Fear not, sweet tens of readers, for I have not left you. Today, in fact, marks my return to “the office” after three weeks at home post birth. Now that I am back at work, I can blog apace and not be distracted by pesky issues such as children and sleep.

This morning, exiting the parking garage, was a trial. I instantly felt like turning around and driving the five miles back home and curling up in bed next to my lovely wife and beautiful daughter, with two warm kitties asleep at our feet and a watchful-but-relaxed ‘hood dog perched on her bed on the floor. The Georgia summer, having launched its annual attack with both humid elbows swinging, obliterating distractions such as mail carriers delivering bills and out-of-school teenagers cruising by with crunktastic bass. Sometimes living off of savings for a month or so seems like such an attractive option. I could stay home longer, and really get to bond with my daughter and help my wife around the house and with the baby, and we could take walks every day, and cook dinner each evening. Our mornings would be completely focused on waking, then feeding our beautiful baby, and we’d feel proud each time she guzzled down each ounce of that precious lactic elixir. We’d high five and sleep on sofas and nap and nap and nap.

Of course, the bliss would be temporary, and penury is a strong deterent.

So I went into the office.

Everything is just as it was. Projects I worked on before are still haphazardly careening toward completion. Everything is the same. Same. In a way, it’s nice to know that I won’t be jumping into a totally different scene, but the other side of the equation is that, of course, nobody really noticed I was gone other than some of my collegues, who have the good fortune of working for the client rather than the giant technology services company, and therefore, feel entitled to demand work from me because of this perceived position of power, and who didn’t have their “fix it” bitch for a few weeks. Already I received this e-mail:

bq.Scott: Congratulations on your recent addition to your family. I have made these diagrams last week, but they are wrong. Can you fix them and send them back to me ASAP? Thank you and congratulations again!

It’s all fine and the same. The same people were complaining about the same things in the office: no transition, no training, no raises, no excitement—the list goes on. Going through my mail was one hell of a chore, but I learned much about what did or, more appropriatly did not, happen when I was away. I learned that certain types of sites were now blocked by our proxy servers and that the corporation plans to more strictly follow the Corporate Security Standards. I was able to instantly circumvent the recent proxy and security policy enforcements in order to instant message and blog from work, so everything is back on track in the “working” from work area. ASIDE: is it not truly ironic that the very tool security organization require (SSH) is by far the most handy way to defeat security policies and blocks?

Three weeks of intensity unlike anything I’ve ever experienced now lay behind me. Intensity intensified: the emotions, the exhaustion, the information overload, the baby. I have licked myself clean at sunrise after all night raves on parking pads all over the Western hemisphere, I have implemented massive, multi-million dollar eCommerce platforms in 48 hours with no sleep, and assisted with the build of the then-largest mobile network in the world and then tore it down within one week. I’ve traveled via overnight train to Amsterdam from Vienna for twelve hours of insanity. I contra danced with convicts. I’ve seen men die. And more. Yet all of it added together doesn’t seem like much when compared to the unrelenting and overwhelming intensity of a newborn—even a “good” newborn. The mystery, the demands, the complexity—all of it compares to the sheer ceaselessness of it all. In fact, with a starving infant staring you in the face, a shuddering cry gathering in her throat, one sees the rest of one’s life stretched out before you like a ribbon of track with hurdles, obstacles, challenges, joy, victories, defeats. In the words of my friend Elliott: it simply doesn’t stop.

And yet, back at the office in Midtown Atlanta, everything is the same.

My cube is in the same condition as when I left. Somebody left me a nice spiral-bound notebook and some vendor pens, but that is the only difference. The guy across the hall is still rattling on about the same geeky things, such as his home network and the fact that his high speed Internet is not “copper-based.”

All of this sameness feels alien, rather than familiar. My wife and I were discussing our situation a week or so back, our situation being one of new parents living with a newborn infant, after having spent four days in the hospital being tortured with “checking vitals” ever four hours overlapping with the “prick baby’s heel” every four hours, and having a dog that suddenly developed allergies and needed emergency care at three AM right when we were able to go to sleep for maybe the first time in two days. It was all almost too much, and my wife compared it to a rite of passage not unlike something a “primitive” culture may do as part of an initiation. After the waiting and the waiting and the murderous waiting, the intensity of birth and new life takes the parents to another place and into a completely altered state of conscience. And then there’s the completely new form of love that one never knew existed, much less was capable of understanding. Once one partakes of the peace pipe of parenthood, or sits in the sweat lodge of marathon feeding schedules, one is not the same person at the end of it all.

It is the process through which one becomes one’s parents, among other even more-startling metamorphoses.