S and I began 2016 the same way we finished 2015 -- by not getting enough sleep. These kids are really doing a number on us. We're holding our own, but every day is a new struggle. S gets it during the night; I get it during the day. Breaks are few and far between. And this is with S's mom here. I can't imagine how we'd function without her. S's dad is here, as well, but as I've mentioned before, he actually makes things a bit more difficult on us. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad he came for a visit, but he's not much help in the way of childcare, and we are one bed short when he comes to town. That's the worst of it. He takes Lil' S1's bed (S's mom prefers to sleep on the floor in the baby's room), which means Lil' S sleeps with S in our bed, and then I'm on the futon in the basement. It's bad for S because Lil' S1 tosses and turns so frequently that he's now almost impossible to co-sleep with (he also wakes up in the middle of the night and makes random requests -- "I want milk! I wanna watch something! I wanna go downstairs! I want my elephant!"), and it's bad for me because our futon sucks ass. What we really need to do is train Lil' S1 to sleep on a mat on the floor or on the carpet or something -- we did that type of thing all the time as kids -- but we aren't quite there yet. Hopefully we can do this before the next time people come to visit, because, as it is, neither S or I are getting enough sleep.
But we have been able to do some "normal" things the past few days, which is nice. We've been going to workout classes at our gym in the morning (one of the advantages of not sleeping as much, you are up and ready to go by the time the first class starts). They are total butt-kickers. I haven't exercised in a structured environment like that in a l-o-n-g time. I forgot how much more difficult it is than exercising on your own, because in a class you can't slack off or slow down without being left behind and looking foolish -- accountability matters.
Also, we went to a New Year's Eve party, and we both made it to midnight! It was a murder mystery party, but S and I RSVP'd so late that we didn't have characters, so we just showed up like "hey, we're the murder mystery crashers." It felt a little awkward at first, but quite quickly everybody got drunk and the pretense was forgotten except for a few moments in which the participants read their scripts. I wasn't really that into the story, but I did successfully guess the murderer. I could have won a prize, but on my card, instead of writing down who I really thought did it, I wrote "Adnan Syed." It's a pretty good joke, but as it turned out, instead of reading our cards, the hostess took a show of hands, so nobody even knew what anybody wrote. Don't worry though, during a particularly important moment I stopped the proceedings and said, "Wait! I have a question! Was there or was there not a payphone at the Best Buy?!" So I got in a Serial joke anyway (and everybody laughed).
Murder mystery parties are fun because it gives people a reason to dress up in goofy costumes and act silly, but in my experience the actual solving of a mystery part never really works. The plots are either incredibly hokey or way too convoluted. When I was studying in Hungary circa 2000, one of the other students wrote a murder mystery and threw a party, and that thing was harder to figure out than Memento. After a while I just gave up and started taking shots of tequila with whomever was around. I still remember the pain I was in the next day -- it was perhaps the worst hangover of my life, and I was young and resilient then, so I must have really over done it. I also remember my character -- Ricky Waves, ultahip MTV veejay (see, among math people, I'm often considered "cool"). I wore a gaudy orange shirt with a zipper in the middle that I unzipped to my navel and a fake gold chain around my neck. Two different girls told me I looked hot, and somewhere I still have a photo of one of them with her arm around me and her hand under my shirt on my chest, so it was a successful costume. Of course, I woke up the next morning alone on a random classmate's sofa with a giant pot next me with a note on it saying "VOMIT HERE," so the night as a whole was decidedly less successful.
It's weird that I remember that night in such detail, and I also vividly remember the next day. I slept until two in the afternoon, and then I staggered to the gym thinking I could "sweat off" my hangover. But instead I could hardly move, and I strained my neck, somewhat severely, taking off my shirt. I then went to this little Italian place and ate a pizza and tiramisu. After that I dragged myself to an Internet cafe and read recaps of the week's NFL games and checked my email. (It's weird to think that I used to only check it once a week.) My friend emailed me a story about how her brother got lost going for a drunken walk in the snow in the foothills of Mount Baker, and they didn't find him until the next morning. Apparently there was some sort of squabble that he took very personally, and he stormed off in a huff. Once he realized he was lost and it was too dark to find the way, he knocked on the door of a cabin, but nobody was there, so he wrapped himself up in some cushions on a porch bench and slept there for the night. He made his way to the main road the next morning where they found him.
I remember all this, and it didn't even happen to me. I just read about it in an email -- 15 years ago. Why I remember this, and yet I don't remember other more recent and more consequential events in which I was directly involved, who knows? (One good thing about keeping a blog is that a lot of these things are preserved. And many times I'll read an old entry, even one from just a few months ago, and think, "Oh, man, that's right! I totally forgot that happened.") That's just the way memory works for some reason, and so as a consequence that's just the way life works for some reason. After all your life is just the things you remember. That's not my saying. It's from a writer named Doug McGray; I heard it on a podcast. Here's the full quote:
But we have been able to do some "normal" things the past few days, which is nice. We've been going to workout classes at our gym in the morning (one of the advantages of not sleeping as much, you are up and ready to go by the time the first class starts). They are total butt-kickers. I haven't exercised in a structured environment like that in a l-o-n-g time. I forgot how much more difficult it is than exercising on your own, because in a class you can't slack off or slow down without being left behind and looking foolish -- accountability matters.
Also, we went to a New Year's Eve party, and we both made it to midnight! It was a murder mystery party, but S and I RSVP'd so late that we didn't have characters, so we just showed up like "hey, we're the murder mystery crashers." It felt a little awkward at first, but quite quickly everybody got drunk and the pretense was forgotten except for a few moments in which the participants read their scripts. I wasn't really that into the story, but I did successfully guess the murderer. I could have won a prize, but on my card, instead of writing down who I really thought did it, I wrote "Adnan Syed." It's a pretty good joke, but as it turned out, instead of reading our cards, the hostess took a show of hands, so nobody even knew what anybody wrote. Don't worry though, during a particularly important moment I stopped the proceedings and said, "Wait! I have a question! Was there or was there not a payphone at the Best Buy?!" So I got in a Serial joke anyway (and everybody laughed).
[At one point I also announced, "I know who did it! It was Professor Plum in the conservatory with the lead pipe." It also got laughs.]
Murder mystery parties are fun because it gives people a reason to dress up in goofy costumes and act silly, but in my experience the actual solving of a mystery part never really works. The plots are either incredibly hokey or way too convoluted. When I was studying in Hungary circa 2000, one of the other students wrote a murder mystery and threw a party, and that thing was harder to figure out than Memento. After a while I just gave up and started taking shots of tequila with whomever was around. I still remember the pain I was in the next day -- it was perhaps the worst hangover of my life, and I was young and resilient then, so I must have really over done it. I also remember my character -- Ricky Waves, ultahip MTV veejay (see, among math people, I'm often considered "cool"). I wore a gaudy orange shirt with a zipper in the middle that I unzipped to my navel and a fake gold chain around my neck. Two different girls told me I looked hot, and somewhere I still have a photo of one of them with her arm around me and her hand under my shirt on my chest, so it was a successful costume. Of course, I woke up the next morning alone on a random classmate's sofa with a giant pot next me with a note on it saying "VOMIT HERE," so the night as a whole was decidedly less successful.
It's weird that I remember that night in such detail, and I also vividly remember the next day. I slept until two in the afternoon, and then I staggered to the gym thinking I could "sweat off" my hangover. But instead I could hardly move, and I strained my neck, somewhat severely, taking off my shirt. I then went to this little Italian place and ate a pizza and tiramisu. After that I dragged myself to an Internet cafe and read recaps of the week's NFL games and checked my email. (It's weird to think that I used to only check it once a week.) My friend emailed me a story about how her brother got lost going for a drunken walk in the snow in the foothills of Mount Baker, and they didn't find him until the next morning. Apparently there was some sort of squabble that he took very personally, and he stormed off in a huff. Once he realized he was lost and it was too dark to find the way, he knocked on the door of a cabin, but nobody was there, so he wrapped himself up in some cushions on a porch bench and slept there for the night. He made his way to the main road the next morning where they found him.
[That little Italian place in Budapest whose name I've forgotten -- still the best tiramisu I've ever eaten.]
I remember all this, and it didn't even happen to me. I just read about it in an email -- 15 years ago. Why I remember this, and yet I don't remember other more recent and more consequential events in which I was directly involved, who knows? (One good thing about keeping a blog is that a lot of these things are preserved. And many times I'll read an old entry, even one from just a few months ago, and think, "Oh, man, that's right! I totally forgot that happened.") That's just the way memory works for some reason, and so as a consequence that's just the way life works for some reason. After all your life is just the things you remember. That's not my saying. It's from a writer named Doug McGray; I heard it on a podcast. Here's the full quote:
You life ends up being made up of the things you remember. You forget most of it, but the things you remember become your life. And if you can make something that someone remembers, then you're participating in their life. There's something really meaningful about that. It feels like something worth trying to do.It's a great quote, and a great quote to end on. Until next time...
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