Entry 768: Four Days In Paradise

It was a weird juxtaposition of a week -- so much terrible news coming out my home country, while I'm off vacationing in a tropical paradise. But I suppose it was only ever thus. There's never been a time in the history of people in which everything was all good, not by a long shot. That's how the human experience works. It's misery and ugliness and death laid right on top of joy and beauty and life. Navigating this conflict is kinda the whole game. It's a game you play as best as you can but never win, or maybe never lose. I guess it depends on your perspective.

S and I went to Turks & Caicos on Monday and returned last night. We had two traveling companions but not our usual ones. We went not with our kids but with our friends FB and SM. And unless I'm forgetting something, it was our first real vacation without children since we've had children. It was nice. It went exactly how you might image it went. We spent a lot of time at the beach, a lot of time at the pool, and a little bit of time doing other things. We ate some good food, had a few sugary cocktails,* and spent too much money. 

*Literally just a few. Our partying days are long gone and none of us are huge drinkers. 

We arrived latish on Monday evening and didn't have much time to do anything other than eat dinner at a restaurant at our resort. When we arrived they asked us if we had a reservation, and we said no, and they said that's okay, but you should make one in the future, and I thought that was strange because it wasn't close to being full, and there were open tables every time I walked by the entire week. In general, I was pleasantly surprised at how not crowded everything was. I've been to resorts before where it's next to impossible to get a decent seat by the pool or at the beach, and that sucks because not only do you not have a good seat, but you're resentful about it because you're usually paying a lot of money to not have a good seat. S asked somebody about it and was told that it was a down period. It was during the week (not the busier weekend), and it was near the 4th of July, which isn't a big international travel time for Americans (by far the most represented guest, if my ear for accents is accurate). We didn't plan it that way. We were just lucky it worked out for us.

The big event the next day was massages all around. Actually, S didn't get one because there was some sort of error, and they only had three booked, but she didn't really want one anyway (or, more accurately, she didn't really want to pay for one -- they were pricey), so it worked out okay. I love a good deep tissue massage. It's a once-every-three-to-five-years guilty pleasure of mine. Although, I don't know if "pleasure" is the correct word here. She was burrowing into my leg muscles in a way that I could barely handle. More than once I had to stifle a yowl. I left with my calves feeling like iron rods had been inserted next to the bones. It was definitely not relaxing. But I'll damned if I didn't wake up the next morning feeling as loose and ache-free as I've felt in years.

On Wednesday, we rented bikes and rode them into town. SM didn't join us because she can't ride a bike very well, and it's probably a good thing she didn't, as the road was bumpy and narrow and the bikes were shot to hell. S, FB, and I made it there and back safely, but it was much more adventurous than a leisurely ride a mile down the road, on a completely flat surface, should be. When we got back, S took a nap, and the rest of us drank the local lite beer at the pool bar. I don't think I've ever sat at a bar stool that is actually in a pool before. It was quite nice. Afterward we at dinner at a place called Hemingway's. It's unclear to me if that's just a name or if Hemingway used to come there or something like that. He did spend a lot of time in the Caribbean. I had the curry shrimp, and it was the best thing I ate while I was there.

The next day, we went on a kayaking excursion. A little motorboat towed us out to some small islands, and then a guide had us paddle around to see the local flora and fauna. It was pretty cool. We saw baby sharks, giant turtles, barracuda, and even an octopus. The latter, we were told, was especially rare. The guide said, he'd never seen one up-close -- it was just chilling in clear, shallow water right by the shore -- in his five years of doing tours. The only thing I didn't love about the excursion is that it was quite long (three hours), and it was hard for me to sit in the kayak for that long. Also, they were two-people kayaks, so S was my partner, and she's not exactly the world's strongest rower. When I needed to take a break for a few seconds we would lag behind the rest of the group. Still, it was fun, and I got a good workout in -- my shoulders were sore the next morning.

Speaking of the next morning, it was our last one on the islands. We had an evening flight, which put us in that awkward limbo of not having enough time to do anything substantial but having too much time to do nothing. We went to the pool for a bit in the morning, and then showered (and tried to dry our wet suits in the sun) just before checkout. Then, after much deliberation, we took a cab into town to a burger joint called Big Al's because we were told it had AC (which it did). We ate there (great burger -- second best thing I had during the trip), and then we went to the airport and flew back home. S and I got to see a bunch of random fireworks from the beltway as we drove back from the airport. It was a nice little impromptu way to celebrate the 4th, honestly. And as I always say: The best part of any trip, no matter how fun, is returning home.

A few other things.

• FB and I both work out regularly, and we were joking that the only people who check out middle-aged men at the beach are other middle-aged men to see how they stack up.
  
  
• I also was keeping tabs on the types of bikinis women were wearing -- not in a lascivious way, but in a more anthropological way. I noticed four basic types of bikini bottoms -- the "full-on Brazilian thong" where all you can see is butt-cheek (only saw one of those); the "flared thong", which is quite skimpy, but does cover a small portion of the booty; the "normal" bikini bottom that covers pretty much the entire butt; and the "hot-pants" bottom, for women who want full-ass coverage, but still want to wear a two-piece -- and it's interesting to see what type of woman wears what type of suit. I saw a lady wearing a very skimpy "flared thong" with her child, which I thought was a bit strange, but then she spoke a language other than English, and it made more sense. Most other western cultures are less prudish about nudity than Americans are.
  
  
• The resort had a complementary breakfast buffet, which was a huge plus. Sure, you just pay for it as part of the overall expense instead of individually, but psychologically it's nice to eat as much as you want "for free". Also, you can work it. You can eat a massive breakfast, and then basically ride that until dinner, so that you are only paying the exorbitant island prices for one meal. That's what I did. Every morning I'd get an omelet with the works and a side of potatoes, all topped with a huge scoop of salsa, and then I'd eat whatever sweet thing they had (waffles, pancakes, or French toast), followed by a mound of fruit. And lots of coffee, of course. One nitpick is that they didn't have iced coffee. That would have really hit the spot in the warm weather. Oh well, it wasn't too hot in the morning, and the breakfast area was in the shade.
  
  
• The drinking water situation was a ecological disaster at the resort. Basically, they just gave out an endless supply of bottled water, so that in order to stay properly hydrated you had to created a load of plastic trash. They should have set up drinking water stations and let people fill up their own water bottles or put out paper cups. They could even sell water bottles or reusable cups, and I'm sure people would buy them. It makes no sense to do it how they do it.
  
  
• As we were waiting in the lobby for our friends to checkout, we were chatting with a couple from San Francisco, and the woman was looking at her phone, and she said, "Oh my gosh, they had a giant flood in Texas, and a bunch of girls at a camp are missing!" That is a truly horrific story. It makes me especially uneasy given that my kids are at sleep-away for the next week, and it's supposed to rain where they are pretty much everyday. There are no flood warnings, but still...   

So as not to end on that grim note, I'll post some pics.

Until next time... 

Entry 767: Camp

A lot going on this weekend, both personally and in the world. It seems like that's the new normal. On the personal front, school has ended, and we are getting ready to send the kids to sleep-away camp. It's for two weeks this time, which they've never done before. I'm not worried about Lil' S2, as he's good in these types of situations, and he'll be there with a whole cadre of his buddies, anyway. But I am a bit anxious about sending Lil' S1 for that long. None of his friends will be there, and he's aged out of the little-kids section of the camp, so he won't even be around anybody he knows, family friends and the like, as they are all younger than him. Given the type of kid he is -- quirky, nerdy, sensitive -- it could go really badly if he gets the wrong mix of cabinmates. He's not into sports (the cheat-code for male bonding), so if the kids are really jockish, he might struggle to find people to hang out with, and if they are mean kids who cope with their own insecurities by belittling others, he might find himself a target, which would be really awful.

On the flip-side, navigating these types of situations is a social skill everybody has to learn, and it's much better to be the awkward tween than the awkward thirty-year-old. Also, I don't know if kids are mean in the same way they were when I was that age. So much of the bullying we see and hear about now is online, and the kids at this camp won't have access to their devices. Maybe that's one of the few good things about everybody being addicted to their phones now: Kids aren't as adept at being mean to each other in person as they used to be.

It's also possible, of course, that he finds a kid or two to connect with and has a great time. I should allow for that in my hypothetical visions. But that's not typically my way. As I mentioned in a previous entry, I'm a bit of worrier -- well, to a point, anyway. I'm sure in this situation once we actually drop him off it will be "out of sight, out of mind." Plus, S is like ten times as apprehensive about this as I am, so I've been playing it cool and reassuring her, so as to forestall a full-on double-barreled freakout. That's a thing I've learned about being a parent. It's really bad if you're both crazy simultaneously. Anxious times are much more manageable if you can learn to stagger your neuroses.

In other news, there's a lot going on in the world and not much of it seems great. Hopefully I'll get a chance to comment on it all (I have thoughts!) at some point in the not too distance future, but not now. It's a busy weekend. In addition to getting the kids off to camp, S and I have to prepare for a little kids-free getaway we have planned. We haven't had one of these in forever, so I'm really looking forward to it. We meant to do it last year, but we ended up having to go to Florida instead to help out with her dad. He had some sort of mysterious ailment and needed to go to a bunch of doctor's appointments and neither he nor S's mom drive that much anymore. (He was properly diagnosed and is feeling much better now.)

Alright, gotta go. The rest of the family is watching A Minecraft Movie, and even though I have little interest in seeing this film, I should join them. If I don't, I will be shamed by them for sitting by myself with my nose in my laptop instead of spending time with the family before the kids leave for camp.

Until next time... 

Entry 766: Power Outage

We got blasted here in DC yesterday by a thunderstorm, almost completely out of nowhere. Storms were in the forecast, but only around 50%, and I didn't see anything predicting the ferocity with which we ultimately got hit. The worst of it didn't last long, only about ten minutes or so, but it completely fucked shit up. It seemed like just a "normal" thunderstorm at first, and then at some point it was like, Man, this actually pretty intense, and then Whoa, this is legit scary. It was the worst storm we've had here since the derecho of 2012.

But we're all good now. I hunkered down in my basement (actually, I just happened to be down there working but whatever), which was a relatively safe place to be, as it's mostly underground, and there aren't many windows. S and the boys waited it out in our car in a parking lot. We lost power, and it seemed like it was going to be at least a day until they got it back up and running, but at 2 am this morning we were rudely/pleasantly awakened by every light and electronic device in our house turning on simultaneously. I gotta hand it to our power supplier Pepco. They are pretty good about getting the lights back on. This was the longest our power has been out that I can remember, and when I saw the number of fallen trees out on the streets and sidewalks today, it's like, Yeah, that makes sense. Some power lines are gonna go down and some transformers are gonna pop. You can only do so much to safeguard against the wrath of the gods.

We actually hosted a party at our last night despite not having any power. It was an end-of-the-year celebration for Lil' S2's flag football team. The storm came through about 4:15, and the party was supposed to start at 5:00. So, we texted everybody on the team telling them that we didn't have power, but nobody had power, so everybody figured we all might as well hang out in the dark together. Also, we had a taco bar for 25 people, and I'm sure nobody else felt like making dinner. It worked out really well, actually. The kids just spooked each other out in our dark basement, and the adults hung out on our covered porch. And then eventually the rain stopped and the clouds thinned, and it wasn't that dark anymore, and the kids were even able to play outside.

But we still didn't have any power. Lil' S1 went to my sister-in-law's who lives about a mile away and never lost power, and Lil' S2 slept over at the house of the one kid on his team whose power came back on right away. (It was an impromptu slumber party -- very nice of the parents to do that.) So, it was just S and I, which made things much more tolerable, if not exactly pleasant. The main thing is the AC -- it's getting hot here, now (next week is triple digits... ugh) -- but thankfully our basement never really gets that hot, so we slept in the guestroom down there.

It's funny the little things that you just totally take for granted until they're gone. I formulated this grand plan to use my iPhone hotspot to download podcasts to my iPad, which was fully charged, light a couple candles, and tear through all the dishes from the party by hand, since obviously we couldn't use our dishwasher. But once I started washing things, all the food and gunk clogged up the drain and created a huge pool in our sink, so I flipped the disposal on, and of course nothing happened because it's electric. Damn. Foiled. I just left them for the next day and watched Tires instead.

Alright a few pics of the wreckage and then that's the post.

Until next time... 

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...