It's 9:19 at night, which means I have about 15 minutes until I will struggle severely to string together coherent sentences. So, I'm giving you five quick thoughts and then I'm out.
In the past three weeks, I attended four kids' birthdays, two of which are my own. They went fairly well. Lil' S1's was especially nice. We had it at a swim club at which our friends are members. A pool is a good place for a six-year-old's birthday party. It was not blazing hot (high 70s), so when the sun went behind a cloud it got a bit chilly in the water. Kids just don't care though. They'll be in the water shivering, teeth chattering, refusing to get out, "I'm not c-c-c-c-old."
Speaking of birthdays, mine is coming up in a few days. I might have a little celebration with the family, but nothing beyond that. I'm very birthdayed out. Maybe I will do something big next year for my 42nd -- my "Jackie Robinson Birthday," or if you're more into sci-fi than baseball, my "The Meaning of Life, the Universe, and Everything Birthday."
As you've surely heard, John McCain passed away recently. Like most people who lean left, I have mixed feelings on him. I never cared for his politics, and every time I heard him called a "maverick," I thought of the Mark Twain quote, "Give a man a reputation as an early riser and he can sleep 'til noon." I was thoroughly underwhelmed by his fecklessness in the face of Trumpism, but he did shoot down Obamacare repeal, and he gave some good speeches, and he was way better than any current Republican politician I can think of.... so, you know...
I started listening to a new podcast: the second season of In the Dark. It's really good, but it could probably be cut down by about 20%. That's basically my feeling on everything these days: good, but could have been shorter.
The Mariners are falling out of the playoff race, and it makes me sad.
First full week of school here at the G & G household. It's a year-round school, if you are wondering about the early start date. I prefer year-round. There's no reason in today's non-predominantly-farming-based society to have such a long break in the summer. It makes more sense for college, because it gives kids a chance to go home and/or get a summer job, but I don't see the point for elementary school. Also, I heard that kids retain knowledge better if their gaps in school are shorter. I've never actually read such a study (or even read an article detailing such a study), but it intuitively makes sense. So, I'll just go with that.
This year is Lil' S2's first at a proper school. He's in pre-K3. It's nice for me logistically -- one-stop drop, so I save about a half-hour on my morning commute -- but it's been rough on the little guy so far. This morning was the first time I didn't leave him in tears, but he still had to be coddled by his teacher. The weird thing is that when S picks him up in the afternoon, he throws a fit because he doesn't want to leave, so right now we are getting the worst of both worlds. But it's temporary. It's just the transition period. It will all be okay, and in the meantime, he's building character. Seriously. Being willing and able to adapt to situations outside of your comfort zone can be a very useful life skill and one kids should learn early. As somebody smart once said, "Half of life is showing up." I agree with this quote, which is why I don't understand the backlash to the idea of "participation trophies." Participating in something -- seeing it through to the end, giving it your best, even if you're not the best -- is laudable. Why, then, are participation trophies so disparaged? The real answer, I suspect, has little to do with the value of participation, but rather it's a way for an insecure older generation to denigrate the younger generation that will inevitably replace them. It's just "Harumph! Kids today!"-ism. I hate the garbage. But that's another story...
S is away for the weekend, so I have both boys to myself. I can't say I'm particularly looking forward to it -- three and six is a tough combination of ages -- but it will be alright. We thankfully have some events already on the calendar, birthdays today and tomorrow, so I'm not going to be at a loss for things to do. The worst part is that I usually get to sleep in one day on the weekend and now I won't be able to. The best part is that I will get to spend time with my kids and do things my way. Sometimes it's actually easier for me to take care of the kids alone, because when S is around she wants everything done her way, even when I'm the one doing it. One example of this is homework. Lil' S1 gets homework now, which is fine -- I'm mostly anti-homework, but whatever -- but it's supposed to be his homework. I'm not going to be the gatekeeper of it. I don't see the value in that. If he needs help or needs a little nudge or reminder from time to time that's one thing, but S is constantly getting on my case to get on his case about his homework. And I don't want to do that. If homework is not designed so that kids can handle it on their own, then it's not age appropriate and should be modified so that it is. It should in no way be the parents' responsibility. That's my take, anyway.
Another example is school lunches. S is (or was until very recently: see below) insistent on packing a school lunch for Lil' S1 a few days a week. That's fine, but she gives him, like, a seven-course meal, and he only eats a tenth of it, and then the rest of it goes to waste, and it's good food too. It's not like Oscar Meyer bologna and Fruit by the Foot -- it's stuff that adults (e.g., I) would eat otherwise. And our food bill is super expensive as is, we don't need to be throwing stuff away. The other day she gave him two turkey meatballs, a Tupperware of black beans, a cheese stick, an apple bar, and an apple. It would have been a decent lunch for a normal adult, let alone a finicky six-year. When I cleaned out his backpack at night, there remained one turkey meatball, the entire container of black beans, the cheese stick, and the apple. So, he ate one meatball and an apple bar -- and this is not an anomaly. It's the norm.
The next night when I got home there was some chicken a la king left over from the kids' dinner and S asked me not to eat it because she wanted to give to S for lunch. I insisted he wasn't going to eat it (no more than a few bites, anyway), and then this set off something between a fight and a good-natured disagreement. I was saying it was just a waste of good food, and S was saying, well, a lot of things. The thing is, she doesn't have a good rational argument, because her desire to pack huge lunches doesn't come from a place of rationality. It's a Mama Bear, provide-for-your-kids mentality. I totally understand that. I'm not belittling it. I do things that aren't rational all the time. I will get out of bed sometimes and check the house alarm and check the door is locked, even though I remember checking those things already. I still go into the kids' room before I go sleep to make sure they are still alive -- literally. I will listen to them breath, and if I can't hear anything, I will actually feel for a pulse. It makes no sense, but it's my primitive "protector" brain at work.
So, we all have our hangups. The key, I think, is to keep them in check, so they disrupt other people as little as possible. If I was waking up S every time I went to check the lock, or if I was waking up my kids whenever I checked on them, then I would force myself to stop doing it, because it would be affecting the family negatively. In the case of school lunches, we are basically just throwing away a meal everyday, because of S's food hangup. (And it's actually not just school lunches. She almost always makes them too much food, and it ends up getting tossed.) One of her arguments is that he would just throw away most the school lunch as well. But even if that is true -- and we don't know that it is -- it's much smaller and less expensive and doesn't require us to do any work. It's the far preferable option in my opinion. Look, if the kid wanted a huge home lunch everyday, and he ate it, I'd be totally on-board. But he doesn't and pretending that he does is not going to solve anything.
We did, however, have something of a break-through the other day. I don't know if he actually ate the chicken a la king. S cleaned out his lunchbox that night and didn't say anything about it one way or the other, and I wasn't about to ask. (I'm not that dumb. I'm not going to start a fight over nothing. I'll just write about on my blog after the fact. Much healthier... right?) However, S gave him quiche the next day, and he didn't eat a bite of it. This was apparently the straw that broke the camel's back, as S said me, "You know, I think I'm just going to have him get school lunch everyday now. If he's not going to eat it, why bother?" She said it, as if it was something new and not what we had just argued about two days earlier, but whatever. I'll take it.
Well, I think that's about enough for this entry. RIP Aretha Franklin.
For some reason TV seems to be a topic on a lot of the podcasts I've been listening to lately. I'm really out of the loop on TV these days. Although from what I understand, there is no loop anymore. Streaming has ruined the loop. There are so many shows -- so many good shows -- on so many platforms that everybody is watching something different at any give moment and there is no public conversation about a show the day after it airs like there used to be. It's apparently one of the big laments of hardcore TV fans. I think there might be a push-back to binge watching on the horizon (if it hasn't started already), where streaming services drop episodes of their big shows periodically, instead of all at once, to build up the anticipation and make TV watching an event again.
For my part, I haven't given up on TV totally, but I'm pretty close. It's a combination of two big factors: 1) I have little free time; 2) I'm daunted by TV now. TV has gotten so much better over the past 20 years, and there is so much more of it, which in theory is a good, but in practice it probably makes me watch less of it, because I'm overwhelmed and when I actually do watch something, if it doesn't grab me immediately I think I'm wasting my time watching the "wrong" thing. Because the bar is so high, I'm not willing to give anything a chance. Also, the on-demand-ness of TV works against me too. I like to watch with S because it's an easy way to spend time together at night when we are both tired (and it's actually a good way to bond: intimacy = shared experience), but she watches a lot of TV and since she can watch whenever she wants, she watches it all before we get a chance to watch together.
Anyway, one of the podcasts I listened to was a recap of the top 100 TV episodes of the 21st century, and it got me thinking what my list would look like. So, I started to map it out in my brain, but what I found is that I can't really remember whole episodes, even of my very favorite shows, instead I remember moments of episodes. So, I started to do my own list of "Top TV Moments," but in so doing I started looking up things on YouTube and I fell into a Simpsons rabbit hole. So here's my new list...
Top 10 The Simpsons Jokes I Stumbled Across On YouTube
10.
He eats the pie anyway -- brilliant.
9.
"We went fishing." Get's me every time. 8.
Perhaps the best movie clip parody ever. 7.
Do schoolchildren still watch 30-year-old videos on pointless topics? Probably not. They have the Internet now.
6.
"I don't know."
5.
THRILLHO: As somebody who named hundreds of fake players on Nintendo's Baseball Stars, I know the pain of limited character space all too well. 4.
This is probably the quintessential The Simpsons joke. It starts off as a hackneyed sitcom gag and then finishes in a different direction. 3.
Üter at his finest. 2.
I still recite this one with my friend JY when I see him: "I sleep in a big bed with my wife." 1.
I love this bit. Hutz replying in the manner as written on his card is what takes from "solid joke" to "number one on the list."
