eptivity

I like to think that my parents were in charge of Katie Beta. Moving out of their house marked the release of Katie 1.0, and getting married bumped me up to Katie 2.0. Not like there was anything lacking in previous versions; the new ones just have more features you never knew you were missing.

Standard features originally programmed by my dad include:

Complete Inability To Not Tune Out Conversations of a Technical Nature My dad is an electrical engineer who knows everything about electricity, engines, computers, and mechanics. When I was Katie Beta, he once told me story of the Optical Time Domain Reflectometer (OTDR). I to this day have no idea what it means or what it does, but I remembered what it was called because I liked the way the words sounded. Imagine my delight when this information was actually useful, once, at my job. But no matter how hard I tried to focus on his explanation of the binary system or how pistons work, I always end up tuning out somewhere early in the second minute.

Complete Inability To Connect the Weather with My Potential Outdoor Discomfort I don’t know how Katies Beta and 1.0 even survived, because 2.0 is the first version packaged with someone to tell me things like “wear hat when cold” and “wear rain jacket when raining.” When I was Katie Beta, I spent approximately every Saturday afternoon outside in the forest* with my dad, who heartily espouses the “it’s all in your head” school of thought when it comes to being cold, wet, and/or miserable in the out of doors. See also: “you just need to get your second wind.”

Irrational Affinity for Ragtime Music Friday nights were for Dad reading “Frog[gie]s in the Palace” from Uncle Arthur’s Bible Stories (“And there were froggies in the ice cream, and in the refrigerators, and in the front seat of Pharaoh’s car…”) and falling asleep midsentence, to be revived only by a glass of cold water. And also for Doing Tricks (walking on the ceiling, being an airplane on Dad’s upturned feet, etc.), which only resulted in injury twice, once when I sprained my ankle after being flipped over his head, and once when I conked my head on the brick hearth. But Saturday nights were for Bump-Bump, a dance we created and danced exclusively to an LP of Del Wood’s Honkytonk Piano. It was very complicated and involved much jumping about randomly, clapping, and my dad kicking his leg over my head.

Belief That Almond Joys Are Good For Me The only candy I ever saw my dad buy were Almond Joys, and since he generally eschews unhealthy food, I was convinced that Almond Joys must be good for me.

The first summer I was home from college, my mom was the nurse at a summer camp, so Dad, Matt, and I bached it. It was during these months that he would stay up late working, stumble downstairs into the kitchen at 1:30 in the morning, take a cookie out of the package, take a single bite out of the cookie, and replace it in the package.

He by this time had also developed a technique for eating sweets while letting us know that it was entirely against his will:
Dad: [Enters kitchen and cuts a piece of no-crust fudge pie]: Hey, Katie, do you want a piece of this pie?
Katie: No.
Dad: Well, I already cut it, so I guess I’ll have to eat it.

Safe Driving Habits This feature clearly developed as rebellion against Katie Beta programming. When I was Katie Beta, we never once left for church on time, so Dad would take advantage of the one straight stretch of road to tie his tie while steering with his knees. Whenever we caught him driving without his seatbelt fastened, he would tell us that buckling your seatbelt while driving is the most dangerous thing that you can do. Which may or may not be true, but my then very wee brain somehow disregarded the “while driving” point that he was trying to make and was quite confused for quite some time.

A Unique Understanding of the Real World When it was time for the Katie and Matt Betas to start getting allowances, our parents decided that we should have chores for which we would be paid. Instead of actually being assigned chores or pulling them out of a hat, however, Dad decided that we would bid each other down for each specific job, because this is how it works in The Real World.

In theory, a good idea; in practice, there were two problems: one, this was not a silent auction, and two, my brain was still quite wee. I’ve always been good at math (right up to practical application, anyway), but I have a hard time visualizing values that aren’t whole numbers between 0 and 1,000, even with my currently gigantic brain. But with my then very wee brain, I was once bid down to a sixteenth of a cent to feed our horse. I appreciate that the real real world pays me more than almost-one-cent every two weeks.

Dear Dad, thank you for the many valuable lessons.

* Or on The Chicken Pox Trail, which is what my dad called the railroad tracks we used as a trail when we were chicken poxed, so as to not infect any innocent passersby at any actual trail.