Entry 452: Sick Day... Not Okay

Actually, it's been more like a sick week here at the G & G household.  It started on Tuesday when Lil' S1 woke up in the wee hours of the morning with a bit of a fever.  We gave him some Children's Motrin, and it went down, and he went back to sleep, but when he woke up to start the day, he wasn't himself.  Last time I nudged him to go to school when he wasn't feeling well, he threw up in his classroom, so this time I figured it best to keep him home.

S just started her new job -- it was her first week in the office -- so she understandably didn't want to take a sick day, which mean I had to stay home with him.  He's actually really easy when he's sick.  He doesn't have the energy to bother me constantly about entertaining him.  He sleeps a lot, and then when he isn't sleeping, he watches TV, and when I finally turn it off (he'd literally watch all day if we let him), he lies on the couch and thumbs through books.  I could have easily worked from home, but my computer was at the office, so I took a sick day too.  It was kinda nice, except for the fact I had to miss my Krav Maga class.  Also, I was worried I would be next.

It was a well-founded worry.  I would say about 40% of the time the kids are sick they get me sick too, and this was one of those times.  It's a weird bug.  I simultaneously have a head cold and a nervous stomach.  It's not knock-you-on-your-ass terrible, but it's annoying as hell.  I have to stop what I'm doing every few minutes to blow my nose or sneeze twenty times in rapid-fire succession or make a mad dash to the toilet.  I feel like I'm constantly egesting something.

I also can't sleep well, which makes it that much worse.  It's the Catch-22 of illness: You need to sleep so that you can stop being hacking and wheezing, but you can't sleep because you're hacking and wheezing.  I've had some crazy vivid dreams the last few nights too.  Those ones that feel so real, and leave you waking up in a state of utter confusion.  I dreamed that I forgot I was watching the kids, so I left the house, and then I remembered it and had to get back home.  It was one of those classic anxiety-filling trying-to-somewhere-but-can't dreams.  That one where you get stuck at a party with your old high school teachers, and when you finally leave your car is blocked in by a garbage truck, so you ride a bike, but the bike-lane becomes a patch of thistle and your tires won't move through it no matter how hard you pedal, so you get out your phone to call somebody, but every time you dial a number you get redirected to gay porn website -- that one.

I'm not sure why it was gay porn, by the way.  It's definitely not my subconscious trying to tell me something.  I am very sure I'm not gay, because if I was, I would just be gay.  I wouldn't be trying to suppress it.  In fact, I wish I had a big gay gaggle* of friends, who did brunch, and went to Solid Core, and got happy hour drinks in the gayborhood.  That sounds terrific to me.  Really, the only part about being gay that doesn't appeal to me is the actual being gay part, so if I was gay I would be completely embracing it.  I wouldn't be hiding it away in the recesses of my subconscious.

*Hat-tip to Nancy podcast for the term "gaggle".

Anyway, after I got sick Lil' S2 got sick, and he had to stay home yesterday, so I had to stay home too.  I usually work from home on Friday anyway, so I didn't technically take a sick day, but it was hard to get stuff done.  Lil' S2 is not as easy as his younger brother.  For one thing, he doesn't sleep as much, even when he's sick, and then as soon as he starts feeling the slightest bit better, he wants to roughhouse.  So, he goes from bouncing off the walls one minute to throwing up the next.  Also, he's not as big a TV watcher as his brother.  I put on a movie for him, hoping to work for an hour and a half in peace, and he was upstairs 20 minutes literally tugging on my pant leg.  Plus, he can climb everything now.  I have my computer on a standing desk, and I would tune him out for a few minutes, and then next thing I know there's a little hand banging on my keyboard.  He would push a chair over or a wicker basket, or stand on the heater, or climb the shelf.  The other thing he does is he literally climbs up me.  He'll grab onto my belt and kinda shimmy his way up, trying to get onto my back.  He can't get all the way up, but he gives it a pretty good go.  He learned it from his brother who recently ripped the back pocket of my jeans using it as a foothold.  They were expensive jeans too.  (The tailor was able successfully mend them, if you were worried.)

In other news, the shutdown is over -- for now, hopefully for good.  Technically, it's only a three-week reprieve, but I have to suspect even Donald Trump is not dumb enough let it happen again.  He might try something else equally dumb (and perhaps even more damaging), but probably not another shutdown.  It was an idiotic gambit from the get-go.  For one thing, it's premised on the notion that Trump is such an amoral piece of shit that hurting other Americans -- forcing them to miss paychecks and sowing chaos in their lives -- will bother Democrats more than it will bother him.  Now, this is true, and I guess Trump knows himself pretty well.  But in theory, why should a shutdown give leverage to one party over the other?  And what are you left with if the opposition refuses to budge?  Well, we got our answer: You are left with nothing.  Worse than nothing actually.  Trump looks weaker than ever, and Pelosi looks strong as can be.  She stood up to the bully and he backed down.  She coalesced a disparate Democratic party (for now), and he is still wall-less, with historically low approval ratings.  It would be a good thing, except literally nothing about the Trump presidency is a good thing.  I can't even feel schadenfreude in his failures because they just remind me that we failed a million times worse as a nation by electing him in the first place.

Okay, that's all for now.  Oh wait... one more thing.  Remember last post when I mention how S accidentally bought all those cauliflower pizza crusts?  Well, we tried to use one.  The instructions say you have to bake it by itself before you put on the sauce and all that, and you have to flip it over midway.  So, I went to flip it over and this happened.

We still have a couple more, so we will probably try again at some point.

Until next time...

Entry 451: Snow Day... Okay

We got a bit of snow here in DC -- just the right amount, in my opinion.  It was enough to shut down school on Monday, but not enough to keep it closed any longer.  One snow day is cool, but anything longer than that is tough.  One extra day home with the kids is plenty.  It was fun to play outside with them, but that only lasts about a half-hour before their gloves (and their back-up gloves) get thoroughly soaked and their hands start to freeze.  Then they are just inside wrecking havoc for the rest of the day.  Also, snow is an annoying mess.  It's only slightly better than sand from a beach.  Everything gets soggy and salty, and you have to trudge everywhere in clunky boots or with wet feet.  I like being able to walk places without needing to bring an extra pair of socks, and I like being able to drive places without needing to deice my car for 15 minutes before I go.  One thing I weirdly like about snow days, however, is shoveling the walk.  It's a good workout, and it's super satisfying to see a path formed as you go.  My neighbor has a little snowblower, and sometimes he'll do the stretch of sidewalk in front of our house as well as his, and so this time I went out with my shovel early to make sure I did it before he did.

[There is something very melancholy about melting snow, no?]

Speaking of shutdowns: the government.  This is one of the most idiotic episodes in our country's history -- I mean the entire Trump presidency, not just this shutdown.  But this shutdown is particularly idiotic, and like everybody else, I don't see the resolution.  My hope is that Trump just ends it on a whim and then tells everybody a bunch of lies about why it actually worked and why the wall will still be built or is already being built or actually already exists.  He also might go the route of a legally dubious loophole (e.g., state of emergency) and let things get tied up in court.  That would give him a face-saving out, but he said he didn't want to do that for some reason.

Whatever happens, I don't foresee Democrats caving, and I don't want them to cave.  Of course, I want the shutdown to end.  It's hurting millions of people, and the hardships are only going to compound and expand as it goes on.  Some of my friends are currently working at the State Department without getting paid.  Supposedly, they will get back pay, but when?  You can only maintain things without a cash flow for so long, and it could get expensive if you are forced to take out high-interest loans to cover necessities like food and housing.  So, if I were a Dem politician I would be willing to cut a deal with Trump to open the government.  But "deal" seems to be the deal-breaker.  Trump doesn't seem to want a deal.  In fact, he has already refused to sign a bipartisan bill to reopen the government.  He just wants his wall funded for nothing, and Dems should not abide by this.  If they do, he will just do it again.  That's the kicker.  Even if your goal is to alleviate pain, and you don't really care about some dumb-ass metal slats in the desert, it's still bad strategy to give in, because you wouldn't be alleviating pain, you'd be temporarily soothing it.  It would come back immediately the next time Trump (or some other Trumpian figure) wants something else, and then it would come back the time after that, and then the time after that, and so on.  If you allow a president to bypass Congress by, in effect, holding federal workers and large segments of the economy hostage, you are on the path to dictatorship.  It's another chip off our already eroding democracy.  It's better to stay strong now.

It helps of course that the shutdown is not very popular and most people associate it with Trump (because he bizarrely claimed it in that awkward press conference last month with Chuck and Nancy).  At this moment, there is virtually no political pressure on the Dems to outright concede.  If anything, it's working in the opposite direction, whereby people like me will be mad if they do give in.  It's only Trump's base that wants a wall, and they are unlikely to ever support a Democrat no matter how obsequious they act toward the president.  So, there is no political incentive to give in -- and if there's no political incentive and the humanitarian incentive is limited to the very short-term and would probably makes things worse in the long-run, then there isn't much of anything at all.  On the flip-side, Congressional Republicans could end this with 14 votes in the Senate to create a veto-proof supermajority, but they are too gutless to break with the president.  (He'll tweet something mean about them!)  So, it seems as if we are just going to keep plugging along until Trump caves or something big breaks -- and if the latter happens it's going to be tragic because it was so preventable.

Back to personal news, S had another hilarious episode of bad grocery shopping.  She bought a frozen pizza for the kids, but very unsurprisingly, she got the wrong kind -- she got cauliflower crust.  However, it worked out, because the kids didn't even notice.  (I tried it.  It tastes fine, but the texture is weird.  It's really sticky.)  We figured that we would get cauliflower crust every time from now on because it's (probably) healthier.  So, I come home from work the other day, and what's in the freezer?  Cauliflower crusts.  Not pizza with cauliflower crust, just the crust.  This completely defeats the purpose of frozen pizza, as it's something we give the kids when we don't have the time or energy to actually prepare something beyond taking it out of the box and putting into the oven.

It's one of those things, where it's not that big a deal, but it's like... how?  How do you get the wrong thing over and over again.  Her justification was, "It says 'Cauliflower Pizza Crust' on the box."  Yes, because that's what it is!  It doesn't say pizza with cauliflower crust.  Also, look at the box.  It's a crust!  There is no cheese or sauce in the picture.  That didn't tip you off?

To makes matters worse she bought a pile of them.  I mean, I guess we will go through them eventually, so that's better than the milk she bought the other day.  We already had a half-gallon, but we go through milk very quickly, so she bought two more gallons.  The problem is the sell-by date on each of them was the next day.  She said that we would go through it all before it spoiled, but I knew we wouldn't.  And we didn't.  We dumped over a gallon and a half down the drain because it started smelling bad, and it was that chichi non-homogenized organic milk (which normally we don't get), so it was like $9 worth of milk.

I love my wife, but this just drives me bonkers.  Between buying the wrong things and making meals too big for our kids to finish, the food waste in this house just makes me batty.  But, I suppose every marriage comes with certain "prices of admission," and in the grand scheme of things, this is a pretty small one.  Perspective, see.

Until next time...

PS: Shutdown update.  Doesn't sound like much, to me, but who knows?

Entry 450: Decluttering and Toughness

It's a time of flux here at the G & G household.  S got a new job, which is good.  Her old job was fine, as I understand it, but she was getting bored with it, so the change is welcome even if it's just a change for change's sake.  That's how S is.  She likes to keep moving -- keep looking for the next best thing.  It's an illusion, I think -- there is no actual nhe next best thing -- but life's about the journey, right?  S and I are different in this way.  Meaning and self-enrichment are important qualities in a job for her.  For me, those things are not at the top of the list.  I want something low-stress that pays enough for me to pursue the things I really like outside of work.  Once S's job gets too comfortable she wants a new challenge; I don't have that same impulse.  Sometimes I think I should try to do more -- take on Silicon Valley or whatever -- but ultimately it's just not that appealing to me.  I'd rather punch in for eight hours and then spend my remaining time on things like blogging, crossword puzzles, and Krav Maga -- and spending time with the kids, of course.  That's an area where S and I very much see eye-to-eye.  We both want jobs that allow us to spend time with our kids every day.

Since S is at home, jobless for a few days, she's been doing some wide-scale decluttering.  We are probably going to look for a new place to live in the Spring, and you have to be ready to move on a dime in the D.C. housing market.  So, we're boxing up/throwing away a lot of our crap now.  I've started going through my stuff, and I'm trying to get down to just a few boxes of stuff.  I have so much shit I never use, and there is no sense in hauling it all around.  I'm giving away about 75% of my books.  I rate them all by a formula:

keepability = rereadability + coolness - thickness

Only books that rate in the top quartile of keepability will be kept.  All my old math texts are going, and I have dozens of them.  They rate high in coolness, but extremely low in rereadability.  They are also mostly thick (usually hardcovers).  My dreams of one day being a professor are not happening.  I'm never going to have an office in a university adorned with shelves of math texts.  I just don't have a need for the ones I have anymore.

I also don't really need my CDs.  I haven't had a CD player in years.  I don't even have one in my computer anymore.  I have no way to listen to CDs.  I mean, technically, I could listen to them in my car or play them on my DVD player (which I still have), but I never do that.  On-demand music streaming is so easy and prevalent now that it has made CDs totally outmoded.

Nevertheless, I can't part with my collection -- not yet anyway.  It's strictly an emotional thing.  That collection tells my life story from age 13 through 30.  Every track on every album has a meaning and a cherished memory associated with it.  I know intellectually this doesn't change if I get rid of the physical discs, but still...  I won't even miss them.  That's the really crazy part.  I know once they are gone, I won't care one bit; I won't even think about them.  But still I can't pull the trigger.

[This was my first ever CD.  It does not have sentimental value.  In fact, I think I already got rid of it years ago.]

[I redeemed myself with my second CD, which I still have and still think is good.]

Anyway...

I found a ton of old pictures and notes and stuff like that, so it was a little trip down Memory Lane.  I also found all my old wrestling awards, which were nice to see, but not nice enough to keep them.  I mean, I don't foresee myself ever displaying my "Most Inspirational Junior 1995" plaque on my mantle at any point in my life.  I did have a moment last night, however, in which I got a tiny taste of reliving my glory days.

At my Krav Maga class, we did a drill in which we had to lie down on our back with somebody on top of us, and we had 30 seconds to get up.  The goal for the top position was to not let you get up.  Usually you match up with somebody at a similar skill level, but there was only one other dude in the class, so we were partners, and he's a much higher level than me.  (I just started Level 2; I think he's Level 4 or Level 5.)  I was on top first, and I held him down the entire time.  Then when I was on the bottom, I got up twice in the 30 seconds.  To be fair, I am a bit heavier than him, but not by that much.  I just flat-out beat him, and I'm way prouder of it than I should be.  

See, here's the thing about a sport like wrestling.  (I'm about to opine in a very self-serving way; feel free to skip ahead if you like.)  There are three components to it: 1) strength, 2) technique, 3) toughness.  1) and 2) are pretty straight-forward: Are you physically strong?  Can you do the moves correctly?  But 3) is fuzzy.  It's a je ne sais quoi.  It's hard to explain, but I know it when it see it.  I used to wrestle people who could lift the weight room and do the moves with excellent precision, and within the first minute of the match, I knew I was going to win, because I just was.  I was eventually going to break them down and out-tough them.  (The flip-side of this is that I used to wrestle people who were tougher than me, state champions and the like, and I would psych myself out and not do as well as I could have.)  That's what happened last night.  Maybe that won't always be the case; maybe he had a bad day or I took him by surprise because I'm a newbie.  But, like I said, it made me inordinately proud, no matter what the case.

By the way, Lil' S2 might have some toughness in him.  He loves wrestling.  It's almost all he wants to do.  Sometimes he wants to wrestle me; sometimes he wants to wrestle his brother.  They were going at it pretty good the other day -- so much so that S was ready to ban wrestling as an activity before I got them to tone it down a bit.  Lil' S2 definitely holds his own against his much bigger brother.

Lil' S1 is different.  He doesn't seem as tough in that way, which is fine, of course.  I'm not trying to groom my kids to be MMA stars (although...).  He likes it when he's winning and in control, but as soon as the tables turn, he starts crying and doesn't want to play anymore.  He actually had an incident at school the other day where two kids pinned him down on the playground and poked his hand with a stick.  He wasn't hurt or anything, and the adults broke it up immediately, but understandably he wasn't happy about it.  One of the kids is his best buddy, and he's actually a pretty sweet kid, so it sounds like it was just horseplay that went a bit too far.  It's probably not a big deal, but still it got our attention.  I mean, you certainly don't want your kid to be getting bullied, but I don't think that's what's happening.  So, it's probably best to just let it go.  It's one of those things where you want to help your kid, but there's nothing you can really do.  They need to work it out themselves -- and they probably have and everybody has forgotten about it by now.  That's the beauty of being a kid.  It's just like Ahmad says:

Then he get mad and want to scrap
We stay mad about, ten minutes then it's like back on the bike

Until next time...