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.