Friday, June 24, 2016

Entry 338: Oops... I Forgot to Post Something Last Week

I'm back after an unintentional one-week hiatus.  Earlier this week -- Tuesday, maybe -- I thought to myself, "Hey, I forgot to write a blog entry last weekend."  The problem is that I often write on Saturday, and last Saturday I was busy from the time I woke up to the time I went to sleep.  We took the kids to an amusement park in Pennsylvania called Dutch Wonderland.  Then, when we got back, I hustled off to a friend's housewarming party.

Dutch Wonderland was pretty fun.  It's on the lower side of the amusement park scale (in every way except for the cost: $75 bucks a person -- oof!).  The rides are small and dingy and the attractions are kinda... meh.  But this is actually good when you have little kids, because it means they can do most the rides -- nothing does crazy loops or has huge drops or anything like that -- and it means the lines are manageable.  Plus little kids don't really care about shoddiness.  We went to an exhibit with big replicated dinosaurs, and Lil' S1 thought it was the greatest thing ever, even though the models looked kinda cheap.  Also they have a water park.  Lil' S1 went absolutely nuts in it.  I could barely keep up with him.

[I found this photo online.  Judging by the cars it must be at least 40 years old.]

The party was good also.  My friend A just bought a place in a neighborhood of D.C. called Eckington, which I had literally never heard of before Saturday.  She's a single, corporate attorney, with no kids, so you can imagine how different it was for me walking into her place from what I'm used to.  It was the first party I've been to that didn't have goody bags in, like... I don't even know how long.  In looking at how she lives, I thought to myself, "You know, I bet if I never had a family, I would still be pretty happy."  Don't get me wrong, nothing is more important to me than S and my boys, and I would be devastated if I lost them, but in an alternate reality, in which I decide not to go that route, I think I would still find my life rewarding and pleasurable -- just in a radically different way.

Is this a bad thing to think or to say out loud?  It feels taboo to write down such thoughts, but it's not a bad thing; it's a good thing.  I mean, look at the alternative.  What if, through bad luck, I just never met somebody I wanted to marry?  Or what if I did meet this person and she didn't want kids?  Or if I had defective sperm?  What if, for whatever reason, a family just never happened for me?  Should I just be miserable for my entire life?  That seems absolutely absurd.  So I'm standing by it: Going it alone would not (and was not) my first choice, but if it happened, I'd be just fine.  I'd be in better shape; I'd get more sleep; I'd go to the movies more; I'd play more Scrabble;and I'd travel more.  But, of course, I wouldn't have pictures like the ones below, so, you know...


[This is more the type of party I'm used to attending.  Lil' S1 is hanging back; he can't be too into it having previously declared that he hates princesses.]

And maybe it doesn't even matter anyway because the fate of everybody and everything in the universe was completely determined at the moment of the big bang.  Maybe we are all just bits of matter interacting in extremely complex ways.  But maybe it is a completely predictable system if there was someway to fully comprehend all the rules and all the input data.  Maybe I'm typing this right now, not because I'm making an active choice, but because all the particles in the universe have been interacting in a way that have led to this outcome and only this outcome.

It's something I've thinking about since I started reading A Brief History of Time. (I have since stopped reading it.  I can't hang with quantum theory.)  It might sound like "whoa, man, you're blowing my mind!" stoner blather, but I think there is actually something more profound there.  Think about it: If you, like me, believe that we are products of the physical universe, and not imbued with some sort of "otherworldliness" by a creator, then we should completely obey the laws of the physical universe.  This includes our minds.  So perhaps what we think of as free will is not actually free will, but particles in our brains interacting in a completely predetermine way to give us the illusion of free will (all our thoughts and actions would be completely predictable if we fully comprehended the totality of the universe).  I mean, if a "path" was started at the big bang -- why would humans have a special power that allows us to alter this path?  We don't think the sun can choose to alter its destiny.  A comet can't decide to streak in a different direction.  Why are humans different?  We certainly are self-aware in a way that a star or a comet (seemingly) is not, but that just means we understand the concept of free-will; it doesn't mean we have free will.  Human beings represent not even a speck in the known universe.  Isn't it the height of egoism to think that we have special agency in controlling the future that nothing else seems to have?

I don't know.  And it's difficult, because assuming we don't have free will has a whole raft of terrible implications.  For example, it means the holocaust was inevitable.  It also can be used to justify any terrible action by anybody.  If you think about it, a predetermined universe is the ultimate caste system: it means, in the most literal sense, that some people were born to be happy and some people were born to suffer, and there is nothing we can do about it.  This is highly unsatisfying, to say the least.

I guess this is one reason why people are religious.  Belief in a creator is a very convenient way to side-step this entire enigma: God created the universe and its laws; God created us; God gave us free will.  Bam!  Done.  But then if that's the case then who created God?  The Coast Guard?

[The famous "Pale Blue Dot" photograph of the Earth.]

Anyway...

In other news: Brexit!  That one really sneaked up on us, huh?  I listen to and read a lot of news, and I don't recall hearing much of anything about Brexit before this week.  Then it was like, "Oh, by the way, England is voting on Thursday about whether or not to leave the E.U., and it's, like, a huge fucking deal, so pay attention!"  I'm not going to pretend like I have any inkling about the ramifications this will have on us here in the U.S. (nobody really does), but I don't think it's a good thing.  It seems to have been driven largely by xenophobia and scapegoating "others," which is unfortunate.  A lot of people have made comparisons between the pro-Brexit movement and the rise of Donald Trump, and they seem apt to me.  In fact, Trump is in the U.K. right now, Tweeting about how great Brexit is.  Of course, he's in Scotland, which overwhelming voted to stay, but, hey, Trump has never been bother by major inconsistencies before -- why would he start now?

One thing I take solace in is that Trump is in a foreign country right now instead of running his presidential campaign here in the U.S.  As Jonathan Chait, has been continually pointing out, Trump's campaign has been a garbage fire thus far.  The bad news is that a garbage fire could still beat Hillary Clinton in a general election.  It is not likely, but it is not massively unlikely either.  The latest odds have Hillary at around 75%.  So if you take four pieces of paper and put them in a hat, one of them represents a Donald Trump presidency.  Scary thought, huh?

In other other news, my throat is still bothering me.  It doesn't even feel like it's getting better at all.  I went back to the ENT on Thursday, and he had another look inside, a longer look this time, and he just doesn't see anything out of the ordinary.  As I said before, this is both reassuring and troubling.  If it was a serious issue, presumably he would see signs of that, so in that way I'm glad everything looks good.  On the other hand something is wrong -- I'm experiencing the symptoms -- and it is very unsatisfying to be told, "sorry, I don't know what to do about it."  The newest "fix" is to take Prilosec for a month (acid reflux is a possible, though unlikely, cause) and hope it goes away.  That's it.  That's where I'm at: The Waiting Game.  And as everybody knows, The Waiting Game sucks.  It's much better to play Hungry, Hungry Hippos.

Until next time...

PS -- Can you find the two hidden The Simpsons references in this entry?  The answers can be found here and here.

Saturday, June 11, 2016

Entry 337: AC Is Fixed, Throat Isn't

Our AC is fixed, but my throat is still bothering me, and I can't figure out why.  The most likely cause is that some food scratched my esophagus on the way down causing a minor infection (an un-chewed bit of cashew is my primary suspect).  But I'm not sure.  I went to the doctor, and it went down exactly like I said it would in my last entry:
So basically I’m going to sit in traffic for an hour for a doctor to examine me for two minutes to refer me to an ENT, so that I can burn another afternoon, so that he or she can tell me everything is fine and it will go away in a few days.
The good thing about going to see an ENT, however, is that he prescribed me an anti-inflammatory, which might help (but might not), and he looked at my throat with this thin probe that goes into your nose and down your esophagus (it's very uncomfortable; it made me gag several times).  But he didn't see anything out of the ordinary.  On the one hand, this is very good: He didn't see any "growths or lesions," so esophageal cancer is a very unlikely culprit.  On the other hand, it's not so good: It is difficult to fix something, when you don't know what that something is.  Like I said, he prescribed me an anti-inflammatory, but I think he did that primarily just to make me feel like he was doing something.  His real recommendation was to just wait for it to go away.  Okay.  That's what I'll do.



In other news, we are sleep training Lil' S2, and Night 1 did not go well.  The downside of having S's mom here for so long is that she took care of the little guy too well.  She pampered him.  She rocked him to sleep every evening, and if he made the slightest peep during the night, she immediately picked him up and coddled him.  Now he expects that kind of treatment from us, and we're like, "Sorry, little dude.  We gotta work in the morning, so you gotta learn how to sleep through the night on your own."

We're doing the Ferber method, in which we let him cry in increasingly long intervals, before attending to him briefly.  The idea is to get him comfortable with us not being around, but not make him feel like we have completely abandoned him.  It's a tough balance.  Since we're on a formal regimen, we use a stopwatch, so we know exactly how long he cries before he goes to sleep.  S predicted it was going to be two hours, but she's constantly overly pessimistic about such.  I said it would be about ten minutes, under the notion that people don't realize how long ten minutes of straight baby-bawling actually feels like.  We were both way off.  It took 45 minutes -- three-quarters of an hour of uninterrupted, red-faced, snot-nosed, ear-piercing crying.  That is so brutal.  Although 45 minutes is technically closer to ten minutes than it is to two hours, I think S was right in spirit.  And as if that wasn't bad enough, he woke up and did it again at 4:00 a.m.  Ugh... I know it's short-term pain/long-term gain, but that's not a very comforting maxim when you are currently in the pain period.



Other than that things have been going pretty well.  I've been rocking the crossword puzzle scene -- another NYT puzzle ran yesterday, along with news that three more have been accepted -- so that's cool.  Lil' S1 is almost finished with his first year of school, which is also cool, other than the fact we have to go to a bunch of bullshit "graduation" events.  I'm typically not one to grouse like an old fogy about today's namby-pamby, "participation throphy" kids, but there a few things along these lines that I do find highly annoying.  One of them is the insistence on making every transition in their lives a special moment.  My son is going from PK3 to PK4.  Many people don't even know those grades exist.  He is literally just moving from one side of the classroom to the other.  We don't need to commemorate it as if he just graduated from the Starfleet Academy (a nugget for all you sci-fi nerds).

Another thing I find irritating -- and this is relevant because today we are going to our fourth of seven birthday parties in a two month -- are goody bags.  Nowadays it is expected that, as host of a birthday party, you provide goody bags for all the other kids as leave.  I don't think I had even heard of goody bags as a kid.  It is at the point where Lil' S1 started crying at the last birthday party we went to because I told him they didn't have goody bags.  As it turns out they did, so he got one after all, but what the hell?  Pizza and cake and jumping in an inflatable bouncy house with your friends isn't enough?  You also need to have a lollipop and a Ninja Turtle pencil for the ride home?  It's ridiculous.  If we have a party for our boys this summer, which we might, I'm laying down the law: No goody bags!  That law will quickly get overturned by S, who will simply buy the goody bags on her own, knowing full well that, ultimately, I'm not going to care enough to stop her.  But still, it will be laid down nonetheless.


Alright a few bullets before I go:

  • I, like almost everybody else in the country, was completely shocked and dismayed by the leniency of the punishment for that Stanford swimmer/rapist Brock Turner.*  As many have pointed out, the judge basically said, "Because of his privileged life, prison would be especially difficult on him, therefore I'm going to go easy on him."
  • Sometimes I think back on myself at the age, and I think it is fortunate that I never did anything unforgivably stupid, because I never expressly thought about consent -- it wasn't something I remember explicitly considering.  But then I read the account of what Turner did -- dragging an unconscious girl behind a dumpster, disrobing her, and penetrating her with his finger, likely with worse to come if he hadn't have been caught -- and I think, "oh, right, but I'm not a rapist and never was."  And then I profusely apologize to my 20-year-old self for deigning to entertaining such a heinous notion, even in the most hypothetical sense.
      
  • But I do have a point about consent: I didn't explicitly think about it back then, because it wasn't in the forefront of our minds as a society back then.  Like most boys I knew what consent was and I abided by it, even if I never really actively thought about it.  But that's not good enough.  It needs to something we explicitly address with boys as part of sex education (and girls too, but mainly boys), and I think we are trending in that direction.  Consent will be the main topic of one of the many uncomfortable conversations I do not look forward to having with my sons.
  • On a completely different note, Elizabeth Warren endorsed Hillary Clinton today.  This might be a big deal.  A lot of left-wing Hillary haters love Elizabeth Warren, so this could persuade a few more people to "hold their noses" and vote for Hillary.  Warren is a big "get" for Clinton.
  • The biggest one, of course, is Bernie Sanders.  I think he will eventually get behind Clinton, but who really knows?  I really, really, really hope he does.  A Donald Trump presidency is absolutely terrifying.  It seems like every election, we exaggerate the negative consequences of the hypothetical presidency of the candidate we don't like.  But in this case such prognostications of doom-and-gloom might actually be warranted.  This is absolutely not the time to get principled.  The lesser of two evils is absolutely the way to go this election.  And this is coming from somebody who supported Ralph Nader... in 2008.
  • I picked up Stephen Hawkins' A Brief History of Time on a whim and started reading it.  It's really good.  It's a mind fuck.  Here are three things that most mess with brain if I think about them for too long, in reverse order: (3) Relativity of time, (2) Infinity, (1) Death. 
And on that note, until next time...

*To be completely accurate, Turner was not convicted of rape because of legal technicalities.  But I think most non-lawyers would classify what he did as rape.

Friday, June 3, 2016

Entry 336: Life, Etc.

It’s been a bit of a crap week.  For starters, our AC unit is still on the fritz, so everybody is much more irritable than usual.  We have two window units, but they are in rooms in which we can’t spend too much time (the baby’s room and the attic) because we have to cook and use the bathroom and stuff, so for the most part we are slogging through the day with open windows and fans.  The bright side is that it has rarely jumped higher than the mid-80s; the not-so-bright side is that the mid-80s is still pretty warm, and S is particularly affected by the heat – and not in a good way.  It bothers me too, but not to the same extent.  It puts her in a very bad mood (well, that and the usual lack of sleep that comes with having small children, especially since her mom left on Wednesday), and when she’s in a bad mood, she tends, on occasion, to take it out on me, which of course makes me upset, so I push back, and the next thing we know, we’re only communicating through text and only about logistical stuff -- who’s going to pick up whom, who’s going to write the check for daycare, etc.  Fun times!

Our AC still being out-of-commission is a double kick-in-the-nuts because I waited for the guy to come all day yesterday – from 12:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.  He never showed.  S called the company like twenty times starting at 4:00 p.m. and never got through to anybody.  Then she tried to find other companies to service our unit, but the earliest anybody could come is Tuesday.  (We are somewhat limited in options by our insurance company, unless we want to pay hundreds of additional dollars out of pocket.)  The original company, the one that stiffed us, called us today and explained that they had a massive power outage yesterday, which shut-down all their computers and thus, in effect, their entire business as well.  Now they have a massive backlog of jobs, so the earliest they can come out is… Tuesday.  Ugh… S somehow bargained (pleaded? bribed? threatened?) for them to come out tomorrow, so that’s where we stand now.



But, of course, there is snag tomorrow as well.  I’m going to an all-day crossword puzzle tournament, so S will be home with both kids by herself, and Lil’ S1 has a birthday party to attend, which overlaps the time window (again 12:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.), so I’m not sure what she’s going to do.  I suggested hiring a babysitter for a few hours during the party.  That way she can leave the baby with the sitter and take Lil’ S1 to the party (which would be much, much easier on her), and somebody will always be home on the off-chance the AC guy shows up earlier than 4:59 p.m.  Barring another power outage, it will all work out, and it’s well worth the $40 or whatever it would cost to do this.

I gave serious thought to skipping the crossword puzzle tournament, but I would kinda be leaving a friend high and dry, whom I’m supposed to meet there, and also I really want to go.  I spent the last two weekends with Lil’ S1 pretty much 24-7, and I want to do something fun for me.  I think you have to prioritize your own needs sometimes.  If you don’t do that it’s actually counterproductive to your parenting/spousing, because you’re stressed out and resentful all the time, and it is extremely hard to be a good parent/spouse, if you’re stressed out and resentful all the time.  I think that actually happens to S quite a bit; she tries to do it all, and nobody can do it all.  It causes a disconnect because I’m not trying to do it all – I don’t care if our kids don’t get baths every day; I don’t care if they don’t have planned activities every weekend; I don’t care if Lil’ S1 barely touches his dinner; etc. – so vis-à-vis S, I probably look like a slacker sometimes.  (And that’s before we even get into the fact that she’s much more career-oriented than I am.)  But that’s not the case.  We just have different priorities, and one of mine is our own mental (and physical) health.

And speaking of physical health, that’s another thorn in my side at the moment.  My shoulder is starting to get better, very slowly, but at least it’s going.  So now a different annoyance has arisen out of the blue: my esophagus.  For the past four days, I feel like a piece of food is stuck in the back of my throat.  But I can’t get it out no matter how much water I drink, no matter how much hacking I do.  I feel like Larry David on Curb Your Enthusiasm when he swallowed the pubic hair.  (I’m pretty sure that’s not my issue.)  I have no idea what it is, and I did the stupidest thing anybody could ever do when they have an undiagnosed malady: I Googled the symptoms.  I know better than this.  I told myself, “Don’t Google it… Don’t Google it… Don’t Google it… Whatever you do, don’t Google it.”  But I Googled it.  And of course the first link is to a woman telling a tale about how she went to the doctor because it felt like something was stuck in her throat, and now she was waiting on test results to determine whether or not she has esophageal cancer.  WHY DID I DO THAT?!

[No! No! No! No! No!]

After reading it I felt like I had to see the doctor right away, so I made an appointment, and the only time available was 4:30 p.m. today (Friday), which is the absolute worst time of the week to be the on road here.  So basically I’m going to sit in traffic for an hour for a doctor to examine me for two minutes to refer me to an ENT, so that I can burn another afternoon, so that he or she can tell me everything is fine and it will go away in a few days.  At least that’s what I think will happen, and that’s what I hope will happen.  Going to the doctor is one of the few things in life, where the best case scenario is that you just wasted a few hours of your life.  Anyway, I’ll keep you posted.

Well, I should get back to work.  I wrote this entire thing on my lunch break.  That’s some speedy typing right there.  Usually it takes me five times as long for half the content.  What can I say?  When I need to complain the words just flow like wine – wine that will hopefully be used later to make me care less about the things about which I’m complaining.

Until next time…