Friday, July 29, 2016

Entry 343: A Return From Cooperstown

This will be my last post for a few weeks.  The G & G family is headed to the southern shores of Puget Sound for a two-week vacation.  I’m really looking forward to it.  I got a little appetizer vacation with my Cooperstown weekend, but now it’s time for the main course.  The one big thing I don’t like about my life right now is that I live so far away from my family and my closest friends.  And unfortunately there is no easy or immediate solution to this problem, so I just have to make do with what I have, and vacations are what I have at the moment.

Cooperstown was terrific though.  My buddy RW flew in from Seattle Friday evening, and then we drove up Saturday morning together.  It’s a good six-plus hours, but it went by pretty quickly.  I have some friends with whom a long car ride would be quite difficult, but RW is not one of them.  He can come off sometimes as kind of terse or surly, but once you get going with him, he’s a pretty good conversationalist.  He was pretty worthless when it came to directions, however.  He’s like a borderline Luddite when it comes to technology.  He has an iPhone, but it’s so old that he can’t get most apps because it can only run an old version of the operating system that isn't compatible with the newer apps.  Our friend DK, who got to Cooperstown before us with his buddy K, sent us a pin-drop of a parking lot, and it was like a one-man Abbott & Costello routine listening to RW try to figure out how to place the pin on his maps app and get directions.  Once he started talking about Vashon Island – a location roughly 3,000 miles from where we needed to be – I pulled over and used my phone to get directions.

The actual city of Cooperstown is basically just one street with the Hall of Fame museum and a slew of eateries and memorabilia shops.  On Saturday night they had a parade featuring many of the living Hall of Famers; it was my favorite event of the weekend.  It was a blast seeing all the players from my childhood come out and wave to the masses.  I got a lot of good pics.  I also enjoyed the interaction with the crowd.  It was like a big street party.  I started yelling out things I thought would make the crowd chuckle (e.g., “You had a very respectable and underrated career.” to Bert Blyleven), with varying success.  Ken Griffey Jr. and Mike Piazza, this year’s inductees, got the biggest rounds of applause, as expected, followed by Randy Johnson and Pedro Martinez.  Johnson was a teammate of Griffey’s and Martinez of Piazza’s, so that makes sense.

[Griffey]


[Randy Johnson]

After the parade, we went to this funplex that had batting cages and speed pitch and stuff like that.  It was like something out of an ‘80s teen/sports movie – the place where the protagonist would have some sort of preliminary showdown against his rivals.  Like  the main kid would go to this place mid-film with his love interest.  They would be having a great time until the love interest’s asshole ex-boyfriend arrived drunk with his posse.  (There would be a shot showing them surreptitiously taking nips from a flask to establish they're the bad kids.)  Somehow a mini-competition would be started in which the main kid and the ex-boyfriend each would go into the batting cages to see who was the better hitter.  There would be a montage of each of them hitting baseballs, while all the other patrons, who were suddenly interested in this petty competition for some reason, cheered.  The main kid would be winning and embarrassing the ex-boyfriend, so one of the ex-boyfriend’s cronies would rig up the pitching machine to fling a baseball that would hit the kid in the knee causing him to have to quit the showdown.  The ex-boyfriend would then claim victory and leave telling the main kid “you’ll stay out of the Tri-Cities World Series, if you know what’s good for you!”  The main kid would be downtrodden and considering quitting baseball until his unlikely mentor, an old Japanese recluse, who was a disgraced star from the Nippon Professional Baseball league, motivated him to rehab his knee and become an even better baseball player.  The main kid would then go on to hit the game-winning home run off the ex-boyfriend in the Tri-Cities World Series, and the movie would end with him kissing the girl he was trying to woo earlier, while his mentor smiled wryly.

What do you think of my film?  I call it The Baseball Boy.

Actually, at the Hall of Fame museum, there was a little section on baseball movies.  There are a lot of them.  My personal favorite is probably The Natural.  Bull Durham is great too, but Tim Robbins is so unbelievable as a star pitcher physically – it’s looks as if he’d never thrown a baseball in his life before getting the role – that it really bumped me.  I know it’s just a movie, but it’s difficult to ignore.  Also, Kevin Costner’s character is too sanctimonious about baseball for me.  His whole "what I believe in" speech didn't do it for me.  Actually the whole film is steeped in the old-school, “right way to play baseball” mindset that I absolutely despise.  Well, it’s still a better movie than The Kid From Left Field starring Gary Coleman, that’s for sure.



After our adventures in the funplex (let’s just say nobody is mistaking us for former big leaguers, after watching us in the batting cages), we hung around Cooperstown for a while, and then drove to our hotel in Utica, which is about an hour away.  It was the closest booking I could get.  Utica is not the nicest city in America, but the hotel worked well enough.  There was only one bed in the room I was sharing with RW, so he slept on a roll-away cot (he volunteered to sleep on it, and I did all the planning and paid for it, so I don’t feel guilty about taking the good bed).  He also snores like a mo-fo, but luckily I had earplugs in my backpack, so it was all good.  That’s one of those things you do that pays off later, and makes you feel so smart.  I remember, probably three years ago, putting earplugs in my backpack specifically for the moment I was traveling and sleeping in a noisy environment – forethought, see.

The problem with earplugs though is that you can sleep too deeply with them in.  We woke up quite late and didn’t have time for a proper breakfast.  We had to hit up Mickey D’s on the way out of town.  Although, I have to say, as far breakfasts-on-the-run go, you could do much worse than an Egg McMuffin and a McDonald’s iced coffee.

We got to the induction ceremony a bit on the late side, so the field at which it was being held was already quite full.  It’s the type of deal where you just rock up and throw down some lawn chairs, and the prime real estate was quickly dissipating by the time we arrived.  We got decent enough seats though.  At one point we got hassled by a security guard and a police officer who told us we were in an emergency exit area (apparently we missed a faint line in the grass that people were sitting on), but ultimately nothing came of it.  If 200 people refuse to move, there isn’t much two workers, who probably don’t actually care all that much, can do about it.  In general, the event was not properly managed and the seating areas were not clearly delineated.  There were 50,000 people there, about twice as much as the typical induction ceremony.



And the ceremony itself wasn’t that fun.  It was cool.  It was a good experience, but it wasn’t really enjoyable, if that makes sense.  For one thing, it was so hot, and we were just sitting there for hours among the throngs of people, before the speeches began.  It is like being at an outdoor music festival, but instead of hearing great live music, you hear John Fogerty’s Center Field over a loud speaker.  (Has anybody more cashed in on such a mediocre song?)  For another thing, athletes are typically lousy orators.  Piazza’s speech was okay, for a baseball player, but if you have to add “for a …” to qualify something, it probably means that something wasn’t all that great.  And Griffey’s speech was downright brutal.  It was a blubbering, blathering mess.  He began it totally choked up and never regained his composure.  His quips fell felt and his anecdotes meandered to nowhere.  Nevertheless, he totally transformed me into 12-year-old fanboy mode, we he ended his speech by putting on a Mariners cap backwards – his signature style


.
We spent much of the remainder of Sunday back in the museum looking at all the busts.  Our favorite one was of Cumberland Willis “Cum” Posey, Jr., of which DK, RW, and I each independently took a picture because, well, because it’s a funny nickname.  RW spotted Mariners’ play-by-play announcer Rick Rizzs walking around the museum and talked to him for a while.  I never would have identified him.  I only know his voice.



We stayed in Cooperstown pretty late.  We grabbed a few late-night slices at a local pizzeria, where we saw Jerry Hairston Jr., who was in town promoting his charity.  He was just chilling at a table with some family eating.  He’s not a big enough star to be hounded by fans.  We certainly didn’t bother him.  I was more concerned with my slice of Hawaiian pizza.  It had a single piece of pineapple on it – exactly one solitary, little chunk.  I thought about asking for another one, but really, why bother?  Life's too short to argue with the weird guy behind the counter about pineapple, right?



The worst part of the trip was the drive back the next day.  It was the exact opposite experience of the drive there.  It took us about an hour and a half longer than it did to get there due to some crazy spates of thunderstorms and road work.  At one point, I-81 went down to one lane, and it caused a backup that was like three miles long.  That alone added 45 minutes to our trip, easily.  But we did make it back… eventually.

When I walked through the door of my house the first thing I heard was, “Daddy did you buy me a toy?”  It was good to be home.

Until next time…

Friday, July 22, 2016

Entry 342: Cooperstown Bound

I'm leaving for Cooperstown, New York tomorrow morning with my buddy RW, who is getting into DC tonight.  We are meeting some other friends there.  I'm looking forward to the trip.  I'm a little bummed that it is the same weekend as my twenty-year high school reunion, but there is a decent chance I wouldn't be able to make it back for that anyway, so at least this way I get to do something fun.  And I do expect it to be fun.  It's a weekend of baseball and baseball history, what could be better than that?  Well, you could also throw in a Hall of Fame induction ceremony for my favorite player of all-time -- that would be nice.

Hey, what do you know?!



Ken Griffey Jr. was Seattle's first great baseball player and the first superstar in any sport who joined a Seattle team while I was a cognizant being, so he has a very special place in my fanboy heart.  I also have an anecdote involving a baseball card of his that I shall share now.  It's short, which is good, because I don't have much time.

Griffey's 1989 Upper Deck No. 1 baseball card was the card in my days of collecting.  It was a super hot commodity, worth around $100, which at that time was a boatload for a 12-year-old.  (It's probably worth less today than it was then, even without adjusting for inflation.  1989 was perhaps the peak of the baseball card bubble.)  I always wanted one, but couldn't muster the funds.


Then one day, this kid down the street had one that he said his dad bought for him in Mexico on a recent business trip (which totally doesn't sound made up, right?).  He wasn't the savviest kid in the world, so I offered him a trade: He could pick any team he wanted, and he would get all my cards of players on that team in exchange for his Griffey card.  However, as a condition of the trade, he couldn't see in advance what cards I had from what teams.  I would bring all my baseball cards out in a box, and then after he picked a team, we would go through it together and every time we came across a player from that team he would get it.

It was a brilliant negotiating strategy on my part.  By adding this extra condition -- one that was completely unfavorable to him, by the way -- it added an element of mystery and wonder.  As a straight up trade, I would never have gotten that Griffey card away from him -- he wasn't particularly bright, but he wasn't a total idiot either -- but by making a game out of it, by tantalizing him with the possibility of what could be, he agreed.

I went inside grabbed as many "good" cards as I could, as quickly as I could, and removed them from my baseball card box (a total weasel move, I admit) and brought it outside.  He selected the San Francisco Giants (my rookie Will Clark card was one I had removed, so I felt pretty good about my underhanded maneuver).  We then went through the box, and I gave him all my Giants cards -- Chili Davis, Jeffrey Leonard, Mike Krukow, Will Clark (non-rookie) and so on.  I got the Griffey card.

Years later, I was getting a ride home from a teammate after lacrosse practice, and when we neared my house he said, "Hey, does so-and-so live there?"  And he pointed to the kid's house with whom I made the trade.

"Yeah," I told him.
"I hate that little fuck!"
"Why?"
"I swear he stole my brother's Upper Deck Ken Griffey Jr. card like five years ago!  He denied it, but he was the only one around when it disappeared.  I shoulda kicked his ass right then and taken it back when I had the chance.  Fuckin' little shit!"
"Hmm," was all I could muster.

I didn't tell him that I had that card.  It wasn't even because I would then be compelled to give it back, and I wanted to keep it.  At that point, it didn't mean all that much to me, and its monetary value had already dropped a lot.  I just didn't want to explain to him how I had gotten it.  I was weirdly embarrassed about it -- as if I had did something wrong.  It's not a very good reason.  I was in no way complicit in the theft.  Had I said -- "What?!  That's crazy!  I have that card.  You can have it back and give it to your brother." -- he probably would have greatly appreciated it.  But I didn't.  I just sat there silently as we pulled into my driveway.

I still have the card.  It's on my bookshelf right now.  I lost touch with the kid who gave me a ride home, but I randomly Googled him recently.  He works for some sort of advocacy group for cancer patients.  I thought about selling the card on eBay and donating the proceeds to a cancer prevention charity, but it's not in mint condition, and I doubt I could get more than $20 or $30 for it.  At that price, it's worth more to me to keep on my bookshelf, as a reminder of one of the many short and ultimately pointless anecdotes that make up my life.

Saturday, July 16, 2016

Entry 341: Back to Normal... Or Not

Man, I thought after last week I was going to be able to get back to worrying about my own little banal problems here in my own little nook of the world in our own little nook of universe.  And then some terrorist asshole drives over a bunch of people in France, and Turkey might be experiencing a coup d'état, the ramifications of which are probably very profound.  (I can't say for sure because I don't know anything about Turkey.)  Now it feels a bit silly to stress out about things like trying to figure out childcare for Lil' S1 for two days in August, after his camp ends, before we go on vacation.  It doesn't seem like a "real" problem.  But it is my problem, and as I've said before, my problems have a trait very relevant to me: They're mine.  That matters quite a bit.

I've actually been thinking about this a lot lately -- about "having perspective."  I've come to the conclusion that it's mostly bullshit.  It's just something we tell ourselves or we tell others to try to assuage stress or sadness.  But it never really works, because "having perspective" is contrary to how human emotions work.  Emotions aren't governed by global, objective laws; they're very much personal and relative.  I think I've had a sense that this was the case for a long time, but it really got hammered home listening to last week's episode of the Invisibilia podcast.


The episode is titled "Frame of Reference," and in the show's final segment host Alix Spiegel talks to comedian Hasan Minhaj about growing up with a father who refuses to acknowledge his son's sadness or any other negative feeling.  Hasan's father grew up impoverished in India, and so his philosophy is that no matter what happens his son's life in America isn't that bad.  Hasan tells a heart-wrenching (but somehow still funny) story about some asshole kids calling him "Osama" after 9/11, and then breaking the windows of his family car, and his dad just kinda shrugging his shoulders and taping up the windows, like, "oh well."  Given his dad's background, a few punk kids and some busted windows weren't going to be the cause of some great despair.

As you might expect, this put Hasan in a constant state of internal conflict, because he didn't -- he couldn't -- feel the same way as his dad.  To him, being the target of ridicule and vandalism by racist punks really sucked (as it would for most people), and he couldn't help but have negative feelings about it.  But then he had his dad constantly telling him, basically, "your life is still good; get over it."  So he was essentially guilted into never feeling bad about anything.

It was a very interesting episode; I recommend listening to it (there are some other good segments as well).  And the big question comes at the end of it when the host asks -- who's right, whose way of looking at life is better, Hasan's or his dad?  Hasan sorta reluctantly comes to the conclusion that his dad's way is better, but I think that's the wrong answer.  The correct answer, in my opinion, is that they are both right.  Because it depends on one's frame of reference.  Relativity is not just a physical law; it's an emotional one as well.  So just as two people can precisely measure the duration of the same event and get different times, two people can each have radically different feelings about the same incident and both be valid.



There is a tendency for us to discount the feelings of people who have it "better" than we do.  For example, we all scoff when we hear about an athlete who feels "insulted" because he was only offered $10 million a year, instead of the $20 million he thinks he's "worth."  But is that right?  In his world that might actually be an insult.  Is it illegitimate for him to feel this way?  To you and, me he looks ridiculous, but to somebody like Hasan's father, you and I look ridiculous worrying about our stupid problems like charter schools and car seats and leaky faucets and undermining coworkers.  And to somebody with a terminal illness everybody's issues seem trivial.  So who actually has a right to feel insulted or sad or upset?  Nobody but the person in the worst situation in human history?  That clearly isn't right.  But then where do you draw the line?  Just above yourself?  I think it's better just to say everybody's feelings are equally valid.

Now, to be clear, I'm not saying that society's responses to people's problems have to be (or should be) the same.  Obviously we should be more inclined to ensure the working poor get a living wage than we should be to ensure underpaid athletes get their additional $10 million a year.  Sometimes the correct response is a new policy, sometimes people just need to suck it up.  But this doesn't mean that the former's feelings are any more authentic than the latter's.  A human is a human is a human -- and all humans have the right to feel slighted or sad or stressed, no matter how silly it might seem to others.

In other news, the chaos at our house is rapidly increasing as Lil' S2 becomes more and more mobile.  He can't quite walk yet, but he can book it crawling and like his brother he's a good climber.  The other day I was in the kitchen making breakfast, and I turned my back on him for about thirty seconds, when I turned back, I found him like this:



It's a good thing the toaster wasn't on.

I fear that Lil' S1 is already becoming the bully older brother, and I'm not sure how to stop it.  He takes his little brother's pacifier from him; he tips him over when he's in the car seat; and he just generally treats him roughly.  We're constantly telling him to be nice and gentle, and he does, for about five minutes, and then he goes right back to tormenting him.  What can you do?  The compounding factor is that often they do coexist nicely together, and sometimes when Lil' S1 does something to Lil' S2, like tackles him, or something, Lil' S2 loves it and starts laughing.  That really undermines our pleas to be gentle.

"See! He likes it!" Lil' S1 tells us.

"Yeah, he does," I reply, "but he's not going to like it in 30 seconds when you take it too far."

But somehow that message doesn't really register.

Anyway, one thing they're good for is waking each other up.  If one of them is sleeping in too late, I'll take the other one and put him on the bed.  He'll wake up his brother, and they will start playing together.  It's actually really cute.  So they have their moments, you know, typical brothers, I suppose.

Well, that's about it.  Until next time...

Friday, July 8, 2016

Entry 340: The Week Sh*t Got F*cked

Jesus it was a bad news week.  It started out with Hillary Clinton being cleared by the FBI of all criminal charges relating to her private email server, but in the process being implicated in the misdeed of being sloppy with sensitive information.  Even Hillary supporters, if we are being honest, should view this as a massive lapse of judgment on her part.  But there is nothing we can really do about it.  I mean, is this worth the risk of a Donald Trump presidency?  C’mon, get real.  Not when Trump responds to this softball he’s been tossed by recirculating anti-Semitic memes and then praising Saddam Hussein (seriously) for his approach to terrorism.  That’s what American needs in a leader -- somebody who finally understands how effective brutal tyranny can be!  Trump didn’t swing and miss on this one; he stepped out of the batter’s box and repeatedly hit himself in the nuts with the bat.

As if that weren’t bad enough, we also saw black people being killed by police officers at point-blank range, under highly dubious circumstances, in consecutive days.  And then after that some nut with a gun upped the ante by taking out multiple police officers sniper-style at a Dallas B.L.M. protest.  As I “joked” on FaceBook, what’s next – the asteroid that wipes out humanity?



So, yeah, it was rough week for America.  And aside from Clinton’s email improprieties, the underlying issue of all the bad news is the same: racial strife.  We still haven’t fixed the problem of white supremacy in this country.  It all started when our forefathers made the brilliant decision to import human beings as cheap labor from Africa and treat them as if they were property.  Then it was Jim Crow, and then "separate but equal."  After that it was wink-wink, nudge-nudge discriminatory housing and hiring practices.  Today it is a little different -- people aren’t overtly racist, and they aren’t even racist on the sly.  I know a lot of white people, and the vast majority of us truly do not care what color somebody is.  On an individual level, we treat people as people, period.  But, the mistake many of us make is thinking that this is enough – thinking that being a good, non-racist person is all we need to do.  But it’s not.  This just maintains the status quo, and the status quo isn't working for a whole lot of people of color.  This is why "color-blindness" is such bullshit.  Color-blindness is cop-out for people who don't want to acknowledge that they live in a systemic racist country.

Also, we all have subconscious biases that we cannot address unless we admit we have them in the first place.  And this isn’t some overly p.c. claptrap.  This is backed up by studies that show people with black-sounding names are less likely to get job interviews than people with a white-sounding names, and that show that we are more likely to be scared of black people than white people.  The former has profound implications on black people competing economically; the latter has profound implications on black people being over-policed.  And I think the events of the past week are a better illustration of this fact than any study could be.  I find it very difficult to believe that Alton Sterling and Philando Castile would have been shot if they were white.  Not being viewed as potentially dangerous by law enforcement is perhaps the epitome of white privilege.

But, as you know, not everybody thinks the same way I do (regretfully).  There are many people who believe racism is over, or it’s overstated, or it’s balanced out by equal grievances against white people (reverse racism!).  I thought it would be fun to post the five most annoying arguments used by people like this to discount racism and police brutality against people of color.

The vast majority of violence against black people is perpetrated by other black people

Yes, gang violence, which is primarily what you are talking about, is a problem.  There are myriad causes of it, and myriad people trying to fix it, with varying degrees of success.  But what does this problem have to do with other problems like police brutality?  I mean, far more Americans kill Americans than foreign terrorists kill Americans -- does this mean we can't ever address terrorism?  One serious problem does not negate another serious problem, and we have to be able to work on multiple things at the same time.

Liberals just feel guilty about being white

I can't speak for all liberals, but I've never felt white guilt, because I didn't choose the color of my skin (I would have gone for something that doesn't burn quite as easily if I did), and because I didn't cause racism our society.  I was born into it like everybody else alive today.  With that said, I do feel privileged to be white -- because I am -- but that is a very different feeling than guilt.

Black Lives Matter supporters are such hypocrites -- they complain about the police and then as soon as shots were fired in Dallas they ran to the police for protection

Ugh... This is a particularly annoying charge.  The obvious rebuttal is that the BLM protesters are not anti-police; they're anti-police brutality.  That last word is very important.  Honestly, I can't figure out what's so hard about this differentiation.  It's a very simple concept.  Here's an analogy: If you speak out against child abuse, does that make you anti-parent?  Of course not.  It sounds absurd.  But that's basically what people are saying when they conflate being against police brutality with being against police.

Also, I would suspect that protesters were turning to police for protection, because its the police's job to protect them.  This brings me to the next topic...

It's not going to be worth it for police to protect people, if they are constantly being scrutinized and disparaged

Ahh... The so-called "Ferguson Effect."  How low is your standard for a police officer that you willingly accept that they won't do their job unless we only ever say nice things about them, even when they do something terrible.  I mean, call me crazy, but I think it is possible for police officers to be able to enforce the law without, say, shooting a black driver in the head because he rolls his car forward a few feet.  And I don't think it is wrong to say this.

If you don't do anything wrong, the police won't bother you

Yes, if everybody acted perfectly police brutality wouldn't be a problem.  We also wouldn't need police officers at all.  This notion that somehow people "get what they deserve," because they don't comply with everything an officer says is very troubling.  For one thing, when people are dealing with police officers they are usually stressed and aren't thinking straight, and sometimes, because they are humans who are stressed out and not thinking straight, they make mistakes.  Punishment for these mistakes should not be the death penalty.  Yes, we know Alton Sterling should not have been resisting arrested; yes, we know he add an extensive criminal record; yes, we know he was illegally carrying a gun -- nobody is saying otherwise.  What people are saying is that the cops did not have to shoot him at pointblank range, when they had already tackled and neutralized him.  I think I speak for most Americans we I say we want criminals to be apprehended and prosecuted through the justice system; we don't want police officers to play the part of judge, jury, and execution, without the first two.

OK, that's all I got.

Until next time...

Friday, July 1, 2016

Entry 339: Throats, Hands, Feet, Mouths, and Showers

Quite annoyed at the moment.  My throat felt normal almost this entire week, so I thought that maybe, possibly, hopefully it was completely better, and then literally threes minutes before I started writing this entry I ate some lunch and afterward it started bothering me again.  Why?!  Why?!   Why has my own esophagus turned against me?!  And to make matters worse another malady has entered the fray: hand, foot, and mouth disease.  I don't have it, but Lil' S2 does, which is worse.  It looks quite gross, but thankfully he doesn't seem too bothered by it.  Lil' S1 might have had it a few years ago.  It's pretty common in babies.  It typically runs its course in about a week and isn't that big a deal.  As I said before, however, it really needs a new name.  It sounds so much worse than it is.  It reminds me of mad cow disease (I think because there is something else called foot-and-mouth disease that affects cattle), and the two couldn't be more different.  With one your get little red bumps on your skin that clear up in a few days; with the other your brain degenerates into a spongy mess and you turn into a deranged lunatic before dying a horrible death.  There really should be some way to distinguish linguistically between the two.  I suggest the word disease only be reserved for things that are gravely serious, and for everything else we should use a term like illness or condition: Hand, foot, and mouth illness sounds much better -- it doesn't make you think your kid is dying when you first here it.

[I don't want to disgust you by posting photos of kids with hand, foot, and mouth disease, so I will put up a picture of former Colts defensive end Jon Hand instead.]

On a tangentially related note, I once knew a guy who had a genetic predisposition for Creutzfeld-Jakob disease (CJD), which is the human version of mad cow disease (formally known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy).  It's extremely rare, but some people in his family had it.  He said he watched his uncle die from it, and it made him very ambivalent about his own mortality.  He told me he often hoped he would die early (he was about 20 at the time) rather than risk contracting CJD later in life; it's that awful.  He was smoking a cigarette at the time, and I joked, "Well, if you keep that up, you might get your wish."  And he replied in the most matter-of-fact way possible, "Absolutely."

I've noticed that about kids who grow up with life-threatening disorders; they are very blasé about their own deaths.  I suppose you just learn how to cope without freaking out, like you learn any other survival skill.  I grew up with a kid who had something wrong with his internal organs -- I never really knew what -- and he always told people he was going to be dead by age 19.  I never paid it much attention because we were, like, 12 years old at the time, and at that age seven years might as well be 70 years, and also because he tended to be overly dramatic about other things.  But then he died in his early twenties, so yeah... he was actually pretty accurate on that one.

Okay... This entry got off on a more morbid note than I intended.  In happier news, FiveThirtyEight pegs Hillary Clinton as the very likely winner in November's election -- 80%, which is a bit higher than the 75% from the betting markets I cited last entry.  Now, the obvious counter to this is that FiveThirtyEight was totally wrong about Trump in the primary, and that's true, but the funny thing about that is that their poll-based modeling was actually right!  It consistently showed Trump being a very strong candidate in the primary.  The problem is that nobody actually believed it.  Everybody thought Trump was a joke (he is), and that being a joke precludes somebody from winning the Republican primary (it doesn't).  Even the people who run a data-journalism website fell into the trap of believing the narrative instead of the numbers.

It's like when I was in Missouri with my family for my cousin's wedding last year, and we put the wrong address in to the iPhone maps app, so the GPS took us the wrong way.  But then we changed it to the right address, but we were already going the wrong direction, so the GPS had to turn us around, and we ended up taking an absurdly circuitous route to travel a few blocks.  After that, my uncle refused to use the GPS for the rest of the trip, even though it was completely right.  The problem was the humans using it.

So Clinton is a heavy favorite at this point.  This is very good news.  Sure, the odds could change between now and November, and even if they don't, Trump could still win in an upset (20% ain't nothing).  But I would much, much, much rather have it be 80-20 Clinton at this point than the other way around.



In other news, we had to pay nearly $700 to fix a leak in our shower -- yay.  In a way, it should have been expected.  Before we moved in, we had the bathroom completely redone, and we kinda did it on the cheap.  S had a contractor she had used before, and he did the job for like a third of what other contractors were quoting a friend of ours who had her similar bathroom remodeled around the same time.  The job he did looks really good, so at first I was quite pleased, but then I started noticing evidence of shoddy work -- like the toilet paper nook is to shallow to hold a full roll of toilet paper, so we never actually use it, and also there is a small (nearly inaudible) leak in our sink faucet, and the handle on the shower would untwist and just pop off for seemingly no reason from time to time, and we would have to screw it back on.  But those were all small nuisances.  There was nothing majorly wrong -- until there was.  And that time was about a week ago.

There were three big problems, only one of which was fixed.  The first was the leak, which was caused by a piece in the hot water stem being slightly off-kilter.  There was no way to completely shut off the hot water.  The handle would just spin around and then turn the water back on again.  (It was the same handle that would pop off sometimes; I'm guessing this is not a coincidence.)  The second problem is that there is no valve for just that shower, so the plumber had to shut the water off in the entire house while he worked on it.  (And, as it would happen, I had to take a huge dump shortly after he arrived.  I knew that I would have one good flush from the water that was left in the tank, and I would have to use it wisely.  I did.)  The third is that he had a very hard time getting back at our pipes.  The aforementioned contractor installed our shower so that there is no way to get behind it (the other side is another shower in our other bathroom), and he didn't put in an access panel (and we didn't know enough to ask for one), so the only way to replace a major component would be to cut out a huge section of tile.  Initially that's what the plumber told me he was going to have to do, but he managed to get at the defective area by taking the handle out.  It's kinda jerry-rigged now, but it works, and the leak is gone, so, okay, I guess that's worth $700.

It's a lot of money, but we saved several thousand dollars going with a cheaper contractor, so if you look at it that way, we are still way ahead (for now).  I was saying this to S, but instead of taking it as a positive, which is how I meant it, she got defensive (probably because I was criticizing "her" contractor's work -- they have a good rapport, and he's a very nice guy).

She was like, "Well, how do you know it was something he did that caused the leak."

And I was like, "I don't know for sure, b-u-u-t... he installed it, and it's not like everything else is perfect.  Look at our toilet paper nook, and our sink, and remember when he came out to fix our bedroom door that wouldn't latch?  Well, it broke again like a week later.  And also he ran out of paint in our basement.  Oh, and don't forget..."

And she was like, "Okay.  Stop.  Whatever.  I don't care, anymore."

And I was like, "It's funny how you stop caring as soon as I start making good points."

And she was like, "Babe, I just got home.  I'm hungry and tired and we just spent $700 that I had earmarked for savings.  I'm really not in the mood to argue right now."

And I was like, "I think there's some leftover quiche in that blue Tupperware in the fridge, if you want to eat that."

On that note, until next time...