Entry 318: Snow

Snow!

As forecasted we did indeed get a bundle of it -- two and a half feet to be more precise.  Most of it is still here, doing nothing but inconveniencing everybody.  It's blocking parking spots, taking up entire lanes of highway, making sections of the sidewalks unwalkable, and making people's feet wet and their eyes sore.  It's now that nasty yellowish-brown, sludgy snow, not the pure white snow that you here about in Christmas songs.

Snow is like your roommate's hard-partying friend in college.  You know that guy.  He's a nice enough fellow, but a bit too much of a fuckup for you.  He doesn't actually go to school because he can't handle the responsibility and because he has two DUIs and a misdemeanor for fleeing arrest on his record (and the misdemeanor will go up to a felony if he doesn't stay out of trouble for two years).  Every now and then he comes to visit your roommate and you guys all have a party and drink and laugh and have a good time.  But by Monday, when, on your way to class, you are stepping over his prostrate carcass, passed out on your kitchen floor, fully clothed, with a half-smoked cigarette in his mouth, you just want him to go away ASAP.  That's how snow is.

[This is a cool picture of my street during a calm in the storm]

Actually, rereading that, that's not a great analogy.  How about this: Snow a is likely a beautiful woman who has emotional issues, and ...  Oh, screw it.  Snow is like snow.  It is very cool while it's falling majestically from the sky and blanking out your city like an eraser on a whiteboard.  But it leaves you with an awful mess and a huge headache in its aftermath.  At this point, it can't melt fast enough for me.

But Lil' S1 certainly enjoyed it while it was still fresh.  School was canceled Friday, Monday, and Tuesday, so we had five days with him home, which was trying, but the fact that we could put him in his boots and his snowsuit and take him outside for a few hours everyday made things much more bearable than they would have been otherwise.  Also, he could play with his little friend down the street, which was nice.

[My car the morning after]

One thing I don't like about the snow is that it exposes my inadequacies as a preparer.  I would be a terrible boy scout.  I never have the appropriate gear for a situation.  On Sunday we walked to our friends' house and our friend C is on his roof shoveling snow from it.  His walkways are already completely clear, and he's decked out in Gor-tex with ski bib pants and buff snow boots and all that.  Meanwhile, I'm wearing hand-me-down boots that my dad gave me, like, ten years ago (and that give me awful blisters), sweats over jeans, and a normal rain jacket.  Also, I don't even own a snow shovel.  I had to borrow his.  And then I accidentally broke it (still works though), so I had to tell him I will buy him a new one.  And then a small avalanche of snow slid off our roof, so I had to re-shovel the walk, so I had to ask a different friend to borrow his shovel, because of course I'm not going to ask somebody whose shovel I just broke to use it again.

But now everything is done.  We have a nice clear path from the sidewalk to our front door, and our car is completely dug out -- one of them anyway.  After shoveling for a few hours, I sized up the amount of effort it was going to take to dig out our other car, and thought, "nah... we can get by with one car until this stuff melts."  So the only thing I have left to do snow related is buy a couple of shovels -- one for my friend, one for me for the next time it snows.  Although, what I really should do is think about the things we're going to need in the summer and buy them now, while they are cheap and in stock.  Now that would be smart... I probably won't do that.

[Before and after, the after photo was taken today, a week later; still a lot of snow on the ground]

OK, a few quick hitters before I go.

-Election year.  After being very supportive of Bernie Sanders in the beginning, I'm now leaning begrudgingly toward Hillary.  A lot of the recent criticism against Sanders is ringing true to me.  It's not the electability factor (in our sharply divided, two-party system winning the primary of a major party automatically makes you electable, in my opinion).  It's that the finances of his proposals -- particularly with respect to health care -- don't add up.  And this is assuming he could pass them through Congress, which he obviously couldn't.

Also, it doesn't help woo voters like me, when Sanders and his supporters dismiss all criticism against him (even from people who big-picture agree with him) as "hatchet jobs" drummed up by establishment sell-outs and corporate hacks.*  This is the same noxious deflection that many anti-vaxxers use to defend their ridiculous positions.  Anybody who disagrees with them is ipso facto a slave to Big Pharma.

-Another thing I don't like about Sanders is that he talks about moneyed influence in much the same way Conservatives talk about big government.  That is, it's a bad thing, in and of itself, without further explanation.  But I think that's the wrong way to look at things.  Just as big government isn't necessarily bad, neither is the influence of money in politics.  Wasteful, inefficient big government is bad; the corruptive influence of money in politics is bad.  But neither of things is a certainty in all cases.

For example, on a recent episode of the podcast The Weeds the hosts make the point that moneyed interests are often times more practical and empirically-based than the general public and its elected leaders and that can lead to actual compromises and results that we wouldn't achieve otherwise.  Obamacare is an example of this -- the insurance industry was obviously a major reason why it passed -- and if you don't like Obamacare, then there is also the debt ceiling debacle.  Absent the influence of Wall Street, Republicans might have actually been stubborn enough to take us over the cliff.  Money is not ideological in the way humans are; its only goal is to make more money.  This can (and often is) a very bad thing, but it can be a good thing too.  (Big business often opposes discriminatory laws as well.)  It just depends on how we regulate it and keep it in check.

-I tweaked my shoulder somehow and shoveling aggravated it.  It's not enough that I'm going to go the doctor or anything like that, but it's definitely enough to annoy me.  That's one of the underrated bad parts about getting older: You're never completely injury-free.

-S's mom left us today.  S's dad has to get shoulder surgery (speaking of shoulder injuries) on Tuesday, so she has to go back to South Carolina to help him out.  She's coming back in a month and will likely stay until the summer, but this month is going to be challenging.  I've gotten used to sleeping uninterrupted until 7:30 every morning.  There goes that luxury.

-Somebody on Facebook just posted that it's supposed to snow another couple of inches this weekend.  Dear god, I hope they're wrong.

Well, that's about it.  Before we go though, how about another dose of Snow?!



Until next time...

*Here's perhaps the most illustrative passage when it comes Bernie supporters dismissing all criticism against them as illegitimate:

In addition to multiple barbs thrown by the New York Times‘ Paul Krugman, the Washington Post editorial board just recently unloaded on Sanders in a laughable hit piece called “Bernie Sanders’ fiction-filled campaign.” I call it laughable because the editorial’s opening argument, made with a straight face, suggests that Sanders is wrong to say Wall Street needs additional regulations because Wall Street has been thoroughly regulated. 

Um, okay. 

What the establishment’s collective Bernie Sanders freakout essentially boils down to is this: a candidate who now has a serious chance at becoming the next President of the United States is promising to give the power and wealth they’ve been hoarding back to the people they stole it from. And that scares the shit out of them.

Right.  Paul Krugman is scared shitless by Sanders' position of redistributing wealth from the top down.  That's why he's been relentlessly advocating for this very thing since I started reading him.  And the author doesn't even attempt to rebut WaPo's position that when Sanders is pressed about how he is going to afford all his social programs, his answers start to sound a lot like Republicans explaining their tax plans -- everything seems to rely heavily on questionable assumptions about growth and fiscal improvement.

Entry 317: Making a Hamburger

We finished the Netflix series Making a Murderer, and I have a few thoughts on it.  Oh boy, do I have a few thoughts on it.  Immediately after watching the final scene of the final episode, I started formulating these thoughts into a coherent narrative in my head, because I wanted to write a blog post about it.  And then, in doing some further reading, I came across this article, which basically makes the exact case I was going to make -- right down to the irony encapsulated in the final lines (the filmmakers doing the very thing they caution against, but on the other side).  So now I effectively cannot write the blog post I was intending to write, because it would just end up being an inferiorly written knock-off of the linked article.  Instead I will just give you a brief summary of my Making a Murderer thoughts.

It wasn’t a bad series.  It tells a fascinating story, and the problems the filmmakers address with the criminal justice system -- both in general and with the Manitowoc County Sheriff’s Office in particular -- are very real.  The way the cops get tunnel vision and go after suspects, seemingly without the slightest hint that they might be wrong, is highly disturbing.  So are interrogation techniques, in which investigators feed confused and/or scared suspects the story they want to hear, and then call it a confession when the suspect inevitably parrots it back to them.  (The hardest part of the series to watch is investigators coaxing a mentally slow teenager, with no council present, into admitting involvement in a very serious crime.)  Confessions, along with eye-witness testimony (which the series touches on briefly, in the beginning), are still bedrocks of our legal system, even though they have been proven to be much, much, much less reliable than we think.  That Making a Murderer demonstrates this in a powerful, intriguing manner is a very laudable achievement.

With that said, as illustrated in the first linked article, the series has major credibility issues.  The filmmakers cherry-picked the evidence they chose to show in a way that makes the state’s case against Steven Avery and Brandon Dassey seem weaker than it really was.  Further, they omit key facts from Avery’s background and the testimony of people who knew him that paint a picture of a man with strong proclivities for sexual assault and violence against women.*  Because of this I find the series very dishonest and even irresponsible.  It’s simply not the exploration of truth and justice that it presents itself to be.  For this reason, it ultimately fails its viewers in a big way.  If you haven’t watched it yet and you want to, you should.  But keep all this in mind as you do.

And if you wondering, I think – I don’t know, but I think – both Avery and Dassey were involved in the crime in some manner, and I further think that some of the evidence was “massaged” by somebody (or somebodies) in the Manitowoc County Sheriff’s Office.  In my opinion, there were enough improprieties in the defendants' prosecutions that retrials should be strongly considered.  Even “bad” people deserve fair trials.  And that could have been the message of Making a Murderer.  Instead they went a different way – a way in which doubt was not properly emphasized and innocence was strongly implied – and in so doing, I believe they ruined what could have been an excellent product.

On a macro-level, what it ultimately boils down to is a question I keep coming back to: Why can’t everybody think like me?  By this I don’t mean that I wish everybody shared all my opinions or liked all the things that I like; I mean that I wish everybody tried to look at things objectively and form opinions and make decisions based on neutral observations -- that is, based on reality rather than what one might want reality to be.  We couldn't get it perfect, of course, we all have biases, but we could do a lot better than we are doing right now.

The Right clearly is the worst offenders when it comes to this.  They are the side of ideology and religion, pretty much exclusively.  But there are elements of it on the Left as well.  I was reminded of this when I was checking out Facebook and came across a long thread about how we should boycott Girl Scout cookies.  The reason?  GSA has the audacity to -- get this -- believe in science.  Sigh…

GMOs and organic food and things of the like are something I’ve done a complete 180 on.  I used to think it made sense to shop organic and go for the “natural” brands and all that, but I’ve come to realize that it is probably pretty much all bullshit.  (Although I still do buy a fair amount of organic food, because I like to support local small businesses, which are often organic, and because there are certain organic brands whose products I think taste better.)  A friend of mine from high school – a Ph.D. in chemistry – frequently posts on social media about this topic, and her arguments are largely what turned me around on the subject.  Also, Bill Nye changed his mind, and that dude is usually spot on.

[My name is Jonas, DC's in the red... Thanks for all you've shown us, your weekend is dead...]

Anyway…

In other news, it is supposed to snow here in DC on Saturday – like big-time snow, like two-feet-of-snow snow.  Of course, I remember a time when I was at UMD, and a snowstorm like this was predicted, so they canceled school the night before the storm was supposed to hit, and then not a single flake fell.  The truth is, we aren’t very good at predicting the weather.  Actually, that’s probably a mischaracterization.  The real truth is likely that future weather is a random event of which there is no certain outcome, and so the best we can do is assign probabilities to possible outcomes -- and the thing about possible outcomes is that they aren't definite.  (I remember hearing once in an academic talk that meteorologists actually do a pretty good job of estimating these probabilities – like roughly half the time they say there is a 50% chance of rain, it rains.)

I think this fact (that future weather is a random event) is part of the reason why people think meteorologists are more wrong than they are.  If somebody sees an 80% chance of rain, and then it doesn’t rain, they think the forecast was wrong.  But that’s not necessarily true, because the forecast allowed for a 20% chance of not raining – and any particular day of no rain could be part of that 20%.  The way a forecast is wrong is if its percentages don’t match up with reality over a large sample -- like if a meteorologist said there was an 80% chance of rain 100 times and out of those it only rained 30 times, then one could safely conclude the forecasting model is wrong.  (And by the way, this isn’t restricted to weather, people don’t understand randomness and statistics in many fields.  As a sports fan, this frequently drives me crazy.)

But back to this weekend.  I’m definitely not looking forward to such a snowstorm if it actually materializes.  Snow is fine if you don’t have anywhere to go and you don’t have young children.  But with a hyperactive three-year-old and a little baby to boot, heavy snowfall is going to be dreadful.  What are we going to do?  There are only so many snowmen you can build before you get cold and run out of dry clothes.  And Lil’ S1 already watches too much iPad.  And he already gets on our nerves if he’s inside for more than three minutes.  How are we going to survive three days?  It’s not even fun to drink (a snow day staple in the good ol’ days) because you know you are going to have to wake up at the crack of dawn to the sound of somebody crying in your ear (usually one of my kids… occasionally my wife).  Ugh... Kids... they kinda ruin everything, huh?

Anyway, that’s about all I have time for today.

Until next time…


*To me, the most egregious omission of evidence is the fact that Dassey told the police that he helped Avery remove the battery from the victim’s car, and then they found Avery’s DNA under the hood.  So much was made of blood samples linking Avery to the car – were they planted? – I felt totally cheated finding out later that even without the blood they could place him at the car.  The filmmakers responded to this (and other questions), but not in a very thorough or convincing manner.  They Tweeted that they omitted it because it was "disputed evidence" and "less significant."  But (a) pretty much all evidence in a criminal trial is disputed -- it's the defense's job to dispute it; (b) it's highly significant because it ties Avery to the car and it corroborates something Dassey told investigators, which they also omitted.

Also, the series really should have gone further into Avery's past.  Even if they didn't know about the stuff with his ex-fiancée there was plenty of stuff out there (I mean, it's never even explained WHY everybody in the area hates him so much).  Apparently Brendan alleged that Avery touched him inappropriately, and there were accusations that Avery molestated other family members.  The series doesn't mention this at all.  (By the way, the entire Avery family sounds like a bunch of sick fucks.  Makes me wonder what was going on in their childhood, and it also makes me wonder if the sympathy I felt for Avery's parents while watching the movie was well-founded or not -- in most cases you reap what you sow.)  And when they mention anything sordid about his past, they do so very briefly.  At one point in one of the early episodes, they quickly flash a letter on the screen he wrote to his ex-wife, in which he threatens to kill her, and then don’t say anything else about it.  And I remember being confused, and thinking, “Wait, did he just write to his wife that he’s going to kill her?”

Entry 316: Is There Life on Mars?

Is there life on Mars?  Probably not.  However, there might be in the relatively near future.  But I'll get to that in second.

First, I want to pay tribute, in my own small way, to David Bowie, who died of cancer about a week ago.  Bowie was probably number one on my list of "Artists I Love But Don't Own Much of Their Music."  Somewhere I have a Bowie's greatest hits album that I bought about 20 years ago, but that's about it.  I don't own any of his studio albums, and I haven't downloaded any of his songs individually.  I just kinda picked up Bowie along the way -- like, somebody burned me the Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou soundtrack and he has some good songs on it (including the eponymous "Life on Mars").  Or when I worked at The Sports Authority one summer, they would play the same prepackaged mixed tape over and over throughout the store, and David Bowie's collaboration with Trent Reznor "I'm Afraid of Americans" was on it (odd selection, huh?).  Then there is Queen's "Under Pressure," on which he makes a guest appearance.  (It's a song I hear randomly all the time, but still one I really like.)  And, of course, his bizarre "Peace on Earth/Little Drummer Boy" duo with Bing Crosby.  I first started listening to this song ironically, because it's such an unusual pairing and the video has that ridiculous, campy intro, but after a while it grew on me, and I legitimately like it now.  They actually harmonize really well.  I guess that's what happens when people have genuine talent -- even when they make something incredibly cheesy, it still comes out really good.

Anyway, R.I.P. David Bowie.



In other news, I was listening to Neil deGrasse Tyson's Startalk podcast the other day, and he had a fellow on named Bas Lansdorp, who heads a nonprofit called Mars One, whose mission is to put human beings on Mars by 2027.  I don't think this will happen, but I do find the project fascinating all the same.

What makes Mars One different from any previously proposed Mars missions is that Lansdorp doesn't plan on bringing his astronauts back.  He wants to create a permanent colony on Mars.  This has advantages -- apparently a return trip is where a large percentage of the difficult and the cost lies -- but it has the obvious disadvantage in that the colonizers might get to Mars, run into problems and die.  There are huge logistical obstacles to keeping people alive indefinitely on Mars, and we probably don't have the technology to do this.

Yet.

To me, that is the key word: yet.  When President Kennedy announced in 1961 that man would walk on the moon by the end of the decade, I'm sure not all the technology existed.  But eight years later his pronouncement came to fruition, because smart people developed the technology that needed to be developed and other smart people solved the engineering problems that needed to be solved.  Why can't smart people do that for a Mars mission too?

One obvious answer: money.  Putting people safely on Martian soil, if even possible, is going to cost billions and billions of dollars, and Mars One doesn't appear to have that much money.  In fact, according to Wikipedia (see above link), they have less than $1 million.  One of Lansdorp's solutions to this is to make the Mars mission into a TV show and sell it to a network, which, I don't think is a terrible idea, but it is problematic for a few reasons.  For one thing, this is essentially turning the mission into a reality TV show, which denigrates it in many people's eyes (right or wrongly) because of our perception of reality TV.  For another thing, what happens if things start going badly, like, really badly?  Is the public going to tune in to watch a group of explorers die in space or starve to death on another planet?  Actually, they probably would -- I would -- it would beyond fascinating, but the backlash would probably set back any future Mars missions for decades.

It was very interesting to listen to the commentators on the podcast.  Not including people involved directly with the Mars One project, there were three people with technical knowledge -- Tyson, Bill Nye, and a former NASA astronaut name Mike Massimino -- and it was two-against-one.  Both Nye and Massimino dislike the Mars One project -- or, at least, look upon it askance -- and Tyson was kinda in favor it.  I'm with Tyson.  Mars One is mostly getting shit on; people in the media have called it "unrealistic", compared it dismissively to the TV show "Big Brother", and even labeled it a "scam" -- but I think this criticism is mostly off-base.

1.  If it's unrealistic, then let's work to make it realistic, like the countless other major engineering feats that seemed impossible at first blush.  The steam engine, rail travel, homes powered by electricity, the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk, Apollo 11, driverless cars, rockets that can land -- how many of these would people have believed 10 or 20 years before they were invented?  If we only did things that were "realistic," we would never do anything cool.  One thing I noticed that we do as a society is we say "that will never happen" to a lot of things, and then when they actually do happen, we just kinda shrug our shoulders and get on with our lives.  And then after that thing becomes the new normal, we move on to the next thing that can't happen.  This is most prominent in politics, but I think it applies to technology as well.

2.  The TV show aspect of Mars One strikes me more as a means than an end.  If there was a better way to raise funds, it might not part of the deal at all.  (In fact, Lansdorp has said before that he hopes a multibillionaire will come along and fund his project.)  And why would it be a "reality TV" show?  Why couldn't it be a legitimate documentary style series?  I mean, if people actually did land on Mars, and it was broadcast to the masses, can you imagine that moment?  It would be the most watched event in the history of the world.

3.  After listening to Lansdorp and one of the finalists to be on the maiden voyage, I definitely don't think it's a "scam."  If you think it's a pie-in-the-sky idea, fine, but to call it a scam involves an element of underhandedness that I don't think is there.  So far as I can tell, Lansdorp has been very transparent with the intent and expectations of the mission.  I mean, he is telling people there is a decent chance they will die; it's not like anybody is being tricked.  Personally, even if I didn't have a family, I don't think I would ever consider taking a one-way trip to Mars, but I think I would think about it.

I guess the bottom line is, I'm not saying that I believe in Lansdorp and that Mars One is going to succeed, but I am saying I would like to see it try.  If it all goes horribly wrong, and everybody drifts off into space, so be it.  The crew is signing up for that possibility, and our history is littered with noble pioneers who died trying.  Plus, think if they actually do get to Mars, even if they starve to death within two months (which is what many experts believe), it will be one of the most remarkable accomplishments in human history.  Sure, it will be sad if a crew of young people die before their time, but look at what they got to do.  I mean, we are all going to die -- would you pick to do it at age 85 in relative anonymity in a hospital with tubes stuck into every limb in your body, or would you do it at age 35, a hero to millions, on a planet on which no human had ever set foot before you arrivied?  I would probably pick the former, but I know a lot of people who would pick the latter, and I don't think it's crazy, by any means.

Okay, that's all I got.  Until next time...

Entry 315: The Logistics of Watching Television

S and I started watching that Making a Murderer show on Netflix that everybody is talking about (I can only assume my Facebook feed is an accurate representation of “everybody”).  We are only two episodes in, but it is pretty good so far – intriguing.  And it brings up an interesting ethical dilemma.  No, this dilemma has nothing to do with fabricating evidence or wrongful conviction or anything like that.  It’s a lighter meta-quandary: How should one handle spoilers for a nonfiction TV show?  With make-believe, it’s simple: You avoid spoilers and make an effort not to spoil it for others.  But for nonfiction, do the same rules apply?  It seems like they can’t -- at least not in this case -- because it’s an ongoing situation.  It’s actual news in a way that, say, Bloodline isn’t.  (I just finished that one, by the way – loved it.)  You can’t expect people not to spoil real news for you.  And also, it feels a bit gauche (for lack of a better word) to avoid spoilers, because it’s like now you’re only interested in it for your entertainment.  That’s fine with fiction (obviously, that’s the point of it), but when somebody’s real-life livelihood is at stake, treating it like it’s just a tale for your amusement feels morbidly inconsiderate.

[If you are looking for a show to watch, I recommend "Bloodline."  It's about this high school football coach whose sister is a smart kid trying to fit in with the cool crowd, and their mom is the prom queen who gets blood dumped on her... or maybe I'm confusing it with three other things.] 

With that said, maybe I’m just one sick dude, because I have been avoiding news stories about the Steven Avery case.  I want to watch the full season of the show and then read all about the case.  In fact, I even went so far as to harangue S not to read about it either, because I want her to be equally surprised about it with me.  She balked at this, and in retrospect, I think she is right.  Again, it comes down to fiction versus nonfiction.  It's a bit much to ask somebody not to follow current events.

I think it was a knee-jerk reaction on my part because S doesn’t care as much about spoilers as I do.  So we might have a conversation like the following.

S: So, I accidentally found out what happens to Character X on Show Y.
Me: What?!  How?!
S: I was just looking online, and I accidentally saw an article about it.
Me: “Accidentally”… C’mon.
S: It was!
Me: Funny, that never happens to me.
S: They don’t talk about those shows on the sites you go to.  They don’t talk about them on … football dot com.
Me: Well, whatever, now it’s ruined for me.
S: Why?  I won’t tell you what happens.
Me: Yeah, but you know.  We are supposed to experience it together.  That's the whole reason why you watch a show with somebody.
S: I still want to watch it!  We will still watch it together!
Me: I know, but it’s not the same.
S: Why? I won’t tell you what happens.  It’s the same for you.
D: No it’s not, because Dr. Drew says…
S: [Eye roll]
D: … that intimacy is shared experience.  So if we aren’t sharing the same experience then we aren't developing the same level of intimacy.
S: Whatever... Speaking of intimacy, Jake bought Elaine flowers and a card and put it out for her in the morning when she went to back to work on her first day after maternity leave.  How come you never do anything like that for me?
D: You don’t even like flowers.
S: True, but that’s not the point…

[And, scene.]

[Spoiler Alert!]

Actually, it’s a minor miracle when S and I can get through any show at all.  The first problem is finding something that neither of us have seen before (S watched a bunch of stuff on maternity leave, so she's already seen almost all the good shows) and something that we want to see and that is available on a platform to which we have access (we cut the cord almost two years ago).  Then it’s finding an hour long stretch in which we both have free time and are awake.  Then it’s making it through an entire episode without one of our kids disrupting us.  (Numerous times we’ve had to pause a show in the middle to tend to one of the Lil’ S’s and then by the time we are done with that it’s too late for S to finish the show because she wakes up at like four a.m., so we finish it another time.  It’s not a very satisfying way to watch TV.)

Also, our own little idiosyncrasies can make things challenging as well.  For example, I like to turn the lights way down so that the room is almost dark; S likes the lights on full blast.  S often wants to do other things while she watches TV like look at her phone or laptop; I only want to watch a show if we can both be focused exclusively on it.  S likes to eat a snack while we watch; I get annoyed sitting next to somebody who is eating.  I mean, it's fine when you are at a movie theater and you have some space between you and the sound is cranked up so high that you wonder if it's going to damage your hearing permanently -- in that case get a bucket of popcorn and some Sour Patch Kids and knock yourself out -- but when you are on a couch cuddling, watching something on an iPad with the sound low (so as not to disturbed your sleeping children), then it's very irritating to hear *munch, munch, munch* in your ear.  

And it's one of those things where I don't want to be a dick about it.  S enjoys eating a snack while she watches TV, it's a relaxing ritual for her.  I don't want to ruin that.  But at the same time, I can't enjoy myself if I'm struggling to hear a TV show over smacking lips.  It's like trying to sleep with a dripping faucet.  It drives me crazy.  So we managed to come to something of a compromise: She can eat, but nothing crunchy.  It works okay.  Neither person is completely satisfied, but that's the definition of compromise, right?  And what is marriage if not a serious of compromises?  I mean, if Paula Abdul and MC Skat Kat can work it out, we can too.  

[Checking Wikipedia: Paula Abdul is twice divorced and never actually dated MC Skat Kat at all... crap]

Anyway, I should wrap this entry up soon.  Everybody is napping, and I have to wake them up soon.  We've been trying to find the right napping schedule for Lil' S1.  He started going down for like three hours in the middle of the day, but then he wouldn't go to sleep at night.  So we cut out the nap altogether, but then he would become insufferably cranky in the afternoon.  Now we are going for an hour or an hour and a half max.  It's been about that long.

Until next time...

Entry 314: Ringing In the New Year With Some Sleeplessness and Some Nostalgia

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).

[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...