Entry 398: Life Stuff

Lot's things going on here in the G & G household, none of them very exciting, which means they are perfect material for this blog.  We are getting a ton of work done on our house.  This is on the heels of getting a ton of work done to our yard this summer.  Some of it is just cosmetic stuff -- changing the blinds, touching up some bare paint, fixing a dent in the wall where Lil' S1 crashed a chair, and most importantly, getting rid of this damn dangling chandelier-like light fixture in our dining area that's good for nothing but whacking me in the head.  Some of it is important maintenance -- our furnace was leaking carbon monoxide (not enough to harm anybody, but enough to set off our detectors, and you don't mess around with CO), so we are getting it replaced (the workers are here as I write this, actually).  And that's our savings account drained down to nothing.  But I don't mind.  Improving where you live pretty much always seems like a good investment to me.  For one thing, you improve where you live.  For another thing, you can often get the money back (at least a decent portion of it), if/when you sell.

We are actually discussing doing some serious renovations -- like get-a-line-of-credit-for-a-couple-hundred-thousands-dollars renovations.  And by "discussing," I mean S is telling me she wants to do this, and I'm trying to find the best way to keep a happy marriage.  I don't really want to do renovations, to be honest.  It's too much money for too little payoff, and it doesn't seem to me as if we have the type of house for it structurally (although admittedly I know very little about architecture).  S wants three things: 1) a bigger kitchen, 2) a more open main area, 3) a room on the ground floor for her mom when she visits because she struggles going up and down stairs.  But it's like $300,000 to do 1 and 2 (3 might not be realistic), and I'm not convinced it would be that much better when it's done.  I mean, for that amount of money, we could buy a whole new house!

Except we couldn't.  Not anything decent; not anywhere near DC proper.  You have to go pretty far out in the suburbs, not even the suburbs, the suburbs of the suburbs to get a good house in a decent neighborhood for that price in this area.  We have been keeping a close eye on DC real estate (well, S has at least, and then she makes me look at it), but the market is just INSANE.  It's like $1 million for what we want, and you have to be ready to make an offer five minutes after you see it or somebody else is going to come in and snatch it.  And these places aren't even that great.  They are "yeah, okay, this could probably work" not "OMG!  This is my dream house!"  If we wanted to sell our house and move to a totally new place, now we would be a great time to do it.  But since we want to sell and buy in the same market, it doesn't really work to our advantage.

My feeling on the whole thing is that I'm open to moving, but I don't really want to do it (similar to renovations).  If a great deal presented itself, then I'd be all for it.  But we haven't seen anything close to a great deal yet.  So that being the case, I say we just stay here, don't pump a bunch of money into our place for a marginal upgrade, and live a happy life (or try to at least, it's hard to really be happy with Tangerine Idi Amin in the White House).

Unfortunately, the problem with having a family is that you have to consider what other people want as well.  And S doesn't like that plan, so we have to figure something out.  I think we might just end of moving next spring.  We will sell our house and then move into a rental for a while and then look for a new place.  I like that idea better than trying to do it simultaneously.  It's easier to work out the financing (you don't have to put a contingency on the sale, which many sellers around here won't agree to anyway, because somebody else will make an offer without one), and we won't feel rushed into buying a just okay house for an obscene amount of money.  Also, I ultimately would love to move somewhere else completely -- where?  I don't know.  But if we don't own a house, it's a lot easier to dream realistically about such scenarios.

But renovations are definitely still on the table.  We wouldn't have to buy a new house, and we would ultimately get to stay in the neighborhood, two big pluses for me (although we would still have to move out for a few months).  Renovations also have the upside that we have more control over what we want.  But they have the downside that we are limited to what the current structure of our house will allow and that there are somethings we still won't get even if we renovate -- like a parking space.

So some "fun" conversations are on the horizon for S and me.  Our marriage works because we, at a very macro level, agree on things -- we have similar values and we work really well as parental team.  We're happy as a family, which is probably the singularly most important thing.  But there are some big lifestyle issues on which we have never seen eye-to-eye.  We have different priorities and derive satisfaction from different things.  S always wants to be going, doing, moving someplace, something -- a new job, a better house, a better school so on and on -- onward and upward.  Whereas I just want to get to a place of adequate comfort and free time, so that I can do things that actually make life worthwhile -- you know, like crossword puzzles and blogging.

And, by the way, it should go without saying, but neither one of us is right or wrong.  We're just different.  That's something I think we could both stand to remember is moments of frustration.  S often chalks my attitude up to "not ever wanting to be bothered by anything" (as if moving to a new house is equivalent to running an errand), and I often dismiss S's opinions because I think she's just going to have new ones in a few weeks anyway.  I think she often wants to change things just for the sake change not because they get us closer to any sort of final goal.  But, even if this is the case (and it might not be) so what?  Why is that any less worthy a way to live life than any other way?

Anyway...

Well, my blogging period has elapsed.  Until next time...

Entry 397: Some Brief Thoughts On a Culture of Sexual Assault (I Should Have Done More)

Short entry this week.  We have a bunch of company this weekend, the in-laws and some family friends of the in-laws.  There are currently six adults and four kids staying in our house, so, as you can imagine, it's a bit hectic...

[Note: This entry ended up not being that short after all -- as usual.]

It has been interesting, to say the least, to watch this Harvey Weinstein story snowball into a much broader story about a culture of sexual harassment and sexual assault in general.  It seems as if this didn't really happen when the mainstream media started reporting on other predators, like, say, Bill Cosby.  I'm not sure why Weinstein seems to have resonated so much more with people.  Perhaps Weinstein's tactics were more in line with the type of unwanted sexual advances the typical woman receives on a regular basis.  Most women were never drugged and raped by "America's Grandpa," but many have been harassed in the workplace by men who had power over their careers.

As I mentioned previously, I was only vaguely aware of Weinstein before all this broke, and my opinion of him was already negative -- I thought he was the stereotypical asshole, bullying business executive (and he seems to have been that too).  I've been reading a lot of the stories about him, and I've been following the chorus of "me too"s on social media.  I've said almost nothing about it, and I haven't responded to any of my friends' posts.  It's way too easy to misunderstand somebody or be misunderstood when communicating in a series of texts and emojis, so I typically steer clear of serious issues on social media.  (On a related note, is this soon going to be a cop-out on my part?  Is discourse on social media going to take over to such an extent that saying "I don't want to talk about it on social media" is tantamount to saying "I don't want to talk about it all?"  A different topic, for a different time.)  Also, when you're not a member of the victimized group, when you are just an ally, you have to be careful not to "make it about you."  So, with that said, I know this subject is not about me.  But men do play a big part in it, and this blog is about me, and so I believe it's the appropriate place to give my thoughts on the subject.

My thoughts are very much in line with those of Quinten Tarantino.  I have read some criticism of Tarantino on this.  Many say it's too little, too late, which is one hundred percent fair, and it's basically what Tarantino himself says.  ("Anything I say now will sound like a crappy excuse.")  But his words really resonate with me, and I don't think I'm alone.  Only a very small percentage of the population is in a position to see firsthand somebody as rich and powerful as Weinstein in action, but I suspect the vast majority of men have known another man who very likely crossed a line with a woman in some way -- and we didn't do enough about it.

In my case, throughout my life I've had three woman tell me they've been raped, and each time my reaction was completely underwhelming.  I basically did nothing.

The first woman -- girl, actually -- was a high school friend.  She described the first time she had sex, with her boyfriend at the time, and it was not consensual.  I dismissed it at the time because she was still really close friends with the guy.  But, if what she told me was accurate (I think it was), and if my memory is correct (I think it is), then she was flat-out date raped.

The second woman was a college friend.  She openly said a different guy, who we all knew, raped her.  To my knowledge, nobody did anything about it.  (I don't even know if she did much about it.)  I did ask another friend about it once, and he said, "I don't think that's really what happened."  And so I just accepted that without further inquiry because it was easy -- that's probably not what happened.  I even saw the guy around a few times after that.  I always tried to avoid him, but even before this all went down, I thought he was a colossal asshole and tried to avoid him.

The third woman was a high school friend, who was visiting some other high school friends at my college, so we were all hanging out together.  We were playing the drinking game "I Never," where you say something you've never done and everybody who has done that has to drink (or something like that).  Because we were all young, drunk, and dumb somebody said "I've never been raped!" and my friend drank.  She didn't make an ostensibly big deal about it, but it was pretty clear she wanted people to notice.  I did, and I didn't do anything about it.

That's the point: I didn't anything about any of them.  Maybe it wasn't my place to do anything, but I could have asked -- could have, but didn't.  My attitude was somewhere between denial and "somebody else other than me should be handling this."  And that's not good enough.

One through line of all these incidents is that they happened when I was young.  I think I was only 21 or 22 when the last one occurred.  I didn't have the life experience to really know how to process something like this.  But like Quentin Tarantino, I knew enough to do more than I did.

Entry 396: The Rubik's Cube of Life

The in-laws are in town.  I mostly like it when they come.  They're good people, and S's mom really helps out with cooking and cleaning.  However, when you add two more grown people to a not-humongous house, things start to get a bit crowded no matter how much you like them.  Plus, Indian people typically don't put the same value on personal privacy as do people raised in the States -- it's a culture difference -- so they are more okay with staying right on top of one another.  I remember when S lived in a tiny condo by herself and her family came to visit and they had five adults and a toddler all staying in a 500-square-foot area.  S's family is not hard not up for money, so asked her why they just didn't get a hotel room for a few days, and she said it was not even a possibility -- culturally they just would never do that.  It's wasn't even in the question.  In a way, it's nice -- you're much less likely to get lonely (I heard a piece on a podcast about a predominantly Indian retirement community, and how the norm was that anybody could stop by anybody else's room at any moment and it wasn't considered rude); in another way, it's like, "Can I just have an hour alone, please?"

But I got some time to myself right now.  S and her parents took Lil' S1 with them on some errands, so it's just me, a napping Lil' S2, a cup of coffee, and my laptop.  Aaaaah... bliss.

I had a funny episode with S's dad, where he couldn't find the spare key we gave him when he first arrived.  The first thing I suggested is that he check the pockets of all the shirts he had worn recently (I frequently see him put the key there when he takes his daily constitutional).  But he insisted that he put it in this little box on our mantle like he always does.  He thought the kids got into it, which is a perfectly reasonable theory, except everything else in the box was in order.  When the kids get into something, it looks like a twister came through.  So he starts looking all over the mantle and on the floor near the mantle, and again I'm like, "check your pockets," but he doesn't, so it's just lost for the day, and they don't have a key.  (I don't let on how much it bothers me not knowing where this key is.)  So then today, I ask if he found it yet, and he said he hadn't and starts looking for it again.  Twenty minutes later he says, "Found it!  It was in one my shirt pockets."  Of course.  The funny part is that there is no recognition, no "Hey, you were right along.  Should have just looked there first," it's just "found it," moving on.  I think he just legit didn't hear me when I was telling him to look in his pockets, or he heard me but it didn't register.  I think that's pretty typical human behavior actually -- we get tunnel vision and just can't see anything outside of a narrow scope.  My father-in-law was convinced he put the key in the box, and so any initial rejection of that premise just didn't compute.

Anyway...

I've taken up a new mini hobby: Rubik's Cube solving.  At first, I was going to figure it out all by myself, from scratch (apparently if you are good with permutations in abstract algebra, which at one point I was, you can figure it out), but this lasted about ten minutes, before it was

So I went online and got the instructions.  Once you have the instructions, it's mostly straightforward, but you still have to figure some things out on your own.  It's a nice little project.  I'm going to get to the point where I can solve it in a few minutes from memory -- that's the only way you can impress people -- nobody thinks it's cool if you're like, "Check this out!  If you give me 45 minutes and let me reference the directions on the Internet I'll can solve this puzzle!" -- but it's not easy, because there are a lot of moves to remember, and there's not just one path to take every time.  You have to learn all the different scenarios.  It takes a lot of practice.

S doesn't really like this new hobby of mine because she says I just zone out and don't pay attention to anybody while I'm doing it, which there is probably some truth to.  But the thing is, S doesn't like anything I do.  I swear, she just wants me to sit there and stare into space, doing nothing, so that I don't seem distracted when she makes an offhand comment to me every five minutes.

As you can probably tell, this is one of our ongoing "discussions," -- the zoning-out discussion.  My general defense is, "Aren't you glad you have a husband who has hobbies he's interested in?  Isn't that better than some passionless dolt?"  I'm not sure if she totally buys it or not.

[Rubik's Cube inventor and crossword puzzle favorite ERNO Rubik]

In other news, Lil' S2 is really starting to grow up fast.  He can talk now, which is fun and cute.  He's even learned how to tattle on his brother,"To-to," as he calls him.  ("To-to do that!  To-to do that!")  I think he's still a bit behind verbally, but he's catching up quickly.  He's definitely behind where Lil' S1 was at his age.  We have video of Lil' S1 counting to ten by myself when he was a few months younger than Lil' S2 is now, and Lil' S2 can't really count at all yet.  He can maybe get to three, before he just starts saying the first parts of random numbers ("Waah, do, tree, nigh, si, te!").  But I'm still not worried because Lil' S2 seems to be pretty advanced analytically.  From a very early age, he understood most of what we told him, and he's really good with puzzles.  He does this US states puzzle by himself without any help.  It's pretty impressive.  Also, he's already telling us when he has to go poop sometimes ("Poop-butt! Poop-butt!"), which is great.  I cannot wait to ditch the diapers.  Tossing our stink-ass Diaper Genie will be a major milestone in my parenting career.

Alright, speaking of Lil' S2, I hear him waking up now.  Better go.  Until next time...

Entry 395: Bad Weekend for Humans

Last weekend was a bad one for humans.  The disaster in Puerto Rico was awful enough without the fucking moron (TM: Rex Tillerson) "running" our country deciding an island full of beleaguered, desperate brown Americans would be the next foil in his ongoing culture wars.  He's a disgrace.  He's been a disgrace since day one, but that doesn't make it any less true now.

Then to pile catastrophe on top of catastrophe, a deranged man killed 50 people (and injured scores more) with an assault rifle in Las Vegas.  This, naturally, opened up the floodgates for the spate of "thoughts and prayers" from (mostly Republican) politicians who then will do absolutely nothing about it.  I just don't get this.  I just don't get gun culture.  I understand having a gun if you want to hunt or shoot skeet or if you legitimately want to protect yourself (although I think it's drastically overstated how effective they are for self-defense).  But this notion of equating a war-ready arsenal of assault rifles with "freedom" is beyond me -- as is the idea that pretty much anybody should be able to buy pretty much any gun and pretty much any ammo with pretty much no safety training or experience.

A lot of Americans see eye-to-eye with me, which is good, but a lot of Americans don't, which is the problem.  Proponents of gun control love to blame the NRA for gun violence -- which is fine by me, I loathe the NRA -- but the truth of the matter, as I see it, is that's it's not really the NRA itself, it's the millions of people who love guns.  They make the NRA, not vice-versa.  I've seen a lot of tweets going around by liberals claiming congress is "owned" by the NRA, but actually they give only nominal amounts of money to candidates.  They don't have to spend a lot.  In fact, I would say your typical Republican candidate needs the NRA more than the NRA needs the typical Republican candidate.  It's the people, the voters, my fellow Americans.  They love guns, and there is seemingly no amount of death that can ever convince that guns are possibly, maybe part of the problem with gun violence.

I don't like what Bill O'Reilly said about mass shootings being the "price of freedom."  But I think it's something with which a lot of people agree.  In fact, I think that if God came down from heaven and offered hardcore gun lovers a deal -- all gun violence would somehow be ended instantly, but in return they would have to relinquish all their guns -- I don't they take it.  They would rather have guns than peace.  They might not ever admit it, even to themselves, which is why they make a lot of terrible rationalizations about owning guns that involve hammers and cars and Chicago and Switzerland and force monopolies.  I don't think we're going to be able to change the laws until we change the culture; although, circularly, I think changing the laws would go a long way toward changing the culture.

The good news is that now that outed serial sexual harasser Harvey Weinstein has pledged to take on the NRA, everything should be all good in, what, a few months?  Jeez, what an awful story and an awful man.  The only thing I really knew about him came from Adam Carolla, who basically called him a crook, saying he would cook the books on movies he produced to avoid paying the movie makers their just royalties (I think he produced Carolla's movie The Hammer), so I had a negative image of him already.  I had no idea he was so involved in Democratic politics (although it sounds as if the actual amount he donated has been exaggerated), and I couldn't care less.  Listen, if you didn't know before this there is sexism/misogyny on the left, you are the world's biggest naif.  It's much more about power than politics.  Many powerful dudes abuse their power and treat people, particularly women, even more particularly young, vulnerable women, like shit.  They get away with it for so long because speaking out against it, even if you are totally in the right, sucks.  It's often easier to just move along, especially if you get a settlement offer.

Weinstein has tried to pull the "it was a different time" garbage to explain away his actions.  (As somebody on Twitter wrote: "You have to understand, it was a different time.  The science on whether women were people was still up in the air.")  This is clearly a very weak attempt at rationalization -- he is much better off with the mea culpa, "I have a problem and am working hard to fix it," route -- but he probably isn't wrong when he says that this is part of the culture.  This is actually a big reason why I've been very reluctant, despite some very good opportunities, to give it a go in Silicon Valley.  The bro-y lifestyle just doesn't sound appealing, and the sexism I've heard so much about is a part of this.  It's not the entire thing -- it might not even the biggest thing (the hours, the instability, the expenses of raising a family in the Bay Area, etc. also come into play) -- but it is a thing I take into consideration.

Alright, I think I've said enough for now.  Until next time...