Entry 214: Post-Christmas Non-Blues

Well, one good thing about not getting too excited for Christmas is that you don't get the post-Christmas blues.  You know what I'm talking about, right?  That malaise you fall into when a special event comes and goes.  I used to get it bad as a kid, and it wasn't just for Christmas.  Just a standard Sunday evening was a bit on the melancholy side for me.  I think that's pretty typical, and it gets even worse when you get old enough to go out drinking Saturday evening.  During my single days, there was no lonelier a time than Sunday evening after a night of partying.  I don't get that feeling anymore, though.  Now, I'm too tired to be sad.



Anyway ...

The big event for S and I on Christmas Eve was watching a movie.  But only after a medium-size fight to determine which movie to watch.  We don't have Netflix anymore, so our options are iTunes and DirecTV on-demand.  There are a lot of movies we can agree on, but they're all newish (Dallas Buyers Club, Bad Grandpa, Nebraska, Her), and so they're unavailable for rental (although some of them you could buy).  This led to a lot of back-and-forth over which movie we should watch, and this slowly escalated into a fight when she didn't understand why I was adamantly against buying a movie,* and I didn't understand why she couldn't agree on one of the nearly twenty movies I suggested.  But like most our spats, it all blew over in about an hour after some dinner and time apart.  It's funny how 99% of our quarrels occur when at least one of us is tired or hungry.  Huh.  I wonder if there is a connection.

We ended up watching this movie called Once, which was my choice.  It was on some "Best Movies of the 2000s" list, and it got really good reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, both from the audience and critics, so I thought it would be safe.  I was wrong.  It was not good.  It was painfully slow.  It was also a quasi-musical, and I don't really get the allure of movie musicals. (Isn't being there in person basically the whole deal with seeing a musical?)  I actually kinda dug the ribbon of story that tied the movie together, but the musical bits were just too plodding.  Plus, almost all the songs were John Mayer-y, singer/songwriter stuff, and that's just not my bag, S's neither.  So this one goes down in my movie loss column, unfortunately.  I tried to protest the decision to S -- "C'mon, it was like my 25th choice!  If we would've just watched Scarface like I really wanted to, this wouldn't have happened!" -- but she was having none of it.  I have a feeling we will be watching Don Jon in the near future.

On Christmas, we went to our friend's place, which was nice.  I had a moment with my friend's grandma of the type Adam Carolla always talks about on his podcast, where you make a connection with somebody you think is uncanny, and they just shrug it off.  My friend's grandma lived in Denmark for many years, and when I told her S lived in Denmark too, she just said, "oh", and moved on.  Then she told me her late husband was a math Ph. D., and I said, "I'm a math Ph.D!", to which she just nodded, as if 80%-90% of the population has an advanced degree in mathematics.  Then she said that he taught at Syracuse, and when I told her S went to Syracuse, she said, "yeah" and asked for more Brussels sprouts.  Geez, tough audience.  Apparently three coincidences isn't quite up to snuff.  If her husband and I were both named Ulysses Simpson Grant**, would I have gotten more than a "that's nice"?  Eh ... she's old.

Our friends gave us all Christmas gifts, which was a bit awkward, since we didn't know we were exchanging gifts and thus didn't get them anything.  (We did buy their three-year old daughter something, so we weren't completely empty-handed.)  S felt bad about it, but I didn't care so much.  I've already decided that I want to establish myself as the guy who never gives gifts.***  Once I get that reputation cemented then it won't be weird when I don't bring one.  Like my coworker who never eats sweets.  Everybody knows this, so it's never awkward when somebody brings in birthday goodies, and he doesn't partake.  That's how I want to be with gift-giving.  And by the way this doesn't mean that I'm never going to buy people stuff.  I don't want to be a cheapskate.  I'll happily buy drinks, pick up dinner tabs, pay for cab rides, etc.  I'm just not going to give people perfunctory gifts anymore.  It's my New Year's resolution.


This afternoon we had some friends come over for lunch.  Well, actually they're S's friends -- old coworkers.  I basically met them for the first time today.  It was cool.  They have two kids, a 9-year old boy and a 7-year old girl.  The boy has a mild form of autism, which actually makes him kinda fun, because he's not shy like most kids.  When he first came in, before he took off his shoes or jacket or said hi or anything, he went straight to Lil' S's toybox and started jamming on his Elmo guitar.  Then later he told me all about the TV show Austin and Ally.  It's a show on the Disney Channel set in Miami in which Austin, played by Ross Lynch (he actually cited the actor's name), is a singer and Ally is his songwriter companion.  Austin's best friend and producer is named Dez, and Dez has an "enemy" named Chuck.  They once sang a song called, "I Love Christmas".  I swear to you, I'm not looking any of this up; it's entirely from what he told me (maybe I have a bit of autism, since I remembered it all).  Later, he told me that the One Direction album was called Midnight Memories, just in case I wanted to buy it.  He said that last part a few times, "just in case you want to buy it".  So earnest.  It was pretty cute.  

OK, that's all I got for now.  Until next time ...

*I don't really know why either, honestly.  It's one of the few things I'm irrational about.  I have trouble enjoying something if I feel like I'm getting ripped off, and buying a movie for $10.99 that we only want to watch once is a ripoff to me.  S's argument is -- Who cares if we pay $6.00 more, isn't it worth it to get something we both want to see and keep marital harmony?  My response is -- It should be, but it's not.  I just can't do it.  I can't buy a movie we're only going to watch once.  Like I said, irrational.  Contrary to what my wife might believe, I do have some human emotions.  I'm not all robot.

**This commented was inspired by this weird baseball tidbit I stumbled across.  There was once a player named Stoney McGlynn and once a player named Lil Stoner, and they both had the real name Ulysses Simpson Grant.  Two unrelated players, a Stoney and a Stoner, and they're both named after the same president?  That's weird, huh?

***The Christmas gift exchange with my family is the only exception.  It got grandfathered in.

Entry 213: It's Not Beginning to Look Much Like Christmas Anywhere I Go

I took a good long look at the calendar yesterday and found out Christmas is next week.  I had a vague notion it was getting close, but I didn't realize it was this close.  Christmas in five days?  And here I am without a single hall decked with holly -- or any other ilex, for that matter.

[One great thing about Christmas: Bing!]

I do believe this is the first Christmas S and I are spending together alone -- well, not alone of course, there's Lil' S -- but without any other extended family members.  I burned through all my vacation days, so going somewhere is off the table, and we just saw both sets of parents within the last few weeks, so that pretty much eliminates the people who might come see us.  I don't even know what we're going to do for Christmas.  Oh wait, yes I do.  Just remembered, we're going over to some friends' house for dinner.  It's for all the DC transplants who aren't leaving town.  Should be fun, even if I do have to work the next day.  I'm actually (somewhat sadly) looking forward to going into the office the day after Christmas.  I know it's going to be super empty and quiet, and I'll be able to get a ton of shit done.

We don't have any decorations or anything like that set up around the house.  I don't know if we will ever "do" Christmas.  I asked S the other day if we're going to get a Christmas tree when Lil' S gets older, and she said, "if you want to".  And therein lies the rub -- I don't really want to.  I don't have anything against Christmas trees (and "O Tannenbaum" is a hell of a song).  I just don't want to get one -- for the same reason I don't want to get a pet: it's work.  Not much payoff either.  Sure, it looks nice and festive, but is it worth the effort it takes to go out and get one and put up and decorate?  Absolutely not.  I believe I've covered this in a different post ... Ah, yes, Christmas three years ago.  Bah Humbug, 2010 me.  Bah Humbug, indeed.




Another thing about Christmas is that I'm an atheist and S is -- well, I actually don't know what she'd call herself -- Atheist?  Agnostic?  Nonpracticing Hindu? -- certainly not a Christian.  I know that Christmas has morphed into something beyond a strictly Christian holiday, but isn't this really weird, if you think about it?  A lot of people who don't believe in Jesus Christ celebrate his birthday in almost the exact same way as those people who do believe in him.  We don't really do this with any other holiday.  Maybe I should start fasting on Yom Kippur, and then when people say, "Oh, I didn't know you were Jewish", I can reply, "Oh, no, I'm not.  I just like the tradition.  It reminds me of those colorful fall days when I'd atone for my sins as a kid."

And I did very much enjoy Christmas as a kid, but it wasn't so much Christmas as it was getting toys (Tecmo Super Bowl, 1991, greatest gift ever), having time off from school, and spending time with my family.  You don't need a tree or tinsel or Chipmunk carols to do any of these things.  Although if you want these things, knock yourself out.  I'm not anti-Christmas, even for non-Christians, by any means.  A Christian friend of mine was grousing to me once about non-Christians "taking away" her holiday.  She was arguing that such people were degrading the holiday for actual believers like herself.  Knowing that she's really pro-gay rights, I said sarcastically, "Yeah, I know, that's how I feel about gay people getting married."  It silenced her, but good.  It was perhaps my finest analogy ever.



OK, enough about Christmas.  Let's talk about pi for a few moments.  As everybody knows (or should know), pi is an irrational number, meaning it cannot be represent as a fraction of integers (e.g., 1/2), and it's decimal expansion has an infinite number of digits that never repeat in any sort of pattern.  3.1415926, that's as far as I can get off the top of my head.  As you can imagine, there are people who know many more digits.  In fact, memorizing pi is something of a sport, as I realized when I came across this website.  Before you click it, though, take a guess at what you think the record is.  Now click it and have your mind blown.  Not only that, but apparently some other dude has beaten that mark, by a lot.  That is in-fucking-sane.  The record for a computer is pretty impressive also, if only because you have to Google the unit it's measured in, but it's not nearly the same as the human record, because a computer is, you know, not a human.

All this reminds me that I once wrote a limerick about pi for the math department holiday party at UMD.  The emcee botched the reading, though, so it didn't go over well.  I still remember it.

Round a circle to polygons lie,
They asked the old Greek, "why"?
He said with a smirk,
It's not difficult work,
In fact, it's easy as 3.14159 ...

See, it's all about how Archimedes developed the first algorithm for theoretically calculating pi to an arbitrary number of digits by bounding a circle with an inscribed and a circumscribed polygon, and then ... Oh, OK.  Fine.  I'll stop.

Until next time ...

Entry 212: Hyperdrive

Just got back from a dinner party.  You can tell we took the little guy because it's not yet 9:00 p.m., and we already attended and came back from the party.  It was pretty fun.  The hosts have a six-month old; another couple who came have an 18-month old; so with our 16-month old, there was a decent under-2 years contingency in the house. 

I spent most the night stopping Lil' S from knocking over wine glasses and poking the baby in the eye*, but when I wasn't doing these things, I was keenly observing the 18-month old.  I wanted to compare and contrast his behavior with Lil' S's.  I'm trying to figure out if all little boys are as hyper as Lil' S or if he's exceptionally spazzy.  Tonight was a data point in favor of the latter.  The 18-month old was totally chill.  Well, totally chill by toddler standards, at least.  He was still motoring around and laughing and playing.  But he wasn't trying to climb every piece of furniture he saw; he wasn't grabbing everything in his reach; and he even sat down and let his dad read to him for five minutes.  I was shocked.  That would never fly with Lil' S.  Unless he's sleeping or strapped down, he's not staying in one place for longer than 20 seconds.  Now, this other kid is two-months older than Lil' S, but I can't foresee Lil' S mellowing anytime soon.  All kids are different, and I think S and I just got one who's in hyperdrive 95% of the time.  The joke in my family is that I was like that when I was his age, and now it's some sort of cosmic payback.  I can neither confirm nor deny the veracity of this contention; I don't remember how I acted at 16 months.

In other news about the little guy, he can kinda talk now, by which I mean he says five distinguishable words -- "uh-oh", "no", "go", "bye", and "ball".  That's the extent of his vocabulary so far, and with some of the words you have to extrapolate.  Like with ball, he just says "bah", but you know he's talking about a ball because he's pointing to one.  He's also learned how to get his ball on command.  I'll say, "go get your ball," and he'll go find it and bring it me.  It's pretty cool.  He's worked his way up to the level of a golden retriever.

Anyway ...

My parents came to town last week which was really nice, other than the fact the weather was completely miserable just about the entire time they were here.  It even snowed a good amount one day.  My parents must be some sort of rain gods as every time they come to visit we have extreme weather, like hurricanes and derechos.  Well, either they're rain gods, or it's total coincidence that the last three times they've come to visit there has been an extreme meteorological event.  Hmm... actually, that second seems believable as well.  Maybe they aren't gods.  Whatever the case, the weather kept us inside for most their trip (not that we would've done a whole lot, anyway).  But it was great to see them nonetheless.  I wish we didn't have this whole opposite coast thing going on.  The problem with this country is that it's too damn big.  If we were Danish, and we lived on opposite sides of the country, we could see each other all the time.  But in our bigass country the best we can do is twice a year, three times times tops.  Well, I suppose it could be worse.  We could be Russian.

Alright.  That's all I got tonight.  I woke up long before the break of dawn this morning.  I'm tired.

Until next time ...
  

*He literally poked him in the eye.  We let him touch the baby, and of all the types of touches in the world -- stroke, caress, pat, dab, daub, tap, rub -- he went with the eye-poke.  Baby was annoyed, but unharmed.

Entry 211: Classic Crocodile -- NYC, 2007

My folks are in town this weekend.  They arrived Wednesday and are here for a week.  It's been really nice, but it means I don't have much time for blogging.  For this reason, I'm going to do what radio programs do over holidays and run a "best of" entry from the past.  This is from way back -- March, 2007 -- back when I had my initial MySpace blog.  It's on the longish side (two parts), so if you don't read it all I won't be offended.  Every thing you read was written by 2007 DG, starting now ...

(This turned out to be a pretty long entry, so I've divided it up into two.)

Part I

I went to New York city this weekend.  It was fun, a lot of fun, actually.  T was attending some sort of Montessori conference there, so I went up to visit him and St and St's West Chester best friend, L.  It's such a huge city.  It works out nicely.  Each time I go I end up hanging out in a different part of town then I have before.  Last time I spent almost all my trip in Brooklyn, this time it was all in Manhattan.  We had an excellent, reasonably affordable hotel room right near Time Square (big props to St on that one, you're check is in the mail, by the way.)

The worst part about going to NYC is the 4 hour bus trips in each direction.  Although, when I'm tired, but not in a comfortable enough position to actually fall asleep, sometimes I can get myself into a state which I can best describe as trance-like.  I have my eyes shut, but I'm not asleep, I'm cognizant.  If I have music playing I can hear all the lyrics and remember which songs played, and I can't do that when I'm asleep.  I also don't feel rested when I return to full consciousness, but I don't get bored or antsy in this state, and time goes by really quickly.  I can't do it all the time, but it's great for travel when I can.  I was able to put myself in this state most of the way there and back, so the trips were tolerable.  Also the bus driver on the way back was pretty funny.  As we were leaving, he told some jokes one of which was mildly (very mildly) sexist, so then he said, "don't worry ladies.  I got something for you.  I always got something for the ladies."  And he busted out into some Neville Brothers-esque R&B singing.  He had a pretty good voice too.  It was hysterical.



[Not big on R & B, but this song is pretty damn good.]

The first night there we all had more than our fair share of drinks.  Before dinner we were wandering around Times Square giggling like school girls.  For some reason we ended up going into the M&M store where they sell a bunch of M&M and other Mars candy merchandise you'd have to pay me to take.  Seriously, they only way I'd spend $30 to buy a fuzzy M&M backpack is if it came with a $50 bill in it.  I do have to confess though, I waited in line to get my "color tested" by an M&M scan machine.  It's a beam of light that reads your mood and tells you which M&M color you are, and what this means.  (I was cream, by the way, which is fine by me as I've always loved that Price song.)  While waiting I turned to T and said, "well, this is just about the stupidest thing I've ever done."  The middle-aged, African-American lady waiting in front of me started laughing, then turned around, nudged me and said, "He-he... ain't that the truth!"

After the M&M store, we went to this Cuban restaurant that had excellent food, and a little live latino music, to boot.  Next up was a comedy club "Ha!" (a name which one of the comedians ripped, "It's like naming a restaurant, 'Mmm'").  I've been to a comedy club just like this on a previous trip to NYC (perhaps the same one), and I told T beforehand, "None of the comedians will be all that funny, but we'll all laugh and have a good time because we're there live, and they serve alcohol."  I was spot on.  Also, we were sitting in the front so I thought that we'd get made fun of a bunch, but we didn't really -- just a little bit.  Actually, T said something funny to one of the comedians.  He was asking about dogs and he asked T if he had any, and T said, "yes" and the comedian said, "what kind" and T said "mixed."  So the comdian said, "A mutt huh, what's it a mix of?"  And T said, "two other mutts."  I laughed pretty hard.  T's delivery was great, and he wasn't trying to be funny.  He was just being T, which was precisely why I thought it was so funny.  (All his friends reading this know what I'm talking about.)  After the show we went back to the hotel and T and I ate mixed nuts and watched St and L lay on the bed, occasionally spank one another, and converse in a language that's a mixture of hysterical giggling and nonsense.  It was pretty comical.  We then faded off while watching George Lopez do stand-up on HBO (funny how even in a city like New York where things go on 24-7 watching HBO still seems like a real treat).  He was pretty comical also.  I guess it was all around a comical evening.

Part II
The next morning I was not feeling terrific.  I suspect nobody was.  T managed to get up early for the conference.  St inadvertenly tricked me into getting up earlier than I usually do.  She was up reading the paper, and I groggily asked her what time it was while laying in bed.  She told me noon, then said, "just kinding it's about 9."  But I didn't hear the last part, so I was thinking, "wow, I slept in until noon.  I had better get a move on it."  So I got out of bed and hustled to take a shower and get dressed, lest I waste the day in NYC.  When I was all ready to go for the day I looked at the clock and it was 9:15.  I was really confused for a little while.

While T was at the conference St, L and I walked through Central Park.  It was a fabulous morning.  We climbed up this little rock and looked out over the park.  A bunch of people were out ice skating on this rink below us.  It was nice.  We walked up through Strawberry Fields, John Lennon's memorial site, to the Natural History Museum.  Living a 20 minute metro ride from the Smithsonians I've become spoiled and now have trouble paying for a ticket to a museum, but it was really cool.  St is way into animals in general, and L is way into sea creatures, so they were both loving it.  I'm way into football and Scrabble, but it was still enjoyable for me.  We had the typical big museum experience where you start out as if you're going to see everything, so you're just moseying through it, and then gradually you start to get hungry and tired.  You look at the map and realize you're only about a fourth of the way through all the exhibits, and think, "Shit.  We gotta speed this up."  You end up picking out the few exhibits that you really don't want to miss and bypassing most the other stuff.  My favorite part was this early man replication.  It's two monkey-people walking side-by-side, a male and a female, both anatomically correct, and it looks hilarious.  The best thing about it though is that the male has his arm around the female.  As if he just strolled up on her, and was like, "Hey baby, where's the fire?"  (Although that was probably a serious question back then.  "No, really, where's the fire?  I'm cold as Hell and gotta cook this beast I just killed.")  Two cave people looking like they're strolling down the lane on a first date with their junk flopping in the breeze -- not even the most serious of anthropologists could resist sniggering at that, at least a little.  Even Maraget Mead would've cracked a smile.

Upon leaving the museum, to our dismay, we realized that our beautiful day had turned into one that was blustery and quite cold.  We divided the unpleasant walk back to the hotel with lunch at this little Japanese restaurant.  The sushi was terrific.  Something about raw fish wrapped around rice, dipped into a sauce of soy and wasabi, really works for me.  I love it.  St and I were trying to show L how to eat with chopsticks.  She couldn't really get the hang of it and a few minutes later the waiter came over and gave her these "training chopsticks" he had made with a piece of folded paper and a rubber band.  It was pretty funny.  It worked too.  She ate with those for a while, but by the end she was so-so with the real ones.

Walking back from lunch we saw T on the street getting out of his conference for the day.  We met T's "boss" D at an Irish pub and had a few Guinni.  Then we just killed some time until dinner which was St's big event because we were going to a Vegan restaurant.  D's girlfriend recommended this place, and it was terrific.  I was amazed.  If engine technology progressed at the same rate as fake meat technology we'd all be getting 100 miles to the gallon.  I hadn't even heard of a veggy burger until I was in high school, and just ten years later at this place they have vegan meatloaf, chicken, shrimp, bacon, you name it.  And it's good.  And most of it tastes ridiculously like really meat.  In fact, in some ways I prefer it to real meat.  We got these buffalo wings that were super tasty, and you didn't have to eat around all the nasty gristle.  The only problem with the meal was we got too much food.  I was about to split.

After dinner we went to a few bars (one of which was named "The Slaughtered Lamb" not very fitting to follow a vegan restaurant -- it smelled like poo though, literally, so we didn't stay long), but everybody was pretty worn out.  I seriously would've been content to fall asleep immediately after dinner I was so tired.  We went back to the hotel and watched some Jackass while in bed.  I tried to get everybody to watch some porn, but nobody was down.  That's only half a joke.  St was flipping through channels and on 56 there was something risque and a woman said, "sometimes the men just want to lie and chat."  Now, in my apartment VH1 is channel 56, so in my tired state I was thinking it was VH1 in the hotel as well.  I said, "wait, go back to that."  So St flips back and this scantly-clad woman is cuddling with this naked man (you can't see any genitalia).  I had just read an article about "snuggle parties" where a bunch of adults get together to snuggle, and for some reason -- again I'll blame my tired state -- I'm thinking this is some sort of somewhat legitimate news story on snuggle parties, or the naked counterpart to snuggle parties.  I'm intrigued, so when St says, "I can't hang" and turns it again I protest, "no, wait, go back to that."  So she flips back to it.  Now it starts getting really graphic, and St is like, "DG, I'm changing it."  And I say, "no, wait a minute, I wanna see where this is going."  L chimes in, "I think it's pretty obvious."  Then things start happening that they can't show on VH1 and everything dawns on me.  Of course, it's not VH1, this is the soft porn channel at the hotel.  I've just been adamantly trying to get everybody to watch soft porn.  Now that's comical.

The next morning I wake up and ride the bus back.  The bus driven by the self-proclaimed, bus-driving comedian.

Entry 210: Enough

A wise (sailor)man once said, "Enough is enough, and enough is too much!"  I'm feeling that these days.  I'm talking about my son's penchant for putting himself in predicaments where the possibility for bodily harm is much too high for comfort.  His latest "injury" happened at his grandparents' in South Carolina, when he climbed into a half-filled clothes basket, tipped it over, and hit his head on the wall, giving himself a nice marble-sized knot above his right eyebrow.  S and I put ice on it (no small feat), it went away, and he didn't seem to be experiencing any ill-effects thereafter (our doctor friend who was visiting took a quick look at it and said it was fine).  But that's not really the point.  The point is, how are we supposed to get this kid through his toddler years without him killing himself?

I know most little kids are adventurous in this way.  Some would say little boys in particular.*  But I think Lil' S is exceptionally bad.  I don't remember my other friends and family with little boys having this much difficulty preventing their kids from maiming themselves.  Lil' S just wanders around looking for something he can get on or in.  As soon as he gets to an object -- table, chair, ottoman, clothes basket, gate, what have you -- one little leg goes up in the air to probe for a foothold.  If he finds one, he tries to use it, no matter how precarious it is.  And he's fast.  One moment he's on the floor playing with Legos; the next, he's climbed onto an air mattress and then onto a TV stand, and he's rocking the TV back and forth.  Kinda like this.

At first I thought it was cute, and I took some pride in the fact that my kid was so mobile at a young age, but now I just want him to chill a bit.  It's impossible to keep a set of eyes on him every waking second, and it feels like that's what we have to do now.  He really needs to develop some common sense or some "landing" coordination soon.  (And being that he's a male, the former is probably too much to hope for.)

He's also gotten really into slamming his toys, which is especially unfortunate if you happen to be in range of his slamming hand as I've been on a few occasions lately.  He nailed me on the head with an oversized Etch-a-Sketch a few days ago.  And then yesterday he cracked me on the nose with this little drum.  This one actually left a bruise and completely laid me out -- to the point I was writhing on the ground and howling in pain and S came running in to see what was going on.  This morning as I was watching The Ultimate Fighter finale, I had a new-found respect for the participants and the punishment they can withstand.  I got TKOed by a 20-lb. toddler, after all.  (To be fair, his toy drum is made of some pretty hard plastic and gravity was on his side**.) 

Anyway, we're back from the trip down south.  It was great.  The only downside is that we only got one night to spend with S's extended family.  Everybody came in Thursday, and we left Friday.  Initially we thought people were coming in Wednesday, but they waited until Thanksgiving Day to avoid some of the travel traffic.  Probably a smart move, although I feel like Thanksgiving traffic is creeping to the entire weekend.  Everybody knows that Wednesday and Sunday are awful travel days, so more and more people are traveling on the other days, causing them to get congested too.  We drove home yesterday and the last 90 miles was pretty much stop-and-go the entire way, and it was 2:00 pm on a Saturday. 

Travel always sucks, but it's worth it.  Hanging out with S's family is always nice.  She has two little cousins*** ages 4 and 9, who came up with their parents from Florida.  They're both super cute, and they always want to spend time and play with me, which makes me feel all warm inside.  I have good mojo with kids that age.  They're still young enough to think all my corny jokes and tricks (which are just my dad's old corny jokes and tricks -- "Hey, kids, watch me take my finger off!") are cool.  The older one is also into word and math games, and as you might know, those happen to be specialties of mine.  I played a lot of hangman this weekend.  The littler one just writes down whatever letters you say in a row -- that's her way of playing.  The older one can play a legit game, but occasionally there will be a stray empty space, or two spaces will somehow merge into one as the game goes on, and sometimes you might have to guess a letter a few times to get it to show up.  It's cute.    

After we left SC, we stopped in Cary, NC to visit our friends and also to break the drive home up into two legs instead of one.  (We flew down, and we're borrowing S's parents' car for a while, so we drove back.)  It was nice to see them.  They're a bit older than us, and they have two daughters, 13 and 11.  It's remarkable how much worse I am at interacting with kids of that age than little kids.  I think my kid mojo stops when the kids hit double digits.  I had nothing to say. ("So ... How do you like attending whatever school it is that you attend in whatever grade it is that you are currently in?")  When I did say something I got a confused look or a one-word answer in response.  And it's not like these girls are rude or antisocial or anything like that; on the contrary they're incredibly polite and sweet.  I just don't know how to relate to tweens -- especially female tweens.  (Judging by the posters on their bedroom walls I should've studied up some sort of band of boys called One Direction.)  Maybe I should work on this a little bit.  I'll start by putting out a request on social media: 36-year old man seeks girls between the ages of 10-15 to hang out with.  I can't think of anything that could go wrong with that plan.

Actually, the real issue, I do believe, is that kids that age -- even the nice ones -- don't want to hang out and converse with adults.  I certainly didn't.  I remember being 13 very well, more so than any other age from my childhood for some reason.  The year was 1990-1991. I was in middle school, 7th grade.  It was the last year of recess and the first year I wore deodorant.  Culturally, Vanilla Ice was waxing chumps like a candle and things were heating up in Iraq for the first time, leading to the now forgotten collaborative tribute song Voices that Care.



Because I got kicked out of band for sucking at the saxophone so badly, I was in choir, and we had to sing this song in front of the older junior high kids.  I really wanted to do the little Fresh Price rap solo, but our band teacher chose the only black kid in our class to do it instead, even though he a) didn't really want to do it, b) fucked it up every time, including during the performance.  If you listen, the Fresh Prince comes in during the lyric, "To make the wrong things right."  And he delivers the line, "Right or wrong, we're all praying you remain strong / That's why we're all here and singing along".  He times his initial 'right' so that it overlaps with the terminal 'right' in the previous line.  But the kid in my class would always wait until after the line before he started.  So instead of hearing one layered 'right' like in the actual song, the audience would hear "... wrong things right. [Brief pause] Right or wrong ... "  It drove me crazy, because I knew I could better.  I just never got the chance to prove it.

Anyway, seeing our friends was good.  They had a little party in honor of us coming to visit, which was fun, but in retrospect it didn't really make much sense.  For one thing, parties in a new environment aren't super great for the sleep schedules of 15-month olds.  For another, it's difficult to have a conversation with the hosts of a party, because they're busying hosting.  We were only in town one night, so we didn't get much chance to catch up properly.  In fact, the next morning one of our friends even said something like, "Yeah, I guess we forgot that parties aren't super fun for new parents."  But whatever.  Still a good time. 

So, I'm just about to wrap things up, but before I do, I just wanted to say that I successfully avoided shopping over the holiday weekend.  It wasn't hard, because I hate shopping and try to avoid it every weekend.  Thank you.  Thank you.

Until next time ...

* I would probably say this, unless I'm around certain friends who get really offended anytime you suggest that maybe, possibly, on the whole, there might be biological behavioral differences between little boys and little girls.  In which case I wouldn't say it, because it's not an argument I like having.

** 32 feet-per-second-per-second -- that's the acceleration of gravity.  Still remember that from freshman physics.  That's 9.8 m/s^2, if you prefer SI units.

*** They are her cousins once-removed if you want to get technical about it.

Entry 209: Brief Entry From Down South

It's vacation time for Crocodile DG.  Kinda.  The G & G clan is in South Carolina visiting the in-laws for a week, but I still have to work Monday and Tuesday next week.  Being able to work remotely is a double-edged sword.  On one hand, you can cut down drastically on mind-numbing commutes (my hour and a half round-tripper would drive me insane if I had to do it every weekday, or if podcasts weren't yet invented).  On the other hand, it means even when you're out of town, you still might be expected to be on the clock.  Although in this case, if not for the ability to work remotely, I would have to physically be in the office, so there wouldn't even be an "out of town" in the first place, so being expected to be on the clock while out of town wouldn't even be applicable.  Hmm ... I take it back.  Working remotely is actually a one-edged sword, and it's the edge that doesn't cut you.

It's a new tradition to come down this way for Thanksgiving, but usually we come down Wednesday or Thursday.  This week we did it early because we have to be in attendance tomorrow for a puja -- a Hindu prayer ceremony -- to bless my in-laws' new house.  I have no idea what this entails, other than I have to up at 9:00 a.m, dressed in Indian garb, and I've been assured that I'll be able to watch football in the afternoon.  I brought the iPad and I have the Sunday Ticket app installed, so if all goes well, I won't miss any action.  If all doesn't go well ... At least the Seahawks are on bye this week.

The fact that I have no idea what to expect for the puja isn't so much due to the fact that I'm ignorant of Hindu tradition (although that's certainly part of it); it's more that I never know what to expect with S's family.  I just go with the flow.  Go where they go, eat when they feed me, sleep where they say, and be happy.  That's how I roll.  Actually, it's usually really great and relaxing.  There's usually a lot of down time -- and there are plenty of people around willing and able to watch the little guy -- so I use it catch up on "fun reading", which I almost never have a chance to do anymore.  My book this time is Squared Circle: Life, Death, and Professional Wrestling by David Shoemaker (aka Grantland's "Masked Man").  It's fantastic so far.  I just read the chapter on the Von Erichs.  That is one fucked up family.

Until next time...

Entry 208: Publish or Perish

Update on the little guy.  He's doing fine, and his laceration is healing fairly well.  He doesn't even seem to notice it, honestly.  A few times I've seen him pick at the half-disintegrated sutures, but other than that, it's baby life as usual.  He's been really whiny lately, but that has nothing to do with his wound.  I don't know what it has to do with.  He'll seemingly be fine, and then he'll just start fussing, out of the blue, and putting his hands up in the universal kid "hold me" gesture.  If we don't do it, he'll come over and start tugging on our pants.  It's not just with me and S either; the daycare reports say things like, "Lil' S played on the slide and ate all his lunch.  Then he whined for a while."  Like I said, I'm not sure what's up with him.  It could be he's just a baby.  That's a perfectly acceptable answer to me.

I'm a bit worried that we're indulging him too much, because we almost always give in to his cries.  We've talked about being a little bit firmer with him, but it will have to wait a few weeks.  We're going to S's parents' in a week, so any progress we make will be instantly undone.  He's going to be doted on and then spoiled and then doted on some more.  Their nickname for him is the Kannada word for gold, if that tells you anything.  What Lil' S could really use is a little sibling to put him in his place.  Hopefully that's in the cards in the not too distant future.

 [Gold]

Now for an update on me.  I'm doing well, although it was a tough morning.  S and I woke up in one of those married-couple moods, where neither of you is doing anything wrong, but you're just annoyed with each other for some reason (perhaps sleep deprivation).  The mutual annoyance reached its peak on our way to a birthday party for our friends' three-year old.  It was at a park, but if the weather was bad, then it was going to be at their house.  Of course, just to mess with us, today was one of those days where the weather was kinda bad, but not really bad, so it wasn't clear which way they would go.  S thought it would be at their house -- and they just live two blocks from us -- so she said we should just walk there.  I said she should call them to find out where it was.  So she said I could call them if I was so concerned about it.  But I feel weird calling because they're more her friends than my friends -- I don't even have their numbers, and the evite wasn't even sent to me -- so we just walked to their house.

And of course they weren't there.  They were at the at the park, which we figured out because S called them.  I (perhaps foolishly) pointed out that that was exactly what I suggested in the first place.  S of course didn't appreciate this and came back at me with "you never want to do anything", meaning she's the one who does all the planning and coordinating and all that.  Normally this is a fair point, but not in this case, in my opinion, because these are people she was friends with before we met, and she's the one who got the evite and has their numbers and all that.

[Tracey Gold]

To make matters worse -- annoyance begets annoyance -- on the way to the park it was as if all the drivers on the road had conspired to drive me insane.  The worst was when we got to park.  The only parking spots available were on the curb, which wasn't a big deal because there was a huge open space that could fit four cars.  One guy is in front of me, and he pulls into the space, and instead of pulling all the way forward (or all the way back) he parks right in the middle of it.  So now instead of just sliding in behind him into a long gap, I actually have to parallel park in one of the two little gaps he's now created.  And he made it so that only three cars can fit now.  This is one of those things that's so irritating, because it's just ... Why?  Why would he do that?  He's either colossally inconsiderate or colossally oblivious.  I prefer to assume it's the former, because it better justifies my indignation.

So I was in a bit of a stew this morning, but things got better.  The party was fun, some friends came over afterwards for some beers, I sneaked in a catnap, took a walk, and in a minute S and I are going to watch a movie (The Way Way Back) which we almost never do.  Plus I came across this article about the degradation of modern science, which strangely made me feel good about my current career.

The article talks a lot about how one of the biggest problems with science is the publish or perish gauntlet that so many researchers face.  Researchers feel compelled to equivocate with their findings to make them sound more significant than they are.  And not enough people have the time or willingness to put in the legwork to call them out on this.  As a result you get a bunch of results that can't be replicated.  Fudging things to come out the way you want is the antithesis of science.  And that's basically what's going on on a large scale right now.  And I complete understand it, because I lived in that world for a several years (and I still moonlight in it when I can).  The academic publishing process is completely outdated and broken.  I have many thoughts on how to make it better, but those will have to wait for another post (or not, we will see how it goes).

[Robbie Gould*]

The reason the article made me feel good, in a weird way, about my career is because it confirms that I made the right "choice" to go into the private sector instead of academia.  I have to use quotes because academia more denied me, than I did it.  Over the course of two years I applied for at least 50 tenure-track professorships and got exactly two interviews.  One got canceled, because the position was eliminated; the other I turned down, because logistically I couldn't make the interview, and it was at the bottom of my list anyway.  Now, I'm sure I could've found an adjunct position at Palookaville City College and tried to work my way up; maybe by the time I was 40 I could've had a real gig.  Or I could've done what I did, which is take a position with a private company in a major metropolitan area for double the salary and half the stress.  It was a choice in name only.

Alright, that's it for this entry.  It's movie night!  (Smash cut to an hour later: S is sleeping on the sofa, and I'm working on a crossword puzzle with my earbuds in while a movie plays in the background.)

Until next time...

*Robbie Gould once got me a mention in the "Missed Connections" section of the local paper.  I was at a bar watching football, and I was shooting the breeze with a girl sitting next to me, and I made the (lame) joke "good as Gould" after Robbie Gould kicked a field goal.  The next week the owner of the bar, whom I know fairly well, showed me that she submitted a missed connection about me that referenced this joke and suggested we go out sometime.  I didn't follow up on it.  I think I was dating S at the time.  Also, she was a bit too, um ... Rubenesque for my taste.

Entry 207: Calamity

Rough one, this week.  Nothing too terrible, but a few distressing events went down.  I'll relay them in reverse chronological order.

We spent Friday night in the emergency room at the children's hospital.  Lil' S busted open the bridge of his nose and had to get it sutured.  I'm not exactly sure how it happen.  We were in the basement, and he was playing around in some empty cabinets.  I turned my back for a minute, heard a small thud, turned back around, and he was on his hands and knees in the cabinet with blood pouring out from between his eyes.  I grabbed a baby wipe and pressed it against the wound.  He hated this of course, so he started throwing a fit, trashing this way and that, causing blood to get everywhere and making it difficult to stop the bleeding.  I brought him upstairs; S saw what happened, and we basically pinned him down while S pressed her finger on the cut.  I ran and got the first aid kit, but there wasn't really anything in the first aid kit we could use.  The bleeding had stopped by the time I got back, and there was no band-aid that would fit properly.  Plus, he was just going to pull off anything we put on.  So we just gathered up our things, tossed him in his car seat, and headed to the ER. 

(In retrospect, it's pretty funny that when we got to car, we realized that neither of us actually knew the way to the hospital.  So we had one of those frantically-trying-to-pull-up-directions moments where both people are on their phone. "Should I search for children's hospital?  Is it actually called 'children's hospital' or it just a hospital for children?", "Oh ... Michigan Street? I thought it was Minnesota.", "Is that Michigan SW or SE?", "I don't know why ... it's just not loading on my map app ... oh, wait, OK, yeah, I think we're good."  I guess that's why it's good to have these things mapped out ahead of time.  Even if you have smartphones.)

Apparently Lil' S punched himself out from all the trashing, because he actually fell asleep in the car.  It made things much easier, as it meant S and I could exhale a bit.  It was pretty intense for a few minutes.  I knew the cut wasn't anything too severe, but that part of the body bleeds like crazy, and when you see blood flowing out of your kid's head like a spigot, it can get the adrenaline pumping.

[Pretty much what S and I went through.  Small cut between the eyes, heroin overdose, no big diff.  Actually this clip ends before my favorite part of the scene.  The stoner chick in the background taking a big rip off her bong.  I love that for some reason.  It's like she takes a break to watch the whole madness go down, and then when it ends -- right back to smoking weed.]

As you can probably imagine, the ER was a zoo.  If you know people who think Obamacare should be repealed, take them to the ER of D.C.'s Children's Hospital on a Friday night, and ask them if our current system should just carry on as is.  I would guess by looking at the kids and overhearing conversations that the majority of the people in there didn't have a problem that was appropriate for the ER.  But it's the only access to a doctor they have.  (And, by the way, for all the people claiming Obamacare is "redistributionist", who do they think is paying for these ER visits, now?)  I think Lil' S's wound put us as a middle priority case, but I'm not sure.  What I do know is that we waited for four hours before the doctor saw us.  It's funny how once you reach about hour two, you just start looking for people to blame, and you start thinking you're some sort of triage scheduler -- "We got here a half hour before those people!  A laceration should take precedent over a earache!  And why isn't that nursing dressing that kid's wound now, so when the other nurse is free he can see us.  And are these doctors doing their own paperwork?!  Don't they have orderlies for that?!"

Lil' S woke up about 20 minutes into our visit, so we had to entertain him for a long time.  It was like a bad airport experience, but worse because we rushed out the house and didn't have anything toys or anything for him -- we weren't prepared.  And we didn't even get cell service in the hospital (that's what we get for switching to the cheaper carrier, I guess), so we couldn't show him YouTube videos.  Also, he had a big nasty gash on his head.  It was rough.

Once they actually came in to fix him up, things went pretty smoothly.  They wrapped him up in a papoose, which is a board with thick straps connected to it.  It's like a cross between a straightjacket and a swaddle blanket.  Lil' S apparently thought it to be more like the latter, because he didn't really mind it.  He did however mind very much the anesthetic-filled needle being poked into his cut.  (S had to leave the room, at this point.)  He also didn't like having his wound cleansed with pressurized water.  The student* who was doing it "assured" me that he wasn't in any pain; it was just that, because water was getting in his eyes, he was experiencing the sensation of being drowned, like water boarding.  That's the actual comparison he used -- "water boarding".  Well, okay then.  It's nice to know my son is merely being tortured, not actually hurt.  But once all that prep work was done, he fell asleep again (it was about midnight, after all), and he snoozed the entire time while they put in his sutures.  He didn't really wake up until the next morning.

He's totally fine now.  If the cut wasn't in a visible area, you'd never even know it.  He hasn't given any indication he's in pain, and he hasn't been rubbing the area or anything like that.  There might be a small scar, but at his age, I'm guessing it will all but vanish as he gets older.  Plus, at the rate he's going, this isn't going to be the last one.  He's at that bad age where he's agile enough to get into trouble, but not agile (or sensible) enough to get out of it.  And we can't babyproof life.  The cabinets are locked now, but unless we raise him in a padded room like he's in a mental hospital, he's just going to find the next "cabinet".  I guess we just hope he doesn't do any permanent damage and chalk it up to boys will be boys ... Although that's probably not PC, now.  How about "kids will be kids"?  That sounds better.  Don't want to exclude all the little daredevil girls out there.

[A traditional Native American papoose.  Not quite what Lil' S was in, but you get the idea.]

Well, like usual with this blog, I set out to write about six things and got through one of them.  Here are the other calamitous events that went down this week, rapid fire.

• S and I each came down with some sort of weird stomach bug.  It was short lived, but nasty.  I spent Thursday night wrapped up in three layers of clothing and a blanket, with the heater on, and still had the chills.  The next day I couldn't eat and was pooping up chocolate soft serve all morning.  I had that unfortunate moment when you go to pass gas and realize it's not gas that just came out.  Thankfully I was working from home.
• The cleaning ladies put my soda stream bottles in the dishwasher, and now they're all warped and don't fit on the nozzle properly.  Very annoying.
• The cleaning ladies also set off the house alarm and the police came.  This one is completely on me, though.  I forgot they were coming and set the alarm.  I got a call from the security company mid-commute to work and had to turn around to straighten things out.  At least the officer was pretty cool.  He didn't seem mad or anything.  My problem was that I didn't set the "don't set the house alarm" alarm on my phone.  Yes, I need an alarm to tell me not to set an alarm.  Somehow I can remember how many RBI Alvin Davis had for the Mariners as a rookie, in 1984 (116), and I can remember the determinant of a 2 x 2 matrix (ad - bc), but I can't remember the cleaning ladies are coming on Tuesday.  This type of memory is very good in school, but -- when S is getting a call at work telling her our house alarm is going off -- not so good in marriage. 
• Lastly, lest you think everything is bad, a few good things did happen this week, as well.  For one, we hosted a nice birthday party today for S's good friend E.  It was supposed to be a surprise, but E put two and two together.  Still fun tho.  And I received word yesterday that I'm getting another crossword puzzle published in the New York Times.  This one is a themeless (my first themeless), so it will run either Friday or Saturday.  Not sure exactly when, yet.  Pretty stoked about it.

Alright.  That's it for now.  Until next time ...

*The student was named Michael Mullen, like the Navy admiral, and the presiding doctor's name was -- and I'm not making this up -- Doctor Doctor.  That's even more on the nose than my friend from Australia who's an applied mathematician named Dr. Engineer.  Before I met him, I corresponded with him, and he signed his emails Dr. F. Engineer -- F. being his first name.  I read it as Dr. F., Engineer, as if F. was his last name and Engineer his title.  So I kept referring to him as Dr. F., like he's a celebrity (Dr. Phil, Dr. Drew) or I'm a little kid at the dentist.

Entry 206: What to Make of the Slutification of Halloween

Something I started to notice about a decade ago -- the slutification of Halloween -- is now a full-on, well-known culture phenomenon.  Back when I was first attending Halloween parties as an adult, females mostly wore "normal" costumes -- something spooky or funny or clever.  Then gradually the "sexy" versions of all these costumes started popping up.  You started seeing less ugly, warty-nosed witches, and more Elvira, "Mistress of the Dark" type witches (only less '80s).  I, being a straight male of hoping-to-hook-up age, rather liked this new slutty Halloween, but I must admit, it might have gotten a bit out of hand, when at the last non-kid Halloween party I went to a girl showed up in just lingerie.  That was her entire costume.*

Having a one-year old, I imagine the days of celebrating Halloween in the presence of scantly-clad young women are mostly behind me.  In their lieu, I see a succession of things like Boo at the Zoo, trick-or-treating, and sitting on my couch watching sports, waiting for trick-or-treaters who never come, eating handfuls of candy, thinking to myself, "this isn't even very good", and then eating handfuls more (which is what I did last night).  But still, it's an interesting topic.  I've seen two broad camps emerge on this issue.  One is that the slutification of Halloween is an empowering thing, a let-your-freak-flag-fly type of deal that allows women the opportunity to let out their inner trollop** for a night without being judged -- the straight pride parade, as Dan Savage calls it.  The other is that it reinforces an unfair and damaging double-standard that women are expected to sex it up and wear skimpy clothing to attract men, while men aren't expected to do the same thing -- a "gender binary" illustrated pictorially in this article.
 
Personally, I'm more in the former camp.  And it's not only because I'm a straight male.  It's also because for things that don't directly and tangibly harm other people in a non-trivial way, I generally have a "who gives a shit" philosophy.  You have to go down pretty far on my triage schedule of societal problems before you get to grown women feeling compelled by social norms to dress in slutty Halloween costumes when men don't have this same compulsion.  Plus, you will see a lot of shirtless Tarzans and Hulk Hogans and whatnot out and about on Halloween.  I'm not claiming it's the same ratio, but they're out there.  Also, everybody makes a conscious decision to put on his or her own Halloween outfit.  If 95% of women want to go as the "sexy" whatever and show a bunch of skin, but only 20% of guys do, then that's just how things shake out.  You can blame it on societal norms (and I'm not denying they're a factor), but at some point, don't we have to assume adults in the U.S. in the 21st century can make up their own free minds when it comes to dressing themselves?

Anyway...

I really want to see this Gravity movie I've been hearing so much about.  Unfortunately going to the movies is a tall order these days.  And when I do get to go, it seems like nothing good is playing.  I've heard Gravity is really only worth it, if you watch it on the big screen in 3-D, so my window is limited.  S and I talked to a couple we're friends with who have a two-year old about swapping baby sitting duties.  Maybe it's time to put that into action.

I'm also slightly intrigued by Ender's Game.  It's a terrific book, and this is coming from somebody who doesn't really like sci-fi/fantasy all that much.  Here's a tell that it's not my genre; despite really enjoying Ender's Game, I have absolutely zero desire to continue the series or read anything else by its author Orson Scott Card, who, by the way, sounds like a bit of a nutjob.  I knew he wasn't really down with the whole gay thing, but there's much more to it than that, which I didn't know anything about, until I read this article by Rany Jazayerli. (He normally writes about baseball, which is how I found the article in the first place.)  In the article, Rany links to this correspondence between Card and himself about Islam and terrorism (Rany's Muslim; Card, Mormon) written in the aftermath of 9/11.  I found it pretty interesting.  And it's funny -- not in a ha-ha way, but in a really sad way -- that their correspondence was written over a decade ago, and yet Bill Maher was talking about this exact same problem on his podcast last week.  Ten years from now, I image we will all still be talking about it.  Because that's how it goes with religion.  When it comes to Islam or Christianity or Judaism or any other faith ... well, Jello Biafra put it best.   



Until next time ...

*To be "fair", she had angel wings, but they kept knocking things over, so she took them off.
**By the way, have you ever noticed how many synonyms there are for slut?  Ho, whore, strumpet, harlot, trollop, tramp, quean (Scrabble word), woman-of-ill-repute.  And that's just off the top of my head.  I'd like to have a "synonym off"someday between slut and pot.  I think pot wins, but slut could put up a good fight.

Entry 205: Boo At the Zoo

We took Lil' S to a Halloween event at the National Zoo last night -- Boo At the Zoo.  It was really fun.  You get a bag when you go in, and then there are a bunch of sponsored booths, with people giving out various goodies.  We went with two other couples who each have a kid between two and three, so Lil' S was the young 'un of the bunch.  He's right on the borderline for events like this.  He had fun, even though he doesn't really get the whole trick-or-treat concept yet.  I ate almost all his candy.  And by the way, my taste in candy could not be any different than it was as a kid.  I used to love Skittles and Mike & Ike and Starbust as a kid, and now I think it's pretty gross.  Might as well just eat spoonfuls of granulated sugar.  That's what it taste like to me.  In general, I don't really get candy as an adult.  If I'm going to eat something sweet and ingest those empty calories, I want it to be something good -- ice cream or pie (or ice cream and pie) -- that's what I want, not gelatinous corn syrup pellets.  I don't care what Marshawn Lynch has to say about the matter. 

But if I am going to eat Halloween candy, I want the mini Snickers bars.  At the Mars booth I used my, S's, and Lil' S's bags to get three of them.  Or so I thought.  They were actually Milky Ways, which I might enjoy, if not for the existence of Snickers.  Every time I eat a Milky Way, I just think to myself, "Where's the peanut?!"  I still ate 2.9 of them, though.  (I may not understand candy as an adult, but I definitely understand lack of willpower.)  I gave Lil' S a small piece of one, which he seemed to enjoy. 

He was dressed as Kermit the Frog, and he was just adorable.  The kids of the other couples were dressed as Curious George and a dog.  I took a really great picture of the three of them (well, it's great by kids standards -- one smile, one deadpan, and one not looking at the camera -- Lil' S is the smile, which is why I say it's great), which I will hopefully post to Facebook soon.  I forgot to ask the other parents if they're OK with having their kids' pics posted online.  Most people don't mind, but just in case.  I think it's good to ask even with adults.  The other day, a friend of mine took a picture of me at a bar making a stupid face, and then posted it on Facebook without telling me with some sort of caption implying that I was drinking heavily (which I wasn't, I was drinking moderately).  I don't care enough to actually say anything to her about it, but I did think it was slightly inconsiderate.  It's not like she put up a picture of us together hanging out.  It's just me being goofy.  What's the Facebook etiquette here?  I'm not really sure.

In other news, I watched a really interesting 30 for 30 documentary last night called Big Shot.  It's about this guy named John Spano who bought the New York Islanders in the mid-'90s for $165 million, despite the fact he had maybe a couple hundred thou to his name.  He conned everybody into thinking he was a billionaire and actually closed on a deal to buy the Islanders -- an NHL team was his for several months -- before shit hit the fan.  I love conman stories (see this post).  I realized that being a good con artist isn't about being a good liar; it's about picking the right things to lie about.  If you find lies that people want to believe, they will believe them no matter how outlandish they are (ahem... Fox News).  In the case of John Spano, everybody was desperate to find a new owner who would keep the team on Long Island.  When Spano came along and said that he would do that, it didn't matter what he said next, people were going to believe it.  Anyway, I don't want to spoil the film too much, in case you want to watch it, which you should.

[J. Spano]

In other, other news, the Obamacare website continues to a debacle.  Supposedly the plan is in place to fix it by the end of November.  We shall see.  The powers-that-be fucked this one up royally.  There's no two ways about it.  They bit off more than they could chew, and you can't do that with complex computer programs.  It sounds to me like it wasn't a time crunch that fucked them per se; it's more that the time crunch forced them to go about things in a way in which fucking things up royally was almost a guarantee.

I don't know anything about the code behind Obamacare specifically, but I do know about computer programming in general.  And the way you build complex programs is to build a bunch of small individually tested component modules, which are themselves composed of smaller modules, which are made of even smaller modules, etc.  It sounds like they didn't do a good job of this with Obamacare.  They tried to do everything in one fell swoop, which has predictably been a nightmare.

In my (admittedly ignorant) opinion, they should have built three separate modules: 1) The browser module, where the user shops for plans.  All the prices would be based off user input and insurance catalogs.  This module wouldn't link to any outside sites, so everything would be estimates and would be contingent on the user providing accurate data. 2) The verifier module, in which all the info from Step 1 would be verified by linking to the various agencies and a final price and plan would be determined. 3) The provider module, in which the plan in Step 2 would be sent to the healthcare provider and the transaction would be completed.  Initially, the modules would not be linked, so the user would have to bridge the gaps between the three steps himself or herself, nothing would be automatic.  (Like they'd get an electronic output form in Step 1 and then be responsible for submitting it online for Step 2.)  And the user might have to iterate back and forth a few times between steps to get it right.  It might be annoying, but then once they're all working independently, you could link them automatically, for one-stop shopping.  And if one module crashes you could isolate it quickly and put in temporary work-arounds just for that one module until you fix it.  It might be a grueling, user-unfriendly process at first.  But it'd get better, and look at the alternative.

As you can probably tell, I've spent too much time thinking and reading about this.  I've been having daydreams where I'm the guy who somehow single-handedly fixes Obamacare.  It's similar to the fantasy, where you're in attendance at the big football game, and the home team's last quarterback goes down with an injury, so the coach picks you out of the crowd to come in and lead the team to victory.  Only replace "football game" with "computer program" and "coach" with "president".  What?  When you spend a large portion of your day debugging software, these are the types of things you dream about.

[One of the best Homer clips ever!]

One last thing about Obamacare.  Mike Konczal has a good article about how the problems with it are precisely those that were needed to make it less "liberal" and thus more politically viable.  This is an excellent illustration of the broader plight of rational-thinking non-Republican these days.  You end up defending a lot of not very good ideas, because "not very good" is a huge step up from "nothing" or "completely terrible", which are the only alternatives Republicans are offering right now.  It all comes back to our two-party government monopoly.  It always does.

Until next time ...

Entry 204: Scattershot Thoughts

It's 8:00 p.m. on a Saturday, and S wants to watch an episode of Downton Abbey before she goes to sleep.  (And she has an early bedtime.  She might try to tell you it's because the kid, but she's gone to bed early as long as I've known her.  She's one of those head-hits-the-pillow types of sleepers too.  I am so jealous of those people.)  I've little time for a flowery intro or seamless segues, but I have some thoughts.  So let's get to it, bullet point style.

• I've found myself checking Facebook a lot more now than I used to.  I figured out it's because while watching the little guy, I only get breaks of 45 seconds or so, while he's preoccupied with other things.  Facebook is something I can check in under a minute.  One of my friends posted a link to this article ("7 Ways to Be Insufferable on Facebook"), which I thought was funny and mostly accurate.  One thing I do disagree with though is the open brag.  If it's not couched in an obviously fake self-effacing shell ("guess i have everybody at worked fooled.  i got the promotion!!"), and it's reserved for big life events that are actually accomplishments, I don't find it insufferable.  Everybody should be allowed to crow at bit.  
  
  One thought I had: Would Facebook be better if their was an anonymous "dislike" button?  Maybe with different types of dislike -- "trivial", "boring", "braggadocious", etc.?  As the author points out, almost all the reinforcement on Facebook is positive.  If there was a non-confrontational, easy way to indicate to somebody that their posts are stupid, would that be a good thing? 
  
• Speaking of watching the little guy.  He's so demanding right now.  He's at that age, where he's old enough to get into things he shouldn't, but he's not old enough to really understand reason or consequence (unfortunately for boys "that age" doesn't end until about 25).  And he's learned how to pout, to make things worse.  So it's just constant supervision and attention wherever we go.  And when you thwart one escapade, he just goes on to the next.  It's like if you surveyed a room and ranked all the things in it from least to most suitable for a child.  And then you brought Lil' S in, he'd just right down the list in order.  He'd start with the scissors that somebody forgot to put away and then move on from there.  If we're lucky, we can eventually get him down to just chewing on cell phone wires.  I'm really hoping Kid No. 2 (which is in our plans at some point) is a girl.  I don't care if it's a baseless, gender-normative stereotype, little girls are easier than little boys... until they're 14.
   
• I have an acquaintance who's really heavy, like gasping-for-air-walking-up-a-few-stairs heavy.  She's a really nice woman, and her hobby is baking.  This got me thinking about obese people.  On one hand, they are severely stigmatized by society.  Slender people (especially slender, good-looking people) just have it easier in many ways -- socially, romantically, logistically (think airplanes), etc.  But in another way, they aren't stigmatized enough.  I'm not trying to sound overly harsh, bear with me.  This woman bakes a lot and then partakes in her goodies, and nobody says anything to her or openly looks down on her for it.  Imagine if this was some other unhealthy activity, like drinking or smoking.  If somebody was an alcoholic and his hobby was brewing and drinking beer that wouldn't be okay with people, right?  Or if somebody had emphysema and loved to hand-roll and smoke cigarettes, they'd get a lot of dirty looks, wouldn't they?  But when it comes to being unhealthy with food it's just not the same.  We have it backward with really overweight people.  We should be much less judgmental with the social aspect and more judgmental with the health aspect.
  
• We had a handyman come over today to get estimates on some odd jobs.  Small stuff -- fixing sticky doors, tightening a shower knob, removing a wall-mounted TV that came with the house that we've never used -- all things that I could probably do, if I would take the time to learn how to do it (which would probably be easy, everything is on Youtube now).  But I won't.  I feel a bit guilty, like it's wasting money to pay for these things.  But on the other hand, you have to put some monetary value on your time.  Working full-time means my free time comes at a premium.  It also means I can afford to pay somebody to do odd jobs.  If I lost my job then I couldn't do this.  But then I'd have the cheap free time to do it.  It's a reverse catch-22.  At least that's how I justify it.
  
• The government shutdown is over.  What a colossal, idiotic, pointless embarrassment of a farce of a sham.  And it was entirely on the Republicans.  If, after all this, you come across somebody who still tries to feed you the both-sides-are-just-as-bad line, kick them in the nuts.  Or if it's a woman, tell her she has a really bizarre-looking asymmetrical head, stare at it for a few beats, shake your head in a puzzled manner, and walk away.  Trust me.  It will spoil her day.

 Until next time...

Entry 203: Strategy

So the government shutdown and the debt ceiling brinksmanship roll on.  It looked like a deal might be brokered last night, but it didn't happen.  Obama seems to be quite serious about his requirement of a "clean bill" before he engages in good faith* spending negotiations, and the Republicans seem quite serious about their requirement of getting something -- anything at all -- that doesn't make it look like they "lost" (even if they don't know what that is).  These two positions seem to be mutually exclusive, so ... here we are.

There's really nothing to like about the situation, but if you had to find a silver lining, it would be watching the Republicans completely bungle things over and over again.  What this whole foofaraw really hammers home is the unmitigated, collective delusion of the GOP (especially the Tea Party wing) -- the "Republican Bubble" as Bill Maher calls it -- an insulated little pocket that neither fact nor logic can penetrate.  The reason this is so obvious now is because the Reps' delusion is largely hurting themselves.  That's when you know it's legit.  By contrast, last year, for instance, when the GOP ignored reality (and basic statistics) and insisted that Mitt Romney was going to win the election, they weren't hurting themselves all that much, other than just looking stupid, which obviously they aren't too bothered by***.  This time it's been a different story.  They're getting the bulk of the blame.

And let's look at why they're getting most the blame, and what a masterful job they've done bungling everything.

For starters, they completely misjudged Obama's resoluteness on not allowing them to use a government shutdown or the debt ceiling as leverage in negotiations.  They thought he'd cave for some reason, and then they had no contingency plan for a graceful exit when he didn't.  This was especially absurd at the beginning when their demands were the defunding of Obamacare.  Could anything possibly be more delusional than thinking the POTUS is going to agree -- under any circumstances -- to wipe away his only signature piece of legislation, especially one that's been legitimize by all three branches of government?  (Well, maybe thinking the End Times are upon us, but that's more flat out nuts than it is delusional.)

And, by the way, herein lies the sweetest bit of, I'll say, irony, for lack of a better word.  The initial roll out of Obamacare has been the figurative train wreck its opponents said it would be.  The complexity of linking to all the various agencies that are needed to confirm all the appropriate qualifications has made the online exchanges incredibly glitchy, causing many people to not be able to use them.  This should be an incredibly embarrassing time for the White House. If the Reps had a modicum -- just the tiniest iota -- of realism in them, they would have known trying to defund Obamacare was a fruitless endeavor, and they could've used its calamitous beginning to their advantage in a major way.  Instead Obamacare's failings have been a relatively minor story, completely overshadowed by the Reps' decisions to shutter the government and get everybody in a lather over the debt ceiling.  Strategically they couldn't have given the Democrats a bigger PR gift.

Which brings me to my next example of delusion.  No matter what the polls say**, no matter how many elections they lose, no matter by how many votes, the Republicans always think they're the true voice of the American people.  Any notion to the contrary is deemed illegitimate in some way.  It's funny, isn't it, that a group who ostensibly prides itself on being the party of personal responsibility blames everybody else for its (and the nation's) failings -- the liberal media, moochers, immigrants, academics, gays, minorities, young people, single moms, Hollywood -- instead of pointing the finger where it really belongs.  The Reps would be wise to heed the message of a creepy dead pop singer.



But they won't.  And so their retreaded ideological war will continue -- a war they can't admit they're losing and that unfortunately we all get to be pawns in.  Maybe it will hurt them in the midterms next year, maybe it won't.  In the long run it probably hurts their brand, but that's the problem with the long run -- it's the long run.   I'd prefer things get settled by Thursday.

Until next time...

 *I love that this term always gets slapped in there when talking about negotiations, as if it actually means anything.  "I'll agree to negotiate, but only in normal faith."

**The "boomerang effect" discussed in the linked story is very applicable to me.  As anybody who has known me for at least the last six years knows, I was not an Obama fan in the early going.  Now, I'm a supporter, completely by contrast.  The craziness of the GOP has made me an Obama supporter.  This is another amazing gift the Reps have given the Dems.  Just look at Obamacare: the Reps somehow managed to turn a very conservative, free-market, for-profit healthcare system into a coalescing of liberal cause.

***One subtle thing I find hilarious about this clip is that, ignoring his "legitimate rape" comments, his position on abortion in rape cases is to punish the rapist.  How controversial!  And here all this time I thought the solution to the whole rape/abortion quagmire was to let rapists proceed with impunity.  Thanks Todd, for finding such a great and relevant solution.