Bound

Tomorrow is the next official step in the next chapter of our lives. We're going to DC to look for places to live. My new job starts in less than two months, so it's a good time to go and find somewhere we can hang our hats. Already, I can tell my methods for picking places to live have changed. I'm scanning the maps for daycare, proximity to hospitals, school system ratings. I look at monthly rents and immediately calculate whether I can keep up the savings routine for the kid's college fund.

I'm excited for the changes. They're good ones. The new job is a promotion, more complicated work, better pay, better opportunities. Everyone I talk to about the thing is impressed, and more than anything, I feel like I earned this job. Every other job I got before I just kind of fell into. It was the swimming hole next door. I was the boss's kid. I showed up and no one else was interested. I had a degree and a pulse. Now, however, I got into something kind of prestigious because I've got a formidable resume and I interview well. And I'm lucky. Right place, right time.

I've been repeating that a lot lately. I'm lucky. We're lucky. We've been very lucky. With the job, the wife, the kid. Other people say they're "blessed," but I don't think that's where it comes from. My successes are from hard work, persistence, creativity, and just plain coincidence and luck. If the old man didn't have a stroke I wouldn't have gone to law school in Akron, met Carly, all of it. If my sister wasn't already living in Jersey, I wouldn't have applied for the NYC job. And more subtle coincidences.

I have this budding rant about miracles. Everyone says the kid is a blessing or a miracle. I chafe at that, mainly due to my ingrained atheism, but also due to my desire to stay in the land of the real. The fact that my child survived his birth and his first six weeks in the oxygen-rich nitrogen environment is not divine... it's a lucky congruence of statistics and science and the effort of Carly, me, some of our family members, and a long list of nurses and doctors and engineers and inventors, all the way back to Lucy, the australopithecus afarensis. We've been doing this for four million years without books or the internet, and it seems awfully magical, but it's not. Science rules out when it comes to chromosomes mashing around, and our tiny brains are only capable of understanding the smallest smidge.

But I digress. I don't want to mock or belittle those people who believe in some kind of magic or miracle. If it gets you through the night, have at it! Like I said, before, I want my kid to believe in the magic, I just hope it doesn't fog over the lenses of reality. Think in those separate strains, kiddo.