Entry 231: Wife, Baby, and Me Minus Wife Plus Mother In-Law Makes Three

S is going to Africa for work for three weeks.  It's the first "long" trip she's had since the little guy was born.  She did go away another time, about a year ago, but the trip was shorter.  And for that trip, we sent Lil' S to South Carolina to stay with his grandparents.  We're not doing that this time for a variety of reasons.  First, there's the purely logistical issue of getting him to South Carolina; second, I don't want to be away from him for three weeks; third, he's not a baby anymore, but he's also not yet a "little boy".  He's at that tweener age where he's physically able to get himself into precarious positions, and he lacks the necessary sense to prevent himself from doing so (I think this phase will end right around 25).  And there is absolutely no reasoning with him.  He doesn't even get little kid logic yet.  We can't threaten to take his toys away or put him timeout or anything like that.  He's still too young for all this.  

As a result, taking care of him can be physically exhausting, and as much as I love my in-laws, physical strength is not their collective strong suit.  Now, I'm sure they could make do; they probably have that weird grandparent strength that's not really strength, but rather technique and experience that comes from raising two kids for 20 years.  (They're like the crafty basketball veterans who can no longer jump and are the slowest people on the court, yet still manage a nightly double-double from pure guile -- think Charles Barkley with the Rockets.)  But still it makes me a bit nervous; I'd rather be around to keep up with him and keep a close eye on him.

So, the little man couldn't go to his Ava, but she could come here -- which is exactly what she did on Wednesday.  My mother in-law is here and going to stay with us while S is away; my father in-law will join us for the last week.  We're currently still in the "warm-up stage" that occurs anytime a toddler meets a "new" adult -- he's a little standoffish -- but I think things will be cool in a few days.  It's simultaneously funny and sad how unintentionally cruel little kids are.  All his Ava wants -- the singular most important thing in her life right now -- is to win her grandson's affection, and he does nothing but dis her at every turn.  For instance, I put him on the sofa between us and started reading him a book, slowly trying to transition to his Ava reading it to him, and as soon the book got near her lap, he would rip it away, scream, "NO!", and put it on my lap.  Or she would hold out a toy for him, and he'd run over, take it from her, and then run away -- like I said, funny and sad.

I remember one of my nephews treated my mom like this for a while.  I guess it's just part of being around kids that age.  It's (obviously) nothing personal, but I image it still hurts a bit.  It wouldn't hurt me, but as my wife is fond of saying, I'm part robot.  The thing is, Lil' S used to spend a lot of time with his Ava -- she was out here for the first six months of his life -- so I think somewhere in the recesses of his brain he remembers her.  I can already see hims starting to get comfortable.  By next week, I bet everything will be completely cool.

In other news, I've started doing yoga.  I've been at it a couple months now.  I used to make fun of people (especially men) who did yoga because it always seemed like a wuss workout -- it was for people who couldn't handle real exercise like running and weight lifting.  But I was having a lot of problems with my back (an old issue), and I was having trouble finding the time to go to the gym and the weather was terrible, so I was looking for something I could do at home, and I heard former WWE wrestler "Diamond" Dallas Page hocking his "DDP Yoga".  It supposedly helped all these old wrestlers who whose bodies had been ravaged by years of mistreatment (apparently being hit repeatedly by a folding his not good for you), and it worked Arthur.  So I bought the videos, and gave it a shot.

It's been awesome so far.  My back feels a lot better now (still not 100%), and I can actually get a legit workout in my basement, which is pretty sweet.  The thing is, it's almost false advertising to call it yoga.  It incorporates some of the "traditional" yoga positions (e.g., down dog), but a lot of it is isometrics and calisthenics.  Although, I guess it's fair to call it yoga because that word has already been so bastardized that it's fair game to call just about any exercise in which you use a mat yoga.  Real yoga is a physical and spiritual practice founded in ancient India and mostly associated with Hinduism (when I told my mother in-law I was doing yoga she perked up for a moment before I told her it was fake yoga).  Devotees are called yogis, and they ply their discipline to try to achieve some sort of divine freedom called moksha.  It's a far cry from getting decked out in Lululemon gear and going to a studio to do a bunch of stretches led by a white woman from Takoma Park.  

Not that there's anything wrong with this.  But we should call it something different, otherwise it's misleading (and perhaps a bit insulting).  From now on, I'm not going to call what I do yoga -- I'm going to call it "fake yoga". Or how about just "exercise"?  Saying "I do yoga" is like saying "I take communion" because I sometimes eat bread and drink wine. 

Alright, that's all I got today. 

Until next time ...

Entry 230: Just the Facts, Ma'am

It's Good Friday.  This doesn't mean much to me, other than my Facebook feed gets inundated with prayers and Bible quotes that I don't fully understand.  I was thinking that being a non-believer and trying to follow religious mumbo jumbo must be similar to not liking sports and being in the company of a bunch of sports fans talking about sports.  You understand the basics and get bits of the terminology here and there, but overall you're not really sure what's going, and you'd just as soon change the subject.

For example, I don't really understand the story of Easter.  I think Jesus died on Good Friday and was resurrected on Sunday.  But I'm not sure exactly why Jesus died.  I've always heard that he "died for our sins".  But what does that mean?  How (Why?) does somebody die for somebody else's sins?  And who exactly killed him?  Were they in on the "die for our sins" deal?  And if Jesus didn't die, what would have happened to us and our sins?  I don't get it.  I'm sure I could find a website that would happily provide me all the answers to these questions.  But the truth it is, I don't really care.  Just like how a non-football fan couldn't less what a cover-3 defense is -- that's how I am with the story of Jesus.



Don't get me wrong, Jesus is just alright with me.  He had some pretty cool messages: take care of the sick and poor, love thy neighbor, and whatnot.  I just don't believe there was ever a man who was also the son of God who physically walked among us on this Earth.  Frankly, I don't know how any grown person can believe it.  I can kinda sorta get on board with religion if it's completely in the abstract.  But once literal interpretation of fantastical scripture is involved, I'm out.  And by the way, isn't it such a shame that Jesus lived 2,000 years ago, before the advent of things like movie cameras and tape recorders?  I mean that whole resurrection thing must have been quite a sight.  If only he had lived in today's age, somebody could have captured it on their cell phone and put it on YouTube.  Then everybody would've been a believer.  Like I said, it's a shame.

Anyway ... I think I need to take a break from Facebook.  I've found myself getting really annoyed with people's posts lately.  For one thing those fad "What ___ are you?" quizzes just need to die.  The thing about a fad is that eventually it goes out of fashion, but that "eventually" somehow hasn't arrived yet with these stupid quizzes.   For another, I have friends who are continually putting up posts that are just getting on my nerves -- some are political, some are medical, some are just completely vapid.  (I won't say anything more than that on the off chance one of them actually reads this blog.)  The thing is, I like all these people, and it's Facebook -- they can say whatever they want.  It's my problem that I'm annoyed.  So I think the solution is to just not look at it for a while.  It's a shame too because I like a lot of the posts I read on Facebook.  I suppose I could fiddle with the settings, but that just seems like more trouble than it's worth.  What I need is a single setting that says "Baby pictures, broad strokes of people's lives, and legitimately funny or interesting comments or links", and then anything that doesn't fit into one of those three categories gets filtered out.

In other news, Lil' S is doing just fine -- getting bigger as kids will do.  He's also been waking up really early recently, which is an unfortunate trend.  Today he woke up a 5:50, about an hour and a half earlier than I'd prefer.  Being that he woke up last night and started wailing right as I began to doze off around 12:30, and it took about twenty minutes to give him milk and calm him down, and then it took me about a half hour to get back to sleep, I'd reckon I got about 4.5 hours in.  Eh ... I'm used to it.  That's the thing about parenting: You get used to it, just like anything else.  When I wasn't a parent I used to be very suspicious of people who acted as if parenting was the most difficult undertaking in human history (so difficult only a billion people can do it!), but I didn't really have any grounds to stand on.  Now that I am a parent I can say -- it's not that hard.  It's not easy, but it's not the most difficult undertaking in human history.  I'm not a stay at home dad, but I'd rather be one than be, say, a lackey on a construction site like I was one summer in college.

Along these lines, I came across this video (on Facebook of course) and shook my head in annoyance.  For one thing, I saw the reveal coming three seconds in.  For another, I would be pissed if I sat down to do a job interview and got a righteous "lesson" on the difficulties of motherhood instead.  In general, it's pretty mean to interview (presumably) unemployed people for a job that doesn't exist.  If you're going to do it, the payoff had better be much better than this drivel.

So ... I noticed my trash bin somehow got swapped with my neighbors'.  All the bins have numbers, and I wrote down ours when we first got it.  Now I see the one with our number is in my neighbors' yard, and we have one with a different number.  I don't really care -- they're all the same.  But I wonder if we took theirs or they took ours, and if they notice/care.  I'm debating whether or not I should talk to them about it or just let it ride.  I think I'm going with the latter.  No harm, no foul.  (Know harm, know foul.)

Before I go, a few bits of good news to share.  The first is that I got another crossword puzzle accepted by the NY Times -- that's two on the docket.  The second is that I got fully reimbursed for all that work I had done on my hand (all to find out I possibly have arthritis that I will need to manage the rest of my life).  Apparently my work contributes to something called an HSA (health savings account), which is basically a cash account you can use on medical expenses.  I had roughly $2,000 in it, and I racked up a total bill of about $1,400 in copays and deductibles, so I scheduled a reimbursement check, and it came -- just like that.  I couldn't believe how easy it was.  It's kinda sad that I get so excited when things actually work as they should ... but here we are.

I felt stupid at first for not knowing how my HSA works earlier, as I could have used it on medication and a dental copay (relatively small amounts).  But then I thought, how should I have know about it?  It's not like managing HSAs is an innate human skill or I took a class on HSAs in college or anything.  Yes, at some point I'm sure I received paperwork on it.  But I don't always read that stuff, and when I do, it usually doesn't stick.  The truth of the matter is that we're so inundated with contracts and legalities in modern society that it is basically impossible to keep up with it all without a law degree (and I suspect even if you have one).  Just to buy a house alone S and I had to sign close to thirty documents.  There is no way for the average person to retain what it all means.  Toss is credit cards, car payments, health insurance, college saving accounts, etc., and there is no way for the average person to keep up with all of it.  Hell, you need to "sign" a several hundred word agreement just to buy a $1.99 song from iTunes.  It's ridiculous, and it's why I'm not going to feel stupid or beat myself for not knowing about something like an HSA right away.  And, damn it, you shouldn't either!

Alright, that'll do 'er.  Until next time...

Entry 229: House Cleaning

Alright, it's time for a little house cleaning.  I'm referring of course to my "Blog Topics List".  As I've mentioned before, I keep a list on my phone of topics that I might want to discuss on this site.  Inevitably, when the time comes to actually crank out an entry, I just talk about whatever happens to be on my mind at that particular moment and don't even get to anything on the list.  So it just grows and grows.  Well, no more.  I'm going through my list lightning-round style and hitting some of the topics.  Let's do it.

***
I "love" when movies, especially vapid comedies, use hackneyed plot devices that only ever happen in movies.  One I've noticed recently that is especially "nice" is the "impossible to explain" plot device, where a conflict is created due to a misunderstanding that in reality would have been cleared up in thirty seconds.  For instance, S and I (mainly S, I was just a bystander) were watching the end of some movie with Steve Carell, and in it some guy thinks that Carell's character is having an affair with his underage daughter because he finds a revealing letter written to her from him.  But it wasn't actually written by him, she has a crush on him and wrote it to herself from him without his knowing.  So the dad storms out of the house, drives across town, and starts a fight with Carell's character. His daughter tries to stop him, but of course the situation is just "impossible to explain".  And thus a "hilarious" fight ensues.  Now, in actuality somebody could blurt out "He didn't write it!  I wrote it to myself!" in approximately one second.  Maybe two, but certainly in the amount of time it would take somebody to find their keys, put on their shoes, and get out of the house.

Another example is the entire premise of Maid In Manhattan (again, S had it on).  If it was real life here's how the big reveal would go:

Snooty Woman: She's not classy!  She's the maid!    
Ralph Fiennes: What? You're the maid?
J-Lo: Yeah
Ralph Fiennes: All right ... We can still have sex, right?

OK, maybe he wouldn't say that last part, but he'd be thinking it.

[What? You're a maid?  Ewwww ... Get away from me.]

***
A lot of people complain about chatspeak -- "I mean, the kids today with all their LOL and OMG and BFF, I'd like to see it all DOA, amiright?"  But if you think about it, it's just initials and acronyms, which everybody of all ages use all the time.  Next time I hear somebody complain about chatspeak, I'm going to say, "Yeah, you know what else drives me crazy?  When people say DNA.  What, you don't have time to say deoxyribonucleic acid?  Laser, too.  It's light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation, people.  So lazy."    

***
I know somebody who looks a bit like Lena Dunham.  I was going to tell her this, but then I thought better of it -- what if she doesn't think Lena Dunham is attractive?  Then I thought telling somebody they look like somebody else is a weird thing.  Because if you tell them, and they get offended, you're not really dissing them, they're dissing the person you just compared them to.  Maybe this will be my new thing.  I'm going to go around and tell people they look like unattractive celebrities (I'll tell guys they look like Clint Howard and women they look like Elena Kagan), and then when they get offended, I'll say, "Geez, don't be so such a superficial ass".

   
***
We took Lil' S out to brunch with us the other day, and I realized the real reason parents with toddlers don't go anywhere except to specifically kid-oriented establishments.  It's not fun.

***
I came across this Onion article with the headline, "Find The Thing You're Most Passionate About, Then Do It On Nights And Weekends For The Rest Of Your Life".  It's (obviously) satire, but the thing is, I completely agree with it (maybe that's part of the joke).  There's this idea that the way to true fulfillment is to love your job, and then you can do what you want everyday.  But that's a fool's errand for all but the most fortunate people in this world.  The better strategy for the vast majority of us is to work a job that pays the bills, and then do what we want the rest of the time.  You can work and have hobbies.  As a prolific mathematician whose name I can't remember (Ron Graham?) once said when asked how he was able to get so much done, "What do you mean 'how'? You do know the average person is awake for 16 hours a day, right?"
   
***
Queen's "Another One Bites the Dust" came on my Pandora station the other night.  I tried to skip it, but I was out of skips from skipping so many other songs, so I listened to it.  And I realized something: It's a fucking great song.  Like really, truly great.  The bass is awesome, and Freddie Mercury just shreds it on vocals.  I never really got a chance to appreciate it because it had already been played into the ground by the time I became aware of it as something other than a song they play at sporting events.  The greatness had been overexposed right out of it.  Here are a few other legitimately excellent songs that society has ruined for me:

• "Seven Nation Army", The White Stripes
• "Losing My Religion", REM
• "Smells Like Teen Spirit", Nirvana
• "Bad Romance", Lady Gaga
• Anything off Dave Mathews' Under the Table and Dreaming

Until next time ...

Entry 228: Mr. Mom and the Rest of the 1980s

There are certain aspects of society in the '80s -- when I did most my growing -- that seem so out of date by today's standards that it's as if they happened, not a mere three decades ago, but in a different century.*  I'm not talking about profound things like how we have a black president now (unimaginable back then) or gay rights or the explosion of computing power and the rise of the Internet and cell phones and all that.  I'm talking about small simple things.  Here are a few.

1.  Cars used to break down all the time.  It seems like throughout my childhood there was always some discussion among my parents over which car could actually be used and for what.  We once had a broken-down car sit in our driveway for, I dunno, five years?  Ten years?  It was a long time -- so long, the car literally grew vegetation.  I remember driving up to a Mariners game once and having my car (i.e., the car my parents let me drive) die in the Kingdome parking lot.  And my friends and I had to find a payphone in a not-so-great area of Seattle and call somebody to pick us up.  That sort of thing just doesn't really happen today.  Cars have somewhat quietly become super reliable.  There's almost no such thing as shitty car anymore.  It's kinda weird.

[My first car.  Not the actual car, but the same make and model.]

2.  Normal people could be shown smoking in movies and on TV.  I caught 30 seconds of Ghostbusters the other night and was reminded that they smoked cigarettes throughout the entire movie.  That would never happen today.  For some reason, smoking has ascended beyond the realm of bad habit and into something only Voldemort would do.*  The heroes of a Hollywood blockbuster would not smoke today.  TV is the same way.  You can have shows on prime-time network TV depicting murder and rape, but you won't see any protagonists with cigarettes in their mouths.

3.  Thai food wasn't a thing.  I don't think I had heard of Thai food until I was about 16.  Asking somebody if they wanted Thai food back then, would've been like asking somebody if they wanted Liechtensteinian food today.  If just wouldn't have made sense.  Among Asian cuisines, there was Chinese and sushi (if you were really fancy) that was it.

4.  The notion of men trying to care for children was hysterical.  This phenomenon was captured in at least two popular films: Mr. Mom and Three Men and a Lady.  The absurdity isn't so much that men are obviously bad at child-rearing (although that is absurd), it's that the mere act of being left alone with children turned men into complete retreads.  Tasks requiring nothing more than an IQ above the first percentile and basic motor skills were suddenly too much for otherwise capable men.  In actuality, diapers are pretty easy to put on, even if you've never done it before.  Likewise turning on a vacuum cleaning isn't something you need training in.  But for moviegoers in the '80s, it was enjoyable to watch everymen like Michael Keaton and Steve Guettenberg bungle these simple chores.  Or maybe it wasn't and people just didn't have anything better to do back then but watch bad movies.

The latter item is especially relevant to me right now because S is out of town for the second night in a row, so I've been on my own with the little guy.  I'm happy to report that I was able to give him a bath tonight without him escaping from the house and running around the yard naked.  He did me pretty wet though.  His baths used to consist of us dumping water on him from a bucket.  But now he's able to dump it on himself, and he's started wanting you to do whatever he's doing (like he'll try to feed me his food when he eats), so he dumped a cup of water on my knee.  Like a filled-to-the-brim cup of water.  But the joke's on him.  I wanted to put those pants in the wash anyway.

S is coming back tomorrow, thankfully.  (Just because I can take care of him all by myself, doesn't mean I want to do it.)  She had to make a quick trip to South Carolina to return her parents car; we borrowed it for the winter.  The DMV started getting up our ass about having it parked on the street for an extended period of time without DC plates, and they will tow it or put a boot on it, so we had to get it out of here ASAP.  We wanted to store it at a friend's place with a driveway, but we realized that we don't actually have any friend with a driveway in the area.  (It's times like this I miss the suburbs.)  So S had to make the drive down south.

Actually, it's good practice, as in a month S is going to be leaving for three weeks to Africa for work.  That's when my childcare skills are really going to get tested.  Although, S's mom is going to come up to help me out, so that will be nice.  She's excellent help.  She always wants to watch him; she's a terrific cook; and she doesn't talk too much.  It's perfect.

Anyway ...

In other news -- sporting news -- I won my office March Madness pool for the second year in a row.  It's kind of a big deal.  They've been doing it for like 15 years, and people get really into it.  Each year the winner gets a little trophy with his or her name on it, and it's put on display above the copy machine so everybody can see it.  I'm the first person to win two years in a row.  That's mad respect, bro.

[U. Conn. was the team that helped my bracket the most.]

I don't even follow college basketball until the tournament.  But I've developed a simple ranking algorithm using Nate Silver's win probabilities, and I just use that every year.  My goal is to break the game by always winning.  I like the money (about $150), but really it's about the pride.  The pride of being the best at a game based on a game played by 19-year olds I don't know and have no connection to whatsoever.  It's awesome.

And with that.  Until next time ...

*Yes, I'm aware the 1980s were in a different century.  Don't get smart with me.  You know what I'm saying.

**I hope this reference makes sense.  I quit reading Harry Potter after the first book.  My thoughts on it can be summed up thus, "Yep, it's a story about a kid wizard alright."