Interview in a Car Seat
My heart is fine and I got a job, so it was a nice bounce-back month. Life is so full of ups and downs, you generally can expect regression to the mean in the absence of terminal illness. That’s why it never makes sense when sad people commit suicide. Don’t sell a stock before the rally. You want to off yourself at the peak of euphoria with a downturn all but guaranteed.
There was a fascinating case of assisted suicide with Daniel Kahneman, who won a Nobel Prize for his work on decision-making. The guy created a whole branch of economics studying the intricacies and fallacies of arriving at decisions. All that research presumably informed his pretty high-stakes decision to end his life at a relatively happy and healthy age 90, like Jordan offensive fouling Bryon Russell and hitting his final shot except with no option to change his mind and come back a Wizard.
Wow that was a dark tangent considering what I really wanted to highlight this month was my first child starting kindergarten the same day as our ninth wedding anniversary. Yay! It was a joyful milestone, and not in the aforementioned pre-suicidal framework.
Another paradox regarding kids came to me during unemployment, more favorable than the one about loving them so much yet not wanting to hang out for more than 20 minutes at a time. Kids complicate and make everything harder, from the trivial like going to a restaurant to the bigger like financial planning to the intensely philosophical like how to raise a human and what makes a good life.
We surely agree on the difficulties. Now, you would think kids make unemployment a lot harder with the pressure of providing and caring for them. But — with a huge asterisk of being fortunate to have a long financial runway a.k.a. savings and severance — I found my children to be a calming, sweeping simplification during the job search in an uncertain market.
They kind of functioned like a poor man’s F-U money. They matter so much more than everything else, noise becomes exposed for what it is: status, ego, arbitrary expectations.
Fired from a great job? F’em. Didn’t get an interview? F’em. Got unofficially rejected after a technical assessment with technically unsound verbal questions by being inadvertently cc’ed on a one-line internal email giving no reason let alone evaluation criteria? F’em.
It’s almost laughable how insignificant things are that seem significant in the moment when juxtaposed with your kids. The effect is useful, almost like a selective nihilism that doesn’t make you try less hard but picks you up when you fall. Kids add both motivation and support through blunt calibration of perspective.
I tried to explain to mine during our daily profound car seat conversations how my interviews were going, the need for a job and money, societal exchange of goods and services. Truly, just no f’s were given. It was like talking to dogs strapped in the back.
My kindergartener can engage in spirited discussions, but only about whatever his pre-autistic mind has fixated on at that moment, which is invariably independent of other people’s questions and topics. He got that from me. I’m hoping his mom can fix it as a genuine, empathetic listener herself.
I am very much 80-20 rule when talking to people, paying just enough attention to comprehend the gist of what they’re blabbering about and then using my remaining processing power to think of what to say next, daydream or contemplate something more important. It’s why I am very good at interviews and punch above my weight in experience and knowledge.
But look at my big baby in his car seat on the way back from his second day:
He turned 6 a few weeks before kindergarten and likely will be the oldest in every class, every year. The other kids will speculate he had to repeat a grade and call him “Dummy Dumbo” before graduating to racist irony like “Confucius Sr.” and “Mao the Ding-dong.” Parents will judge us for holding him back at a formative stage.
Our line of thinking was a) he’s been in a Mandarin immersion program and could use the extra year to acclimate because his English has the accent of a Beijing cab driver b) we had free tuition c) girls develop faster d) it will be easier to make sports teams, à la Malcolm Gladwell’s cherry-picked arguments in “Outliers” e) I also have a mid-July birthday and was a late bloomer who could have benefited from being one of the oldest rather than youngest f) my oversized Hermosa Beach bros call me “Small Frame” even though I have more abs than they can do pull-ups.
I don’t need to defend our parenting choices. They are none of your business unless you want to ask honest questions to guide your own.
But look at my little baby in his car seat at age 2. He looks so white I should have asked for a paternity test to go with the vaccine paperwork.
I didn’t feel this sharp of nostalgia until I went digging for pictures and should probably backtrack on rolling my eyes during my wife’s three-week emotional ramp-up to the first day of kindergarten. This is why I encourage everyone to blog or journal. You don’t really know what you want to say until you try to write it down.
You know he still loves garbage trucks? His interests progressed to violence, weapons, bullying, aging and death thanks to mature themes packaged as Disney Plus movies. But he still plays with toy garbage trucks, drives his electric recycling truck on its second battery down the sidewalk, aggressively calls out every truck on the road and demands a response even if I’m making a blind left turn during rush hour.
And every Tuesday, my boy who loves his sleep sets his internal alarm clock to wake up early and chase our neighborhood sanitation trucks. I used to have to carry him and support his big bobblehead while jogging to keep up. Then he grew up and could run and skip himself. Now he bikes in the blind spot of the very understanding Mr. Mohammed (garbage truck, Peterbilt model with the ladder that raises the bin) and Mr. Brian (recycling truck, Mack model with the claw that raises the bin).
School started on a Wednesday, so my son had one last morning before kindergarten to either sleep in or see the trucks. This kind of thing might sound insufferably banal, and I know my 27-year-old self is so ashamed of me right now. But I feel compelled to write down and share because it’s the stuff I hope to remember.
20 years from now, the only people who will remember that you worked late are your kids.
David Clarke, software engineer
I will try to remember that when I start the new gig. I am excited about it and excited to come home from it.
