Odin Quotes

Things our son Odin said that amused or surprised me.

2017.04.15
Tonight Odin and I built a guitar out of tinkertoys because he asked me to air-play "Dueling Banjos."  Also at his request, he was dressed like a chicken. After adding a tinkertoy piece he said, "chicken helped."

2017.04.15
Odin: It's Saturday. We should make saturs.
Haley: What's a satur?
Odin: it's a pancake with red things in it. The red things are raspberries. Not the "PPFFFTH!" kind. The put on your finger kind.

2017.09
On their way to preschool, Haley drives over San Bruno mountain in order to take in the spectacular views and greenery. The mountain is mostly covered with scrub brush, interrupted with the occasional tree stand.  In her rear view mirror, Haley sees Odin looking thoughtfully out the window for a long time.

Odin: Mama, does grass grow into trees?

2017.10
(In another car trip over the mountain)

Odin: Mama, do rocks grow?

2018.01.17
(Our dear friend "Uncle Martin" left after his semi-regular Friday dinner visits)

Odin: I want Uncle Martin to live with us. This is the last time he will leave. The next time he comes to dinner, he lives here.

2018.02.20
(Odin's closest friend is a girl his age named Leila. Their bond is strong and consistent to a unusual degree for their age. This dates to his first few months in preschool 2.5 years ago; he recently turned 4)


Odin (unprompted): Mama, Leila and I have known each other for a long time. We were holding hands before I was in your belly.

2018.02.22
Odin: What does "outstanding" mean?
Haley: It means unusual, in a positive way. There's good, then great and then outstanding!
Odin: Oh. I thought it meant "not having feet."

2018.03.10
(walking upstairs from rotating the laundry)
Odin: Dada, do stairs always go up?

(earlier, with Haley)
Odin: Mama, is the past always behind your back?

2019.03.30
(looking at a picture of Spongebob Squarepants fiercely riding a bike)
"That piece of cheese is struggling with his motorcycle."

2019.04.30
"Do black holes ever get full?"

2019.05.02
"Do anteaters also drink ants, or do they just drink water?"
"Is infinity more than a trillion, or less?"
"If I wanted to lift a church, I'd need a trillion people. Maybe the whole world."

 

2020.08.28

Me: "What is Mama doing?!" 

Odin: "She's pouring water on that plant." 

Me: "What?! Why would she do that?" 

Odin: (clearly doubting my sanity) "...so the plant's roots can take it up." 

Me: "Why does the plant need water?" 

Odin: "It mixes it with sunlight and air to make food." 

Me: "Oh. Well, I'm hungry. I'll slam some water, step outside and breathe. Sound good?" 

Odin: "...no. You're not a plant." 

Me: "But I eat plants." 

Odin: ... 

Odin: "You are confusing and full of nonsense." 

In support of removing the stigma around anger and replacing it with a toolkit

Haley and I often discuss how to interact with emotions as parents (ours and the boys'). At least in my world there have been strong proscriptions against the legitimacy of expressing anger. It's taken sustained effort for me to support rather than stigmatize - often with zero conscious thought - "negative" emotions in our family.

Obviously, as an adult, we can't throw tantrums or scream at others and expect to thrive. I'm not saying that we do or should cultivate this in our boys. On the other hand, anger and sadness happen regularly. That doesn't stop with age. So I try to do better than shaming emotions as disallowed, or telling them, effectively, to shut up and get over it. This category of response isn't strategy; it is a demand for an outcome without guidance for how to achieve it. When I realized that, it became obvious that silencing and shaming were failures of parent-as-teacher and therefore of my own understanding of how to deal with anger. The impulse to silence Odin's anger arose from not knowing how to interact productively with this emotion.

So, this passage in a 2014 Slate article stood out to me:

The violence that is a part of anger disorders is fueled by chronic repressed rage that has found no socially acceptable outlet. It is fostered by families in which adults behave in violent, intimidating ways or in which anger is tightly repressed. In either situation there is no appropriate model for the safe or constructive expression of anger.

Adding that, in the absence of productive strategies or support around emotional education, you obviously do better releasing your children into the wild with some ability to modulate the expression of rage. I assume that repression is more functional than for example throwing punches and screaming in the workplace.  Here I just wanted to highlight that better tools than repression exist.

Stories for Odin: where the dragons of Brisbane came from

These are stories I make up for Odin as he falls asleep. Usually he asks for specific features (eg "something I've never, ever, ever, ever heard before" or "the one where butterflies turn into dragons, but only with me and Dada"). I take it from there.

 

Kid version

One day a butterfly flew down from the mountain. We had spilled some peanut butter and honey on our picnic table. The butterfly ate some. Then something started to happen! The butterfly got bigger - like a lot bigger! Its wings grew and spread out and its body did too. Soon there was no butterfly anymore but a huge dragon. Its wings beat down and it went WHOOSH WHOOSH WHOOSH when it started to fly up. 

The dragon looked down at you Odin with eyes that look like outer space. It said "Hello Odin. My name is Pomba." You two became good friends.

Non-kid version

The Mission Blue butterfly is native to San Bruno mountain. Near the peak of the mountain lives a very large family of these butterflies, feeding on lupins and sunflowers.  Sometimes, when the east bay is hot enough, huge bodies of air are drawn over the mountain. These bring with them the marine layer we see brushed over the top of the mountain from Brisbane. When enough air gets pushed over the mountain, we feel it as strong winds.

One day, winds brought a butterfly down to our back yard. It was confused and hungry. We had left some peanut butter and honey in our back patio. He licked both, as much as he could.

It turns out that peanut butter and honey cause butterflies to change. The butterfly's wings grew larger. His blue color faded to green and grey and brown, and his wings thickened. Bones like fingers grew through the new membranes .

We were sitting on the steps while this happened, amazed and alarmed. This butterfly grew huge! Its mass began to crack the picnic table, so it began to move its new wings (carefully at first). WHOOSH. WHOOSH. WHOOSH. Air flew past us while the massive body lifted slowly up to land on the roof.

Now with a long neck, a small dinosaur head and thick leathered wings, we realized that our butterfly had become a dragon.  His head craned down to look at us. You taught him to say "hello." He liked it when you pet him and purred like a very loud kitten.

You named him Pom Pom, but his nickname became Pomba. You became very good friends, bonding especially over piles of noodles left steaming on a Clement Street rooftop for area dragons. 

Only much later did we realize that Pomba's eyes were full of stars.

A comment in support of #metoo, and good parenting

I watch the #metoo posts accumulate in my feed with sadness, because each instance represents trauma and unfairness, but also optimism, because each represents an individual decision to speak up. Speaking up can introduce badly needed personal reality into an often fictional social reality. 

I've deliberated about whether to say anything in support or response. On the one hand, these are statements of an experience from which I'm largely exempt due to gender privilege. Who am I to jump in and say anything? For instance, what if statements by males appear to confer legitimacy instead of the intended support? Women are speaking up about their life - let's listen. On the other hand, as other women in my feed suggest, silence can appear unsupportive. So, fuck it. We can all do nuance, or learn to.

In line with another friend's response, it's extremely important to recognize, highlight and change the reality of harassment and discrimination that my friends are communicating. Hopefully, social media campaigns will help to do this. 

I say this knowing that I've been a part of the problem, both actively and passively. I'd like to think that I've been able to recognize and improve on my own bias, and to openly discuss discrimination against women as a route to change. But maybe not. And if not, I am happy to witness, listen and/or discuss from a posture of respect. I encourage all my male friends to do the same.

One of the most powerful forms of civil disobedience is raising children well. There's a lot to unpack in that statement, with important caveats. Still, for those of you broadcasting your experience as women, and if it matters to you, raising our boys to respect everyone - and particularly women - is front and center for me.

How to talk to "opponents" about politics, and why I think you should try

This talk lines up with a broader conversation I want to promote. Engagement - specifically about politics - is the primary means we have to create systematic change. The oft-bemoaned "polarization" is in my opinion a pain point on the way to a more functional citizenry. Polarization reflects a lack of skills required to best use a very powerful technology platform. Because skills can be learned, I'd rather be here than to not have the platform.

Want to make the country better? Engage those you expect to disagree with you. Bring a hot beverage and be prepared for some discomfort on your way to building a better world .


Here's a related set of ideas, with minor issues.* 

A common complaint I see regarding political discourse via internet is that we either self-select for those who agree with us or fall into offense/defense mode. However, it may be that in grappling with this we effectively use technology platforms to disseminate more emotionally effective and mature means to interact with conflict. I'd like to think that we turn a current negative into a net positive, if you view, as a positive, the frank and calm evaluation of political positions on their factual merits.

* finding common ground for the purpose of winning someone over might work, but is a distant second to internalizing that we all actually *are* in the same boat and even suffer from the same kinds of biases and defenses. A strain of this (just one example) is the irrational use of "rationality" to assert rhetorical dominance. In my view, this is simple aggression (ie, irrational if the goal is to create change) and will thus spark a defensive posture in most recipients. Asserting rationality - here, dominance - isn't partnering with someone in order to dissolve a potential conflict. And it isn't recognizing them as human, with shared foibles (that the aggressor may not happen to suffer at the moment). It's trying to win, which aside from friendly verbal sparring, arises from viewing someone as "other." This is tribal.

Also not thrilled with communicating "tribal" using cartoonish Native Americans, but I get that it visually communicates the point.

Stories for Odin - 1

These are stories I make up for Odin as he falls asleep. Usually he asks for specific features (eg "something I've never, ever, ever, ever heard before" or "the one where butterflies turn into dragons, but only with me and Dada"). I take it from there.

The Spider of Saturn
January 2018

(Inspired by the recent ending of the Cassini mission)

Along the visible rings of Saturn there lives a creature made of energy and specific kinds of matter. This is Saturn's Spider.  It looks exactly like Saturn's rings, but hunts and harvests magnetic particles from the ring as it moves along them. In its path the Spider leaves fine particles entrained to the same energetic field; this is its web.  The Spider also stitches the particles into itself using energy from the solar wind.

We talk about how the Spider traverses its rings. It's not a movement you or I could see. It moves very slowly. Solar energy is dilute at Saturn's distance from the sun, and the Spider, feeding on it, hunts with corresponding slowness.  Any action, even a frenzy of rapid feeding, can take months.

Every 30 years Saturn completes an orbit around the sun. When this happens the Spider trains its attention in the direction of Earth, spreads itself out thin, and listens. Its web acts as a large antenna and its body encodes what it hears. The Spider has been doing this at the same orbital position for millions of years. As Saturn moves away from this position, the Spider taps its encoded message into its web. The web resonates across the entire ring system with the new encoding.  When the web is queried by pulses of radiation from outside the solar system, it transmits what the Spider has written into it. The web has a large surface area, making it easier to see from very far away.

The Spider sews its web and charges it with information from Earth because this is what it was placed into Saturn's ring system to do. Hundreds of millions of years ago, the Spider's creators recognized Earth's potential to create information processing capacity. The timing of that capacity is very difficult to predict, so the Spider was asked to watch our planet for its emergence.

Why Dragon Eyes Look Like Starfields
2/20/18

(Odin requested story with: dragon; Odin; friend Leila; Dada; not little brother Alder; our backyard play structure; and a slide. In my stories, he calls his dragon friend "Pom Pom" but says its nickname is "Pomba," so he stipulates that we call it by the latter name)

Odin and Leila are playing on the slide while Dada watches from the play structure. They roll different items down this slide, trying various balls we have on hand: volley ball, golf ball, baseball. Each works -- will they move at different speeds? We will test this later. They find that a football does not roll well. We think this is by design.

After watching a set of plastic trucks barrel down the slide, Odin tells Leila that he would like to fly with his friend, a dragon named Pomba. As it happens, Pomba lives in a ravine near the top of San Bruno mountain. Like all dragons, Pomba has excellent hearing. He heard Odin's request, and soon a familiar shadow passes over the house. The dragon spirals down, then beats his massive wings to slow his descent and land gently on the roof. Leila and Odin sit on the steps near the slide, looking up over the patio at the dragon. Pomba extends his long neck, bringing his head level with Odin and Leila's eyes. The rest of the dragon hasn't moved -- that's how long his neck is! He says "Hello, Odin. I am happy to see you again. Did you want to fly with me?"

Odin looks into the dragon's eyes and notices, for the first time, that his friend does not have eyes like his own. Instead of a pupil and iris, the dragon's eyes are a dense field of points of light on a black background. They remind Odin of starfields he's seen in Astronomy magazine sent by Grandpa Bob. Pomba's eyes are littered with points of light so dense, with so much to see, that even though nothing moves everything still seems to move. There is too much information to take in that area appears newly seen each time. Odin and Leila look into the dragon's eyes for a long time.

Odin asks the dragon why his eyes look like stars. 

The dragon says, "This is how dragons make fire. People say that we create it in our bellies, but really we ask for it from stars. Our eyes can connect us to any star we like. We open a window to its fire through our bodies."

Odin and Leila are excited, and ask to see dragonfire. Pomba replies that it is not safe even to look at unless it is from very far away. Dragonfire is actually a direct window into a sun. It is so bright that it will damage their eyes up close - even if they look at it quickly. Odin remembers how bright even the eclipsed sun was last summer, at Grandpa Bob's house. He asks how they can see dragonfire safely. Pomba asks them to wait.

The dragon beats his massive wings and lifts himself slowly from the roof. Odin and Leila smell his hide in the air as he rises. Soon, Pomba has flown very high. Odin thinks he looks like a piece of dust in the sunlight, or an slow-moving jet.

Suddenly there appears a flash so bright that Odin and Leila have to shield their eyes! A searing white line extends from the dot of a dragon, then streaks across the sky, into space. They see a solid beam on the inside, but it is decorated with flame along its length.

When Pomba returns, he looks very sad. Odin asks him why. The dragon says that when he creates starfire, the stars he touches are terribly eager to speak with him. They are separated from anything like themselves by great distances, many light years ("Odin, this this is the distance traveled by light in a year"). Their light messages can't travel the distances any faster. But when a dragon asks for starfire, they always give it happily in exchange for the company. He feels them ache for companionship. The loneliness of stars is why all dragons become very sad whenever they make dragonfire and why they do this so rarely.

Dragons can touch stars that cannot touch each other because dragons are born eyes that can develop into wormholes. These fold the distance to any star they conceive and decide to contact. (because, sure -- that's how wormholes can work)