Fatherhood has been wonderful for these first three months. Little baby Marcus keeps growing and changing and developing. Now he's starting to observe the world around him -- he looks around the room, stares at the items on the bookshelf (which is a mess), is completely enthralled with my screensaver, and watches The Wiggles on Netflix instant playback. I even caught him looking at the cats, which is new. He smiles appropriately when we look at him and engage in play with him.
I completely adore my child. When I hold him, it feels like nothing else in the world matters. When I watch him sleep, his face looks so peacefully blank. Whenever I look at him, I see endless possibilities for his future. And when he smiles at me, I just melt -- really, I melt.
Which is why whenever he starts crying, I just want to pick him up. If I pick him up, he stops crying and it's like everything's going to be okay. His crying drives me bananas. I know I shouldn't pick him up at the drop of a hat, but I have a very strong urge to do it. Janelle is much better than me at this; she knows what the book says, and she can execute like it's a work order. I'm glad one of us is like that.
So now we're on the next chapter of whatever book she's reading, and it says right there that we need to train the baby to lull himself to sleep, rather than relying on the bottle or our soothing him to sleep. We're supposed to make sure he's not hungry or in need of a diaper change (or sick, of course), and then once we're sure of that we're supposed to put him down for his nap or bedtime and just let him cry it out. Gradually, of course, not all of a sudden. First we let him cry for 10 minutes, then 15, then 30, and so on.
But because I can't stand his crying and just want to go pick him up or feed him or whatever to make the badness stop, I had to come up with a way to distract myself. So I started playing music to drown out the sound of the baby's crying. Now, I've got a little over 60 gigs of music in my library to choose from. Lots of things I could be listening to, a really wide range of genres.
Naturally, I chose Air Supply. I've got a greatest hits album where virtually every song takes me back to childhood, sitting in the back of my mom's car listening to EZ 101 or whatever that station was. Great songs, really cheesy and really easy on the ears. That little guy with the curly hair has got one of the all-time sweetest high voices. He's right up there with Steve Perry, the guy from Survivor (the '80s band, not the lousy reality TV show), the guy from Styx, and Freddie Mercury. Just a crystal-clear high tenor voice. I could listen to him all afternoon, and he's perfect for drowning out the sound of a baby's crying in the next room.
Don't pretend you don't love Air Supply. "Making Love Out Of Nothing At All", "Even The Nights Are Better", "All Out Of Love", "Two Less Lonely People In The World" ... the list of hits just goes on and on. Maybe you have some Air Supply in your music library, or maybe you're lying. You can't not love Air Supply.
In the process of blocking out the sound of the baby with "Every Woman In the World", I came across a song I hadn't heard before. It's called "Goodbye", and it's a nice melody written in their typical formula for a love ballad, so it turns out it's pretty good. And because I didn't really know the song, I wasn't singing along like I do with every other song. Instead, I just listened. And that's when I came to the realization that Air Supply sounds just like '90s Mandarin pop.
Every freaking Chinese love ballad from the '90s sounds exactly like an Air Supply song. If you close your eyes and listen to any Air Supply song, you could imagine some Chinese guy crooning it on stage in Hong Kong. Seriously. It's almost as if the Chinese music bigwigs all sat in a room one day in 1990 and decided to model their industry after their western counterparts, and they chose Air Supply because their list of English rock bands was in alphabetical order. And the ripples of that decision can be felt to this day as Eason Chan woos the crowd on tour in Taipei, singing songs modeled after Air Supply. It's been a very successful formula, of course. Private karaoke rooms all across Asia echo with the sounds of cheesy love ballads that could have been sung by a short, curly-haired white guy nearly three decades ago.
Go ahead: bust out that Air Supply song from your iTunes. You know you have at least one, don't lie. And close your eyes, and tell me it doesn't sound like every Chinese love ballad from the '90s. You know I'm right.
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