My daughter wants a pet.

My daughter wants a pet. Particularly a cat, because I’ve already rejected a puppy: too similar to a needy human infant and can have hurt feelings. But cats also have litter boxes that I might mostly end up cleaning. I have OCD, and hence one more veto.

Parenting is mostly negotiating- often with oneself. Having a pet is good for my character development: she says. But I recognize my own character breaking down more often if this was the path her development was to take. Non-negotiable.

But I give in with a fish tank. A compromise. Like I compromise by taking out the trash on the day specific trash needs to be taken out. Like stopping at red lights as I walk with my mind up there in the stratosphere. A compromise. In case someday I don’t pay attention and all others around me keep me safe anyway.

Or the kids. Not just mine.

The Boxes: My business. None of my business. My child’s business. Definitely-not-anyone else’s business.

They started forming when as a new mother, I was asked “what would you do if she were gay?”

“What should I do? Why would I do anything, when it’s none of my business or anyone else’s?”

I have many more boxes now that create themselves in and around topics that need categorizing. So that I can worry about the right things, and delegate the rest to none-of-my-business-boxes.

Wittgenstein said: “a philosophical problem has the form: I don’t know my way out” In my case, why speak of the virtue of being kind to a hypothetical pet who shall be unhappy with my short temper, when I give into the temptation so often?

Why frame things as either acceptable, good, desirable etc on the one hand and the opposite on the other hand when nothing is as concrete a solution as the concrete questions that precede it? Why bother with anything, in short, with so many limitations?

How did I get here from a prospective pet?

Can’t find the way out of needing to be earnest and the escape of flippant irony to demean life’s little meanings and their flimsy hold on me — while they choke my need for easy answers.

Another precious box is the reading now box. Willa Cather, Oscar Wilde and Edith Wharton that sheer fluke and the universe threw at me(or my book clubs did), and these patterns emerge in my chaotic mind. Wildly different in class and fortunes, at least Cather was- how did these writers keep their creative kernel intact amidst all the noise around them, the noise that they permitted or created themselves? This pattern interests me both as a creator myself and nurturer of future creators — as we all are. It helps that I’m trained as a Machine Learning Engineer and look for underlying patterns everywhere.

I told my psychologist once that I hate the part of me that is human mainly because it needs other humans to thrive. I want variables that I can control all by myself. Just Me, Mine and my own actions guiding the ship. There are, however, too many variables in chaos. All of life everywhere is chaos. Yet, the need for patterns is the biggest constant amidst all that.

Cather noticed a pattern of Wilde in Paul’s Case- where his need for freedom of expression ended in tragedy. All of Wilde was ironic noticing of patterns, all perhaps except the beseeching De Profundis, where his despair broke banks. The underlying bewilderment in Wharton’s House of Mirth was also perhaps the same? Or am I like the broken clock that’s twice right in a day even for standing still and matching patterns?

Hope is not a destination, nor a desirable virtue. Many a times, reading the news makes me search and replace hope in my thinking with “fool” or synonyms thereof. But, Phillipa Foot’s framing speaks to me : “Hope is a virtue because despair is a temptation”. Say what you will about me, I can resist temptation. So, choose hope I will, even as I call myself a fool.

It pleased me as a teen to read a hopeful sci-fiction about a scientist who gave up making nuclear weaponry for making a blade of grass that was indistinguishable from a natural blade of grass. That’s hope. That we make something that atomically harmless just because we want to, and also because we can resist the temptation of saying that the nuclear weapons kill all blades of grass anyway.

Ergo, I will attend my book-clubs, dissect the meaning and minutiae of the authors’ meaning behind their words and keep going back for more. While demanding that my child cleans up the hard-won fish tank that has no fish yet, does her homework and takes her work ethic seriously while also enjoying it. While they debate about which kind of people/life/values can continue to exist, the rest of us, we will find our own contentment in our little lives and carry on.

Now excuse me, I have a book club to go attend.

List of references made:

Willa Cather, Paul’s Case

Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

Philippa Foot, Natural Goodness

Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

Anonymous science fiction, blade of grass story — untraced