Sunday, February 28, 2016

Entry 322: Sicknesses and Arguments

Came down with something awful Sunday evening -- stomach flu.  It wiped me out for a day, but I'm feeling much better now.  I though perhaps it was food poisoning, but it got S too, so it almost certainly wasn't food poisoning.  Whatever it was it was nasty -- violent vomiting, chills, aches, enervation, and ague (if you don't know this word, you need to do more crossword puzzles).  Thankfully it passed quite quickly.  My tummy still isn't completely settled, but it's no longer a Pandora's Box.

[You did not want to be around when the Evils from my internal Pandora's box were released, believe you me.]

So now I'm normal again, which is good.  Only when you are sick do you so pine for the mundanity of everyday life.  I could barely get out of bed Monday morning, and I was thinking to myself I just want to feel good enough to take my kids to school -- not because this is something I had to do, S picked up the slack (I returned the favor at night, when she got sick), or even something that I enjoy doing; it's just that I wanted to feel good enough so that I could do it.  It's my barometer when I'm sick.  When I'm healthy, I have dreams and aspirations.  When I'm sick my only goal is to get back to the ordinariness of my quotidian routine.

Although S and I got hit, the kids seemed to come out unscathed, which is also good.  Well, actually, it's possible that they already got it.  Lil' S2 has had a bug for about three weeks now, resulting in seaweed poo and a brutal diaper rash (now mostly gone).  S asked the doctor about it at a checkup, and she said it was "daycare diarrhea" and there wasn't much that could be done about it other than waiting for it to pass.  Shortly after he got sick, Lil' S1 also came down with something, but it just seemed to be the sniffles, and neither of them was completely decimated like S and I.  So, I dunno, maybe it's all related, maybe not.  Maybe S and I just needed to sleep -- like really sleep, like not-get-out-of-bed-until-noon sleep -- and our bodies knew the only way that would happen is to get sick.  Can your immune system take one for the team?  Who knows?

Other than getting really sick, things have been going pretty well.  I've been trying to workout and eat better -- you know, the typically struggles of the desk-job-working, nearly middle-age, white man.  It was SO much easier to do without kids than it is now with two hellions (or rather one hellion and one soon-to-be hellion).  I've joined a racquetball league, which is good, but for some reason I suck now, even though I used to be good, so that's a bit dispiriting, but it's still a good workout, although I can really only play once a week.  I've joined a gym as well, but again it's hard to go more than once a week, and even then, it's an ordeal because I usually have to bring one of the kids with me, usually Lil' S1, and he often doesn't want to go, and then when I make him, he bothers me about going to Target (in the same building as the gym) to buy him a toy, and if I don't do it then he pitches a fit, and it's not like the 19-year-old community college student at the gym daycare wants to or knows how to deal with him.  So usually I give in and just buy a little $3 action figure at Target to placate him, which I don't really like because (a) he's already spoiled enough, (b) our house is quickly becoming a repository for cheap plastic shit made in China.

Actually, I have to fair, last time we went to the gym, it was pretty nice.  Afterward we went to Panera and had a pleasant lunch.  (Nothing like undoing all the hard work you just did at the gym by eating half a loaf of bread.)  It was a good bonding moment.

["It's not a lizard, Daddy!  It's a rep-tool!"]

In other news S and I have been averaging about 0.8 fights per night the last few weeks.  We don't have one every night, but four out five seems about right.  It pretty much always boils down to the same things, for the same reasons.  The main thing is that we're both just tired and overworked, so we are cranky and things that would normally just be discussions or disagreements get turned up to 11.  Then we often start fighting about our fight (a meta-fight, if you will).  She gets upset by my tone, and I get upset because I don't understand why we are even having the discussion in the first place.
  
What happens is, S likes to ruminate about major life decisions.  She's also comfortable making what I consider big changes more frequently than me.  (I'm all about moving slowly and incrementally and savoring the process as I go.)  So she will bring something up, and I won't want to talk about it, and then she'll get upset, and I'll get annoyed.  And then she'll say that I never want to do anything, and I'll ask why she wants to bring this up now, when we have two small kids and are struggling just to find the time to do basic life maintenance like exercise and sleep.  And then... Well you get the idea.

S and I just see life differently.  The analogy is this: Imagine you are stuck in traffic, with no break in the immediate future.  There are two types of people: Person 1 wants to stay in the car and make the best of things -- turn on some good music, tell some funny stories, and ride it out, because he knows it's temporary.  Person 2 wants to pull off the road and go somewhere else for a while, maybe try some different roads.  The roads might  not get her to her destination any faster or be anymore scenic, but the experience will be something new -- something different.  I'm Person 1; S is Person 2.  And we've known this for a long time.  We knew it before we got married, and we knew that it's something we had to manage.  And we will.  But it's not always easy.


Alright, party people, that's all I got this week.

Until next time...

Sunday, February 21, 2016

Entry 321: Stuff in the World

Time is of the essence today.  I have four periods set aside throughout the week during which I can work on this blog.  Usually at least one of them is open.  This week, however, they all got snatched up by "real-life" things.  During two of them I had to do work work -- things have been busier than usual at the office.  During another one of them I had to watch the kids because S had to do something, and during the final one I had to take Lil' S1 to a birthday party.  So now I'm in a mad scramble to get something up before somebody in my family figures out what I'm doing and demands my time be focused on them.  It could be any of the three of them.

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So a lot happened this week in the world this past week.  The first, of course, is that Justice Scalia died.  You never want to cheer a man's death (Osama Bin Laden excepted), but the dispassionate truth of the matter is that this is a boon to many liberal causes.  It's already a big deal, but it could end up being a really big deal depending on how this year's election goes down.  I don't expect a replacement to be appointed by Obama.  The Republican-led Senate is unlikely to go for that, and frankly I can't really fault them -- if the situation was reversed, I wouldn't want a successor approved -- but the Democrat is at least a slight favorite to win the election, and in the interim, there are some Supreme Court cases that will likely end in a 4-4 tie in a manner favorable to liberals.  If Scalia were still on the court, he would almost certainly swing the vote to the conservative position.  The biggest one is probably a ruling on Obama's authority to limit emissions from power plants.  A few others are rulings about California teacher unions and how the state of Texas counts voters in a district.

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Another thing that happened is that the government got a court order telling Apple to hack an iPhone owned by that terrorist who shot up the Christmas party in California.  Apparently Apple has made their iPhones more secure in the wake of the Edward Snowden debacle, and the cops don't know how to break into an iPhone without the password.  Apple apparently doesn't know how to do this either and is balking at it (they're appealing the ruling), because it would require them to build a "back door" that currently doesn't exist, and that they don't want to build for customer privacy reasons.  In fact, as I understand it, the latest version of the iPhone, the 6, is so secure that Apple couldn't even break into it if they wanted to.  The terrorist had an earlier version -- the 5c, I believe -- and this apparently is hackable, but not with existing functionality.

I find this case fascinating, but every article I read or podcast I listen to about it, just makes me more confused.  Here are the (perhaps naive) questions I have about it.

  1.  If the current functionality to hack the terrorist's phone doesn't exist, but everybody knows it can be built, can't a third-party figure it out?  Could the government turn the phone over to a group of independent hackers and say "do what Apple doesn't want to do?"  Does only Apple have the expertise and background knowledge to do this in a timely fashion?
  2. One of the big reasons Apple doesn't want to do it is because they don't want this back door to exist at all.  The government says it's a one-off and will never be used again.  Apple says it will set a precedent and once something exists, you never know who will get their hands on it.  But if the back door is only possible because the phone is an older version, and under the newer version Apple couldn't build it even if they wanted to, then how would precedent be set?  Once everybody starts using the iPhone 6, it won't matter anyway, right?  It seems like some grandstanding on the part of Apple.
  3. Is anything ever truly unhackable?  It's only unhackable until a hacker hacks it, right?
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Lastly, the primary races are really starting to heat up -- especially on the Republican side.  Trump continues to confound the naysayers and win votes.  Most the odds makers have him a bit better than 50-50, Rubio a bit worse than 50-50, and everybody else a long shot (with Cruz the only remotely realistic possibility among the long shots).  That seems about right to me.  I'm pulling for Trump.  I think he will get smoked by Hillary in the general election, and I'm loving the way he is destroying the Republicans' myths about their voting base.

On the Democratic side, it's still looking like Clinton all the way.  Sanders is certainly making it a decent fight, but despite his progress, Hillary is still a strong favorite.  Sure, a big upset could happen, but it would be just that -- a big upset.  I for one, really hope it doesn't happen.  I am not feeling the Bern.  I'm sympathetic to his ideals, but I'm a technocrat, and he isn't.  I want the pragmatists, the wonks, the empiricists, the nerds in charge -- I don't want ideologues, even those with whom I largely agree.

OK, that's it, gotta run.  Until next time...

Friday, February 12, 2016

Entry 320: On Coen Brothers Movies

The Coen Brothers dropped a new film recently Hail, Caesar!.  I haven’t seen it yet but probably will at some point in the not too distant future.  I see pretty much every Coen brothers movie.  They are one -- or two, I suppose -- of the only filmmakers, whose films I make it a must to see.  In fact, it's pretty much just them and Quentin Tarantino.  There are other filmmakers I like, but the Coens and Tarantino are the only ones I really make it a point to watch.  Incidentally, Tarantino came out with a new film himself relatively recently The Hateful Eight (which I also haven't seen, but want to) but in this post I’m going to talk about the Coen brothers because I am inspired by this article.



I think the author mostly gets it right, not completely right, but I would say more right than the voters in the readers' poll.  (If you vote at the end of the story you can see the readers' picks.)  Here's the “real” ranking, i.e., my ranking.  I haven't seen Blood Simple, Miller's Crossing, The Ladykillers, or Hail, Caesar!, so I can't rank those, but 13 out of 17 is enough to make the definitive list, right?  I think so.

The list:

13  Intolerable Cruelty
12  O Brother, Where Art Thou?
11  The Hudsucker Proxy
10  Barton Fink
9    Inside Llewyn Davis
8    True Grit
7    Burn After Reading
6    Raising Arizona
5    No Country for Old Men
4    Fargo
3    A Serious Man
2    The Man Who Wasn't There
1    Big Lebowski

And here’s some commentary broken down into category form.

Three Most Overrated Movies
1.  O Brother Where Art Thou?
This is easily their most overrated movie.  I wouldn’t even say it’s a good movie, but the readers have it in the top five.  It’s been a while since I’ve seen it, but I recall it just being a hodgepodge of weird scenes.  There was no there there – no movie there.  That it is supposed to be based on The Odyssey does absolutely nothing for me.  There best thing about it by far is the soundtrack.

2.  Raising Arizona
Solid movie, but I watched it relatively recently and didn’t think it was nearly as funny as I remembered.  Part of this might be the pacing and style of comedies of that era -- the timing often seems slow when you watch them now.  Really great movies last the test of time, and this one doesn't quite hold up.  I put it in the overrated category because the author of the article ranked it no. 1, and it doesn’t even crack my top five.  It does, however, have one of my all-time favorite Coen brothers' lines in it.  A police officer is questioning the crusty old tycoon Nathan Arizona about what his missing child was wearing the night he disappeared.
Police Officer: What did the pajamas look like?
Nathan Arizona: I don't know. They were jammies! They had Yodas and shit on 'em!  
3.  No Country for Old Men
Great movie – just not Oscar-winning great (in my opinion; The Academy obviously feels differently).  That’s why I'm proclaiming this one overrated.  Fantastic individual performances (especially Javier Bardem), fantastic individual scenes (especially those containing Javier Bardem), but as a coherent, complete movie it came up just a tad short – the sum of the individual parts were better than the whole.  The buildup was fantastic, but there was no payoff, and I really wanted some sort of payoff.  I think they couldn’t write a good ending, so they did the artsy thing and just abruptly ended it.  To me, it felt much more like a copout than anything else.



Three Most Underrated Movies
1.  A Serious Man
I love this movie.  In fact, I think I might love this movie more than any other Coen brothers fan loves this movie, being that it barely makes the voters' list at all.  I have it as the Coens' third best all-time, ahead of Fargo by a sliver, because it’s more my style of movie.  I like movies about really interesting characters where nothing “exciting” happens, as opposed to thrillers.  The biggest knock on this movie, however, is that it does the thing I was just complaining about: it ends out of nowhere.  This wasn’t nearly as unsatisfying for me as it was in No Country for Old Men though.

2.  Burn After Reading
This one was much stupided than most other Coen brothers movies – by which I mean it was goofy and silly, not unintelligent.  But it was pretty fun (lighthearted, in a very dark way) and pretty funny.  So I put it in my top-10, higher than the author or the readers.

3.  The Man Who Wasn’t There
No. 2 on my list.  Billy Bob at his finest, with Frances McDormand also giving a boffo performance.  This has one of my favorite Coen brothers scenes in it of all-time.  The one where the woman comes to the barber’s door to talk to him about space aliens... You have to see it to get it.


Boringest Movie
Inside Llewyn Davis
Here’s how this went for me – drag, drag, drag, drag, kinda funny part, drag, drag, drag, drag, way too long song, drag, drag, drag, another way too long song, drag, drag, drag, another kind funny part, drag, drag, drag.  Lather, rinse, repeat.  Yet, weirdly, I didn’t think it was a bad movie.  I don’t think it was great, and I never want to watch it again, but it wasn’t bad.

Excitingest Movie
Fargo
Actually, it's probably No Country for Old Men -- I think I was much more rapt during that one -- but I already talked about it, so I'll give some love to Fargo instead.  Great, great movie, and the TV show is pretty solid too.

The Worst
Intolerable Cruelty
Honestly, I don't even remember much about this movie, but one of things I do remember is that I really didn’t like it.  I think it was one of those every-other-scene-is-a-plot-twist type of movies -- the conman is actually getting conned by his mark, but she’s getting conned by her friend, who’s getting conned by the conman's accountant, but the quiet old woman nobody suspects is conning them all, but the original conman knows this so he’s conning her, so on and so forth.  I really dislike those movies.  If everything is a plot twist then there are no plot twists, because the audience isn't expecting anything anymore, so there is nothing to twist.  Much like the abrupt non-ending ending, it feels like a copout.

The Best
The Big Lebowski
And frankly it's not even really close.  The Coen brothers mainly write comedy and Lebowski is by far their funniest movie.  In fact, in my opinion, it's the funniest movie ever.  (Or rather, I should say, it's the funniest comedy ever.  I think Pulp Fiction actually made me laugh more the first time I saw it, but Pulp Fiction isn't a comedy in the same way The Big Lebowski is.)  There are so many Lebowski scenes I could end on, but let's go with this one.  It's probably my favorite.



Until next time...

Sunday, February 7, 2016

Entry 319: For the First Time in Three Years I Don't Really Give a Shit about the Super Bowl, So This Post has Nothing to Do with the Super Bowl

Some sad news from this past week: S’s grandma passed away.  Now, this is only sad in the way that it is sad anytime anybody dies – S’s grandma, after all, was quite old and had been severely enfeebled for the past few months or so – but it is sad nonetheless.  S’s mom sent her text about it Thursday night after she was already in bed.  I noticed the text on S’s phone as I was getting into bed, but her phone wasn’t showing the names of the people who had texted, only the numbers, so I had a brief moment of panic in which I thought the text was from S’s sister saying that their mom had died!  The text said “Avva passed away” and the only “Avva” I know is S’s mom, because it’s what Lil’ S1 calls her (it’s Kannada for maternal grandmother), so I was like “OH GOD NO!” Before quickly realizing that it couldn’t be about S’s mom because (a) S’s sister wouldn’t text this to S and then not follow up on it; (b) S and her sister calls her mom Amma, not Avva.

So I put two and two together, but then I found myself in the awkward position of having to decide whether or not to wake S up to tell her the bad news or just let her find out in the morning.  I decided on the latter under the better-to-be-rested-nothing-she-can-do-about-it-now-anyway rationale, but then she woke up on her own to use the bathroom, so I told her then.  Not waking her up to tell her is one thing, not telling her after she is already awake is another.  She called her mom, and they talked for a bit, and then she came back to bed.  Both she and her mother seem to be doing okay.  I mean, like I said, S’s grandma was really old, and all really old people die in the near future.  So it’s only tragic if you consider death (and by extension existence) a tragedy in and of itself -- I go back and forth on this one, personally.

[All that remains from the massive snow storm two weeks ago]

Speaking of S’s mom, we’ve been doing pretty well without her so far.  In some ways, it is good she left because it forces us to set a more structured routine with our kids and stick to it.  For example, Lil’ S2 was waking up a lot during the night when S’s mom was here, because she comforts him immediately every time he starts crying (she can’t help herself).  For her this isn't such a big deal, because if she doesn't sleep during the night, she can nap during the day, but we can’t roll like that, so we did cry it out, and now, not even a week later, he’s sleeping pretty soundly until about 7 a.m.  Well, actually, S gets him up around 4:30 and feeds him and then he sleeps until 7.  That’s an important piece of the routine that S would probably not want me to omit.  Also, Lil’ S1 has one fewer adult around to try to cajole into giving him what he wants.  That’s a good thing.  I’m always worrying that this kid is getting too spoiled.

But I’ll be damned if he doesn’t say some funny shit.  A few of my favorites: glubs (gloves); tow-food (tofu); scrapter (scraper, a type of truck in one of his books), and being-haive (“Daddy, daddy, can I watch something?  I’m being-haive.”).  He also has a memory like a black hole.  He just pulls in information and doesn’t let it go.  I’ve learned to give him the benefit of the doubt when he tells me something I think isn’t right, as often it is right and I’m wrong or I’m misunderstanding what he’s saying.  And now, when this happens, he follows it up with “See!  I told you!”  This bodes well for the future.  I would love to have a little know-it-all son.

In other news, I’ve been keeping tabs on the presidential primaries, which are getting pretty interesting.  On the Republican side, I’m firmly in the Donald Trump camp.  It is a sad state of affairs when the best candidate one of our two major political parties has to offer is an odious, xenophobic, chauvinistic farce of a man, but here we are.  I genuinely want Trump to win the nomination, and it’s not just because I think he would get crushed in the general election.  He’s legitimately the least worst candidate.  (Jonathan Chait lays out the liberals-for-Trump case nicely in this article.  I find his Schwarzenegger-Trump analogy a bit lacking -- Schwarzenegger never said anything close to as bad as Trumps ban on Muslim immigration -- but I agree with the bigger picture.)

On the other side of the coin, I go back and forth every few days, but I find, on the macro-level, I'm gradually gravitating toward Hillary.  I like Bernie Sanders, I think he's good for politics; I think he's good for the country; and I think he's been good for the Democratic Party; but I highly dubious that he would make a good president at this moment in time under these circumstances.  Maybe the presidency of the United States isn't the best place to lead a revolution because the Constitution specifically limits the powers of any one branch of government, and right now Democrats hold the power in exactly one of those, and that is highly unlikely to change for at least the next few election cycles.

Also, I don't like that Sanders and his supporters are constantly trying to portray him as the people's candidate and Hillary as the candidate for corporate, sell-out shills.  In reality, Clinton has a massive lead on Sanders among women, labor unions, and minorities -- that's hardly what I would call "The Man."

Anyway, I'm sure I will have more to say as the big election draws near, but for now, I must leave you.  Oh, one more thing, we started watching the show Fargo.  It's pretty good so far.  At the beginning they say it's based on a true story, and I wanted to find out how true the true story is.  So I Googled "Is the TV sh" and look what popped up!  This is probably the second most prescient Google moment I've ever witnessed.



Until next time...