Date:
July 2005
I listened to a show yesterday on NPR that I think you’ll find enjoyable, if not interesting. I’d like you to listen to it to, but not for a while. It was about the future of the human race, and what crazy things we’ll be doing to make ourselves stronger and faster and smarter. Personally, I don’t really know what to think of it, but it seems like it could have some tremendous upside, and some terrifying downside. It all made me think of a movie called Gataca, a futuristic movie about the pitfalls of mans own genius and the repercussions of genetic engineering on society. It’s a good movie; you’ll have to watch it. I wonder what life will be like in 20 years, when you’ll be getting ready to go off to college hopefully. Will the Dodgers have won a World Series in that time? Will Hockey survive? Will the MLS become a truly dominant league in the US? So, I’m kind of a sports nut … you’ll know that by the time you’re reading this I’m guessing. But what I really wonder about is what kind of world this will be. Will we have eliminated hunger and poverty … probably not? Will we have eliminated war? Will we have moved on from the idea of a nation-state to some other sort of arrangement? What will be the history of the future? I wish I knew. I think that the reason many of us want to know the future is so that we can best prepare our children for it. You’ll probably hear, more than once in your life, “If only I’d have known that when I was younger” or some such equivalent phrase. I wouldn’t change anything that came before me in my life, because that is what has made me who I am today, and I’m OK with what that is. But I do wish I knew how things were going to be for you so that I could make extra sure that you’d always be prepared for whatever situation you came across. I guess that I’ll just have to do my best to make sure that you can make those decisions for yourself. I hope I do a good job. I love you.
Today I found out that your mom is pregnant … for sure. She had already taken 3 tests, all of which came up positive, but she went to the doctor just to make sure. They think she’s about 6 weeks along right now. A website I just found says that by now most of your organs have begun to form and that you are about 1 cm long. It looks like you even have little arms with even littler fingers. I don’t really know why I am starting to write this, or even if I’ll keep it up. I hope that I post to it every once in a while, maybe even create a Blog after we tell everyone. Oh yeah, so far only Melanie and Tom know about you, I mean, besides me and your mom. Your mom and I are planning on telling everyone at the beginning of October, but who knows if we can wait that long. We’ll really try and hold out for another month, after your mom’s next doctor visit. She still can’t believe it, and is a little freaked out about it. She’s trying not to get her hopes up. Sometimes she can be a very pessimistic woman, but sometimes I can be an overly optimistic man. There are many things that I’m going to do once you are born, and have grown up a little bit. Some of them will probably embarrass you, but I want you to know that I only do it out of love … any maybe because it was fun for me at the time. I don’t know if you’re going to be a boy or a girl, and I’m not sure that I’ll want to find out when the time is right, but whatever you end up being, know that even now, when you’re about the size of my pinky nail I love you with all of my heart … and a little bit of my lung.
