My wife and I stayed home from work sick this week, she on Tuesday, I on Wednesday. We have picked up slightly dissimilar colds, both fugal variations on your average winter bug. (Hers comes with fatigue and congestion, mine with a cough and nausea. Fun.) Meanwhile, our son is perfectly well, apart from a very slight bit of postnasal drip that he’s been carrying around for weeks.

Childcare, when you are sick, turns into a battle between you and your own infectious self. You can’t tend a baby without picking him up, touching his mouth and hands, or putting your face near his. Hand sanitizer isn’t practical twenty times a day; constant hand-washing may be a little better, but not foolproof. We’re even sleepier than usual, because we are kept awake by our own wheezing as well as late-night baby-tending.

What I wish I knew was whether he was susceptible at all to this virus I’ve caught. It is entirely plausible, after all, that he brought it home from daycare, or that I picked it up there, from a doorknob or other surface. If he’s been marinating in these germs all winter, and built up a fierce immunity, it’d make me a lot less uneasy about (for example) feeding him with my ungloved hands. If on the other hand he is likely to catch this nasty thing, I really do need to take steps, both to avoid putting him through it and to save his parents’ sanity. Because if he spends next week coughing and wheezing as much as I am now, it’s going to be a long hard couple of days around here.

Culver City's La Ballona Creek, showing nature who's boss since 1938

This week we are in Los Angeles, and once again I am torn between wondering why we don’t live here and how we would ever survive.

For a weird start to any stay in LA, try walking somewhere. I trekked two miles down Overland looking for coffee and wifi, and didn’t see another human being for almost the entire time. It’s a lonely feeling, being a pedestrian here, like you are the last human alive in a world of four-wheel internal combustion beings. It now makes sense to me that the Terminator is governor.

I did see one person at the intersection of Washington and Overland, a typical collision of 8 lanes of traffic lined by Robek’s, Subway and Starbucks. It was a woman pushing a baby in a stroller. They, too, looked lonely and half-crazy; they must have been if they were walking somewhere in all this concrete.

There was also that earthquake that woke up the westside Monday night (although I was still up at four in the morning, for reasons too stupid to mention). My mother-in-law has earthquake safety handouts from her block committee. The recommendations involve too much setting aside canned food and not enough prayer, frankly: getting under a chair when the entire roof may fall on your head seems about as effectual as assume the crash position when the aluminum tube of jet fuel that you’re flying on is about to speed into the side of a mountain.

But who can complain when it’s 67 degrees and sunny? When there’s Griffith Park and pony rides and a little kiddie train just a short drive from the world’s most awesome French Dip and beer restaurant? Due to the unlikely union that produced my wife, we spend lots of time in two remarkably pure ethnic enclaves: Mexican East LA and Japanese Gardena. I’ve spent long days being the only non-Mexican I’ve seen, where the bussers at King Taco speak Spanish to me because I must just be some kind of albino Michoacano. And for the funeral of my wife’s grandfather years ago, hundreds of Japanese-Americans and seven priests packed the Gardena Buddhist Church; me and half of my wife were the only non-Japanese that I can remember seeing there. These are appropriate ways to do Los Angeles: great food, too much sun, and an uneasy feeling that in a city of angels, you are an alien.

It’s generally held that Texas has more control over America’s curriculum than all the other states put together. Why? Because Texas (a) is a big market, and (b) has a stringent Board of Education that reviews every textbook used in the state. If you, Mr. Publisher, want to sell a lot of books, you have to clear every word with a panel of fifteen Texans, ten of whom are Republicans, and at least one of whom thinks public schools are a “tool of perversion.” How she got on the school board is hard to imagine.

I shouldn’t have to care about the Texan schoolbook review—except that a lot of non-Texan schools end up buying the textbooks that conform to those “standards.” For instance: As of this week, Thomas Jefferson is no longer a major Enlightenment thinker (too Deist). Separation of church and state is a debatable concept, not a piece of constitutional bedrock. Confederate leaders are positioned alongside Abraham Lincoln, out of some perverse idea of “balance.” (That last one especially kills me. “We’re not ashamed of our heritage—of the Southern way of life!” Well, when it comes to certain parts of it, perhaps you should be. Heaven knows I’m not thrilled with a lot of my own ethnic associations.)

When my kid goes to school, chances are he’s going to have at least a few books like these on his desk. You know things are going down the wrong road when you start considering certain positions previously held only by fringey folks, and when I read about this latest set of Texan criteria, the word “homeschooling” popped into my head, just for a moment. If my son weren’t coming home each night to a roomful of actual book—as well as an environment where his mom and dad can explain to him things like cultural history, social justice, and the right to reject religion if you so choose—I’d start to worry.