Evolution of mammals (or how we've always been fricking awesome)

History of us, the mammals, according to me, Mahdroo (liberties taken)

375 million years ago
We were fish, but it sucked because the ocean was so full of bigger mean fish always eating us, so our most clever ancestor "Tiktaalik" climbed onto a beach, and the big fish could not eat him. They gnashed their big teeth and splashed about in vain. Tiktaalik laughed at them. He laughed so hard he started coughing. Took us awhile to figure out how to breath out of the water. But then on land there were delicious bugs everywhere! so Tiktaalik decided to stay on land. We all stayed, and we ate all the bugs and we did not get eaten by big mean fish anymore! We were tetrapod amphibians now and we spread all across the land. The world was ours! 

359 million years ago:
Living on land was nice but boring, because we were small, because the bugs were all small, because the plants were all small, because the danged fungi kept eating all the plants before they could get big. Boring.

360 millions years ago:
The MOST bonkers thing EVER happened! In the war between fungi and plants, the plants won the most incredible victory of all time. They invented bark and cellulose. Fungi couldn't figure out how to do jack-squat about it.  Plus the plants defeated gravity! Victorious and unstoppable the new plants had a non-stop tree orgy for 60 million years. Everywhere was suddenly ground-to-sky tree forests, and every square inch was pumping out bajillions and quazillions of oxygen into the sky. It was crazy. The air was suddenly all nice and posh and for us, breathing through our skin stopped being so hard to do, and the tasty bugs got bigger and tastier, and we got ultra beefcake huge. Like 6ft long salamander huge. And it started raining and never stopped. And we could have a million babies if we had water to drop them in, and suddenly everywhere was a forest swamp. So we had frajillions of babies! Amphibians FTW!

340 million years ago:
You'd think we would have learned the lesson of the big mean fish, but again some of the big amphibians got mean and took all the best forest/swamp spots and started trying to eat us (jerks), but at the periphery where it was dryer and crappier and unoccupied, we said "F you big amphibians! We'll live out here you selfish a-holes!" but again with the coughing because it too dry out there. Ugh. So we evolved some slightly better lungs. Hard work, but whadyagonna do? Then we evolved another clever trick, a layer around our eggs to keep them wet on the inside if they got dry on the outside. Amniotic sacks are the mother of invention! Take that amphibians. Keep your gross swamps. We couldn't have as many babies as the amphibians, but the crappy outlands were ours! We were hardcore and fringe. We were "amniotes."

335 million years ago:
The continents all smashed into each other forming Pangea. Bonus! We spread over all the dryer regions of the whole planet! The jerk amphibians still wouldn't share all the posh swamps. I mean gross swamps. They sucked. But over time Pangea's shaped changed the weather and there were more dry crappy outlands for us to take over (nice).

312 million years ago:
Us hardcore amniotes split into two groups. The others wanted more holes in their heads (not sure why). We named ourselves synapsids and they got named sauropsids. We weren't that good at names yet, and the split didn't seem like a big deal at the time.

305 million years ago:
Suddenly fungi freaking finally figured out how to eat trees! Crazy twist in the plot! BOOM fungi exploded planet wide and ate all the mega forests. Tree party over. Oxygen dropped, rain stopped, and the planet got hella dry really fast. Suddenly everywhere was a crappy dry region. No more water and all the amphibians got wrecked, and their billion babies died. Jerks deserved it. They are lucky any of them survived at all, but only the tiny ones living in a few posh swampy places. We didn't even care. Whatever.
Meanwhile all us hardcore amniotes realized "OMG the whole planet is crappy outlands now! We can live anywhere and everywhere! LETS GO!" and within like 5 million years we took over the whole planet and all the best spots were ours! YAS QUEEN.

300 to 250 million year ago:
Us Synapsid amniotes were living like kings. We were everywhere, even the gross swamps. I mean posh swamps! Heck yeah! Victory was ours and we could eat anyone we wanted. Yum. We grew huge and grand and majestic. Good times. We were evolving to be mammals, but not really quite yet.
Meanwhile, the other kind of amniotes, with the extra holes in their heads (weird). They were tiny and not a big deal. Sometimes we ate them. So they kept trying to evolve weird ways to not get eaten, like being lizards (too dry), then snakes (too gross), then turtles (too crunchy), then crocodiles (too rubbery). Whatever. We didn't care. They were still small and not that delicious. They were so 2nd string beta. We were proto-mammals and the world was ours!

250 million years ago:
Siberia exploded. Like all of it. It fucking exploded man. Dammit. Volcanos trashed the planet. Shit. All our best spots went dsystopian hellscape. All our best awesome huge synapsids family got extincted. Dammit. Only our tiniest small proto-mammals survived. Worst thing that ever happened. Stupid Siberia.

250-66 million years ago:
Fucking dinosaurs dude. The other amniote sauropsids with their dumb extra head holes evolved into dinosaurs. They took over all the best new niches, and ate any of us mammals they could find, and only tiny mammals that could hide in the ground survived. Shit it sucked. Stupid dinosaurs. It went on for like 200 million years! It SUCKED.
In order to survive we had to evolve really fancy teeth that could crush bug exoskeletons (what else could we eat?). We had to only go out at night (to not get eaten) so we evolved really good eyes, and body temperature regulation aka awesome fur. We evolved really good ears, and big noses. It kept us alive mostly, but it wasn't enough to overcome the damn dinosaurs. This whole window of time we tried so hard, but it sucked. This is when we truly became "mammals."

134 million years ago:
Flowers suddenly evolved, and exploded planet wide. Seeds! Fruit! The dumb dinosaurs didn't even care. Idiots. I mean, there was suddenly seeds and fruit everywhere! Free food, and the dinos were all like "nah we good." Morons. We got really really into seeds and fruit.

Around this time [we really don't know when] us mammals diversified into lots of different kinds of mammals, such as: 
proto-rats
proto-anteaters
proto-dogs
proto-monkeys
proto-horses
proto-elephants
proto-dead-ends (these ones died later)
but we all looked the same: like little rats or racoons. Why? Because the stupid dinosaurs kept eating us. If we tried to specialize or come out during the day or do anything cool like get bigger they just ate us. God we hated them.

66 million years ago:
Giant meteor killed all the damned dinosaurs (except birds) . HECK YEAH!!!! Frickin finally... but we didn't get to enjoy it at first because the meteor set all the planets trees on fire. And uh, y'know how we were all into seeds and fruit? Well dangit, the best of our arboreal tree-loving ancestors, got extincted. Again. GAH! And they were so cool too! Mostly ground tromping mammals survived. Only one little teensy group of tree-hanging mammals made it -us- tiny primates. Weird looking boogers we were. We were hanging out in like a posh hidden swamp in a canyon crevice in Africa or something that somehow survived the global apocalypse. No one thought much of us. Lucky. Without many trees tho we had to learn to run around in the open, but we got pretty good at running on 2 feet. Unique! Most the ground walking mammals thrived tramping around on four feet. They filled all the niches. Mammals for the win! Elephants and mammoths got pretty cool. Lots of big mega fauna! They turned out to be tasty!

When the trees grew back we decided not to go live in them anymore. But none of the other mammals remembered how to live in them either, so the birds got em. That was probably a mistake. Every time I see an eagle kill a squirrel I wish we'd killed off those damned dinosaurs when we got the chance. The birds actually did try to go dinosaur on us again at one point. There was this killer terror ostrich that tried to make a dino comeback, but the direwolves ate its face off. No more of that dino reign. Nuh uh. Mammals all the way baby! Anyway, so with all our hair and ears and keen noses and good eyes, and amniotic sacks and strong lungs, things have been pretty great for all of us. Mammaries worked out well. Our opposable thumbs proved really handy and that two leg thing totally rocks. We got some big brains and here we are! There are still fish and amphibians, and amniotes with too many holes in their heads but we can eat all of them now.  The past 65 million years have been good for us mammals, and the last 10,000 years have been particularly nice for us humans. I doubt anything bad will happen. Hopefully we'll continue to be awesome for millions of more years!

I loved this awful experience

 I always feel so meta that it is hard to describe anything. I love that I love that I describe my sentiment about any feeling I have as something I love. If I don't like something, then that experience of dislike is something I love. I love the experience of disliking things.  I love the experience of being bored. I love having experiences. So I will say a thing like "I love hating aspects of Microsoft Excel."  And I really do. I derive a lot of pleasure from how intensely I dislike it.  

In this moment, I am listening to a song. It is a beautiful song. When my heart tips past the threshold of holding-everything-at-bay and is submerged in the beauty of wave after wave washing over me. I am engulfed in emotion. And the intensity of longing to somehow share this beauty breaks my heart and crushes me. I am a frail leaf dry blown over jagged rocks, and pulled apart, pushed into a creek, and pulled into a million pieces, becoming soil. I am gone. It was helpless. And I cannot share it with anyone. Will anyone ever read these words even? I think not. My life is full of these moments of loneliness and beauty. Do I like this experience? That is hard to say, but I love it. I love it perhaps a bit like Stockholm Syndrome. It has me. It has me and I cannot escape, and my principal experience of life is to love my experience of life. So this too I love.

I had worked hard to setup my daughter's very first playdate today at 1pm. My wife nor the other parents were that excited about it. Or else it felt that way. But I was. So excited. And deeply committed. Daughterboo has been so isolated from normal kid interaction, partially because little kids under 4 don't really play together, but mostly because of Covid. And so I was really eager to make this happen. To give her an opportunity. So I setup a playdate with a kid. How? It was a birthday party last week for one kid in her class, and I asked all the parents if they wanted a play date. Blank stares. I share with them a picture of the place we'd play, a pic of kids playing there, and that made it a better sell. One mom said "YES!" and she delegated to me the task of walking over to her husband to tell him that he'd be assigned to go on the play date. Did our daughters like each other before this date (or even know each other's names?). I don't think so. Yet I was committed. I set it up. The day of, I had a plan, to keep daughter relatively mellow leading up to it. So she would have good energy for it. And my plan got foiled. I'm going to cut that part of this story out. But she had a thrilling morning. One of the best ever. She was so happy and alive, which is good. Great. BUT, come 11am she was not calm. No problem. I took her home. We ate. We watched TV. She cuddled my arm on the couch and we got tranquil. An hour later she wanted to draw. A relaxing thing to do. I made up a project for us. Her mom was out-of-town and coming back at 2pm. We could make her a sign that read "Welcome Home Mom! We🤍 U" So we spent 30 minutes on that. She had at this moment in her skill-growth just learned to color inside the lines, and to cut with scissors. So I had her do both these things. I was proud of myself for keeping it fun, and collaborative, letting her choose what to color and cut, and yet moving swiftly on the other aspects of it to get it all done in those 30 minutes. It was tricky to work out the timing. Really tricky, and I was proud I did it. And kept it fun. I got it to where we wrapped up all our tasks at approximately the same moment. She was finishing up the last thing, the heart, just as I was prepping the tape on the back of all the words to tape it to our front door. At this moment it is 12:28. We are exactly on schedule. All that remained to do was put this last piece of tape on the back of the heart and walk over to the front door, and put it up. We'd be done at 12:32. It was going to be great. Her mom would feel loved when she got home in 1 hour at 1:30pm, and we'd be gone by then, having peed (12:35), eaten a burrito (12:38 to 12:47), and walked out the door (12:51) to stroll to the playdate with an easy cushion of time. This did not happen. Instead, what happened was my daughter had an idea to put a drawing of herself, her mother and myself inside the heart. She drew a circle in the heart, inside which to put the three of us. She drew the first head circle. Then she stared at it. This is the moment that this entire blog post is about. This tiny moment. This is the awful experience that I loved. All this to get to this tiny human moment. My four year old stared at the circle inside the circle. The gears of her mind turned. The head circle, inside the larger circle, was too large, so large, that she would not be ablt to fit two more head circles beside it. And her skills are not so evolved that it occurred to her to draw Mom and Dad smaller, or outside the circle. All that she got in that moment was that she could not do her plan. Her plan was foiled. This is them awful experience I love. Her plan was foiled. And in that moment she decided to make 3 hearts, with 3 circles, each with a different person inside: mom, dad and herself. And in that moment I got onboard and switched my plan to have the sign say " We🤍🤍 🤍U" because I have done comedy improv, and inside that training I get it. Just ride the wave. Whatever someone else's contribution is or becomes, you just say "Yes!, and" and accept it and run with it. So BAM now I am drawing her more hearts and we are coloring them in... and halfway through working on this second heart my daughter unravels. Her commitment to her idea is a canyon to cross, and her tenuous feeling of control is a rope bridge across. Reality is friction cutting the ropes. They fray. The bridge shatters. Explodes. She is falling. ropes fray. Shatter. The bridge collapses. She is falling. She reaches out but there is nothing to hold onto. Me? Apparently she has pulled me into the freefall with her. I need 60 seconds of decisive action to finish this 30 minute plan, and she is flailing and will destroy anything she touches. She wants and opposes every action simultaneously with maximum intensity. She wants to make more hearts. She doesn't. She wants me to put it up. She wants to put it up. She doesn't want me to. It is all screaming and anger and despair and frustration, all felt at maximum strength. I jumped and grabbed the other side of the canyon, and am holding us up with one hand, while holding her with the other. Pulling us up. Because all I want is to make her mom happy, but more so to take her to the playdate and give her the chance to have a friend and be a kid and be social, a chance she has largely been denied for two years. And I am so committed. And the next 10 minutes is a blur. I get that burrito shoveled into her face through tears and her shoes on and out the door to the place, and she is trying to shift from sad and upset to happy, she is really valiantly trying, and just before we get to the other girl, just then she finally does it. We have an amazing two hours. We were a minute late. Only 1 minute. It was almost more. It was a mad dash. It was SO intense. It took everything. And it all came down to that moment when she drew the 2nd circle and had to decide what to do. I love that moment. It was so awful. It ruined so much. It was so human. It was like the song. Have billions of parents already had this experience? And it is so hard to convey. A film might be able to convey it in 3 minutes or less. Who would want to see that film? And so many words here for me to process it and cope, and cathartically get it out. https://youtu.be/0pHotq9fGZU

Fastworward to being a Dad

I just wrote this text to two friends (group chat) and thought to share it here. I will not edit it, I’ll just post it as was. One thing to add is that my daughter is 3 almost 4 years old. This is how I relayed an update in a text:

Personality tests I used to take revealed that I was very accomplishment based. Like more than others. And I have long pondered that. In parenting, I often look back at my time with my daughter through the lense of "what did we accomplish?" My main goal is to provide her opportunities that she may someday grab/seize! Yesterday was a rare double victory day because we had two outdoor adventures! Took her to the creek for 2 hours, wherein she leveled up to: personally desiring to actively go engage strangers! She said “I wanna see who they are.” In weeks from begging me to flee to actually wanting to play with other kids! And later in the day we had a 2nd victory. She still insists at age 3.9 to be pushed around in a stroller. And after a fun bout of her helping me plant wildflower seeds in the canyon, I got her to agree to walk (WALK!!!) to the market for a treat. This action I have imagined will be a staple of our lives here, but we can never do it because she won't walk. Well, we finally did it. She agreed to walk and then did it! We walked somewhere. Half way there I pretended to not know the way (she loves this game) and she got to tell me how to get there. Then after we got candy, Pocky, I let her pick where we sat and she picked a place. Then afterwards she invented a game where she threw white flower petals in the air pretended they were snow and sang the Frozen song" let it go" and pretended to have snow powers for like 15 min. Which was, like a very creative weird fun and interesting thing to do. Opportunity seized?!! So double victory. Triple? A good day. Mostly I don't score myself on her seizing. I score myself on opportunities presented. There is so much Entropy pulling me toward "do nothing." I guess the urgency of the speed of how fast she is growing up is the motivation to act more quickly? In terms of game theory, she is like a weird little pet tamogochi NPC. Hahaha.love is awesome!