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:
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:
*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.
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.
*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.
I hear ya about the goody bags although I did appreciate them as a bribe to get my kids to leave when they were little, but most are over the top. I did provide favors for kids when we had parties, but I kept them as minimal as I felt I could without looking like a cheapskate who doesn't understand cultural norms. Now that the kids are older favors seem to be falling by the wayside as are the number of party invitations.
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