Entry 429: When Life Gives You Lemons...

...Ask For Something Higher In Protein.

That's the slogan on a t-shirt that has been making the rounds at my gym.  Apparently that's fitness humor.

Anyway... I haven't posted anything to this blog in a while because my parents have been in the past two weekends, so I haven't had any good opportunities to write something.  And I'm not going to write anything of substance tonight because I'm very tired and it's 10:30 pm on a Sunday.  I'll post again sometime relatively soon though.

Until then...

Entry 428: A Crazy Coincidence Nobody Cares About But Me

One of my favorite song lyrics is from "Made-Up Dreams" by Built to Spill:

No one wants to hear

What you dreamt about unless you dreamt about them

Very true, but it's just one example from a large set of items of the form "No one wants to hear x, unless x is about them."  There are many things x can equal here, and I've learned throughout life that one such example is x = uncanny coincidence.  Nobody cares about your crazy coincidences unless they involve them.  So many times I've experience something uncannily amazing and told somebody about it in utter disbelief, and their response is something akin to "hey... uh... yeah... how 'bout that?"  This happened to me recently while playing trivia, and I'm going to write about it, because if my blog isn't for writing about stuff nobody cares about but me, then I don't know what it's for at all.

I went to grade school with a girl I'll call Jenny Bannister.  She had a sister named Daisy Bannister.  They were both super-smart and super-ambitious.  Jenny graduated high school at, like, 13 or 14.  She was always skipping grades, but for a few years we were in the same class.  We were in the "step up" program together, so I knew her pretty well and spent a good amount of time with her, collaborating on various smart-kid projects (e.g., Odyssey of the Mind performances).  We weren't friends, but we weren't specifically not friends either.  I liked her fine even though she was kinda a pain -- so uptight, no chill at all.  Her mother was even worse (which is obviously why Jenny was how she was) -- super involved in her kids' school lives, always agitating and lobbying the teacher for Jenny to get a position of privilege -- first chair violin, the lead role in a performance, class rep in the spelling bee, etc.  I hated this at the time (I was also very confused by it.  Why did Jenny's mom know so much about her academic life?  I told my parents as little as possible about school.), and looking back on it, I still don't like it.  It's one thing to be an advocate for your child; it's another to think they are always the best at everything and that they should get advantages over other kids because of it.

But it mostly worked (which made it even more annoying).  Jenny thrived in that environment, even if she did occasionally complain about it in moments of candor.  Once she told me that what she wanted for her birthday was two-hours of free-time so that she could read a book "for fun" -- not play Nintendo, not watch TV, not go to the movies, just read a book that wasn't for school.  That's the type of life this kid had.

Anyway, she quickly skipped ahead of me in school, and I basically never saw her again.  But I did receive an out-of-the-blue email from her circa 2002.  She found my grad school email address online and sent me a "Hey, remember me?  What are you up to now?" note.  This was in the days post-Google, when it was easy to find people, but pre-Facebook (pre-MySpace, even), so these types of messages were somewhat common.  I emailed back, and we had a brief exchange, in which I found out she was a high-powered corporate attorney.  After that I didn't think about her again for nearly two decades.

Fast-forward to last Sunday.  I'm playing pub trivia with my pub-trivia crew -- all of whom are at least four years younger than me; none of whom grew up anywhere near me, by the way -- and one of the questions is something about flowers.  The answer was daisy, and somebody in my group gave a little factoid about the daisy.  This made me think of Daisy Bannister, so just to be goofy I said, "Daisy is also the name of the sister of a girl I went to grade school with.  She was two years younger than me and graduated high school with my sister who's three years older than me."  Then one of my trivia companions R piped up.

R: She skipped five grades!  Wow!
Me: Yeah, crazy -- Jenny Bannister.
R: Wait, Jenny Bannister?  Is she a partner at [law firm whose name I don't remember].
Me: I dunno... she did tell me once she was a lawyer... so, probably, yeah.
R: [Taps button on phone; shows me a professional profile pic] Is this her?
Me: [Squints; does mental aging] Yeah... You know her?!
R: No.  Dan and Priya who play trivia with us sometimes know her.  They just told me about some woman who graduated from law school at, like, age 20, so I looked her up once, and the name stuck with me.
Me: You just randomly looked up somebody your friends mentioned once, and remembered her name?
R: Yeah.
Me: And it's the same person I randomly brought up now?  The one I went to grade school with 30 years ago?
R: I guess so, yeah.
Me: [To the entire table] Everybody!  Can we just please acknowledge how weird this is?!  I mentioned a girl I went to grade school with -- decades ago, thousands of miles from here, on the opposite coast -- somebody I haven't thought about in about 20 years, and R knows who she is!  That's insane, right?!  Can somebody please back me up on this?!
Rest of the table: [Stop for a beat, look at me, turn back to one another] So how much should we bet on the bonus question?  I'm thinking if we do five points then...

S gave me a similarly unenthusiastic response, and then tried to equate it to a time she was in South Africa and met somebody who went to Syracuse like she did and they had the same professor -- as if a major American university with a 20,000-person annual enrollment is in any way the same as my grade school class of like 100 students.  Eh... what can you do?

No one wants to hear

About your coincidence unless your coincidence is about them

Until next time...

Entry 427: I Love the Fourth of July

It's 9:30 pm on the fourth of July, and everybody in my house other than me is sleeping, so I figure it's as good a time as any to crank out a blog post.  I don't know how everybody else is sleeping, given our neighborhood sounds like a war zone and will continue to do so for the next few hours, but one of S's superpowers is being able to fall asleep in almost any scenario, and it seems as if she passed that on to our kids.  I like the fourth fine, but it's pretty high on my list of holidays with the biggest enjoyment difference before and after young kids.  New Year's Eve is number one on the list -- a wonderful holiday, unless you have young kids, in which case it's not that fun.  The night of the fourth is similar -- in fact it's much worse because you have to listen to random explosions.  But the redeeming quality of the fourth is the cookout/day drinking aspect absent in New Year's Eve.  My kids are too young for fireworks (which is a shame, as I really like firework shows), but they are the prefect age for playing with squirt guns in the backyard with other kids while the adults enjoy alcoholic beverages and talk about their kids, because the fact that we're all parents of kids roughly the same age is our biggest unifying factor.

And that's what we did today.  We had three other couples over each with two kids, so it was eight adults and eight children -- a good amount for a backyard cookout.  One of the couples we're pretty tight with, the other two we don't know as well, but they are both very cool.  I never know how to greet the women in the couples.  With the guys, it's just handshakes, but with the women is it handshakes as well?  Hugs?  I know them, but I don't know them that well.  I feel like I'm in a Curb Your Enthusiasm episode every time I go through this.  I watch S, and she usually hugs the guys in the couples, so then I feel compelled to hug as well.  But as a man, maybe I shouldn't initiate hugs with women I'm not good friends with.  I should probably err on the side of not hugging.  Or I could just pretend I'm a germaphobe and only give people fist-bumps like Howie Mandel.  And then I could inflate a rubber glove and put it on my head and everybody will laugh hysterically even though it's not that funny.

Anyway...

We recently returned from a two-week West Coast swing -- San Diego and Seattle.  Well, more University Place than Seattle, but you get my point.  It was an excellent trip with the notable exception of the flight home.  We tried something different -- the coast-to-coast red-eye on Spirit Air -- and it was an absolute disaster.  Well, for me at least.  The rest of my family didn't seem to mind that much (again, the sleep superpower).  We are NEVER doing it again.  (And by NEVER I mean until the next time we can save several hundred dollars.)

I would love to write more about the vacation, but I'm short on time (unfortunately the day after the fourth of July is not also a holiday), so I'll just put up a few pics and call it a post.

It was a gay, Indian, Jewish wedding, so major friend diversity points for us.  We stayed at a resort on the Torrey Pines golf course, which was terrific -- or at least it would have been if we didn't have little kids.  There wasn't much for them to do there, and S got a vicious 24-hour bug (food poisoning?) our first day of the trip.  So, it was more work than fun initially.  One cool thing is that we met another couple there with small kids and became BFFs for the weekend.  We were the only ones at the little cafe in the hotel before it opened at 6 am.  Little kids + east coast to west coast time change = early wake-up.

This is Children's Pool Beach in San Diego, subject of some major seal controversy.

A shot of Mount Rainier taken on a short walk from my parents' house, which is also my childhood home.  Every time I go back I kick myself for taking vistas like this for granted when I was growing up.

Lil' S1 and two of his cousins at Point Ruston.  I've said it many times; I'll say it again.  Tacoma is such an underrated city when it comes to beautiful scenery.

Until next time...