Entry 444: Thanksgiving, The Most Half-Decent Holiday of the Year

In sports media there is a concept of a player being so underrated they're overrated.  What happens is a player will be good for a while without people paying much attention to them and so commentaries will start to trickle out online about how underrated they are, and then because the Internet is the Internet, this idea quickly spreads and reaches a point where nearly everybody is calling them underrated, and so they actually become overrated because of it.  If you are a baseball fan, you can call it the Ben Zobrist Effect.

I feel like that's what happened with Thanksgiving.  It's a good, solid holiday, but I seem to be constantly reading articles or listening to podcasts or hearing from friends and coworkers about how it's the best holiday, and how it's actually better than Christmas, and I think we all need to slow our (dinner) roll with all that.  It's a fine holiday; I like it.  But it's got some pretty major drawbacks -- the main one being that's it's long enough that you can start to get cabin fever if you stay home all four days (especially if you have kids), but it's too short to travel anywhere of distance, especially considering you will likely sit in traffic or in line at the airport for half the holiday if you do.  I think I would like it a lot better if I lived closer to my family or S's family, and we could just stop by and hang out with them for the night.  As it is, it's not very practical for us to go to South Carolina to see S's parents (nor fly across country to see my family), as it's more hassle than pleasure, especially considering we will see them in like two weeks for Christmas break, anyway.  (Actually, we will see S's mom tonight, because she's coming to visit for a bit, but that's not usually the case.)  On the plus side of the Thanksgiving ledger, the food is good and there is usually football on.  Like I said, it's a fine holiday -- nothing more, nothing less.

This year we went over to our friends' house T & Su.  They're really more friends of a friend, but they're good people.  T grew up Mormon -- I don't think he still is, but I'm not sure -- and a lot of his family were there too, so I was having flashbacks to grade school, when about half my friends were Mormon.  The thing about Mormons is that interpersonally they are the kindest people you will ever meet -- genuinely nice, loving folks.  (T's family is no exception.)  The flip side is that as a religious entity they believe some strange shit, and not all of it is benign wackiness like peeper stones and magical underwear.  They have long been opposed to LGBT rights, and they majorly mess kids' heads up when it comes to sex.  (Also, it's worth noting that Utah voted for Trump by a healthy margin.)  The other thing I found as I got into high school is that Mormons are very exclusionary.  When I was a little kid it didn't matter -- everybody just played with everybody -- but as I got older, I mostly stopped hanging out with my Mormon friends.  It wasn't like anybody decided this or there was any ill-will or anything.  We just gradually split apart.  Some of this was on me because I wanted to experiment with the bad (i.e., fun) parts of high school -- partying, swearing, messing around with girls, etc. -- and most Mormon kids don't do that.  But aside from that, I feel like Mormons don't really let you into their world unless you're Mormon too.  You can be their friend, but you're never going to be their friend.

Anyway, this really has nothing to do with anything, as religion didn't come up at all on Thursday, and T & Su did a fine job hosting a nice dinner, and a merry time was had by all.

In other news, it appears as if the lice has not gone away -- or least we are still finding nits in the kids' hair.  We did another round of shampoo treatment and washed and sterilized all the sheets and clothes and stuff.  I also broke down and shaved the kids' heads.  I should've just done it last week.  It looks kinda patchy because I did it with a pair of clippers in our laundry room, but whatever.  It will grow back and hopefully it will help.  If we are still finding nits a few days from now, I might have to take it down to the scalp.  According to an expert on lice per this NPR story, shaving your head is "like using a cannon to kill a housefly."  And that may be true, but at least a cannon kills the housefly (and your house will grow back by itself if it gets destroyed in the process).  Also in the story, it says olive oil has not been shown to be an effective treatment.  So, we probably got ripped off by the "Lice Doctors," selling us their bullshit natural remedy, when what we really need is some good old-fashioned permethrin.  The thing is, I actually went online and researched olive oil treatment and it seemed legit.  I guess I should have done more than just read the first few sentences of the first few links that popped up on Google and called it good.  I should know better.  One of my cardinal rules is to not attempt to diagnose any ailments online.  It almost always go wrong, and this is a good example.

Another wrinkle is that I'm not 100% certain that we are actually finding nits and not just dandruff.  S says she is certain, and she's probably right, but if somebody who actually knew what they are looking for told me otherwise, I wouldn't be totally blown away.

Anyway, I'll keep you all posted, as I'm sure you are on pins and needles.

Alright, that's about all I have time for tonight.  I need to get a decent night's rest.  S is taking me to one of her Solid Core exercise courses tomorrow.  (We're taking advantage of her mom being in town: exercise date!)  She's always talking up how hard the class is, so I have to put in a good effort to show her that it's not any harder than what I do at Krav Maga on a regular basis.  Oh, that reminds me, if you are somebody who wants to exercise but doesn't want to spend a lot of time doing it, you should listen to this Science Vs podcast.  It's less than ten minutes long, but if you want the tl;dl (too long; didn't listen) version, research has demonstrated that very high-intensity, very short workouts, can have a lot of health benefits, and in some ways can be even better for you than longish low-intensity workouts like jogging.  I'm genuinely excited to hear this.

Well, until next time...

Entry 443: Lice, Lice Baby

Some good things, some bad things going on here at the G & G household.  First the good news, which is actually irrelevant news for everybody but me.  (Good thing this is my blog!)  I am now a "yellow belt" in Krav Maga.  I use quotes because you don't actually get a physical belt; it's just a title to signify that you passed the first test and are now a level-two student.



The test is no joke.  I never thought I was in fear of failing (they won't let you test until you can pass), but I still had to do it, and doing it was fucking hard.  It was perhaps the most physically taxing thing I've ever done in my life -- certainly so since high school wrestling.  It started at 1:00 pm and didn't end until about 5:30 pm.  We got fewer than ten minutes worth of break total throughout the entire four and a half hours.  We went the last hour and a half or so without any break at all.  I'm not exaggerating.  It was basically Krav Maga drills nonstop.  You had a chance to catch your breath a bit when you were holding the pad for your partner, but you still had to expend energy absorbing their strikes, especially if your partner was six foot three, 250 pounds, as mine was.

[One of the greatest parodies of all-time]

Before the test the instructors gave us the spiel about “pushing through to the next level” and “you do this because it’s hard, not because it’s easy” and “if you think it's uncomfortable in here, imagine what it would be like on the street.”  I always find this kind of thing super hokey when I’m just standing there listening to it, but when I’m thirsty and exhausted and some big dude has his hands around my neck, I buy in 100%.  As a normal, boring, office-working family man, I don’t have the chance anymore to compete physically in a way I did as a kid.  It’s something I miss and something I find satisfying.  It’s the same reason why people run marathons.  But for me something like Krav Maga is better than running, because with running I can (and do) always slow down.  If you have to defend somebody throwing punches at your head, you can’t slow down.  Well, you can, but you will likely take a fist to the face if you do.  (We’re told to use an “egg shell” hand, not a closed fist, so it’s not going to knock you out if you screw up the defense.  But it still won’t feel good, and sometimes you do get hit hard inadvertently.  In a group drill I caught this one woman with a solid elbow to the head.  Luckily, it was the top of her head, and she’s tough, so she barely flinched.)  A bunch of advanced students and instructors came to watch the end of the test, and they were all cheering for us when we finished, and I gotta say, it felt good.

What didn’t feel good was reading a text from S waiting for me when I finished:

Fantastic.  I was worried about this.  It was going around the boys’ school, and the other night when I checked in on Lil’ S2, he was scratching his head furiously in his sleep.  S confirmed it.  While I was testing, she went through his head with a fine-tooth comb (literally) and found some bugs.  She then called a service called The Lice Doctors, recommended by a friend, and they sent somebody over, who confirmed that everybody had it and began treatment.  Unbeknownst to S at the time The Lice Doctors (not actual doctors) are a “natural” service, so instead of using a “chemical” shampoo they use olive oil.  In theory, I don’t have a problem with this – it seems kinda Gwenyth Paltrow-y to me, but as best I can tell olive oil is a legitimately effective treatment for head lice.  In practice, however, it’s quite awful, as olive oil is ridiculously messy, and it will leave permanent stains on clothing and furniture.  On the plus side, everybody’s head smells like an appetizer at an Italian restaurant.

The idea is that you douse your head in olive oil for eight hours, four days in a row (with a couple of spaced-out follow-ups), and this will suffocate the lice and nits.  The problem with this is that the only eight-hour stretch you can do this is in the middle of night, so we have to put the kids to bed with olive oil in their hair.  (Try getting a hyperactive three-year old into bed with a head full of oil without dripping or brushing up against of something.)  Then in the morning we (I, really, S is at work already) have to get them showered, and wash and dry all the sheets on the bed.  It's hard enough to get them out the door on time without any added tasks.

And it's even more annoying: After talking with a friend skeptical olive oil would actually work, S went out and bought lice-treatment shampoo, and she also applied that to the kids’ hair, so we are now double-bagging treatment, I guess.  I’m not totally sure why we are doing this.  I suggested we stop the olive oil treatment, since it’s such a hassle, but S said she wanted to keep doing it.  When I asked her why, she got upset and said I don’t listen to her and that she had already explained everything.  So, I still don’t know why exactly.  The reason might be that she spent money on the Lice Doctors and doesn’t want to “waste” it.  But it wouldn’t be wasted because the specialist already spent hours picking through everybody’s hair to remove all the lice and nits, and even if she didn’t: sunk cost fallacy.

This is one area in which S and I don’t mesh well.  Often when I question why she did anything the way she did it, she takes it personally and gets upset with me either because I had an accusatory tone (inadvertently, if so) or because I’m not listening to her, even though I am.  I might not be understanding her logic, but I’m listening.  And then she does this thing, where she gets snarky and starts sarcastically overexplaining everything like I’m an alien who has no concept of life on planet Earth.  It’s super irritating.  I think the bottom line is that she just really doesn’t like being questioned or having to explain herself.  I mean, nobody does, but I think she’s especially sensitive to it, and unfortunately explaining yourself is a big part of a marriage -- especially when you are married to somebody as annoyingly pedantic as me.  I’m trying to get better about letting things go.  I'm not perfect, but unless there are major stakes on the line, I try not to push back too sharply – even if it means putting olive oil in your kids’ hair for a few nights.

As for my head, I don’t think I have (or had) lice, but I’m doing the shampoo treatment anyway.  I don’t have an itchy head – or at least I didn’t until S sent the text.  Immediately after that every little tingle on my scalp was freaking me out.  I got my head shaved nearly down to scalp, I’m already nearly bald on top, and most importantly S didn't find anything when she examined my head, so I think I'm good.

You know what I just thought of – the phrase “picking nits” is quite misleading.  It means finding fault for small things, but picking nits is actually very important if you have lice.  It should be a phrase for being thorough and giving the proper attention to detail.  If you don’t pick all those nits, things are just going to get worse.

On that note, until next time…

Entry 442: Purple Rain, Purple Rain

It wasn’t quite a wave -- it was more like a spate of droplets – and it wasn’t totally blue – there was definitely some red mixed in as well.  So, what did Tuesday bring?  Purple rain!  Purple rain!

Actually, it was more like an indigo storm – a heavily blue purple storm – but Prince doesn’t have a song called “Indigo Storm,” and I couldn’t come up with a decent Indigo Girls pun.  The point is, the midterm elections were very-good-not-quite-great for non-Trumpists and disappointing-not-disastrous for Trumpists.  I didn't have a panic attack laying in bed at night, which is a departure from two years ago.  I was definitely sweating it out early in the night though.  I was watching the FiveThirtyEight real-time House odds, and it wasn’t calibrated correctly early in the night, so it was too aggressively changing directions.  When things opened kinda sluggish for the Dems in the Southeast, the dial moved from 90% in their favor to 55% to 30% (!) in about a half-hour.  My first reaction was “oh no… it’s happening again!”  But I wasn’t totally freaking out because I could see the Dems hadn’t suffered a big upset in a House race or anything like that, so I suspected maybe something was up.  Then Nate Silver posted that indeed something was up, and they were changing the settings, and then the odds immediately went up to 55% Dems and trended up the rest of the night from there.  In fact, they probably overcorrected and made it not aggressive enough because it was only at like 70% Dems when the Upshot (the New York Times' forecasting team) had it at more than 95% Dems.  Whatever... it is now at 100%, even though there are still some races pending.

Trump, of course, claimed victory because the Reps gained some seats in the Senate.  But he already had control of the Senate and this election map was incredibly tilted in their favor.  The Dems had to win or hold serve in a bunch of red states, and that's just too tall an order in today's political climate.  (A big take away from the night is that we are hardening even more into a red state/blue state country.  With some exceptions -- Joe Manchin and Jon Tester won Senate seats in states Trump won and Kyrsten Sinema might also.  Bill Nelson probably won't.)  The biggest upset Trump can celebrate is the governor's race in Florida (probably).  The Democrat Andrew Gillum was up pretty big in the polls and lost to a Trump acolyte – possibly because Trump campaigned for him.

The flip side of this, however, is that a ton of winning Dem House candidates campaigned expressly against Trump.  Living in DC I see a lot of Virginia political ads, and Jennifer Wexton was calling her opponent Barbara Comstock “Barbara Trumpstock.”  No points for creativity, but it worked.  And those who didn’t run hard against Trump explicitly, ran against him implicitly, because he dominates the ether.  In a lot of suburban swing districts I think Trump very much worked against the Republican candidates.  He turns people off, and because he makes everything about him, the Dems don’t have to waste their resources attacking him, and so they can focus on other things.  By many accounts, it was healthcare, not rabid anti-Trumpism, that swung things back in the Dems favor.

And this I think delineates the best strategy going forward to the 2020 presidential election.  Don’t run against Trump explicitly.  Run on other issues – healthcare, inequality, etc.  Call him out on his lies and bigotry, hold him accountable for his shady dealings, don't be pushovers, but don’t get bogged down in a morass of Trump hate.  It only serves to entrench people and make the Dems look “just as bad.”  Of the people I know who didn’t vote for Hillary that was their main reason why.  They didn’t really like Trump, but they saw the election as a partisan squabble between two unlikeable people – so what difference did it make?  That’s a very wrong way to see it, in my opinion (and objectively), but that’s how they saw it.  And I think that’s how a lot of people saw it.  If I were advising the Dems for 2020, I would advise them to give voters as little reasonable as possible to think the only message they have is “fuck Trump,” even though that’s what we all wish they could run on.  Again, the reason this could work is because Trump turns enough people off on his own.  "Fuck trump" is already baked into the cake.

This is also why I agree with people who think it would be a mistake for the newly elected Dem majority in the House to go gung-ho, guns-a-blazin' against Trump.  I don’t think they should try to impeach him (for now, at least).  The trick, I think, is to investigate behind the scenes, hold him accountable, but try to expose him without making it look like something the public will just chalk up to a partisan fight.  It’s not easy, and it might not work, but I think it’s the best bet.  I heard a commentator on a podcast say something to the effect of “Liberals need to stop dreaming about the magic bullet that will defeat Trump – impeachment, the Mueller investigation, etc.  The way to defeat Trump is the way to defeat any other politician.  Vote him out.”  I think that’s right.  But also, I could be wrong about all of this.  I’m open to the possibility that nobody really knows anything about political strategy and that the people who are “good” at it are just lucky, because the sample size is so small.  I mean, if you had a million people guess the outcomes of 100 coin tosses, some of them are going to do very well, and if we didn’t know any better we would think these people are good at predicting coin tosses and value their opinions on the matter.  Maybe that’s what’s going on with politics.

Anyway... if you were curious about the biggest upset of the election, meet Democrat Kendra Horn in Oklahoma's 5th district.  FiveThirtyEight only gave her a 7% chance of winning.  I went to her home page and read about her policies.  She's touts fairly standard Democratic positions -- education, health care, gun control (somewhat surprising for Oklahoma) -- and you know who she doesn't mention?  Trump.  And she won.  See, it worked this one time in an election of 250,000 Oklahomans, therefore it will always work on the national level.  That's just good extrapolation.

Until next time...

Entry 441: All Hallows' Eve

Halloween 2018 came and went.  It was fun.  My kids, three and six, are at the right age for it.  In fact, I'd say my oldest is at the beginning of his Halloween prime.  From six to ten, Halloween is an absolutely magical holiday.  Before that you're a bit too young to fully appreciate it, and after that, although you still have a few good years left, you already start to get the sense the end is near, and you start getting self-conscious about dressing up or doing anything that looks like it took "effort."  Some older kids costumes are pretty weak.  Like you'll see somebody wearing a Nationals cap and a batting glove and that's it: Hey, I'm Bryce Harper, give me some candy.  Then at age thirteen or fourteen trick-or-treating isn't cool anymore.

After that it takes some years for Halloween to be fun again.  You have to get to the point where you can go out to Halloween parties with friends and enjoy a night of alcohol-fueled silliness and debauchery.  (Don Savage calls Halloween a "Straight Pride Parade," which is pretty funny and apt.)  And then when you have kids, trick-or-treating is fun again.  But from, like, 14 through 18 Halloween isn't such a great holiday.  The main thing to do at that age is to go out and cause trouble, which usually doesn't end well.  I might have done a bit of that in my day, but I don't remember causing much havoc.  I think once I smashed a jack-o-lantern on the porch of a friend's asshole neighbor, but that's all I can recall (and he totally deserved it).  Usually, I wanted to be trouble adjacent.  I wanted to be in on the action, without being in on the action -- a (mostly) innocent bystander.  What this typically meant in practice is that I would go out with a few friends, walk around the neighborhood looking for people we know and something to do, get bored and tired, and then go back to one of our houses and play video games.

I often wonder how different things would have been if I grew up in the age of cell phones and social media.  I remember looking for people being a central part of my teenage social life.  Like you'd just go to Jack In the Box or the bowling alley or something and hope to see people you know.  And if you made plans with somebody and there was a missed connection, that might be it -- you just didn't see them for the night.  It would be weird to be a kid now and always know where your friends are at all times -- to never have those nights where you just stayed home, because you couldn't get a hold of anybody and didn't know where they were.  Or those nights when you were torn between waiting at home for a friend to call you back or going out and doing something else without them.  You'd tell your parents: If JY calls, tell him to come to the $1 movie theater at 8:00.

An ironic thing, thinking back on those years, is that the mundane memories are actually the ones I cherish the most.  I always wanted to have these "epic" nights like something out of Dazed and Confused, but it never happened (because life isn't a teen movie), but even those rare nights where something "crazy" did happen don't mean that much to me now.  The memories I most value are the ones where it was just me and a few friends doing ordinary things -- playing video games, playing cards, goofing off, doing nothing.  I took those times for granted, and it's something I miss so much now that I'm an adult and a family man and I don't have the time or space in my life to do those things.

Anyway...

Back to this Halloween, my youngest son dressed up like Gekko from PJ Masks and my oldest son went as a ninja.  Our neighborhood really gets poppin' on Halloween, and a lot of it is row houses, packed tightly together, so the kids don't have to go far to get a lot of candy, so they both made out like bandits.  In fact, Lil' S2 just tapped out after about a half-hour.  He said, "My bucket's full," even though it was only three-quarters-full, and stopped going up to houses.  Some of the other kids we were with were tired too, so we headed back, even though Lil' S1 would have stayed out all night if we let him.

As soon as we got home, we clandestinely took half their candy out of their buckets and hid it.  They got way too much.  I don't know what we will do with it.  Probably disperse some it throughout the next year; probably throw some it away; probably eat some it ourselves.  I've lost my taste for a lot of Halloween candy.  I don't like that pure sugar taste anymore.  I still like some of the chocolate bars, but the other stuff -- Smarties, Starburst, Nerds, Pixy Stix, Dum-Dums, Jolly Rancher, etc. -- I don't care for at all.

Here's my Halloween Candy Power Rankings:

5.  Tootsie Rolls (classic): I like the texture more than the taste.  I never want a tootsie roll, but if I'm really jonesing for something sweet, I will eat one.  It's the methadone of Halloween candy.

4.  Mini Kit Kat: Would be higher on my list if the dark chocolate version was more prevalent.  I love the wafery snap when you bite into it, but I'm not huge on the milk chocolate coating (and I downright dislike the white chocolate variety).

3.  Mini Snickers: This used to be number one on my list, but lately I've found they're just a tad too sweet.  I love the salty crunch of the peanut, but they're slightly cloying overall.

2.  Mini Twix: Put it in the refrigerator about a half hour before you want to eat it.  The chocolate is firm, the caramel is chewy, and the cookie is still crisp.  Delicious.  One of my favorites as a kid that still holds up.

1.  Hershey's Nuggets, Dark Chocolate with Almond: Simple, classic, delicious.  Unfortunately, I rarely see these in my kids' buckets.  Most kids prefer milk chocolate and chocolate without nuts, I think.  Dark chocolate is sort of like the IPA of the candy world.  It's for "dignified" adults of "refined" tastes -- for people who care about things like cocoa percentage.  I don't know about all that.  All I know is that when I put dark chocolate on my tongue, it's heavenly.

Until next time...

Oh, also, vote on Tuesday!