7/19 Attempt to wind down and recover.

7/18 Five hours of driving for fifty seconds of Kingda Ka. (And Nitro, twice, one in the front row. What a beautiful coaster.) The scare of Kingda Ka was that before the ride, my daughter and I did not know what was to come. We did not know it when we sat down and the restraints clicked and we looked at each other. Once we launched, I was not afraid of any of it, did not want to escape a single moment. In the selfie we took afterwards, our eyes are gaping wide.

7/17 I have to say it: Every moment with the children is guilt-ridden. I feel I’m not doing enough. We are spending these more than two weeks together, and there are gigantic events almost every day, such as Six Flags last Sunday and another round trip to it tomorrow just so my daughter and I can complete a few missing rides, and yet I feel this terrible guilt about the hours, or even days, in which I do nothing, except make breakfast and a thousand other things. Does every parent feel like that?

7/16 Bonfire in the backyard with s'mores. In J’s words: If you want to inject yourself with diabetes, might as well set it on fire! I’m transplanting an American childhood into myself.

7/15 First time I see one of my kids do what I usually do: publish something about the day we just had. In this case it’s my daughter with a TikTok story about the ups and downs of our day at Six Flags, including a wonderful static shot of the rain hitting the table at which she sat while her brother and I waited out the worst of the rain in a restroom nearby.

7/14 Six Flags Great Adventure. Puzzled how humans take a bruegel-like pleasure being moved through space on mathematical arcs. The trains on the steel tracks sound like spaceships.

In the morning, when we left, I once again had an unexpected fear, which only receded after the first two coasters. After that I felt I could do anything and wanted to do everything. Especially Kingda Ka, which promises to be so different from the other coasters, but was unfortunately closed after a heavy thunderstorm for the rest of the day.

7/13 Attempted assassination of Trump. There is a remarkable disagreement in this family about this event. Welcome to your journey of becoming a true American. – Also, I truly wonder what kinds of entries this blog will get over the next few months that would blow my world apart if I were to read them now.

7/12 Naturalized. Staff in the courthouse has obviously been instructioned to add the word congratulations to every interaction, and so does everybody from the security guard at the metal detector to the gentleman assigning the seats.

From there on, a stunning display of inefficiency. There’s 160 new citizens in the court room, plus relatives, and each of the handful of personnel in the front walks up and down, moves stacks of paper from one place to another, chats with co-workers, for an entire hour after the official start of the proceeding, before the new citizens are even addressed for the first time. 

What follows is another hour of lining up in front of two desks where everybody presents their invitation, hands in their green card, and then gets to see their naturalization certificate to check it for errors. It is not handed out yet, that will happen after the oath ceremony, which begins two hours after the scheduled time. A youngish judge in his forties administers it, speaking randomly to the left and the right of the microphone, which makes his volume bounce up and down. 

For the oath, everybody rises, everybody repeats after the judge in units of three to five words. He concludes with a speech, a kind of sermon in which I am hardly able to make out any sense, not because it’s not audible, but because it consists of nothing but phrases with not enough gravitational pull to turn the phrases into actual meaning. Not even the story of his grandmother who came from Italy all on her own, as a sixteen-year old girl, and who would be so proud to see him, now, welcoming new citizens into the country.

After the sermon, everybody lines up again to be handed their naturalization certificate with a handshake from the judge, and afterwards, is free to leave.

I had scheduled my passport appointment on the Upper West Side at 12.30 and almost did not make it. Come to think of it, the passport is basically a more robust, more counterfeit-proof version of the naturalization certificate, which, in the words of my daughter, looks more like a super-sized dollar bill.

J bought ducks in red, white and blue, whiskey glasses with a label of Undeportable, and a candle on which it says Look At You Becoming An American Citizen And Shit. She says she weirdly felt a bit moved by the ceremony.

7/11 Reading about plastic in Chris Goodall’s book. Squinting your eyes a little, it’s tempting to think we might be on the cusp of being able to put any kind of matter into arbitrary configurations. Yeah, just like the alchemists in the Middle Ages. It would certainly help if we were.

And we all went to the Baylander. The magic of the place is greater than anything that happens there on a particular visit, which is usually not much at all.

7/10 The kids keep asking questions about politics, very sincerely, during breakfast. I still wonder if there’s some kind of hidden irony in it that I’m just not getting, as if they resign themselves to it because there’s not much else one can do with me.