A personality is starting to form, germinating in primordial reflexes like a seedling germinating in a decomposing log. Yesterday morning, after a particularly frustrated night of crying, you failed to grab my face and crumple it in your tiny hand like tinfoil, or whatever infant plan had shaped in your nascent frontal lobe. A freakout. Two minutes later you reached out and touched my face, then did it again. You have abandoned the fencer's reflex, a feat which even surprised you, two infant arms flexed like a miniature version of the incredible hulk on some miniature rampage. Your face changes with each development. Your eyes are not the puffy, almond-shaped orbs they were previously. Fifteen days ago, one of your moods would last a mere second or less, now, you can stay pissed off for five minutes or more if you really put your mind to it. You have two interests-breastfeeding, real and imaginary, and being swung around under the light of a dim edison bulb to the music of Tool or White Zombie. You have made it clear that the heavier part of the burden is to fall on your mother, and you scream in protest when any attempt to correct this inequity is imposed upon you. Still, I enjoy my late nights dancing to Tool, Kyuss, and whatever else Pandora.com finds for us though it leaves me feeling drugged all the rest of the day.
In other developments, the ice ages have returned to Chicago, sadly missing the imperial mammoth. I remember a science fiction story, read as an adolescent, where subterranean cities of future Americans waited out the ice ages in isolation from the rest of the world, tunneling beneath the earth and powering their operations with nuclear reactors. Frost inches up the second story window. Snowdrifts. A white apocalypse out there. The hairless cat snuggles with the turtle near the radiator.
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