What hell sounds like...

Or: Lifehacking the baby.

I'm babysitting tonight. Okay, taking care of my own kid, which I'm told doesn't get called babysitting but when he's six months old and has a clear preference for mama mit der big boobies, well, you get the picture. You feel a little "off the critical path" to use some work parlance. I'm only on his radar because I provide unique kinesthetic experiences (throwing him up into the air until he giggles, upchucks, or both) and can make sounds like an asthmatic Donald Duck. Apart from that, I'm a nonentity unless he's in the 20 minutes a day when he's playful and not hungry or overly tired.

Anyway, I'm sitting here at my computer with Owen on my knee, and I remember that I have Audacity on my computer. Hmm. Computer. Baby. Microphone. Audio editing software...

Hmm.

He's making the hesitant chuckles like a cry isn't far away, so I wonder what it would be like to play his sounds back to him and see what he does. I mean, do you end up with a puzzled look, or the baby equivalent of guitar feedback, or what? I'm actually hoping to get something ridiculously cute and momentous, like him saying "Daddy Rocks" or something, but all he's giving me are pre-cry chuckles. But you have to go with what you've got. That's what art is all about. I mean, we didn't give up when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor. Van Gogh didn't give up when he lost an ear painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling, and Beethoven sure as hell didn't give up when Syphilis made him deaf. Who's with me?

So I record for a bit. Then hit record again, and I realize that Audacity actually plays back what you just recorded. Get this: as you record the next track. Immediate feedback. Then when you do it again, it plays both of the pre-recorded tracks. Sweet! Multiple levels of feedback.

The pre-cry chuckling didn't really amount to much. It just sounds like a whole bunch of babies winding up to start crying. Big whoop. I hear that all the time at work. Sorry guys. Couldn't resist.

Anyway, then he did actually start crying. So I recorded it. Then did it again, and the crying set him off even worse. I only had the heart to do it three more times*. I ended up with a pretty good mix, and I'm fairly certain that this is what hell sounds like:

hell.

*Four would have been tantamount to waterboarding, and I don't have the legal resources the president does to redefine that sort of thing as being legal even though we used to sentence people to hard time for doing it to our guys. Really, it was different, coz, they were like, on their soil when they did it, but we were like in Guantanamo, which is next to Cuba, and worse things would have happened in Cuba if we hadn't been there. Yeah, that's the ticket. If our guys hadn't been there defending democracy from people who had been trained by Al Jazeera (a known terrorist organization) to use cameras (which are just as dangerous as guns in the wrong hands!) by waterboarding them, God knows what Castro could have been up to on that very same soil! Imagine the depravity we prevented just by building our detention facility there. So the world should thank us, because We're Better Than The Bad Guys, Really We Are.

Plus, my wife is a much more hostile adversary than Congress, particularly where Baby Safety Security and Growing Up Without Any Trauma Whatsoever is concerned. Still, my goose is cooked if she ever reads this blog. Hi, honey! I didn't really do anything to make him cry. He just did it by himself. All I did was record it instead of trying to make him stop, which would have been futile anyway. So, er... yeah, I'm really Not That Bad At Childrearing When Compared to Some People**

** Cuba. The regime-y part, not the guys who come here and start kick-ass restaurants with smoking hot waitresses.

Ever notice that? We call other governments Regimes. Ours is an Administration. It sounds so much more official that way. If only we were as precise in our language as we are at ordering our Starbucks (that's a *HALF* Caff Mochafucoccino I ordered there Sparky), then we'd probably understand the world better.