Entry 765: It's Just Life

I can't say it was the best week I've ever had. It seems like when things are going well for me personally, the world at large is on fire, and when things seem (relatively) stable in the world, my own little nook is unsettled. That could just be perception, though, like we each have our own personal level of stability, and we inflate or minimize things in our own mind until we reach that level. That's why small things sometimes tip us over edge, or why we often just start feeling better about things that haven't changed. It's also why some people are constantly living life on the brink and others always seem to be even keel, even though the external circumstances of each person are roughly comparable.

In general, I think my baseline level of anxiety is relatively low -- or maybe I'm just good at coping. Because I actually do worry a lot, about everything, big and small, but then at some point I say, Fuck it, it's just life and get on with my day. But this week definitely pushed me above my norm. It started with the ICE raids and subsequent riots in LA, moved into a new war in the Middle East, took a quick detour into politically-motivated killings in Minnesota, and is ending tonight with a North Korean-style military parade about seven miles from where I currently sit. That's a lot. Oh, and don't forget, the robots are coming for all of our jobs and climate change is still an existential crisis.

It was a double-whammy earlier this week, too, as S was super stressed out for reasons I won't go into (other than to say it was nothing to do directly with me, thankfully), and when your spouse is stressed out it acts as force multiply to your own stress level. S goes to bed a few hours before me, so she's usually in deep sleep REM by the time I'm crawling in to join her, but on Wednesday when I came into the room, I heard those three dreaded words: "I'm still up." It's the worst, because a) it's painful to see someone you care about in distress, b) it's means I'm not getting any sleep any time soon. Even if she doesn't want to dump everything onto me talk things over, even if we're both just lying there quietly, I can feel the stress emanating from her and being absorb by me.

Although, to be fair, I don't think I was getting much sleep that night anyway. Right before bed I was listening to The Bill Simmons Podcast, which is usually relaxing, but he had Chuck Klosterman on, and they ended the discussion talking about AI, and it was extremely grim. I'm not totally convinced AI is going to completely upend society in a negative way, but I'm not not convinced of it either. I'm in the "it's a coin toss" camp, and the thing about coin tosses is that you lose them just as frequently as you win them. What I do know is that from a governmental policy response position, we are absolutely not equipped to handle it. Even if we had the best and the brightest in charge, we might still get it wrong, and we currently have nothing near the best and the brightest. We are at the mercy of the tech companies, and their message seems to be: This thing that we are making is absolutely going to destroy us all, but we have to keep making it, because if we don't China will destroy us all first.*

*It's like the opposite of the joke in Silicon Valley when the duplicitous tech CEO Gavin Belson says "I don't want to live in a world where someone makes the world a better place better than we do."

So, when I couldn't sleep Wednesday night, I thought about what I would do if I could do something about AI, and I came up with three things.

1. Outlaw driverless cars for transporting people or goods. We have drone airplanes that can fly themselves (or be controlled remotely), but commercial flights still need a human pilot in the cockpit (two of them, even). Let's make it the same for cars. It would protect jobs and add an extra layer of security and peace of mind. We can still use self-driving technology, but a human has to physically be in the driver's seat for the duration of the trip.

2. Make it explicitly illegal to make deep fakes of somebody without their permission or without clearly and repeatedly stating that it's not real. There is a thing now in sports social media where you will see a clip of somebody being interviewed, and they are giving strange answers, and you don't know if it's real or an AI-enhanced fake. It's only going to get worse as the technology gets better/more accessible. If something is obviously phony, either because it's clearly somebody acting (like Bad Lip Reading) or because it's labeled as such, then that's fine -- that's satire and should be protected by the First Amendment -- but if it's not, then it should be libel and/or fraud and subject to punishment. And it might be necessary to regulate social media companies for disseminating this stuff as well. Few things are more dystopian to me than living in a world in which nobody knows what's real and what's isn't. It's funny when it's a Nathan Fielder show,* not when it's just life.

*Loved the new season of The Rehearsal, by the way, speaking of humans in the cockpit.

3. Make a law that content creators get paid if their copyrighted material is used to train an AI algorithm. I have no idea how this could be done, but I bet somebody out there could figure it out. Just like an artist gets some money every time their song gets streamed, they should get some money every time an AI algorithm references their work. Like there's AI Spotify, and you give it a prompt "make a hip-hop dance song," and every artist whose work it references to make the song gets half a cent or something. Humans can freely borrow ideas from other humans (we can't help it, anyway); machines should have to pay. 

Alright that's all I got for today. Until next time...

Entry 764: A Few Unrelated Items

Not much time to blog today. I've got maybe 50 minutes, which isn't a lot for me. As S likes to point out to me quite often, I'm slow. I'll usually do a good job with things but almost never quickly. But today time is of the essence, so I'm just going fire off the first things that come to mind.

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Lil' S1 went to "Indianapolis" for a night on Friday with a friend. I use quotes because he actually went to Annapolis, but when he asked us about it, he said "Indianapolis." We were really confused -- for several days, not just like a few minutes -- as to why his friends' family were going to Indianapolis for a single night. It's at least a nine-hour drive from DC. Were they flying there? And isn't that the type of thing the parents should contact us about? That's a big trip to have kids work out on their own, no? So, S texted the friend's mom, and she informed us it was Annapolis, as in the city that's under a 45-minute drive from where we live. Yes, that makes a lot more sense. 

The thing is, Lil' S1's geography is so bad that there isn't a meaningful difference to him between Annapolis and Indianapolis. They're just phonemes and as phonemes they're objective easy to confuse. If you're familiar with where they are on the map, then you're highly unlikely to confuse them. But Lil' S1 isn't familiar with where they are on the map. In fact, if I asked him right now, I bet he could not tell me what states these cities are in, and one of the states is a short walk from where we live and the name of the other one is literally embedded in the city name.

It's not just him either. I don't think his friends know this stuff either. It seems like it isn't something that's taught in school anymore. Maybe it never was. I've known every state and where it is on the map and its capital and largest city since I was seven, but I memorized it all from an atlas we had at home. I don't remember if we learned that in school or not. We should have though, and kids should learn it today. I think stuff like this is sometimes considered unimportant memorization work, but I don't think it is. If you don't know where anything is in the country relative to everything else, you just kinda look like a dumbass, and it's a useful life skill to look like a dumbass as seldom as possible.

And now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go study a map of the world for no particular reason.

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A few nights ago I was creeped out in a way I haven't been creeped out in a long time. I woke up from a really bad dream, one of those panic inducers, where the premise of the dream is really silly -- in this case I was staying with a bunch of family at a friend's vacation house, but then the friend came with his family and so we had to find a new place to stay -- but the tenor of the dream is extremely unsettling, borderline frightening for some reason. So, I woke up in a bit of a disoriented panic. My mouth was super dry and the water bottle I keep near my bed was empty, so I got up to fill it in the kitchen, still very much discombobulated. 

In the kitchen, I heard a startling scratching noise coming from outside in our backyard. It's sounded like concrete being dragged against concrete. My first thought was that somebody was breaking in so I peeked through all the windows* but didn't see anybody. Also, on second thought, it wouldn't make sense that somebody was trying to break in given where the sound was coming from. It wasn't particularly close to a door or a window, and it sounded like it was coming from under the house. I convinced myself that it must be an animal of some sort, which didn't exactly put my mind at ease but was a much less worrisome thought than it being a human trying to rob us, and so after about twenty more minutes of walking around the house making sure everything was locked the alarm was on, I felt comfortable enough to go back to sleep, still more than a little creeped out.

*We have blinds that are one solid piece of fabric, not the kind that are a bunch of individual slats plastic slats. In general, I like our kind of blinds better, but they suck for peeking. You either have to put it all the way up or peek through the side at a bad angle. The individual slats are perfect for peeking, and whenever I hear something outside, I wish we had that kind. 

The next morning, I noticed a random black box in the middle of our lawn, and I figured out what happened. A few years ago we had a mouse problem, where we could actually hear mice running around in our walls and our ceiling. It was pretty gross, so we got pest control out here, and they located the point of entry, sealed it up, and also set a bunch of traps. It worked great, and we haven't had any problems with mice since then.

One of the traps is this bait box thing. It's like a box mounted on a slab of stone with poison in it, and then there is a tiny entry where only something the size of a mouse could get in to. So, some animal, I'm guessing a raccoon, because it would be hard to move this thing without grabbing it, was dragging this box out from under our house, and that's what I heard. Presumably, it was attracted to it for the same reason a mouse would be, but it couldn't actually get at the "goods" (which is lucky for it), so it eventually got bored and left.

There we go, mystery solved, no reason to be creeped out anymore. Now I'm just annoyed because I have a bait box in the middle of my lawn, and if I put it under the house, I'm sure it'll just get dragged out again. I guess I'll just push it off to the corner and call it good. I also don't love that it's attracting other vermin, but perhaps that's unavoidable, and, like I said, we haven't had any further problems with mice, so I'll just live with it.

Alright, time's up. Until next time... 

Entry 763: Secular Meditation

I never got the chance to put up Part II of my last entry like I had hoped. Oh well. I've probably started and abandoned a dozen things on this blog. That's just how it goes. Something else came up last weekend that demanded my and S's attention, something every parent of our generation has to deal with sooner or later: inappropriate texting. Lil' S2 got a new Apple Watch recently, and he's at the age where most his friends have one also (or they have a phone), so he's on a bunch of fourth-grade group chats, and, well, let's just say he obviously did not realize that everything he said on them could be seen from S's iPad. I'm not even going to post what he actually said, because it's embarrassing, and because I don't want this blog entry to get flagged for inappropriate content, but suffice it to say, it's not stuff he learned from watching Bluey.

It's partially, maybe even largely, on S and I. We never explicitly went over texting rules and etiquette with him, and we were extremely lax in monitoring what he was consuming and parroting to all his little schoolmates. We only found about it because one of his friends ratted him out. That prompted us to deep-dive his text history, and it was... not great. Some of it was just superficially bad language, which I don't really give a shit* about. But there was some other stuff in there that was worse on a deeper level. He made fun of a kid in his class at one point and issued vague dis-track-type threats to everybody else at another point. After getting caught, he immediately melted down in tears and claimed he didn't even know what the things he was saying mean, and I believe him to a point, but only to a point. He certainly knew it was wrong.

*See what I did there? 

S and I knew we had to nip this thing in the bud, so nip we did. We laid into him pretty good. We revoked his texting privileges indefinitely. (He's now only allowed to text about logistical things.) We took away his iPad and PlayStation for a week, and we blocked YouTube permanently on his devices. So as to not just be punitive, we also tried to have a nonconfrontational heart-to-heart with him to underscore the importance of being smart about what you post online. It lives on forever and everybody can see it.* I think (pray) this message got through to him, and hopefully throwing down the gauntlet on this early will pay dividends later. It's going to be an ongoing struggle and learning this lesson now, when the stakes are low and people are forgiving, could be very valuable.

*In fact, one of his friends' mom saw the texts before us and responded to him individually, telling him to knock it off or she would contact his parents. I don't know this woman well, but I texted her to apologize, and she was extremely cool about it. She said not to worry too much, that it's just part of growing up these days (true) and that Lil' S2 is a good kid (also true) who is welcome to hang out with her son anytime. I really appreciated her response.    

And some immediate good things did come out of this as well. Without watch time, Lil' S2 spent more time doing other, I would say better, activities. (It's like that scene on The Simpsons when all the kids stop watching Itchy & Scratchy.) He's really gotten into riding bikes around the neighborhood with his little friends, which is great. The G & G boys all got bikes during the Covid lockdowns (S was already borrowing one from a friend), rode them like twice, and then they just sat in our shed for a few years. Lil' S2 is now too big for his original bike, but his brother's fits him nicely, so he took over that one, and so at least one them is getting used. In theory, I could ride mine more, but I don't really like street cycling for some reason. I can't explain it, as I like being outside, and I like riding the stationary bike. You would think I would love outdoor riding, but I don't really. I don't hate it, but I don't love it.

Lil' S2 has also taken up Rubik's Cube solving, which makes me super proud. He's gotten quite good at it. Over the course of three weeks I watched him go from struggling to solve it with instructions and with my help (I learned how to solve one a few years ago) to being able to do it by himself with instructions to being able to do it by himself without instructions to being able to do it by himself without instructions in a minute and 15 seconds. That's about a full minute faster than I've ever been able to do it, by the way. I've been trying to figure out how he's so much faster than me, and I think it's simply that he's way quicker than me at doing the moves. His fingers just move faster than mine. I'm well past my physical peak, especially when it comes to quick-twitch motion; he's not. My only hope is to learn more algorithms that are faster for different starting states. I definitely can't out-turn him, but I can probably outthink him... for now.

Seeing how Lil' S2 has thrived with less screen time has prompted S and I to make some of the limitations permanent for both he and his brother. They both need it for different reasons. Lil' S1 is almost certainly not going to text inappropriate things to his friends. On the contrary, he's a bit of a goody-two-shoes when it comes to that type of thing. The other day I overheard his friend drop his phone and say "fuck!", and Lil' S2 mildly scolded him for it. I couldn't make out exactly what he said, but the final line was something like, "In this house that's all we ask." But Lil' S1 is way more susceptible to the addiction aspect of screens than his brother. Left to his own devices,* he will spend just about all of his waking hours on his phone or iPad. Even his reading, his saving-grace hobby, has gone down significantly in favor of listening to podcasts. And, look, nobody loves podcasts more than me, but I just don't think it's healthy for anybody, especially a child in his formative years, to have earbuds constantly in his head.    

*See what I did there? 

I fear that I'm going to have to start setting a better example and not be on my devices as much when I'm hanging out at home. S is already on me a little bit to do that. I try to explain to everybody that I already put in hours and hours, nay, years and years, of brain development without screens, but it does little to convince them. Also, when I'm on my phone, I'm almost always doing something somewhat productive. I'm doing a crossword puzzle or reading an article or doing trivia with a friend I otherwise wouldn't keep in contact with. I don't do social media at all anymore, and I (almost) never zombie-out on YouTube for hours on end. But, again, it's not really very persuasive, and I understand that. If you tell your kids how bad it is to be on a device all the time, and you're on a device all the time, it's just not going to land, even if it's not an apples-to-apples comparison.

All this does make me happy, however, that I grew up before the time of device ubiquity. I mean, we had TV and video games, of course, but they weren't as good, and, most importantly, the good stuff wasn't available 24/7. When I got home from school there was nothing on TV but cartoons and soap operas. I didn't have all of TV history at my beck and call. And if I wanted to play Nintendo, I only had the same games I had already grown tired of months ago. I couldn't get online and instantly have a new experience. I had to play Cobra Triangle for the umpteenth time. It just wasn't that great. It's not like I consciously decided to better myself by going outside and touching grass. It was just more fun than the other options.

Also, I was just bored a lot of the time, and I think there's value in that. Necessity is the mother of invention, and by corollary, boredom is the mother of imagination. When you have nothing to do as a child, you get creative real quick. In fact, I have a feeling people are going to realize this and boredom is going to make a comeback -- like, it's going to become trendy for people to force themselves to be bored for a little while everyday. Maybe it already is. That's kinda what meditation is, after all. But meditation has a spiritually aspect to it that boredom lacks. Maybe that's how we sell boredom to the masses. We call it secular meditation instead. Secular meditation -- I think I'm on to something here.

Until next time...   

 

Entry 762: When Are Things The Best? Part I

I was listening to a movie podcast the other day, and the hosts were discussing the 1982 cult classic Fast Times at Ridgemont High. It's very much a movie of a time. If you are Gen-X, like me, it probably means something to you; if you aren't, it probably doesn't. One of the hosts was saying that the main reason this film resonates so much with people of my generation is because it's the perfect movie -- it has the right mix of  pathos, humor, and sex* -- to implant itself in the psyche of a young teenager, and, in general, movies are at their best when you are a young teenager. I think he's mostly right about this -- I saw Fast Times at age 13 at an older kid's house, and it kinda blew my mind -- but I have a quibble in that I don't think movies, in general, are at their best as a young teenager.

*In terms of both timeline and content, Fast Times at Ridgemont High is almost exactly between the campy, raunchy comedies of the late-70s/early-80s like Animal House and Porkies and the more "realistic", sentimental John Hughes teen movies of the mid-80s.  

When are movies at their best? Keep reading, and you will find out, as this question got me thinking not just about when movies are their best, but when all sorts of things are at their best. I break it all down in this post.

Movies: Late teens

Movies are excellent when you are a young teen, but I think they are even better when you are an older teen. At that age, you haven't yet become jaded by the realities of life -- you still have the capacity to fully ingest the magic and awe of film -- but you are old enough to appreciate more interesting concepts and themes that would go over your head (or terrify and traumatize you) as a younger person. My personal apex movie moment was seeing Pulp Fiction in the theater at age 17. I knew nothing about it or the director. I had no idea what I was sitting down for, but I was hooked from the get-go. In my memory, I watched the entire thing with my jaw on the floor and my eyes bulging out of my head like a cartoon character. I didn't blink for two and a half hours. I've never been more rapt in wonderment in my entire life.

Then I had almost the exact same experience two weeks later when I saw Trainspotting. Now, in actuality, Trainspotting did not come until 1996, so it was more like two years later, but in my mind's eye I saw these movies almost back-to-back. That's the hold they took on me -- they completely warped my sense of spacetime.

As an aside, allow me a moment to lament the current state of in-theater cinema. Going to the movies just isn't what it used to be, not only because I'm not 17 anymore, but also, and primarily, because the films that play in theaters just aren't that good now. I would say I'm superhero movied out, but that would imply I was ever in on superhero movies in the first place. I've heard Thunderbolts is really, actually -- no, seriously -- quite good, and I still have absolutely no desire to watch it. Since we moved back to DC in 2011, I can probably list the number of movies I truly enjoyed watching in the theater on one hand.*

*Off the top of my head: Once Upon a Time In Hollywood, The Shape of Water, Gravity, and I'll throw in a replay of Avatar in 3-D I-Max (but not Avatar: The Way of Water, which I didn't like that much). That's literally all I got -- three movies and a throw-in.

Music: Early teens

You could pick any age between 14 and 29, and I wouldn't argue with you. After that your tastes mostly calcify, and you find yourself mostly wanting to listen to the same thing over and over again, instead of exploring new music. But I went with early teens because that's when the nostalgia hits me the hardest. I heard Superman by REM the other day and damn near burst into tears. I don't even particularly like that song -- I mean, it's fine but nothing special -- but I did like it in junior high, and so it still really moves me thirty-five years later. This happens frequently -- if I chance upon a song I listened to between 1991 and 1994, I'm all in, regardless of how good or bad it is.   

Also, early teens is when your music most defines you. When I was that age CDs were emerging as the dominant musical medium, and they came in those long cardboard boxes, so I would collect them and decorate my school binder with them. I would rotate the band on the front -- Nirvana, Nine Inch Nails, Inxs -- depending on my mood and tastes at that particular moment, and I had Jimi Hendrix permanently on the back. My message to the world: I love alternative rock, and I am not a racist.

TV: Late twenties

This one is largely a function of when TV was at its best, in general. In my opinion, this was in the mid-twenty-aughts, and in the mid-twenty-aughts, I was in my late twenties, so TV-watching was the best for me in my late twenties. There are undoubtedly more good TV shows available now than at any other time in TV history, but the experience of watching TV is notably worse now than it was twenty years ago.

In fact, part of the problem is that there is too much on TV now. There is paralysis by analysis -- The Last of Us, The Pit, The Bear, Poker Face, Landman, Running Point, The Studio, Your Friends and Neighbors, The Rehearsal, Severance, The Agency -- these are all shows with new(ish) seasons out that I've heard are worth watching. And then even when I pick a show, there is the "online dating problem", where if it's not bad but doesn't rock my world immediately, I become overwhelmed with the feeling that there is something better out there for me, and I'm wasting my valuable time and energy with this not-as-good-as-something-else show, and that sentiment can totally ruin the viewing experience. As a result, I usually end up just watching sports or doing something else entirely.

I miss the days when when I could mostly keep up with the great TV shows just by watching an episode or two a night. Early Netflix, when they sent you DVDs in the mail, represents the peak of TV-watching for me. I only had one service, and with that and all the stuff I already had on disc (my brother-in-law used to check stuff out from the library and copy it), I was able to rip through almost all the great TV shows of the day -- The Sopranos, Sex & the City, Freaks and Geeks, The Office, Six Feet Under, The Wire, Arrested Development, Curb, etc. -- in short order.

And there was something ineffably wonderful about getting the physical discs in the mail. I would go into campus and teach all day or work on my dissertation, and then come home to a mailbox filled with the latest episodes of whatever great show I was engrossed in at the moment as my reward. With the two disc plan, the timing worked out perfectly too. I would watch one disc while the other was out, and by the time I was done, the other had arrived with the next batch of episodes. Well, the timing was almost perfect -- Sundays always threw off my rhythm. No mail that day.

Alright, I can see I have more to say on this topic than expected, so I'm taking this to a Part II. Why not? It's a holiday weekend. Let's go nuts.

Until next time...

Entry 761: Too Much

I sneezed this morning and pulled a muscle in my back and could not be more annoyed about it. It's not terrible, but it's definitely going to prevent me from doing my S & C class* on Monday, which really sucks, because I was finally ready to attend full-time again, now that my finger is on the mend. But no. I sneezed and felt a sharp pain shoot through my body, emanating from my left lat, and I knew instantly what was going on, because it's happened before. Goddammit, that's me out for at least four days.Then I had to go sit in bleachers with no back support for two hours, which certainly didn't help.

*That's strength and conditioning, to those of us who do S & C classes. 

It's just been that type of week -- one disruption after another. I just want things to get back to normal (even though there really is no such thing). For starters, work has been uncharacteristically busy, as we are trying to get a product out to market ASAP, and a lot of the bug-fixing falls on me and my team. Then I had three appointments for my finger (two therapy sessions, one follow-up with the orthopedist), and although it has gotten much better, it's still not 100%, and the doctor recommends at least another month of occupational therapy. Then I got a cold, and then I hurt my back because I sneezed because I have a cold. On the plus side, we had family plans during Lil' S2's baseball game this morning, so I didn't have to fight him on it.

The in-laws were here this week, which, let's just say, doesn't not add to the unsettledness. It used to be a big help having them come in, because they could aid in childcare. But as everybody, children and adults alike, have gotten older, that's less and less the case. The kids are faster and the grandparents are slower, and it's to the point where S doesn't like leaving her father alone with the boys, because she's worried about him. He's really getting frail. He has the physique of Montgomery Burns. We have an electronic deadbolt on our front door, and he can't press the buttons on the keypad hard enough to enter the code. He'll tap it in, but the lock will only register like two of the four numbers, and then it'll time out, and he'll get frustrated and start cursing it in Kannada. Toward the end of the trip, he wouldn't even bother with it. He would just wait on the porch until somebody let him in.

And I say all this with love. Dude is getting old. That's just how it goes. It's going to happen to all of us (probably). So, we might as well have fun with it while we can. If my kids aren't poking fun at me when I'm that age, I'll be disappointed... or dead already.

They left this morning. My sister-in-law gave them a ride to the airport, while the four of us (me, S, and the boys) went to S's graduation. She's been taking night classes for the past few years and just earned a master's in legal studies. It's pretty impressive, and she wanted to do the whole cap-and-gown thing, so we all went. It was cool, but the fateful sneeze occurred immediately before entering the auditorium, and we got there just as the last of the good seats were being taken, so we had to sit in the backless bleachers. We picked a spot at the very top, so that I could lean against the back railing, but it wasn't at all comfortable. And of course Lil' S2's iPad died within five minutes of being there, because he's terrible about charging it, so he was bored out of his gourd pretty much from the get-go.

But we made it through. There was a lot of pomp -- pomp and circumstance, as it were -- but we got that sweet payoff of hearing somebody you don't know say a loved one's name and then watching them walk across the stage, while you squint and say, "I think that's them right there... no, no, the one next to that one." Afterward, Lil' S1 said, "We waited for two hours for something that was over in a minute. That was worse than a track meet!" And Lil' S2 said, "It wasn't even a minute. It was, like, five seconds." He's right too. If you started the clock from the moment S came onto the stage and stopped it the moment she left, it would have been very close to five seconds.

After this past week, I would love a nice, chill normal night at home, but that's not happening. S wanted to celebrate (she also had a birthday recently), so she invited our friends over for pizza and cake, and then their kids are staying the night. It's a great idea… for a different weekend. I so don't feel like hosting anything, and I feel like chaperoning a slumber party even less. And that always falls on me, as S is zonked out by like 8:30. But I'll keep my opinion to myself on this one (other than putting it on this blog -- don't say anything). Unless I'm going to cancel everything, which I'm definitely not going to do, there's not much to be gained by saying something. It will only irritate S, and then I'll have a salty wife on top of everything else. That would just be cutting off my nose to spite my face -- at least I think that's what it would be. I have to admit, I've never really understood that idiom.

Until next time...

Entry 760: Kids Sports II

The woes with kids sports continue this weekend. This time it's Lil' S2. He's signed up for baseball, and every time he has a game, it's a death-battle of the wills to get him to go. Weirdly, he'll go to the practices (somewhat) willingly, but he hates the games. Actually, he hates going to the games. Once he gets there, I see him interacting with the other kids and having fun, and sometimes, if we catch him in the right mood, he will admit after the fact that he had a good time. But I've come to dread game-day morning because I know it's going to be a knock-down drag-out fight to get him to participate.

I so regret signing him up for baseball in the first place. He never asked to play, but I wanted him to try a sport other than football, and a bunch of his friends play, so I asked him if he'd be willing to try it, and he said yes, even though he now says he never said that (more on that below). And the problems began when he didn't get a spot on the team with most his friends. He got put on a different team with one of his friends and one other kid from school he's friendly with. Then he got moved off that team onto a different team with nobody he knows.

I knew that that wouldn't do, so I contacted the commissioner of the league and requested that Lil' S2 be moved to a team where he at least has a few friends on it. The commissioner kinda dragged his feet on the whole thing, so I asked for a refund for league dues. The commissioner was cool about it and said I could have a refund, but that he would move Lil' S2 back to the team with his one friend if we wanted to stay in the league. I think part of the reason he did this is because I mentioned everything to the dad I coach flag football with, and this dad, who is a bigwig in this baseball league, probably said something to the commissioner on my and Lil' S2's behalf. I immediately wished I hadn't said anything to the dad, as I think he felt compelled to say something to the commissioner, even though that was never my intent -- I only reached out to him to get the commissioner's contact info. I even told him straight-up that I didn't want to put him in the middle of it, and that he didn't need to do anything about it, but I'm pretty sure he did anyway.

Regardless, at this point, a refund was still on the table. So, I went to Lil' S2, explained the situation, and asked him again if he wanted to try baseball, and again he said yes. I signed him up, and then, of course, when the season starts, he says he doesn't want to play and that he never agreed to it in the first place. This is an ongoing issue with him. He does this with many things, big and small -- baseball, guitar lessons, Mathnasium, getting a hair cut, taking a shower, etc. It drives S and I crazy. It's gotten to the point where S will record him agreeing to something, so that we can prove to him that he actually said yes. Not that it matters. He's a nine-year-old without a fully formed prefrontal cortex, not a Superior Court justice.

It has gotten to be a huge problem, though, because it makes it so hard to sign him up for anything, and it frequently puts us at odds with him, which also sucks. (Although the flip side of being nine is that you snap out of bad moods just as easily as you snap into them.) I'm definitely not going to sign him up for baseball again, but we still have this season to get through, and letting him quit would a) set a bad precedent; b) put us out the league dues (yes, I know, this is the sunk cost fallacy, but still); c) make me look kinda silly, given all the finagling I did to get him on this team. So, I'm trying to tough it out -- we've got, like, two games and four practices to go. I got him to agree to go to the game today through a combination of bribery and guilt-tripping, but we still have three hours until game time, so... who knows?

The ironic thing is that he recently started playing pick-up baseball after school everyday with his buddies. I asked him why he like playing baseball then, when he hates being on a team. He said it's because after school you get to pitch and hit and play a lot, whereas on the team you mainly just stand around the whole time. And I gotta say, this is a totally fair point. I love baseball, as much as I love any activity, but I concede, it can be very boring at times, especially if you're a Little League participant who doesn't play one of the few premium Little League positions (pitcher, first base, shortstop). I completely understand why a kid wouldn't want to spend two hours standing in right field or sitting on the bench just to get two at bats and maybe field a ball or two. The people who say baseball is ill-suited for today's youth are probably right.

To be honest, I don't think I loved playing organized baseball either. I mean, I must have liked it, because I willingly did it for many years, but when I think about the reasons I like baseball so much today, very few of them involve structured league games in which I played. The things I like most about baseball are the history, the bond with other fans, the numbers, the trivia. When it comes to playing, I had way more fun playing Wiffle Ball or pickup beer-league softball than I did playing anything official. So, it doesn't bother me in the least that Lil' S2 doesn't like playing organized baseball -- or rather it won't bother me a month from now when this godforsaken season is finally over.

Until next time...

Entry 759: Kids Sports

Since Lil' S1 has been at his new school, we have been strongly encouraging (i.e., forcing) him to play a sport each semester. His outside interests -- books, video games, TV, D&D -- are all very sedentary activities, and a kid his age (a person of any age, really) needs to move. First semester he was on the swim team, which worked out quite well. Practices were at a pool very close to campus, and several of the meets were at a school a walkable distance from our house. It was usually SRO, because their pool bleacher area is so small, but that's not that annoying when it only takes two minutes to get there.

This semester he picked track and field from a rather unappealing (to him) list. As the start of the season got closer, however, he began really dreading the idea of doing the sport, to the point that S and I were wondering if we should let him off the hook and try a new exercise strategy. But we told him he only had to try it for two weeks, and then if he didn't like it, he could quit. And for the first week and a half of the season, he was counting down the hours until that two weeks was up, and then somehow, miraculously, when the time actually came, he decided to stick with it. There were two big things I think that swayed his decision: 1) He could do the throwing events (shot put and discus), which meant a lot less running; 2) I told him that as long as he does track I would let him listen to his headphones in the car when I was driving him to and from school instead of making him talk to me like I did before. That last one might sound silly, but I honestly think that it mattered.

So, he's in the midst of his season right now, and I gotta say, track and field is a rough sport for parents. The meets are in the middle of nowhere (most schools in the District don't have their own tracks); they are at least three hours long (often longer); unless your kid is a distance runner they're only actually doing their sport for like two minutes; and you have no idea in advance at what time exactly they will compete. I went to Lil' S1's meet on Monday. I arrived at 4:00 pm (driving through rush-hour traffic to get there), watched him sit around for a few hours and then throw a discus three times, and then left at 7:15 pm. Also, the stands were packed-full with the athletes, so I just stood the entire time in the blazing sun. Thankfully, I thought to bring sunscreen, and I saw this woman I used to know from Lil' S1's daycare days, so we chatted most the time (her daughter runs for a different school). Without that chance encounter it would have been so boring. I saw other parents sitting on the grass away from the action with their laptops and thought to myself, Ah, that's how you do it.

It also doesn't help that my son isn't exactly Al Oerter. If he doesn't finish dead last, I consider it a success. He probably could get decent. The throwing events are enough of a niche thing (he's the only middle-schooler at his school who does it) that I think you could be reasonably successful just through a little bit of extra practice and strength training. But I don't think he cares enough to do that. He likes throwing enough to do the bare minimum, but actually trying to get good might be a bridge too far. His favorite part of the season seems to be using an old chocolate syrup bottle as his water bottle. That's the type of kid he is. (It is pretty funny, though.)

He had another meet on Wednesday, which I missed because I had to go into the office that day, and S got it even worse than me. The event was further away, she had Lil's S2 in tow, and the throwers went first this time, so by the time she got there, he was already done. She drove an hour and a half just to give him a ride home.

Well, one silver-lining of Lil' S1 not being very good is that at least I don't have to worry about him getting on a serious travel team or anything like that. Doing this a few times every spring is barely tolerable. Doing it almost every weekend year round.... yeah, no. That's why whenever I hear those stories about the overbearing sports dad like Earl Woods or Marv Marinovich part of me is like, Well, you do kinda gotta appreciate the commitment to their kid. I'm way too selfish with my free time to force my child to do a hundred chip shots every day or wake up at 5:00 am and drive behind him in the car while he runs. Just coaching Lil' S2's rec league flag football team is more than enough for me.

Speaking of which, they lost their first game of the season today. It was a heartbreaker. We fell down 13-0 early and battled back to get it to down one, 26-25, and we had the ball on the five-yard line with six seconds left. Alas, incomplete pass and we lost. I was legitimately gutted for like an hour after the game. All the other parents and kids were getting ice cream and joking around, and I was just sitting there, despondent. It's completely because I'm the coach. I feel like I let everybody else down. It's silly. Nobody actually cares. It's fourth grade flag football, after all. And I know this, but I can't make myself feel differently. The best I can do is try not to let on about it, so that people don't think I'm a complete weirdo, and then write about it cathartically on this blog.

Alright, gotta go. Until next time...