Entry 170: Rich Man, Poor Man, New York City

Adam Carolla has a bit called "Rich Man, Poor Man" where he talks about things that only those who are really rich or really poor have.  An outdoor shower is an example.  Either you have a palatial estate with an outdoor pool and spa or you're a hillbilly -- nobody in between has an outdoor shower.  The bit came to mind this weekend when I was hanging out in New York.  The Big Apple has a little "Rich Man, Poor Man" to it.  For me to enjoy living there I'd either have to be super rich -- able to afford what would be a normal, modest home somewhere else -- or I'd have to be a struggling 20s-something -- willing to live in a two bedroom apartment with two other people just for the adventure of it.  At this point in my life, I wouldn't want to live in the NYC.

Visiting, on the other hand, is always a blast.  The whole GG Crew (S, Lil' S, and I) went up Friday afternoon and came back Sunday evening.  I did an in-person draft for a 16-team fantasy baseball league I'm in, which isn't nerdy at all, and we visited some friends.  S knows too many people in New York, so when we make a weekend trip we have to confine ourselves to a single borough.  This time it was Brooklyn.

Because of space limitations, sleeping arrangements are always an issue whenever I visit NYC.  I've slept on a small patch of wooden floor (like 6 ft. by 6 ft. small) with two other dudes (worst night of sleep of my life), a twin bed with one other dude, a bunk bed that was over 10 ft. off the ground, a big chair, and countless sofas and air mattresses.  Air mattress are the most comfortable, but they usually take up the lion's share of the apartment, so it's like nobody can move from room to room while it's inflated, and you're putting your head by the TV and your feet by the stove.  You usually don't have much privacy.

On this trip we stayed with our friends K & B, and they have a (relatively) spacious two-bedroom apartment, so we got an air mattress in our own room.  But the air mattress had a leak.  Not a by-the-end-of-the-night you'll almost be sagging to the floor leak, but a this-thing-is-completely-useless leak.  K & B insisted that we take their bed, but I knew there was no way that was happening -- not with my deferential wife.  You can't out-Indian an Indian, after all.  So K & B slept in their bed, I slept on the sofa, and S and Lil S' made beds on the floor out of blankets and mats.  It worked out fine, actually.  The sofa was a little short, but when your NYC-standard is sleeping within inches of another grown man on a hard wood floor without padding, a little-too-short sofa feels pretty damn comfortable. 

[We were in Bedford and Red Hook]

The trip was fun, but I think we took a step backward in our ongoing struggle to get Lil' S to sleep through the night without excessive coddling.  We tried "cry it out" on Monday, and it was awful.  He woke up in the middle of the night and cried for at least 35 minutes* before we couldn't take it anymore, and S brought him into our bed, and I slept in the guest room.  For S it's more a matter of not being able to listen to her baby crying, for me it's more a matter of needing to sleep at some point so that I can actually function the next day (of course I don't like listening to him cry, but it doesn't effect me on the same visceral level as it does with S -- it's probably biology), but we both reach our thresholds after about a half hour.  I think we're done with "cry it out", at least the laissez-faire brand we've been experimenting with.  It's too stressful, and I'm not convinced it will work for Lil' S.  It could just be a lot of headache and lost sleep for nothing.  So, it's back to shifts for us -- I've got 7 p.m. to 1 a.m.

It's frustrating too, because everybody I talk to with an infant** tells me that their kid sleeps through the night, at least in six-hour chunks.  Man, if we can get Lil S' to go six straight hours, S and I are high-fiving like we're Maverick and Goose -- it's a real rarity.  But maybe those parents are lying.  I get the feeling sometimes talking to other parents that they're stretching the truth to make their child sound better, even about trivial things.  Eh... who knows?  

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

*I came up with this number because we started a timer after he'd been crying for at least five minutes, and we stopped when it got to a half hour.

**Now that I have an infant it seems like I know way more people that I used to who have an infant also.  Must be one of those now-you-notice-it things.

Entry 169: Everybody's Just Taking Their Best Guess

We've been trying "cry it out" with Lil' S to try to get him to sleep longer.  Results have been mixed so far.  He's slept well the past few nights, but only after 25 minutes of heart-wrenching, blood-curdling, hysterical crying.  And not just crying, but theatrics -- conniptions, rolling over, throttling the baby cam, etc. (he's not big, but he's squirmy -- he can throw a decent hissy fit).  It's tough to handle, and I'm saying this as a relatively emotionless male; for S, it's torture.  I just don't know if it's the right way to go or not.  I get the whole thing about trying to teach him to become more self-reliant and to learn how to go to sleep without being coddled and all that, but the other side of the issue is, he's seven months old.  Isn't it okay to baby your kid while they're still, you know, a baby?  I'm sure there will be plenty of time for harsh life lessons down the road.

The consensus advice from friends and family with kids is that cry it out is the way to go, but nobody really knows what they're talking about -- everybody's just taking their best guess.  I'm just not sure what that is at the moment. 

In other news, we started watching the show Girls (that was the tradeoff for getting S to watch Breaking Bad).  It's not bad -- pretty funny.  It's not what I expected.  I had heard a lot about it on the radio and such, and adjectives like "groundbreaking" and "controversial" were often tossed around, so I was surprised to find that it's mostly just a silly sitcom.  I think it's good, and well-written and all that, but I don't really get the hoopla and backlash.  It kinda sorta reminds me of Curb Your Enthusiasm in that the main character is always waltzing in and out of these awkward situations and conversations (and her neurosis is usually the joke), but it's much more reality-based than Curb, and it's told through the eyes of an early-20s, hipsterish girl, not of a middle-aged Jewish man.

In other other news, March Madness started today, and I'll be jiggered if I don't love me some March Madness.  Actually, I really only the love the first few rounds.  Once the field starts to get whittled down, I start to lose interest unless I have a chance to win a pool, which hasn't happened since Joakim Noah led the Florida Gators over Greg Oden's Ohio State Buckeyes.* I think the last championship game I watched was when Duke beat Butler three years ago.  The first weekend of March Madness, however, is one of the best sporting events there is.  It's, without question, the very best among sporting events that take advantage of inner city kids and use them as virtually free labor as part of a multimillion dollar industry.  Man, I cannot wait for the NCAA to collapse under the edifice of avarice, exploitation, and denial that it's created.  I think it's happening -- hopefully soon.

[The quality is bad, but the content is genius.]

Until next time...

*I nailed the bracket that year.  I called seven of the "elite eight" teams, and then called it perfectly from that round on.

Entry 168: Fantastical Fears

Feeling a bit better now.  I haven't been that sick in a long time.  I took a sick day Monday, the first sick day I've taken at my current job, and the first sick day I've taken at any job since 2006.  I don't take sick days very often.

Lil S' is doing better now too, and S is soldiering on as always, so, you know, as my high school wrestling coach used to say, "tough times don't last, tough people do".  Of course, he also used to like to tell us we "couldn't whip shit with an eggbeater", so it was a mixed bag with Coach R.

Lil S' had his six month checkup yesterday.  It all went fine, but he's really on the light side.  His length is above-average, but his weight is below the third percentile, down from his previous checkup when it was around the fifteenth.  It's nothing to be particularly concerned about, but try explaining that to my wife.  She's not happy about it.  So, we're trying to get him to eat more, but there's not a whole lot more we can do.  He's on solids now, so we're offering him more mush and carrots (which he seems to be enjoying), and we're putting more milk in his bottles, and S is still nursing him regularly, but it's the whole "you can lead a horse to water..." thing.  If he doesn't eat it; he doesn't eat it.  We're raising a kid here, not farming pate.  It's something to keep an eye on, I suppose, but I'm not sweating it; he is eating something, it's not like he's malnourished, and he's active, healthy (sniffles aside), and alert.  He's just light.  Some kids are.

Anyway, S being fearful about everything with our kid made me think about irrational fears, and then I started thinking about something beyond irrational fear -- something I call fantastical fear.  A fantastical fear is just what it sounds like -- a combination of fear and fantasy.  You aren't really worried about it happening, the same way you aren't really hoping a fantasy will happen, but it still compels you in some way.  I have a bunch of fantastical fears.  Here are five fantastical fears of bodily harm.

1.  Being kick by a horse.  I was bucked off a horse as a kid, suffering some slight bumps and bruises, but that's not the impetus of this fear.  It's a video I saw once in college of a guy getting kicked while he was branding a horse.  He just gets annihilated.  I mean, you take your chances when you press searing metal into the flesh of a 1,000-lb. beast, but still... Hey, I bet I can find that clip on youtube.  Yep.



2.  Getting superglue in my eye.  This one came to me in college as well.  I bought some superglue to glue my fake teeth back onto my retainer (yes, you read that right), and I noticed the bottle looked a lot like a Visine bottle.

3.  Swallowing glass.   This one dates back to childhood: December 22, 1985, to be exact.  My parents went out for a few hours, and I was by myself watching the Holiday Bowl (presumably there was a babysitter on the premise as well, perhaps my sister, I don't remember).  Future Seahawk Bobby Joe Edmonds scored a late touchdown to help the Arkansas Razorbacks defeat the Arizona State Sun Devils 18-17.  Excitedly I bit down on the champagne flute I was drinking sparkling cider from and cut my lip.  Worried that I'd get in trouble for breaking something, I put the shards of glass in the flute and put the flute back in the cupboard.  The perfect crime.  Except, when my parents came home, I cracked immediately and told them what I had done.  My dad explained to me that the broken flute wasn't a big deal, but that I was wrong to put it back in the cupboard because somebody could have used it and unknowingly swallowed the broken glass.

[Not as bad as being kicked by a horse, but still pretty brutal.]

4.  Getting my Adam's apple snipped with scissors.  Not stabbed, not sliced, snipped with scissors -- the standard blue plastic handle, office kind.  I have no idea where this one came from.    

5.  Drinking Drano.  Heathers?  Yeah, pretty sure this is from Heathers.  What a strange movie.  I can't remember if it's actually good or not, but I give it props for being something different.



Until next time...

Entry 167: Sickness and Sleep

Ugh... Came down with something awful yesterday and my condition has only worsened this morning.  I think it's a chest cold of some sort.  I have the symptoms of a typical cold -- sore throat, cough, cloudy-headedness, snot -- but when I cough, it's not a usual cough; it's that deep rib-rattling cough where you can hear the vibrations of the lungs*.   It feels like what I imagine a 70-year old who has been smoking since he was 12 feels when he coughs.  It sucks.

"Luckily" I think Lil' S gave it to me, as he's been sick the past week, so I probably won't pass it on to him.  Just to be safe, however, and to limit S's exposure, I've been asked to quarantine myself in the basement.  We actually have people coming over for brunch this afternoon (of all the days), but they're mainly S's friends and colleagues, so nobody will mind if I'm not there.  I certainly don't want to interact with anybody right now, and most people prefer not to hang out with the sick dude hacking up the joint.  No point in me becoming Patient Zero.  It's actually good that people are coming over as they can help entertain Lil' S for a while.  It'll take some of the burden off S.  She's already annoyed because I can't help out much today.  I understand.  I'm annoyed that I'm sick too, but there's not a lot I can do about it.  I bought some Tylenol Cold which I've been taking, but that just means I'll be sick and out $13.

When I'm sick I just want to sit on the sofa, feel sorry for myself, and watch mindless TV.  I'm fighting the urge to do that now.  It's just such a waste of time.  Even when I'm not feeling well there are better ways to spend my time.  Like blogging or reading or watching Russell Wilson diagnose the art of the deep ball on youtube.  (Alright, two of three ain't bad.)



Speaking of reading, I've gotten back into The New Yorker after a few weeks of letting unopened issues pile up virtually on my Kindle.  Reading a New Yorker article is a bit like going to the gym.  It's going to require some dedicated time and focus, so sometimes it's tough to get the motivation to start, but once you do it feels good.  Their long-form investigative journalism is really topnotch, and (not to sound too pretentious) it's something different and refreshing from the usual barrage of click-on-me-two-paragraph-Yahoo!-nothing stories in our current media culture.

I read two really good articles in the most recent issue.  The first was about sleep and what a mystery it still is to researchers.  Still nobody really knows what function it serves.  We know we need it, but we don't know why.  It's really weird.  As some dude name Allan Rechtschaffen said in the article, "If sleep doesn't serve an absolutely vital function, it is the greatest mistake evolution ever made."

The article also explores the question: Why, if sleep is so necessary, are we so bad at it?  Again nobody really knows, but there are some possible partial explanations.  One is that most people do it with somebody else.  Apparently study after study shows that people sleep much more soundly if they have the bed to themselves.  Another is that not everybody is meant to be on a typical 10 p.m. to 6 a.m sleep schedule, but we conduct our lives as if everybody is.  Not many people are farmers anymore, and yet we are all still on the farmer's schedule for some reason.

[Maybe puritanical '50s sitcoms had it right.]

My own personal experience is very consistent with these explanations.  It took me a really long time to get used to sharing a bed (and S and I still don't do it every night), and I've always been what the article calls an "owl" (the opposite of an owl is a "lark").  I'm always more well-rested if I can get into a groove going to bed at 2 or 3 in the morning and waking up at 10 and 11 in the morning, and that's a bit on the early side.  For a few years in grad school, when I was able to set my own schedule, I'd usually sleep from 5 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.  It was awesome; I've never felt better or been more productive than I was then.   

The only problem with this is that people assume you're on a "normal" schedule (understandably), so sometimes I'd have to meet with people in the morning, and nobody is sympathetic when you tell them that that's actually the equivalent of meeting in the middle of the night.  For some reason if you're on an owl's schedule people have a tendency to think you're lazy.  There's a bit of an early-to-bed-early-to-rise bias in our culture, even though late-to-bed-late-to-rise is essentially the same thing -- same amount of work, same amount of sleep, same amount leisure -- the clock just says something different.

Interestingly most teenagers are owls, which, according to the article, "is why high schools are filled with students who look (and act) like zombies."  (Apparently making the high-school start times later in a district in Minnesota led to a "flabbergasting" rise in SAT scores.)  The article also states that most infants are larks, which is unfortunate being that I have a infant son.  It's a lot like what Jules Winnfield says in Pulp Fiction about having a vegetarian girlfriend.  If you have an infant son who's a lark, that pretty much makes you a lark too.



Anyway, I wanted to touch on another article I read about Aaron Shwartz, the young computer whiz who killed himself before he was to be prosecuted for illegally downloading a large number of journal articles from a digital repository called JSTOR, which he accessed somewhat surreptitiously through MIT's computer network.  But this entry is already pretty long and I'm tapped out, so I'll talk about it another time... or not.   

Until next time...

*I'm using poetic license here.  I don't know if lungs actually vibrate or not.  I'm not a doctor.  Actually I am, I'm just not a real doctor.  The fact that my title is "Doctor" comes up approximately never in my day-to-day life.  I normally don't even use it when I'm filling out forms.  Once S used it when purchasing airplane tickets, and I asked her not to do this in the future, because I don't want anybody on the plane thinking I'd be useful in an emergency.  Unless of course the emergency involved finding the shortest route through a handful of stops, in which case, I'd be precisely the man to talk to.

Entry 166: Even George Burns Died Eventually

I miss George Burns.  Not for his comedy -- I always found it a bit outdated, which, considering he was born in the nineteenth century isn't much of a surprise -- but because he was the go-to guy for all jokes that required a really old person.  We need that old guy now.  We don't have anybody.  Well, I guess Joan Rivers is kinda playing that role these days, but, I dunno, she just doesn't work as well as George did.

George Burns died just a few months after his 100th birthday in 1996 (and just a few months prior to my high school graduation).  His real name was Nathan Birnbaum.  George Burns was a stage name he adopted in the '20s.  It says in Wikipedia he got the name from the two unrelated baseball stars of the time named George Burns.  Being a baseball history buff (i.e., a nerd) I had heard of both the big league George Burnses before, but never though they were connected to the showbiz George Burns.  I just chalked it up to a same-name coincidence -- like the '80s infielder named Jim Morrison -- but, turns out, it's not.

Anyway, the purpose of this post isn't to talk about George Burns.  I wanted to talk about this trending story of the independent living home in California that refused to administer CPR to an 87 year-old woman who collapsed and subsequently died, because it's not their policy.  A nurse at the home called 911, and the EMS operator told her to give the old woman CPR, but she refused.  EMTs arrived later but were unable to revive the woman.  The 911 call has been making the rounds, it's pretty hard to listen to, and a lot of people are understandably outraged.

I say "understandably" because I understand the outrage, but I don't feel it.  Am I the only one who thinks it's not that awful to follow a policy that says you don't resuscitate?  It sounds pretty terrible to us, but if you're housing really old people, they are going to have medical emergencies, and they are going to die.  You need to have logistical policies in place to deal with this unsavory truth.  If the residents (or their families) knowingly agree to these policies, then why the outrage?  To quote the article quoting a doctor:

"These are like apartments for seniors. You're basically living on your own. They may have some services provided by basic nursing staff, but it's not their responsibility to care for the individual," said Dr. Susan Leonard, a geriatrics expert at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Now, you can argue this isn't how people should operate -- it's inhuman to let somebody die in this manner.  To quote another quote from the article:

Independent living facilities "should not have a policy that says you can stand there and watch somebody die," said Pat McGinnis, founder of California Advocates for Nursing Home Reform, a consumer advocacy group. "How a nurse can do that is beyond comprehension."  

But it's not beyond comprehension.  And is watching somebody die necessarily a bad thing?  If nobody is watching you die it means you die alone.  Is that preferable?  Sure it is if you're going to die with somebody watching at 29, and die alone at 99, but at 87?  I don't know.  Not to be insensitive, but how much life did this woman who just collapsed have in her?  I mean, thinking back on my own family experience, I visited my grandma about a week before she passed, and when I saw her she was done.  Not complete senile, not completely immobile, not hooked up to a bunch of tubes -- but just done, done with life.  Now, I didn't actually watch her collapse and expire, but if I had, and I didn't try to "save" her, would it have been a tragedy?   My aunt lived with my grandma before she passed; she (my aunt) knew that one of these mornings she (my grandma) wasn't going wake up and nothing was really being done to prevent it.  This is pretty much tantamount to watching somebody die, and it's not a bad thing.

I know the situation with my grandma isn't exactly the same thing as the woman in the home.  The woman in the home didn't have her family around, and the nurse seemed much more interested in her own ass than in assisting a dying woman.  I'm not saying she's a good person who did a noble thing, and it's probably not what I would have done, I just don't get the national outrage is all.

Maybe I'm missing something and being a callous jerk, maybe this woman was going to live another happy/healthy decade if resuscitated (although at 87, having just collapsed, I doubt it), or maybe we, as a society, don't make a whole lot of sense when it comes to death.  And maybe this is completely understandable -- death is pretty fucking weird when you think about it.

Until next time...

Entry 165: Sequestration Retreadation

So the sequester -- a set of government spending cuts whose main effect will be slowing our already snail-like economic recovery -- became law yesterday.  These cuts were laid out by Congress during the "fiscal cliff" negotiations and were meant to be so distasteful to everybody involved that a long-term fiscal deal would have to be reached.  But our federal government, unsurprisingly, severely underestimated their own dysfunction, no deal was reached (I don't think one was even seriously negotiated), and here we are, doing the exact opposite of what we should be doing to tame unemployment and get ourselves moving again.

[Homer: What does "sequestered mean"?
Principal Skinner: If the jury is deadlocked, they're put up in a hotel so that they cant communicate with the outside world.
Homer: What does "deadlocked" mean?
Principal Skinner: It's when the jury cant agree on a verdict.
Homer: And "if"?
Principal Skinner: A conjunction meaning "in the event that" or "on condition of".
Homer: So "if" we get "deadlocked", we'll be "sequestered" at the Springfield Palace Hotel. Where we'll get a free room, free food, free swimming pool, free HBO. Ooh. Free Willy! ]

A lot of fingers are being pointed about who's to blame, even though the guilty party is obvious to anybody who cares to take an objective view on the issue: it's the Teabagging Republicans.  They absolutely will not entertain the idea of any new tax revenue (and they're so idiotically militant, they even consider closing loopholes tax increases), even if it's counterbalanced with cuts in entitlement spending, which Obama has repeatedly said can be on the table.  They want entitlement cuts for nothing, a position which is worse for Obama than the sequester (which doesn't hit the big three entitlement programs -- Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security), so it can be dismissed as a serious negotiating position out of hand.  You can't credibly negotiate with somebody by offering them something worse than what they will get if no deal goes down.

Basically a faction of Republicans made it clear that they wanted the sequester to happen, and they got their wish.  I think initially it was a small faction, but a lot of other Reps started to get behind it once they realized it was going to happen.  The GOP might be in a bit of disarray at the moment, but they can always come together when it comes to opposing something, anything at all, favored by our radical, leftist, socialist president (who, as it happens, would've fit in perfectly with the Eisenhower administration).

[Actually, I'd be fine with just showing the Republicans the door, for now.  Baby steps.]

Ezra Klein has a good article about how the sequester doesn't make any sense for the Republicans even when evaluated through the lens of Republican goals.  But Klein is implicitly assuming that Reps operate in something approximating a rational, pragmatic manner, which they've shown time and time again isn't the case.  I mean, with the sequester, they were essentially willing to concede cuts to defense -- traditionally a GOP sacred cow -- to protect tax loopholes for the super rich.  That's how radically anti-tax they've become, and this fanaticism, is, in my opinion, ultimately the main reason why Romney lost the election.  (It wasn't because Obama gave the electorate "gifts", and if the Reps really believe this it bodes well for Dems in future elections.) 

So the big question now is, where do things go from here?  Let's examine three possibilities.

1)  The public overwhelmingly sides with the Republicans, the economy stays recessed over the next four years, Obama and the Democrats get the blame causing a Ryan/Rubio ticket to win the presidency.  Under the new regime, government spending is cut drastically, the free market flourishes, and the job-creating great American heroes rain down their riches onto all of us.   

This seems extremely unlike to me because a) the public, by and large, seems to be putting a lot of the blame for the stagnant recovery and sequestration on the GOP (rightfully so), b) given the results of the last presidential election things would have to drastically change for a Republican to win the white house (Obama could've lost Ohio, Florida, and Virginia and still won, which is pretty damning for the GOP), c) the drastic cuts Ryan/Rubio would impose would only send us deeper into recession, you know, like what's happening in Europe.  The conservative economic worldview is being proven more and more wrong with each passing day.  They just can't admit it.

2)  The public sides overwhelmingly with the Democrats, they win big in the midterms, taking the House and a supermajority in the Senate.  With no opposition, they pass a massive stimulus package, unemployment drops to Clinton Era levels, and with the economy now strong, the debt accrued by stimulus spending is alleviated over the long run and the budget is balanced with a liberal mix of tax reform and cuts to wasteful spending.      

This seems nearly as unlikely as 1) because the Reps have too many strongholds to lose the House or become a superminority in the Senate.  Also, even if the Dems were able to pass anything and everything they wanted, let's face it, they probably would bungle things.  Democrats look good compared to the GOP, but compared to an objective baseline of competency, they aren't really that great.

3)  Everything pretty much stays the same: Dems in majority control, Reps maintain a strong minority.  They continue to the have the same fights over the same issues ad nauseum like the retreads they've become.

Bingo!



Alright, that's it for this entry.  Until next time...

[Update: Just noticed this article from Klein that is very relevant.  He's agreeing with the position of Jonathan Chait (the same position adopted in this post) that there is no "grand bargain" negotiation and probably won't ever be because the Reps don't want it.  They talk about a deal because they have to make their obstinateness look like a bipartisan failure (a false equivalence to which the "professional centrists" of the media are all too happy to oblige), but it's not.  It's 99.99% on the Republicans and our best hope at this point is that people start to recognize this and force the Reps to change their uber-moronic position on taxes the same way we've forced them to -- kinda, maybe, sorta, hopefully -- change their uber-moronic positions on gay marriage and immigration.]