Entry 365: What Am I Going To Do?

My Facebook feed has blowing up with outrage this weekend, for good reason.  We are living in outrageous times.  People online compare things with which they disagree to Nazism so frequently that somebody named Godwin formulate a law about it.  But when our government starts trying to ban people of a certain religion from entering the country, including, in some instances, people with legal authority to be here, such comparisons start to become apt.  I realize it's important not to exaggerate, and it's important not to catastrophize, so I'm not going to say Donald Trump is the next Hitler.  What I am going to say is that he's getting way too close for comfort.  And we need to nip this shit in the bud now.

The best quote I saw on Facebook was something like (I'm paraphrasing):

Remember in history class when you would learn about times of oppression and think, "If only I was alive back then..."  Well, that "then" is now.  What are going to do about it?

This is something I was grappling with before this weekend and it's intensified tenfold over the last few days.  Obviously Trump's unconstitutional, unconscionable executive orders have a lot to do with that.  But on a more personal note, I found out a good friend of mine is facing felony charges and a possible multiyear prison sentence for helping shut off an oil pipeline.  When something like this happens it really ratchets up the "I'm not doing nearly enough" guilt.

But that begs the obvious question -- what can you do?  Especially if you, like me, live in a super blue city with no real representation in Congress and have a full-time job and two young children to raise?  For now, I've been donating money.  It's not very creative or personal, but at the moment I have more disposable income than free time.  In the last few days S and I have donated to my friend's legal defense, the ACLU, and Earth Justice.  I've also renewed my subscription to the New Yorker (even though I rarely have time to read it anymore), and I think I'm finally going to give in and get a subscription to the New York Times* and the Washington Post.  Paying journalists to do real journalism is also important when you have a president who lies constantly and then tries to use the media as a bulwark against the public backlash.  So currently my contributions to La Résistance are strictly monetary, but if the moment calls where I have to take it beyond that, I hope I'll be ready.

And if you are looking for a place to donate some money, check out Puzzles for Progress (run by a crossword puzzle constructor named Francis Heaney -- I've never met him, but he seems like a cool guy).  The nice thing about this is that after you donate you will get a bunch of fun puzzles to do.  Diversions and distractions are also very important.  This is going to be a long fight.  It's going to be won over years, perhaps generations.  If you try to battle every minute of everyday, you will likely burn out quickly.  So stay fresh, stay sane, stay positive.  We will do this together.  Truth and sanity always wins in the end... hopefully.

Alright I gotta go, dad duties, see.  Until next time...

*I've resisted this in the past because I don't like that they make you pay separately for the crossword puzzle.  But given how much Trump hates the New York Times, I might have to finally get past this.

Entry 364: A Hero of the Resistance... And a San Diego Weekend Diary

Well, Donald Trump is officially the president of the United States of America and as a consequence the most powerful person in the world.  Sad!  But not as sad as I thought it would be.  I was expecting to spend this weekend in a total media blackout, watching Russell Wilson highlights on YouTube, but I've actually been checking in online from time to time to see what's going on, and I'm good.  For one thing, I've had months to prepare; for another, it's now the case that everyday that goes by is one less day in his term.  But the biggest reason I haven't been in total despair is because of the ground swell of opposition.  Most Americans don't want this; many Americans vehemently don't want this.  If we all stick together and fight as one, we might be okay.  We might even be stronger when we finally do come out on the other side.  Don't get me wrong, I wish more than anything that November's election went the other way -- it eats at me a little bit everyday that it didn't -- but since it didn't, let's hope for the best.  I mean if society as we know it is in fact going to collapse, I don't want to spend my last days in a stew of negativity.  Pessimists are bad company.

That doesn't mean we should quell the fire and outrage, though.  Let it burn within, so that we can flips things in the next election.  Well, maybe not the next election -- 2018 is going to be tough on anti-Trumpers demographically (but we should still try: Vote! And if you live in a secure area, adopt a close race in a nearby area and donate money and/or time!) -- but definitely in 2020.  Things can change.  I did my part yesterday by staying home and taking care of the kids while S partook in the Women's March on Washington.  Yep, I'm pretty much a hero of the resistance.

Anyway...

[Image snagged from Goggle]

In lighter news, my cousin got married last weekend in San Diego.  I was in attendance.  Here's a brief (not realy) diary-style recap of the events.

Friday 1/13:  I flew out on Friday the 13th, which I didn't even realize until now, but would not have cared even if I had.  I'm just about as un-superstitious as person can be.  And my flights were completely devoid of bad luck.  Everything was on time, my layover at LAX went totally smoothly (no small thing, as you know, if you've even flown through the cesspit that is LAX), and I arrived at my hotel as expected.

The only slightly annoying thing that happened is that the woman next to me put all her in-flight materials (magazine, safety placard, air sickness bag, etc.) in my seat pocket before I got on, so it was stuffed full with two copies of everything.  I noticed it shortly after takeoff, and said to her, "Uh... I think this is your stuff."  She took it back without protest.  I had one of the later boarding groups, so I think she thought the seat was going to be open (there was also a bunch of her personal stuff on my seat when I arrived), but that's not an assumption you should make on an airplane until you have actually left the gate.  She looked to be in her late twenties, and she was fairly attractive, so this struck me as a classic example of AWB -- "attractive woman behavior."  That is, something that's slightly inconsiderate -- not totally rude, just slightly inconsiderate -- that an attractive woman can get away with that other members of society cannot.  Although, I should be careful with my assumptions.  Once I shared an office with an attractive woman, and she was super inconsiderate, and I chalked it up to AWB, until one day she came in and told me that she had been diagnosed as on the spectrum.  It wasn't AWB at all; it was autism.  And then I felt like an ass.

I was supposed to meet my parents at the hotel, and then we were going to meet some other family for dinner, but my parents' flight was delayed (they didn't share my Friday the 13th luck), so I went to dinner without them.  I don't think anybody at dinner actually knew I was coming, but everybody was happy to see me nonetheless -- or least they acted as such, which is good enough for me.  I found out one of my cousins and one of my cousins' wives are both pregnant, due in May.  So along with my sister in-law (also pregnant), this means three great-grandchildren on my mother's parents' side (who both have passed) will be arriving this spring.  By my count this will make 23 total great-grandchildren.  The next generation is here, and it's a cool thing to watch.

After dinner went back to the hotel and watched Jackass 3D.  I don't care how juvenile it is; that shit cracks me up like nothing else.



Saturday 1/14: I slept in until 9:15 a.m., which means it was after noon on the east coast.  Did I mention it was nice to sleep without anybody's crying and whining waking me up at the crack of dawn?  I must have had a pretty steep sleep debt to pay off.  After arousing I texted my parents, but they weren't up and at 'em yet, so I walked up to a nearby Starbucks, and had a coffee and light breakfast while I solved the New York Times crossword puzzle (in pen, on Saturday, I might add).  I had a feeling my parents were going to want to join me as soon as I was ready to leave, and lo and behold, as soon as I put my jacket on my dad called...  It was fine.  I didn't mind waiting there (I had nothing else to do), but I had to go to the bathroom, and it was getting increasingly urgent.  I didn't want to lose my table, so I was trying to hold it until my parents arrived, but the situation reached a critical mass, so I did that thing where you put your jacket and hat on the table and hope people respect it.  And then of course while I'm in the bathroom I get a text from my dad telling me they are here and asking me where I am.

Later in the day I went to lunch at the famous Hotel del Coronado with my parents and one of my dad's friends from his teen years.  It was cool.  Then at night we went to the rehearsal dinner which was at a yoga studio.  If you know my uncle, the father of the bride, this doesn't sound that weird.  We drank kombucha beer and ate delicious vegan food.  We also were regaled with some yogic/acrobatic performances -- a guy twirling fire, a guy and a girl doing various planking poses, a woman doing a flaming hula hoop, etc.  It was a lot of fun.

Things wrapped up reasonably early -- around 10:00 pm or so -- and I really wanted to crash out early (gotta sleep while you can), but there was a stupid band playing in the lobby until 11:15.  The hotel we stayed at had a quirky, old Hollywood, swingin' joint theme to it, and on Saturdays I guess they have big band style concerts in the lobby, which is great, unless, of course, you are a patron of the hotel trying to use said hotel for its intended purpose -- sleeping.

[Hotel del Coranado -- also from the Internet I took a picture of it with  my phone, but it got deleted when I tried to transfer it to my email, because my phone sucks.  I'm getting a new one next week.]

Sunday 1/15: One problem with having a bunch of family around is organizing activities.  I think cell phones actually make this worse, because instead of just setting a plan and sticking to it, everybody communicates through text, and you end up with a clusterfuck of cyber communique, and no clear idea about what's going on.  This happened to us on Sunday trying to organize brunch with my extended family.  My dad got a bit peeved, because he felt like he and my mom got left out of the loop (which they did), and if not for a chance meeting between me and my uncle in the lobby of the hotel, they would have gone to the wrong place.

But everything got settled.  The only "casualty" was my sister's Uber account.  She was already in town for a convention, staying at a hotel in Gaslamp District, but she was staying with me on Sunday.  So she checked out of her first hotel and took an Uber over to our hotel... only to get into another Uber with my parents and me, and go right back to the Gaslamp District, next door to her original hotel.  Understandably, she was annoyed, as she could have just stayed in the area.  I tried to explain that it wasn't really any different than the original plan -- initially she was planning on going from A to B to C, but now she went from A to B to A, so as long as A and C are about the same distance from B (which they were), then she didn't "lose" anything vis-a-vis her original plan -- but it didn't really work.  It probably wouldn't have worked on me either.  Psychologically there is something extremely unsatisfying about rushing to leave a place, just to end up right back in that same place a half hour later.

We final did meet everybody for brunch.  I had a chicken wrap that was actually pretty bad.  I wish I had ordered something else.

The wedding ceremony was at Balboa Park near the San Diego Zoo.  It was short and sweet -- just the way I like it.  The reception was really fun.  They had a live band, which is an underrated asset for a wedding reception.  If the band is halfway decent (which they were; actually, they were quite good), it adds an energy to the festivities that you can't match with a DJ playing music from an iPod.  The dancing was fun, although I wish S was there with me.  It's nice to have somebody you're not related to by blood to dance with you.

Monday 1/16: Travel day.  I was worried when I got to the San Diego Airport, as the security line was backed up so far there was a line to get in line.  I'm not sure what was going on, but for a while all security checks in my terminal were closed -- like straight-up not letting anybody through.  I was anticipated waiting for hours and cutting it close with my flight (I got there pretty early, but not that early), but to the credit of the airport employees, they opened up the checks and got things moving -- like you were practically running to keep up with the line.  I made it through with no issues, and once again my flight left on time (three in a row!).

[This was the only picture I was able to salvage from the entire trip.  The line to get to the security line.]

I didn't check a bag, choosing instead to put everything in a carry-on.  As I discussed with my sister earlier, this definitely has it's drawbacks -- namely you have to lug your bag around with you through the airport, and you have to partake in the idiotic battle for overhead bin space (which can be greatly mitigated by using a malleable duffel bag, instead of a hard roller board) -- but when you arrive at your home airport at 9:30 pm and have to work the next day, being able to bypass baggage claim, and walk right out of the airport makes it totally worth it, if you ask me.

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

Entry 363: Leaving Town Again (Short Entry)

I'm a man on the move -- these past few weeks, at least.  I'm going of out town again.  It's my cousin's wedding in San Diego, so I'm taking a four-day weekend and making the trip sans wife and kids.  I'm not looking forward to the travel -- so much so that I thought about not going.  I mean, it's not a great time, all things consider.  We just got back from a long vacation, and it's a long flight (and I have a stupid layover in LA), and it's also a bad time to leave S alone with the kids (winter weekends are the worst and school is out Monday for MLK Day), and I just don't like being away from my boys in general.  I worry about them constantly.  Oh, you can also toss in the fact that I haven't been feeling great lately (although sleeping in a place where nobody will wake me up at four in the morning will probably help that).  But, I really like my cousin, and I really like weddings, so I'm going.  Also it's a chance to see family I don't see very often -- aunts, uncles, other cousins, etc.  Who knows when the next time I'll be able to see them is?  Actually, a different cousin is getting married in the summer, so I do know when, but you get my point.

Anyway, gotta hit it.

[Incidentally, the Chargers' just announced they are leaving San Diego after 56 years to move to Los Angeles.  A referendum in San Diego to build a new stadium using a hotel tax failed, so the owner has "no choice" but to leave.  I mean, what do you expect him to do, use him own money to build a place for his $1.5-billion football team to play?]

Until next time...

Entry 362: Trying to Talk Myself into 2017

We got back from South Carolina New Year's Day.  We woke up early, like 5:30 a.m. early, and drove the seven hours (nine since we have kids) to DC.  There wasn't much traffic (unsurprisingly not many people were out and about the morning of January 1), and since it was Sunday, we still got that vacation "buffer day" for the observed holiday on Monday.  It worked out quite nicely -- quite nicely indeed.  Y'know, other than the fact we spent half our waking hours Sunday in a car.  When are teleporters going to become real things?

Lil' S1 put up a bit of a struggle when it was time to go.  We woke him up from a deep sleep, and he went to bed late the night before (he had trouble falling asleep because of the "lightning," i.e, New Year's Eve fireworks), and he got it in his head somehow that we were getting a puppy before going home.  So our conversation when I woke him up went something like this:

Me [gently shaking him awake]: Hey buddy, time to wake up.  We're going home!
Him: What?!  In the night time?!
Me: It's not night.  It's the morning.  The sun just hasn't come up yet.
Him: Did you get my puppy?
Me: No, we aren't getting one.
Him [in tears]: I want a puppy!!!
Me: If you hurry up and get ready, you can watch Rescue Bots on the iPad in the car.
Him [immediately stops crying]: Okay, Daddy.  Can I watch the one where Dr. Morocco has a shark submarine?
Me: Uh... sure

And that was the end of that potential tantrum.

[We watched the ball drop in the EdVenture Museum in Columbia, South Carolina.  It fell at noon and the kids toasted juice boxes.]

But it's been rough since we got back, truth be told.  Everybody is sick and both kids have been whining incessantly.  They got spoiled big time at S's parents' place, and it's been hard to get them back into their usual routines.  After being lavished with gifts and attention for two weeks, they are loath to wake up and go back to their non-holiday lives.  And we don't want to be too strict with them (S more so than me) because they are both sick.  It's probably just common colds, but S thinks Lil' S2 might have croup.   Either way they legitimately aren't feeling well, so we're trying to walk that impossible line of simultaneously being comforting and stern.

Anyway...

The trip was good -- way too much driving though.  All told we drove from DC to Florida and back.  S has a cousin in Jacksonville, so we all went to visit them for a few days after Christmas.  I did all but a few of the 25 or so total hours of driving, which is fine -- I'd typically rather be the driver than a passenger, if only because the driver usually gets a comfortable seat.  (The car was always jam-packed with people and car seats and luggage and God knows what else.)  While driving, I noticed a new type of annoying driver.  Everybody knows the left-lane-hugger -- the driver who gets in the fast lane and then drives ten mph slower than everybody else, so that a buildup of cars, to which said driver is utterly oblivious (or worse, just doesn't care about), quickly accumulates behind him or her.  But I came across the much rarer counterpart of this terrible person -- the right-lane-hugger.  I watched a man drive at least twenty miles, not particularly slowly, mind you, without moving from the right lane.

What made this so noteworthy is that traffic was very light, there were two other open lanes, and there were frequent mergers on the right.  So this guy would be cruising along, and then he would get to a spot where other cars had to merge into his lane, and instead of moving to the center lane, making life easier and safer on everybody (himself included), he made all the merging cars fit in around him.  I understand this in heavy traffic when it's difficult to change lanes, or if there are only two lanes, and you don't want to block the left lane, but that wasn't the case.  There was a wide-open center lane.  Why not use it, and let the other cars merge with ease?  At one point there was a police officer who was out of his car attending to somebody on the side of the road.  The shoulder was not very wide, so I thought to myself, "Surely, now he will move over." Nope; he didn't.  Instead of moving over to the completely empty area one lane to his left, he whizzed right by, 60 mph, leaving only about a five-foot gap between his 3,000-pound missile and an exposed police officer.  So dangerous, and so weird.  Not as weird as that car who drove across Maine with one tire on the shoulder of the road the entire time, but weird nonetheless.

[St. Augustine, Florida]

Anyway...

S's cousin's was good.  The accommodations were a bit cramped, though.  There were 11 people staying in a one-story house with two beds.  I got one of them, but it was a little kid's twin bed (with princess sheets), and it was not comfortable at all.  It felt like a spring was poking my kidney all night.  I never got a good night's sleep while I was there.  But, I gotta say, I like tropical Christmas.  You can have your Norman Rockwell, rustic, white Christmas, if you want it; I'll take the warm weather.  I would much rather be able to go outside in a t-shirt and shorts than be able to curl up by the fire with hot cocoa.  I don't even like cocoa.  It's too sweet.

While in Jacksonville we went to St. Augustine, the self-proclaimed oldest city in the U.S., and it was really cool.  There are all sorts of shops offering various forms of gimcrackery, but I just liked the vibe.  The city was lit up with a light festival, everybody was happy, and the kids could just run wild with their toy light-sabers S's cousin bought them from a street vendor at the beginning of our visit.  (He and his wife have two daughters -- ages 11 and 7 or thereabouts.)  Also, we ate at a really good pizzeria.  It was just fun all around.

Getting there, however, was not fun -- not at all.  It was SO crowded.  I was not prepared for the onslaught of traffic and crowds that came with our trip.  S's cousin and his family (and S's sister) all went in one car, and I drove S, her parents, and our boys in another car, and I don't know if S's cousin didn't know how crowded it would be, or if he just didn't communicate it S, or if she didn't properly relay it to me.  But I was expecting a leisurely trip to a city with ample parking and space, and that is not what I got.  Our instructions were to park at the fort in the middle of the city.  But unfortunately S put the wrong fort into the GPS, and we went several miles in the wrong direction before noticing our error.  Then when we turned around and got close to where we were supposed to go, we got slammed with traffic -- both cars and pedestrians.  It was like the traffic at a stadium after a major sporting event ends.

To make matters much worse, we still didn't know exactly where we were going.  We didn't have a precise location of the fort, and it was the type of thing where if you make a wrong turn you lose 15 minutes, because that's how long it's going to take you to navigate back to the right path.  Eventually, we found parking somewhere else, but we were over a mile from where we needed to be, and we didn't have a stroller, and S's mom has bad knees.  So we had to get back in the car, get back in the traffic, and find that damn fort.

Finally, I told S to tell somebody in her cousin's party to send us a pin-drop of the fort's location, which she did, and so we got an actual (correct) location we could put into the GPS.  It was less than a mile away, but it took us over a half hour to get there and park and meet up with everybody else.  The thing is, I thought of the idea for them to send us a pin-drop when we first realized how bad the traffic was, but I didn't say anything, because S absolutely hates it when she ends up as the middle-person in a conversation between me and her family, and everybody was already extremely irritated, and I didn't want to inflame things, so I just kept my mouth shut.  I told S this later, and she responded, "What?!  I wish you would have said that!  You could have saved us all a lot of headache!"  Oops.  Oh well, like I said, it was awesome once we got there, so... all's well that end's well, I suppose.

Speaking of ending, it's about time to wrap up this post.  I wanted to talk about Rogue One, because I saw it over the holiday and quite liked it, but I think it will have to wait until another time (or more likely I just won't ever write about it all).  I'll just say one thing about it (warning: contains a veiled spoiler).  Given the events of the final twenty minutes of the movie, I completely understand why Darth Vader didn't believe Princess Leia at the beginning of A New Hope when she told him her spaceship was on a diplomatic mission.

Until next time...