring, but I like Meat Loaf in English, so I can't blame this on the language. Reggaeton is definitively tedious (a whole genre based on 4 bars from one song!?), but used sparingly as a cross-genre remix-affectation its twitchy insistence hasn't totally alienated me yet.  

6-7. Ha-Ash: "Me Entrego a Ti" & "Ya No" from Mundos Opuestos  

Mexican pop-country? It's like Shania Twain for the other border. "Ya No" tosses in a little quasi-hip-hop reggaetonality, just in case there weren't enough elements already. The iTunes "partial album" inexplicably includes everything except "Pobre Diabla", which is actually my favorite track on the album.  

8-9. La 5a Estación: "El Sol No Regresa" from Flores De Alquiler & "Tu Peor Error" from El Mundo Se Equivoca  

A Mexican T'Pau! Or, actually, a Spanish T'Pau transplanted to Mexico City, but whatever. Florid and electrifying. Both albums are terrific, the first a little less self-conscious about it.  

10-11. LU: "La Vida Despues de Ti" & "Maria" from Album  

Quivery balladry, but then, I like the slow Roxette songs, too.  

12-13. Lucybell: "Eternidad" & "A Perderse" from Comiendo Fuego  

Alternately menacing and bouncy Chilean semi-goth, like a version of HIM from a hemisphere where they haven't perfected mascara or slow-motion yet.  

14-15. Osé: "Serás" & "No Digas" from Serás  

Kinda like boy-band refugees trying to prove that they can actually play instruments and write songs themselves. But succeeding, I think.  

16-17. Reik: "Invierno" & "De Que Sirve" from Secuencia  

Kinda like boy-band non-refugees not trying to prove much beyond the power of the supermodel-macho pout as a vocal timbre. But succeeding, I think.  

18-20. Shakira: "Te Dejo Madrid" from Laundry Service, "La Tortura" from Fijación Oral Vol. 1 and "Don't Bother" from Oral Fixation Vol. 2  

Giving in to Shakira is what really got this started, for me. I liked "Te Dejo Madrid" already, but thought of it as an anomaly. She was playing a show in San Juan the night we were flipping channels on our hotel TV, though, and one of the Puerto Rican music-video stations (which are so primitive they still show music) was broadcasting every third or fourth song. She performs like it matters. Like her music matters, and language matters, and bridging cultures matters, and even her abdomen matters. Like she heard Madonna, Tori Amos and Alanis Morissette and understood not only where they intersect, but where they negate each other and leave a hole.