Saturday, January 31, 2015

Entry 270: Not So Super Sunday

Tomorrow evening, the Seattle Seahawks, the football team I've rooted for since I was six, will play in the Super Bowl for the second consecutive season.  Don't worry football haters, this entry isn't really about football; I'm not going to be breaking down how the Seahawks cover-3 defense will attempt to contain Rob Gronkowski or anything like that.  I mention the Super Bowl only to say that, surprisingly, I'm not that excited about it.  I'm excited about it, but not that excited.

There are a few reasons for this.  For one, the Seahawks just won the Super Bowl last year.  It was the first time I ever witnessed one of "my" teams win a championship, so it felt like a once in a lifetime moment.  It's just not the same feeling this year.  It's still fun, but not the same.  It's like when you finish an all-time great TV show like, say, Breaking Bad, and then you try to plug the TV hole -- that void of emotional investment -- with a show like Homeland.  There's nothing wrong with Homeland -- it's a good show (except for the third season) -- but coming off Breaking Bad, it's a letdown.


[The end of a 1983 playoff game between the Seahawks and Dolphins.  This game marks the beginning of my adulation for the 'Hawks.  I didn't actually watch it, but I remember hearing that the Seahawks upset the Dolphins and the mighty Dan Marino.  It's the first football game I remember being conscious of.]

For another thing, logistically speaking, this Super Bowl comes at a bad time.  S leaves for Africa  tonight on a week-long work trip, so I'm in charge of the little man.  He's too young to watch an entire football game (he can't even make it through a minute and a half highlight without requesting we switch it to Super Why), so if I want to watch the Super Bowl in peace, I need to get him out of the house.  Thankfully, one of our friends said she'd take him for game (she has young kids and they play well together), so I'm planning to take him there and then go to a different friend's house for a Super Bowl party, which, I'm sure, sounds much better in theory than it will be in practice.  The two friends don't live near each other, so it's like an hour of extra driving (at least).  And then the game doesn't start until 6:30, so I'm looking at like a 10:30 pickup on a work night (I'm hoping for a blowout like last year so I can leave early).  So Lil' S's schedule is going to be all messed up, and we all know how important schedules are for little kids.  Oh, also it might snow tomorrow -- a nice little "bonus".



Then there are things that have nothing to do with football or Super Bowl parties or anything of the such that make it hard for me to get too excited about this game.  Like, it's fucking freezing here, and it's starting to wear me out.  Yesterday it was oppressively cold -- the type of cold where you step outside and that first blast of wind feels like somebody lashed your face with a cat o' nine tails.  People complain about the weather in the Sea-Tac region because it's overcast all the time, but at least going outside there doesn't cause physical agony; you get a Gortex jacket and go on your way.  Here you have to dress like you're on the planet Hoth just to take out the trash.  (The other day I got caught outside in a particular bad cold spell and had to wait it out inside a dead tauntaun.  It kept me warm, but it didn't smell too good.)  I also don't like the cold weather because it's causing a new fantastical fear for me: I keep having this recurring image of Lil' S getting locked outside of his daycare without his jacket and freezing to death before anybody notices he's gone.  It's absurd, I know, but so is randomly going into his bed while he's sleeping to make sure he's breathing, and I still do that even though he's two and a half years old.

[The open-belly tauntaun, one of the weirdest toys ever.  I had one.]

I also got some terrible news earlier this week that makes it hard to care about frivolities like football.  A member of my extended family has liver cancer -- a young guy too, younger than me.  He's got a wife and kids and ... it's just terrible.  I don't know too much about the diagnosis, other than he's looking to get a new liver and his brother is hopefully a suitable donor.

In other bad, but-not-as-bad news a mother of one of the kids at Lil' S's daycare got hit by an SUV while riding her bike with her daughter on the back.  Luckily, the only injuries were a broken wrist and a black eye for her and a sprained foot for her daughter.  (Well, these are lucky only if we condition on her getting hit in the first place, which obviously is an incredibly unlucky event.)  In fact, the main problem isn't one of injuries, but one of day-to-day life logistics.  This woman doesn't have much money nor a car nor a stroller, so her bike was her only form of transporting her daughter -- and now that's smashed.  Also, with a broken wrist, she can't carry her daughter very well, so just getting her to daycare or the doctor's office is extremely difficult.

This woman has a pretty interesting story.  Her parents died when she was really young, so she was raised her entire life in foster care, somewhere in Florida, I think.  She's pretty sharp, so she went to college, and now she works full-time and goes to law school part-time.  Somewhere along the line, she got married and had a kid, but her husband was abusive, so she left him.  (He is at least paying child support.)  Now she's up here, in her mid-twenties (and she looks ten-years younger than that), trying to juggle work, school, and motherhood, all by herself.  That's the kicker: She has no family or friends to help her out -- no real support network of any type.  Can you imagine?  Along with some other parents at the daycare, we've been helping her out a bit -- giving her rides, lending her a stroller, buying her some premade meals so she didn't have to worry about cooking, things like that -- but we can't be her family or her best friends.  That's not the type of thing you can just do.  It takes time to build those relationships.  And if you have them, cherish them, because not everybody is so lucky.  



OK, I guess that's all I have today.  No snow and a Seahawks victory -- that's what I'm hoping for this weekend.  They won't make all the far bigger ills in the world go away, but, at the very least, they will put a smile on the face of one middle-aged white man.

Until next time ...

Saturday, January 24, 2015

Entry 269: Some Thoughts

First off, since you are surely all wondering, let me just say, yes, my first week without the Adam Carolla Show was difficult, but I made it through.  I did it with the help of an old friend named Terry Gross.  I rediscovered Fresh Air, a show I used to listen to regularly "live" on the radio, back in the days of yore.  It's a solid show.  Sure, occasionally you have to skip past a review of a book you've never heard of, and sometimes you get Dave Davies filling in for Terry Gross (always a let down), but for the most part it's good listening.  Terry's recent interview with Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette on Boyhood was particular interesting.  I love that movie.  I get the main criticism -- nothing happens -- but that's part of its charm for me.  For the most part it's a completely mundane story, and yet somehow it kept me rapt the entire time.  That's tough to pull off, but Linklater does it.



So, I don't have anything big to talk about, so I'll just toss out a few things on my mind and call it a post.  Sound good?  Good.

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On Facebook, a video of a buffalo fighting a rhino is making the rounds.  I started to watch it, just because, and then after thirty seconds of some buffalo-on-rhino head-butting, I thought, "wait, why do I want to see animals getting hurt?" so I turned it off.  From the description, I ascertain the rhino won because it says something like, "buffalo chooses wrong animal to try take its anger out on!"  It's weird when we try to ascribe humanity to animals.  Because the buffalo (presumably) loses the fight and gets hurt, we want to frame things as if the buffalo is some sort of bully getting its comeuppance, instead of a dumb, confused beast fighting out of survival instinct.

You see this sometimes in nature videos, where they'll show the poor, innocent gazelle getting run down by the wolf, and everybody feels bad for the gazelle.  But that wolf is starving -- it's gotta eat!  Or they flip the script and show you an emaciated polar bear trying desperately to get at a baby walrus, and as the adult walruses fend it off, you think, "c'mon, you've got a whole litter, just give him one!"

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In general, what do you think the success rate is for stories or videos you open on Facebook?  20%?  10%?  Something around there.  It's low.  Sometimes I feel like putting up a post saying, "Hey Facebook friends, be more interesting!"  But that would probably just make me look like a dick.

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One thing that I do find interesting, in a very "something is wrong with society" sort of way is the whole kerfuffle with Tom Brady and his slightly deflated footballs.  I can't believe this is a top news story -- not a top sports story, a top news story in general.  Google "deflate-gate" and you get over 12 million hits, including links on the first page to ABC News, NBC News, Fox, and TMZ.  (Did you see what I did there with Fox?)   The term "Salman Saudi Arabia" returns fewer than 11 million Google hits.  Apparently we care more about the air pressure of footballs used in the first half of a 38-point blowout than we do about the succession of leaders of a country with which we have extremely complicated and important relations.

However, I'm glad deflate-gate is a big deal, because I find it funny.  For one thing, people are taking it SO seriously.  For another, it gives us non-New England football fans more fodder with which to troll Patriots fans -- and trolling Patriots fans is very enjoyable.  Don't get me wrong, the Patriots are legitimately shady -- I think part of the reason Bill Belichick is such an effective coach is because he's pathologically competitive and views rule-bending in a very amoral way -- but I don't think under-inflated footballs should crack anybody's top-50 of things about which they should give a fuck.

I'm mean, if you're interested in cheating in sports, you've got much better options:  Read about Rosie Ruiz or check out the 30 for 30 films Playing for the Mob and The Price of Gold.  I mean, let's not forget that just two decades ago, the husband of an Olympic figure skater and his buddy clubbed a rival figure skater in the knee a few weeks before the Olympics in an attempt to knock her out of the competition.  If we remember that, a football being two P.S.I. under regulations really doesn't seem so bad, does it?



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I heard my wife use the word "frauded" several times on the phone the other day while talking to a coworker, and I had to struggle to resist the urge to tell her that it's defrauded; frauded is not a word.  She does a lot of work with non-Americans, so I can only hope that whomever she was talking to that English is not their first language.

In her defense, de- is a very weird prefix in English.  It means to get rid of  -- debug, delouse, decamp, declaw, etc. -- except for when it means the exact opposite, like in defraud and debar and denude and so on.  It's an auto-antonym affix.

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I read an article in the New Yorker about the music service Spotify.  It's been in the news a bit lately because Taylor Swift pulled her entire catalog from it.  Apparently, she was willing to allow her music to be behind a paywall (Spotify has a free and a subscription service), but didn't want it to be streamed for free, because, she said, "In my opinion, the value of an album is, and will continue to be, based on the amount of heart and soul an artist has bled into a body of work".  Uh ... I have nothing against Taylor Swift, but give me a break.  This is pretentious superstar drivel.  The value of one's work, monetarily speaking, is determined much more by the market than it is by how much "heart and soul" one puts into it.  And if you want to get all artsy on us, then how about this, Ms. Swift, how about instead of paying you in money, your fans pay you back in appreciation?  That seems like a fair exchange: your heart and soul in making your art, your fans heart and soul in appreciating it.  From now on, you only play for applause, deal?

I hate when performers do shit like this and then try to play the artist card.  Taylor Swift pulled her catalog because she wants more control and more money, which is fine.  She's a big enough star to pull it off.  Just don't feed us some bullshit line about how much blood you put into your work.  Plus "artist" is a very generous way to describe Taylor Swift.  I've heard "Shake It Off"; it ain't exactly Beethoven's 5th.

I'm of three minds on streaming sites like Spotify.  They're good, neutral, and bad.  The good part is that they turned the music industry from one that was extremely consumer-unfriendly into one that is consumer-friendly.  It used to be that if you wanted to buy a song, you had to buy an entire album for $15 or buy the single (with five shitty dance mixes) for $7 -- and this was in 1993, those prices would be more like $25 and $12, today.  That's exorbitant.  Now you can buy single songs for $2 or get access to huge catalogs on-demand for "free" (i.e., for listening to a bunch of commercials) or for something like $10 a month.  That seems much more fair to the consumer.

The neutral part is that musicians bring in less money from direct music sales now than they used to.  I have no problem with people making a little money off their music; I have no problem with people making a lot of money off their music.  But I have no problem with people not making any money, as well.  There is no law that says if you put a lot of time and effort into something that people have to buy it.  (If there was, I'd be a billionaire off my crossword puzzles.)  Maybe you're just not that good, and it has nothing to do with the state of the music industry.  And if you're a musician and you don't like the streaming services, don't use them.  There are other ways you can monetize your wares.  You can sell music exclusively from your own website; you can "sell out" and license your work for commercials; or you can give your music away for free as a way to advertise for your live shows.  As I once heard Chuck D say when he came to talk at my alum mater Western Washington University, (I'm paraphrasing) "If you want to make money in music, come to WWU and play a show, if you're good, people will pay to see you."  And if people don't pay to see you, then maybe you should look into taking some actuarial exams or something like that.

The bad part is that these streaming sites are not transparent in their payments and are apparently very difficult to audit.  In every article I read about Spotify, they claim they pay the artists x amount and the artist say they receive y amount where y << x.  Something isn't right.  It's one thing if people don't want to pay for your art.  It's another if they do, but the money isn't going to you.  David Lowery, Cracker frontman (and apparently skilled mathematician), has been advocating fervently for years for more royalties from streaming sites.  (Although in the linked article he gives some tepid praise to Spotify because of their paywall option.  His issue is more with Pandora.)  I completely understand why this upsets artists -- if people are making money off of your art and you aren't getting much of the cut, then that's obviously not right.  But this seems more like a general corporate-greed problem than it is a music-streaming problem.

And with that, it seems appropriate to end this entry with an embedded YouTube clip of Cracker's Teen Angst.  Don't worry Mr. Lowery, I'm certainly not making any money off of this.



Until next time ...

Saturday, January 17, 2015

Entry 268: Podcasts

I started listening to podcasts about four years ago, and during that time, it's remarkable how reliant I've become on them.  Menial tasks are just so much more boring without them.  It's a wonder I didn't die of tedium pre-2010.  Every now and then I won't have a podcast chambered for my morning commute, and I'm forced to listen to the radio, and it's terrible.  The local NPR affiliate runs BBC News in the morning, so it's a lot of talk about the performance of the British pound or the government of David Camer-- zzz.  Or I can turn the dial to sports radio, which will probably be a commercial, and if it's not, I'll wish it was, because otherwise it's some yo-yo talking in soundbites and clichés, giving you his Subway Fresh Takes of the Week.  So I'm pretty reliant on podcasts.

But right now I'm having a difficult time with my new favorite medium.  I've made a very difficult and painful decision to unsubscribe to the Adam Carolla Show.  I'm a polyamorous podcast connoisseur, but ACS has been my main since the beginning.  But I feel it's time to move on.  Adam recently fired his newsgirl, Alison Rosen, which stirred up a bit of controversy (among the relatively few people who actually care, that is), and while I liked Alison that's not the reason I'm moving on.  The reason is because Adam's quick wit and ability to be off-the-cuff funny (he's still, hands down, the best in the business, in my opinion) can no longer overcome the negatives of the show -- the most pronounced of which is its repetitiveness.  It's the same stories, the same rants, and the same guest doing the same bits (Bung Lu Su is funny the first two or three times you hear it, not that first 50) over and over and over again.  I found myself listening out of habit, not necessarily because I was enjoying it.

[We had a good run guys.  Damn it!  We had a good run.]

Also there is Adam's politics, which I will admit played a factor.  He's a hardcore libertarian, and hardcore libertarians can get on my nerves very quickly.  For example, Adam holds a particular view that many libertarians share that drives me absolutely bonkers: that rich people are virtuous (or at least beneficial to society) simply for being rich.  That it's their taxes that pay for everything and that they're the ones keeping everybody employed.

I strenuously reject this notion, for one simple reason: If rich people weren't rich somebody else would be.  That's the part that is always missing from the libertarian/Randian view.  Any given rich person is a net zero to society because whatever services they provide: a) they're getting paid for handsomely, b) somebody else would do it if they didn't.  If you don't want to pay taxes, quit working.  I assure you society will replace you and get along just fine.  (On the flips side, if you want to find people who truly are beneficial to society, look to those who have the skills to be rich but are choosing instead to do jobs that aren't high-paying but important -- teacher, social worker, mentor, community organizer, etc.)

Now, if every rich person and every person will the skills to potentially be rich decided to quit working all at once, then that might be a problem.  But that's not going to happen anymore than every pizza company is going to quit making pizza.  It makes me laugh (in  a very cynical way) when people like Papa John "threaten" the country with less production (or higher prices) because of taxes or regulations.  Yes, that would temporarily hurt some of their employees.  But what would ultimately happen if Papa John's scaled back?  (Other than football fans might get a reprieve from those awful Peyton Manning commercials?)  Would their former employees never work again and pizza become a scarce commodity?  Or would Little Caesar's and your neighborhood joint get a bump in business?  I'm going to go with the latter.  It's called competition.  It's a tenet of capitalism.

That's another thing I don't understand.  Why is it that people like Adam Carolla (and presumably Papa John) extol the virtues of competition when it comes to tenured teachers or government workers or people like that, but they're blind to competition when it comes to the so-called job creators?  For thee, but not for me, apparently.  It's similar to something I've heard Ralph Nader say about outsourcing: If it's a necessary part of business, then let's take it all the way to the top; let's get a bunch of bilingual MBAs from China to work as CEOs for a fraction of the price.  Funny how this is never an option -- how it's never the executives that are the inefficiencies.  Why, it's almost as if it's a double standard.  It's no wonder Wall Street gets in a tizzy when Elizabeth Warren says to the average worker that the system is rigged against them: It means somebody smart is onto them.



Ah, yes, once again I've done that thing where I set out to write a paragraph on something and end up writing five on something completely different.  Oh well.

Anyway, the point is, now I need a new number one podcast.  I've got plenty of recommendations, and I've been casually dating a few, but it's hard to get back into something serious when you're so fresh off a breakup.  I put in so many years and got so comfortable with ACS, that it's going to take time to find a suitable replacement (and maybe I never will).  I mean, I love This American Life, but it's only a weekly show -- and not even weekly because they often play reruns.  I need something more steady.  (Although this week's episode on echolocation is unbelievable -- and I mean that almost literally.  I could barely believing it.)

The same goes for Bill Maher's show Real Time -- not steady enough.  Plus, I'm not completely on-board with Maher.  He's a "yeah, yeah, yeah, wait ... what?" guy for me.  That's what I do when I listen to his show: "Religion is stupid and dangerous!" yeah!;  "Inequality is a drag on our economy!" yeah!; "We need to stop climate change!" yeah!; "Flu shots will give you Alzheimer's disease!" wait ... what?



Maher, of course, is best-known these days for his outspoken views on Islam, religion in general, but Islam specifically.  He recently came under fire for agreeing with a guest who called Islam "the motherlode of bad ideas."  Even more recently he doubled-down on this by going on Jimmy Kimmel Live and saying in reference to the Paris attacks:
I know most Muslim people would not have carried out an attack like this.  But here’s the important point: Hundreds of millions of them support an attack like this. They applaud an attack like this. What they say is, ‘We don’t approve of violence, but you know what? When you make fun of the Prophet, all bets are off.'
On this, I can see both sides.  Reza Aslan takes Maher to task for his (Maher's) conflation of Islamic problems with cultural problems (such as female genital mutilation in Central Africa).  And I'm mostly with Aslan on this.  But when it comes to Maher's claim that many Muslims tacitly support (or at least don't expressly disapprove of) an attack like the one in Paris, I don't know.  And I mean that not as a figure of speech -- I literally don't know.  I don't even know how one would go about knowing, short of polling a bunch Muslims.  And even that might not work because when it comes to sensitive topics like this people might not say what they really think.

At the very least, however, I don't Maher's comments are ridiculous, and I don't think they should be dismissed out of hand.  I mean, break down what he's actually saying and think about it.  First, "hundreds of millions" sounds like a huge number, but considering there are 1.6 billion (with a b) Muslims in the world hundreds of millions could mean 10%.  Second, many Muslims -- many religious people in general -- openly believe in Hell.  They believe there is a place -- a literal place that exists in some reality somewhere -- where non-believers spend eternity suffering for their infidelities.  If you actually believe this -- if you actually believe in eternal punishment -- then believing that plain old mortal death is an appropriate punishment for heresy is quite reasonable by comparison.  The point is, a lot of religions preach a lot of fucked up things; pointing this out doesn't make you the contemptible one, and it doesn't constitute hate speech either.

Nor is it racism.  It's basically the opposite of racism.  It's judging people specifically not on the color of their skin, but on their beliefs and behaviors -- which is how you should judge people.  And if you think, in the case of Maher, he's selectively targeting Islam because it's a (mostly) non-white religion, then you should hear his thoughts on Christianity.

With all that said, if I were Bill Maher I would not have gone on Jimmy Kimmel's show and said what he said.  It's not fact-based enough.  What's he basing his claims on?  It seems like he's just speculating.  And if you are going to go before the public and make unfavorable proclamations about a group of people -- especially one with a history of discrimination -- you need to come with something stronger than speculation.  Otherwise you run the risk of looking like a fool.  Just ask Larry Summers.

Alright, that's all I got.  I have to go try to find a new daily podcast to love.

Until next time ...

Saturday, January 10, 2015

Entry 267: Almost-Middle-Aged, Upper-Middle-Class Dad Problems

There are real problems in the world: In Paris, staff members of a satirical newspaper were killed by Muslim extremists for posting silly cartoons of the prophet Muhammad (among other offensive images); in Colorado Springs, some white nutjob detonated a homemade explosive devise outside a building housing an NAACP chapter; and right here in Washington D.C., the political party that now holds both branches of Congress is doubling down on their delusions of grandeur and their racism.*  



But I am not going to talk about these real problems.  It's not that I don't have thoughts on them; I do.  It's that I don't have a lot of free time, and I want to talk me -- about my problems.  After all, what's the point of keeping a blog with a readership barely in the double digits, if I don't get to talk about me?  Also, when it comes to the tragedy in Paris, at least, I don't want to get shot for saying the wrong thing.

My biggest problem, at the moment, is that I'm tired.  Lil' S has been wearing us out at night.  We got him off pacifiers, which is good.  But now we've just traded one problem for a more annoying one: He doesn't ever want to go to sleep.  As soon as you mention the word "bedtime", he starts whining.  And he's already mastered the art of the stall: "I need to wash my hands... I want more soap... I want a book... I want milk... I wanna different blanket... I want my panda... I want my Grover... I want socks... I don't want socks... I want the black pillow... I wanna sleep in the other bed... etc. ... etc."  And once we get through all that, if he's still not properly placated, there is always good old fashion tantrum-throwing.  Don't think my kid is above the tried-and-true meltdown.  

[I couldn't embed this clip, but it's relevant ... and funny.]

We are at the point now where we toss him his bed, lock his door, let him cry and scream for five minutes and then go up and try it again.  If we're lucky, by the second or third iteration he will actually stay in bed and fall asleep.  (And if we're extra lucky he will say some hilarious/cute things while throwing his fits: Open up this door, right now!)  But then he usually wakes up once or twice throughout the night, and we have to repeat the process.  To make matters worse he's been getting up for good way too early -- like 5:30 a.m. early.  He doesn't start daycare until 8:30, and I'm usually the one the who gets up with him, so not only am I super tired, but I also have to entertain him (or listen to him whine) for three hours.  Yes, he's only going to be a little kid for a relatively short period of time, so I should probably just enjoy the fact that we're together and that he actually likes having me around.  But it's difficult to have meaningful father-son time when my brain is still producing delta waves: Hey Lil' S, let's play the lie down on the sofa and cover your eyes with a blanket game.

Now, of course, in theory, I could be less sleep-deprived fairly easily, simply by going to bed earlier.  But that's another problem: I can't go to bed earlier.  I mean, I can, of course -- I can physically get into bed at anytime at want -- it's just that it's extremely difficult to actually fall asleep.  No matter how tired I am throughout the day, my body revs up at night, and I never feel like going to sleep before midnight (at the earliest).  If I get into bed any earlier, I'll usually just lay there and be frustrated.  And then even if I am able to fall asleep early for a few days, the first chance I get -- when I don't have to work in the morning or get up with the little guy -- I'll stay up late again and screw everything up.  

I'm not an insomniac, my body just wants to be on a later schedule, and it's hard to convince it otherwise.  I liken it losing weight.  Everybody can be in great shape, if they put in the work to do it.  It's really just exercise and eating right.  (Excluding the rare cases of people with glandular problems or some other medical conditions.)  But the unfair part is that it's different amounts of work for different people.  Some can keep the weight off just by walking to their cars every morning.  And then others have to -- as Will Ferrell once said about himself -- work-out constantly just to be slightly fat.  If you are in that latter group, you might decide that it's not worth the time and effort to be completely fit.  You might be happier being a bit chubby and spending your life doing something other than exercising and eating kale.  That's how I am with going to sleep early; I'm sure I could do it, if I absolutely had to, but it would be hard, and I wouldn't enjoy it.  I'd rather just be tired all the time ... and complain about it.



Anyway, let's move on to the next problem.  This one also revolves around Lil' S.  (It appears as if all my problems involve my kid somehow ... huh.)  Specifically it's his school.  He'll turn three this August, which means he qualifies for PK3, and, as I've come to discover, you are officially a terrible parent if you don't enroll your child in PK3, so we've been looking into this.  It's actually a somewhat complicated process.  Remember the good old days when you just took your kid to the school in your neighborhood and signed him or her up?  Well, apparently, those days weren't so good for a lot of kids, so here in DC we now have the charter school system.  There are a bunch of privately run schools, and you have to put your name in a lottery if you want to go to one.  (Since PK3 isn't legally required for children in DC, we even have to use the lottery for our local public school.)  This means you have to pick out the schools you like online, schedule open houses to see them, and then, if you like them, apply and hope your number gets picked.  It seems a bit much for a kid who still gets a little confused counting past 12, but it's the system we got.

It certainly doesn't help that S and I have wildly different ideas about what makes a school a good school.  Her main criterion is "What's it's rating?"; mine is "How much time is taking him there going to add to my morning commute?".  When you draw the Venn diagram of schools that she likes and schools that I like there is an intersection with only a few elements -- hopefully we get into one of them. 

In general, I'm not sure how I feel about charter schools.  The pro argument is that they given parents options and create competition, so that failing schools have to keep up.  The con argument is that they draw away the best students (those with parents who care enough to apply to the lotteries) from the public schools, thus making the already neglected public schools even worse.  My tentative feeling on them is that they are like Obamacare: better than nothing, but not better than an alternative, but that alternative isn't politically tenable because it is too easy to label it "socialist", and we as the American voting public immediately dismiss anything that can be labeled "socialist", even if it is a good idea, because we don't really think through the issues on which we vote.  If I were king this is how I would fix the school situation: I would enact a law in each state that the best funded public school in the state had to receive the exact same resources as the least funded.  That is, all schools get the exact same resources.  Yes, it would require people "pay" for other kids' schools through their taxes; yes, it would be redistributionist (you could even called it -- gasp -- socialist); yes, I think it would work.

Ok, that's all I got today.  Until next time...


*Note: This is mostly a joke.  I don't know if this Scalise guy is really a racist or not.  But I do "love" that if you raise concerns over him once convening with a white supremacist group, Republicans accuse you of "race baiting".  That's one thing I've noticed about many Republicans: when you bring up things that poke holes in their world view, their response is to give you a label (socialist, appeaser, unpatriotic, race-baiter, etc.) without further explanation of why, even if this is true, it automatically invalidates your point.  They rarely actually consider the content of what you say on its own merits.  And they almost never rethink their own views because of it.  It's ironic, isn't it, that the party that loves to talk about personal responsibility and accountability, loses their collective shit when somebody holds up a mirror.  Actually, it's not ironic, just hypocritical.

Saturday, January 3, 2015

Entry 266: Happy New Year! ... When Does Daycare Open Again?

The only problem with daycare is that sometimes it closes.

This has been a trying holiday week at the G & G household, and there are still a few days left.  It's weird that I can't wait to go back to work so that I can relax a little bit, but here we are.  Lil' S has been really difficult lately, and I'd much rather sit in a cubicle and debug computer code than listen to his incessant whining.  It's not his fault, of course; he's only two and still might be a bit sick.  It's not like he's purposefully driving us up the wall (it only feels that way), but up the wall we are driven, just the same.  (Plus, every so often, he does something super cute, and it's like, "aww ... how can we be annoyed now?"  He knows when to play the charm card.)

To make matters worse, S is still not feeling 100%, and that stomach bug I mentioned in my last entry finally got me.  It was awful.  I wasn't throwing up, but things were very loose on the other end.  It was my worst case of the runs since India.  The bad thing about diarrhea -- other than the fact it's incredibly uncomfortable and fucking disgusting -- is that it dehydrates you.  And what's more, in a cruel twist of irony, it often leaves you constipated when it's over.  It's like you are freezing in the icy tundra, and then somebody sets you on fire.  (Hey, that would make a good poem.)  You don't get better; you just get a different malady.  And that's what happened to me (constipation, not being set on fire).  I think it's finally over.  I said a nice big, solid puja this morning, if you get my drift.  But things were pretty backed up there for a few days.

Anyway ...

[2015!]

Happy New Year!  2015.  That's insanity.  My life went so slowly up until 1992, and since then it's been a blur.  I went from getting my first pube to going bald in a snap.  There are all sorts of factoids one can relay to demonstrate how fast time has been going (like that we are now in the "future" according to Back to the Future 2).  But here's a weird one that hit me the other day: The Breaking Bad finale was almost a year and a half ago.  I came to this realization looking through some old football highlights, as I remember it was on at the same time as a Seahawks-49ers Sunday Night Football game.  (Sports really are the ultimate time-keeper.)  I remember being bummed that I could only watch one of the game and the finale in real-time.  But then a lightning storm hit Seattle and they had to stop the game for about an hour, and it was almost perfectly in sync with the east coast airing of the finale.  (I don't think there is a God, but if there is, he was smiling on me that night.)  I watched Walt annihilate the Neo-Nazis and die in something resembling peace (spoiler alert!), and then without missing a beat I watched the 'Hawks destroy the Niners and take over the NFC West (another spoiler alert!).  It was a good night.  But in remembering it, the thing that strikes me the most is that it happened in September -- 2013!  A whole other football season ago, and it was at the beginning of the season!  It feels like six months ago tops.




Another, more personal, example of time passage, of course, is that Lil' S is almost two-and-a-half now.  Since becoming a parent, one thing I like to do is read stupid parenting articles that people post on Facebook, even though they annoy me.  Actually, I think it's precisely because they annoy me that I read them -- it's troll reading.  The latest one making the rounds is this one: It's the writer's response to a story about two parents handing out goody bags to the other passengers on a flight on which they brought their young child.  The author's point is that they shouldn't do this because "they’re part of a dangerous trend: People apologizing, or being made to feel they should apologize, for having children."  A lot of my Facebook friends have "liked" this article.  But I have a different take on it.  It's twofold: 1) I don't think there is such "trend", dangerous or otherwise, 2) Who gives a fuck?

On 1), I think there are far, far more people insisting they are not going to apologize for their kids than there are people demanding apologies.  In my experience, particularly on flights, people are very patient and understanding with kids as long as they see the parents are trying their best to minimize their child's disruption (which usually they are).  In my opinion, this "dangerous trend" is mostly in people's heads.  And, the key word, is feel: "feel they should apologize".  If you feel that way, maybe that's on you.

On 2), if people want to give out goody bags to other passengers, complete with a dumb note written from the perspective of a baby -- terrific -- I couldn't care less.  It's neither here nor there to me.  I would never take the time to do something like it, but it's a fine gesture.  As a parent who has flies somewhat frequently with a small child, I'm in no way offended.  And I don't feel pressure to do something similar, just like I don't feel pressure to bake something for my office every time a coworker brings in cookies.  If somebody wants to do something extra, then it's just that -- extra.  It doesn't have to be expected of everybody else.

Also, the tone of the article is really condescending.  The whole article has a vibe of "Silly new parents!  You'll learn!"  I hated the shit before I had a kid, and I still hate it now.  The truth of the matter -- and this isn't specific to the article -- is that we don't know what makes a good parent because we don't even know what a good parent is.  There is no defined objective.  What's the ultimate goal of parenting?  Is it to ensure your kid is happy?  Successful?  Knowledgeable?  Independent?  Fulfilled?  All of these?  What happens when these things are in conflict (certainly knowledge does not always lead to happiness), which one takes precedent?  And are these even the responsibilities of parents at all?

I've thought about all these questions before, and I've never been able to come up with anything close to satisfactory answers.  That's why when it comes to other people's parenting I say, don't neglect them, don't go Adrian Peterson on them, and try not to give them eating disorders.  Beyond that, it's pretty much let your parent freak flag fly.  Do whatever you want to do, even if that entails giving out stupid goody bags to airline passengers when they are babies.  Contrary to what the article says, it's not "wrong".  It's irrelevant.

And ... soapbox dismounted.

Until next time ...