Entry 526: Post-Vacation Wrap-Up

Back from our trip to OBX.  It was a nice vacation -- a day too long, but still nice.  (One of my life axiom: Everything is too long.)  I was burnt out and literal burnt by Wednesday morning, but we had the cottage until Thursday.  (I wasn't that burnt, by the way -- I go heavy on the sunscreen -- but sometimes you miss a few spots.)  The thing is, I would have been fine staying at the beach one more day without kids, I would have preferred it, actually.  With kids though...  It's fun, but exhausting.  I have to be on high alert anytime one of my boys steps foot near the water, and then they always want me to take them in and play in the waves with them.  And the waves where we were can get brutal.  There were a few times they literally flipped me head-over-heels.  Imagine what they would do to two kids under 60 pounds.  We put Lil' S2 in a life vest, but not Lil' S1.  He can swim, but he's only 8 (and as I've mentioned before, he's the least confidence-inspiring swimmer I've ever seen; he's actually pretty good at staying afloat, but you'd be forgiven for thinking like he's struggling to reach the side).  I made him hold my hand or stay very close to me anytime we got further than ankle deep waters.

Thankfully, they will also get distracted for long stretches and play in the sand, and then I can just zone out and bask in the sun.  It felt good.  We were right on the beach, so you didn't need to bring anything other than the essentials.  I wore nothing other than trunks, shades, and a hat.  Then we set up a canopy and some chairs and that was it.  No phone, no headphones, nothing to read.  Just sitting on the beach watching the waves.  It was as relaxing as anything could be in 2020.  The bad stuff was still there in my brain -- Covid, police brutality, our idiot president -- but I could at least compartmentalize it and enjoy the moment.

Speaking of Covid, I think we did a good job being safe.  We only went inside a public place two or three times and literally everybody was wearing masks.  (A quick aside: Mask mandates work.  The "there's no real way to enforce them" argument might be technically true, but it's a total cop out.  If you put things into law and get businesses and most people onboard, then the vast majority of other people follow suit, if begrudgingly, because they don't want to get hassled.)  Then outside, on the beach or about town, it's extremely easy to stay distanced.  I don't think anybody came within ten feet of us the entire time we were there.

Unfortunately, the disease is going to persist, however, because of people like the ones who rented the house down the street from our cottage.  They were having a family reunion (as evidenced by a giant sign that read "Family Reunion 2020"), and they had at least fifty people all packed together, with cars in the drive way from all over the East Coast.  And they certainly did not strike me as the type to test and quarantine before they came.  They had a massive "Don't Tread On Me" flag hanging behind their bar.  (They had a bar and a pool in their backyard, which was right on the beach below this little bridge across the dunes, so you could see everything they had going on.)  They sounded like Long Islanders -- like, if you hear interviews with New Yorkers who love Trump, that's how they came off to me.  They were so obnoxious -- ridiculously loud and inconsiderate.  They has massive, wedding-DJ-size speakers that they bumped them so loudly you could hear them from our cottage which was at least 100 yards away and in the opposite direction they were facing.  They were playing such trite, repetitive music too.  I think they had "In Da Club" on repeat at one point, and then they would all sing along to "Bohemian Rhapsody," like, five times a day.  I was so annoyed one night, I went for a walk down the beach by myself, just to get away from the noise.  It turned out to be a good walk, though, because I got to see hundreds of these cool crabs scurry away as I got close to them (we took Lil' S1 to see them the next night), and even better, when I was walking back across the bridge, I heard one of my "friends" in that house announce that they just got shut down by the police and everybody there was all pissed.  ("I guess nobawdy is allowed to have fun in dis place.")  It was a magnificent moment of schadenfreude, and then they kept it down the rest of the trip.

Here are some other highlights.

• We celebrated Lil' S1's eighth birthday, by taking him kite flying, and then having pizza and sundaes at the cottage. 
• We visited Kitty Hawk, which is pretty cool, even though the indoor portion of the museum is closed due to coronavirus.  
• S locked herself and the kids out of the cottage, and her phone in the cottage, within our first hour of being there, while I was at the grocery store.  It was 9:30 at night, so she had to ask the bros across the way to borrow a phone to check her email to get the code again.  (Said bros were extremely friendly and obliging.)
• She tried to blame the above incident on me, because she said I'm so anal about keeping the doors closed to keep bugs out that I got in her head about it.  It's true that I am anal about this -- for good reason, I say, what's more annoying than flies and mosquitoes in your house? -- but I accept no responsibility.  You cannot blame locking yourself out on somebody who was not there.  You just can't, sorry.
• We drank nearly two cases of Lacroix water in the six days we were there, and I was the only one really drinking it.  I would say I averaged six a day.  By contrast, I had two beers, total.  This pretty much sums up my drinking habits these days.
• S's sister Sw joined us the last few days at the cottage and now she's staying with us here in DC for a bit.  I think she was going a bit stir crazy by herself in her condo in Atlanta.  It should be fun to have her here.
  

Okay, a few pics, and then that's a wrap.

[Three from Kitty Hawk]

[Two from the beach near Nags Head, North Carolina]

Entry 525: Pre-Vacation Shortie

I had another "What I'm Watching on YouTube" entry lined up for this week -- for last week, actually -- but I never got the chance to finish it up.  Life, you know?  I think it's just going to get skipped, because I'm short on time tonight, as well.  We're going to the Outer Banks on Friday, and I'm always busy right before a trip -- packing, cleaning out the fridge, tying up loose ends at work, etc.

It should be a good trip.  I'm hoping we get some sun -- a lot of rain cloud icons on the forecast website -- but if we stay inside the entire time I guess it will limit our potential exposure to Covid.  It should be pretty easy to stay safe anyway, though.  Contrary to what news reports might lead you to believe, I think beaches are some of the safest places to go.  They're huge and they are outside.  Bring a mask, just in case, and you should be good to go.

We're meeting S's sister there, so that should be fun.  We haven't seen any family in long time, obviously.  As a precondition, we all got tested.  We're all negative, which as Lil' S1 made sure to tell me, is actually positive.  He's gotten really into the Pearls Before Swine comic strip, and apparently there was a joke in one of his books with the negative/positive test result as a premise.  It might just be comics, but I'm glad he's reading something on his own.  Who knows how well online learning is going to take?

Alright, three paragraphs is already more than I intended to write.

Until next time...

Entry 524: What I've Been Watching On YouTube: Part I

It's creepy, but admittedly convenient (which is a big part of why it's creepy) how good our content providers are at interacting with one another to suggest things we might want to consume.  Every time I go to YouTube there is a seemingly endless scrawl of clips I did not ask for, but which all look legitimately interesting nevertheless, and it's often related to something I was consuming on a different platform.

For example, I recently listened to an episode of The Weeds podcast -- a one-on-one with host Matthew Yglesias and the linguist John McWhorter ("The Great Awokening") -- and then next thing I know, YouTube is suggesting I check out a clip of a discussion between Ta-Nehisi Coates and John McWhorter.  I think what happened is I Googled McWhorter, because I wasn't super familiar with him, and then since Google owns YouTube it thought I might be interested in more material on him.

Indeed I was.  Well played, Big Brother.  I found his discussion with Coates very thought-provoking.  It's actually quite old -- I think it occurred in the lead-up to the 2008 election -- and it's probably a good thing I didn't know that going into it or I probably would not have watched it.  It's mostly about hip-hop music, a subject on which I don't have particularly strong feelings, but I enjoy listening to McWhorter's arguments.  In a lot of ways he thinks how I like to think I think.  He's very logical, empirical, and solution-oriented -- sometimes to a fault.

For the most part, it was a very amicable debate, but there was one exchange that got slightly contentious, and it reminded me of the type of pointless argument I have all too frequently with my wife.  McWhorter was defending a quote by Geraldine Ferraro, a Clinton supporter (the 2008 Democratic Primary, remember): "If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position," the position being one of a legitimate contender for the nomination.  Coates was having none of it and seemed to find the quote demeaning to Obama and to black men, in general.  But McWhorter pushed back, not really on what the quote conveyed, but it's technical accuracy.  He felt the fact that Obama (whom he very much likes and supported) is black did help raise his profile from single-term senator to presidential front-runner.  Coates argued, basically, that it was offensive to single out race, when there are so many other factors to it.  And it really reminded me of S getting frustrated with me for taking issue with a single detail of something she says when she's trying to make a broader point.  It was kinda funny.

(For the record, I mostly agree with McWhorter, but the retort is "yeah, so."  People are helped all the time in life by things outside their control.  Innate attributes and situations into which we are born largely determine who we are.  Meritocracies don't actually exist.  I mean, you could say LeBron James wouldn't be the best basketball player of this generation if he wasn't abnormally tall (6' 9").  It's probably true, but it's a meaningless point.  That's how I feel about the Ferraro quote.)

More recently, McWhorter has been in the news, so to speak, because of his contention that 21st-century, "woke" antiracism is in effect a religion.  Although I don't agree with everything he writes in the article, I think the general framework he lays out is accurate and very clever.  It's one of those "I wish I had thought of that" things.  It provides a unifying model for a lot of disparate thoughts I've had on wokeness over the past decade or so.  McWhorter has led me, ironically, to an awaking about wokeness.  You can read his article or read this one (a critique of Robin DiAngelo's best-seller White Fragility) or listen to him on the podcast mentioned above or talking with Jane Coaston here, if you like.  If you don't like, I'll give my own thoughts below, and you can just read those.

One thing I've found frustrating about certain voices on the Left is the belief that there is some sort of greater moral purpose to the advancement of their preferred ideas and policies beyond just helping the people they want to help.  It really is analogous to religious enlightenment or redemption or salvation.  The reason I don't like this is, well, for one, I think it's annoyingly sanctimonious, but for another, it is often used to justify dishonesty and deny objective reality.  We can see this in AOC's famous quote about criticism she received for possibly misrepresenting some budgetary numbers: "I think that there's a lot of people more concerned about being precisely, factually, and semantically correct than about being morally right."  That's religious talk right there.  She also recently said an uptick in crime in New York City could be explained by unemployed people shoplifting bread to feed their families.  Again, she's saying something that is clearly not true literally to convey a greater moral message about the plight of poor people in our society.  You could almost argue she was being metaphorical, but I don't think she was.

The thing is, I understand and mostly share AOC's moral beliefs (just as I mostly share the moral beliefs of, say, Christianity), but I can't get behind her wokeness, because I simply don't believe in it, and also because I think it can be counterproductive.  In the case of budgets numbers, they are important because they provide the basis for the actual, real-life resources that will or will not be allocated to people.  If things don't add up and people in need don't get the services they rely on because of it, AOC's moral rectitude isn't going to mean shit.

In the case of rising crime, by attributing it solely to righteous behavior by desperate people, you are destroying your credibility on the issue, infantilizing your audience, and nullifying a very real trade-off we need to consider between a potential increase in crime and a reduction of heavy-handed policing.  If the message of people who want to defund or radically change policing is "we can do it in a way that will not lead to any increase in crime whatsoever, even a small one, even temporarily" then we are setting ourselves up for failure from the get-go.  The correct message about an uptick in crime, in my opinion, is something to the effect of, "We are in a time of social and political upheaval.  Many people are unemployed; many people are anxious because of the coronavirus; many people are rethinking the role of the police in society.  When you put all that together, you are probably going to get an uptick in crime -- some of it is political in nature; some of it is a result of stressed-out people making irrationally bad decisions; some of it is total desperation; some of it is amoral, opportunistic looting; some of it is the police sitting back because they feel underappreciated and are trying to make a misguided point.  Once we start to solve these things, crime will start to drop again."  That, I think, is the correct message, but it's not the woke one, because one of the tenets of wokeness, in the aftermath of George Floyd's murder and the protests, is that you can't attribute any of the peripheral crimes to the people actually committing them, even in a heavily qualified manner.

Another way in which wokeness is like religion is because it requires its adherents to believe two contradictory things simultaneously.  It's like the joke on The Simpsons:

To wit:

You must not generalize groups of people -- no single person is a representative of their racial, gender, sexual orientation, etc. group; saying you see people as individuals is a cop-out, because it denies them their culture and shared experience, and it serves as cover for your own biases ("I don't see color").

As a white person, you must take an active role in standing up and speaking out against racism; as a white person, you have to let black people be the prominent faces in the fight against racism -- don't coopt the movement -- it's not about you.

In the wake of recent tragedies, you should reach out to black friends and coworkers and make sure they are okay; you should give black people space and not overwhelm them to assuage your own burdens.

You should have frank conversations about race with black people to understand their perspective; it's not black people's job to education you about racism.

It is self-evident that sexism was a huge factor in Hillary Clinton losing the 2016 presidential election; Bernie Sanders was way out of line when he (allegedly) stated that Elizabeth Warren's gender would work against her if she was the 2020 candidate.

And so on...

I'm sure that to many people who might read this (hypothetically speaking; in reality I don't have "many" readers), it's going to sound like I'm being a whiny white guy or hating on antiracism or wokeness, but that's not my intent.  In fact, one of the ways I disagree a bit with McWhorter is the degree to which woke antiracism is a pernicious phenomenon.  I've pointed out some ways in which it is bad, but it has a good side, as well (like most religions).  I don't hate it; I just don't want to be a part of it, and I don't want to be considered a pariah for not being a part of it (as I feel with most religions).  I'm extremely tolerant of wokeness (as I am with most religions), and I hope it is reciprocated.  I'm not a big-tent liberal; I'm a huge-tent liberal.  I want (almost) everybody -- woke, non-woke, and in between -- invited to the party. 

Because the truth is, the AOCs and John McWhorters of the world share many common goals, and we all should come together to try to achieve them.

Until next time...

Entry 523: The Danger Zone

You know how when you go to the woods, you will sometimes see a sign telling you the fire danger rating?  I feel like we all need one of those for our anxiety level during "Coronavirus Season" (as my kids call it).  Mine was "very high" earlier this week, in the yellow, approaching orange, but I've dropped off to the blue: just normal "high."  I don't know what causes the fluctuations.  Nothing has happened in either direction that should have affected my anxieties levels.  But, for whatever reason, I felt much more uneasy at the beginning of the week than I do now.  Maybe it's just a learned behavior to relax on the weekend and stress out at the start of the week (an extension of the Sunday Blues).  Who knows?

Our mayor announced DC public schools will go entirely virtually until at least November.  It sucks (obviously), but probably for the best.  I was steadfastly in favor of school returning as normal in the fall, but after hearing a lot of the teachers didn't want to be forced to return in-person, I changed my tune considerably.  They are already overworked and underpaid, and now we are going to ask them to risk their health so that the rest of us can have some relief?  That doesn't seem right.

Although, that's not an entirely accurate way to frame it.  For many parents and students, school isn't just a source of relief, it's a necessity.  If you don't have the resources -- time, money, moral support -- to keep kids home, you really need school.  Not having it is not just an inconvenience (albeit a fucking massive one) like it is for us.  That's why I mentioned in a previous post that I'd be in favor of a school-only-for-those-who-really-need-it model.  Sadly, it probably wouldn't work politically/socially.  We are way too selfish.

Speaking of which, Paul Krugman has a good article up this week titled "The Cult of Selfishness is Killing America", which is about how the reluctance (and in many cases outright refusal) of Trump and his acolytes to take basic precautions against Covid, such as mask wearing, fits into a broader warped world view.  I recommend the entire article, but the final passage is particularly on-point.

Just to be clear, I’m not saying that Republicans are selfish. We’d be doing much better if that were all there were to it. The point, instead, is that they’ve sacralized selfishness, hurting their own political prospects by insisting on the right to act selfishly even when it hurts others. 

What the coronavirus has revealed is the power of America’s cult of selfishness. And this cult is killing us.  

I agree with Paul that this selfishness is mainly perpetrated by those on the right end of the political spectrum, but there is an element of this on the left too -- just not to the same extent and not with the same vindictiveness (and this matters; degree matters, a lot; I'm definitely not trying to "both sides" this).  We have such a look-out-for-number-one, gotta-get-mine mindset in this country.  We are terrible at working toward a greater good, just for the sake of the great good.  Often a greater good happens to be a byproduct of our individual, selfish pursuits (the good side of capitalism), but when this isn't the case, as with this pandemic, we flounder.  It's sad and disheartening.

But, hey, at least we can still have the music of Kenny Loggins.



Alright, I hear the movie I put on for the kids coming to an end.  I better go.  I don't want them to bother S.  She's been really stressed out this weekend.  We are trying to line up some sort of part-time nanny/tutor to help us out when school starts again, and she's not going to be able to relax until that's finalized.  I'm sure it doesn't help that I'm pretty blasé about the whole thing.  (We will find somebody, and if we don't, we will still get by.)  Also, I slept in today, so I think S feels I owe her some emotional capital.  I understand that, but it's not really my fault -- I just didn't wake up and nobody woke me up.  What am I supposed to do, set an alarm for Saturday morning?  Time: 8:00 am.  Label: Make sure spouse isn't annoyed.

Until next time...