Good Morning John Four years ago today, I was in the hospital very tired, and a little anxious and very happy to have a healthy baby boy, and a healthy wife who was now a mom.

While I have pictures and videos and even some audio files of that time, they don’t tell a whole story that you can find in another way. In some ways, a more true story, and in some ways a more personal story, definitely creepy, it’s a little mind blowing, but I can go back in time in my google search history and see what I googled on that day.

And I googled a lot. Some of it I’m proud of, I watched a lot of Youtube videos about how to swaddle a newborn baby. I also googled the etymology of swaddle because that’s a cute word.

Some of the things are a little embarrassing. I get it. For example, Orin was like 90 percentile in body weight when he was born, but like 50th in head circumference, and that made me super worried.

No one told me to be worried about this, I was worried nonetheless. So I googled a ton about this. Turns out, within like 3 days his head size was normal.

It was just that his head was really squished because he had gone, been birthed. I think there’s some learning I could do from that, like the things that I am most worried about when they are most new and. I have the least data are often the things least worth worrying about.

And there are some things that I’m like, “oh!” I have no idea why I googled “gay culture otter.” Because apparently I needed to know about that, like right then when my son was less than a day old. I guess the minutes go by and you get bored. Like everybody else is sleeping, and you’re wondering about things.

But there’s also a ton of stuff that I do not really know how to feel about. Because context here of course, is that my son was born in the days leading up to the 2016 election, a thing I was very worried about. So there’s lots of stuff about Donald Trump, there’s also stuff about Huma Abudein’s laptop?

Do you remember this? Because I don’t. It was something about Hillary Clinton’s assistant’s laptop.

And it felt like a very big story but as with Orin’s head size, it was something we had very little data on, so the story really wasn’t the thing, it was our anxiety about it. And that turned out to be a legitimate thing to be worried about. Worried about the worry.

Like with this anxiety about unproven, unknown levels of maybe corruption that lead people to make faulty judgments that we would then have to live with, for 4 years, or forever. I want my searches from that day to have all been the cute ones, or the useful ones. Breast milk storage guidelines.

Sample birth announcements. Great! How do I know when my baby is done pooping.

Because I’m pretty sure that I thought he was done pooping, and I took his diaper off and he wasn’t done pooping. And then there’s just this search, one word: orin. Katherine’s grand-dad’s name.

We had not yet named him that. So I was searching for baby names. And I guess get out me car vine is also fine.

But I don’t want to have been thinking about Donald Trump on that day, but I was. And maybe I shouldn’t have been, but maybe I should have been. I didn’t know how to be a perfect dad, when I’ve been doing it for a day.

I don’t even know how to be a good human and I’ve been doing it for 40 years. I don’t always know how to engage with a world that has changed so much over the last 4 years of my child’s life. I do know that it’s better for having him in it.

And I think it’s better for having my worry in it. Worry for his health and happiness, worry for the health and happiness of the rest of us too. I think I looked up these google searches because I don’t really know how to handle this moment.

For me this is going to be a rough weekend, it might be a rough few weeks. But also I know that none of this  is going away. I’m very  worried about this election, but it’s not going to be the end of the pandemic,  it’s not going to be the end  of injustice and inequality.

It’s not going to be the end of conspiracy theory,  it’s not going to be the  end of hyper-partisanship. And it’s not going to be the end of the fear and the anxiety and the anger that a lot of people experience, whether they’re justified or not. But, at least let’s all promise to keep worrying for each other, and also occasionally googling the free shavakado vine.

John, I’ll see you on Tuesday. Tuesday…