Entry 530: 2020 Gonna 2020

A few hours after I put up my last post, I learned RBG died.  It was pretty crushing for me, as it was for many people.  Aside from the loss of a civil rights icon, much like John Lewis’ passing early this year, it portends a possibly substantial swing in the ideological makeup of the Supreme Court.  It also sets up what’s sure to be an excruciating confirmation fight in the already highly contentious weeks before the election.  It will be excruciating, in large part, because my side is almost certainly going to lose.  In all honesty, I haven’t really been following it because I already know – I already knew as soon as the news broke – exactly what would happen.  A Trump appointed judge, probably this Barrett woman, is going to be confirmed and seated.  There just isn’t enough, if any, resistance among Republican senators to stop it.  The only thing the Democrats can possibly do is cry hypocrisy, which they should do, but nobody in a position to do anything cares about such cries.  Hypocrisy is not the political liability we wish it was.  A lot of voters, I suspect, even prefer a hypocrite, provided they are hypocritical in their favor.

Democrats could also threaten to “pack the courts,” but in order for that to happen they would need to win the presidency and a majority in the Senate (and hold the house).  Then they would need to get everybody onboard to abolish the filibuster, and then get everybody onboard to change the number of Supreme Court justices.  That’s a lot of conditions.  I mean, it’s not an impossibility, but it’s also not really much of a deterrent for Republicans like Mitt Romney in the here and now.

It is something I would absolutely do, however, if I was Joe Biden and I had the chance.  The rules surrounding the Supreme Court have needed to be updated for a long time.  Even among good faith actors (which out leaders most certainly are not), it’s weird and arbitrary to have vacancies determined by the whims of health of octogenarians.  Also, nine is too small a number.  It concentrates too much power and doesn’t allow for enough diversity and variance of opinion.  If I were in charge I would do something like: 15 justices, 15-year terms.  This way one justice is replaced every year on a fixed schedule, and every president gets four selections per term, and I would make it so that they could only be blocked by a supermajority in the Senate.  No games; no procedural shenanigans.  No multigenerational fixtures; no minority rule.  If you win a few elections, you get the court majority.  That's how it should go.

But something like this is obviously not going to be in effect before November, and that's worrisome because it's possible the Supreme Court will have to rule on a disputed election, and we all know in which way they will be leaning from the get-go.  There's also a possibility Trump loses the election and just refuses to leave.  (Bill Maher has been banging this drum for years.)  I tend to think this won't happen, but I definitely don't feel good about it.  If, knock on wood, he loses decisively -- like Biden carries all the "Blue Wall" states by a comfortable margin plus any of Arizona, Florida, North Carolina, or Ohio, I think he'll put on a show and cry foul, and then come up with a bullshit reason why it's actually better for him to leave, anyway, and then he'll start his own cable channel, telling his lies and conspiracy theories (and outright gibberish) to the 30% of the country that eat that shit up.

But, I could be wrong, and if he stays then I think there are two things to do.  First, say to Republicans "come get your boy."  I'm more optimistic about this working than most people I've heard talk about it.  I don't think that most Reps want the US to become a failed state over Trump.  (What good is a 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court if the government doesn't even function?)  I don't think they even like him, or his presidency, very much.  They know how dangerous he is.  They know he's full of shit.  They just want to be in charge, so they're willing to put up with it.  But straight-up denying an election result is a bridge too far, I suspect, for all but the most hard-core Trumpists.

But, I could be wrong, and if I am, then you go to Plan B: Biden just never concedes.  If Trump loses but Republicans in Congress (and on the Supreme Court), find some sort of way to claim he actually won, by not counting certain ballots, or by changing the law in swing states to appoint Trump-loyalist electors, or by doing something I haven't even thought of yet, then you start a movement in which every Democratic politician and voter refuses to accept it.  We all treat Biden as if he is the president, and he acts like the president.  In effect, we start a parallel government of the United States of America, and claim, rightfully, that ours is the real one.

This sounds absurd, and it is, but what the fuck else are we supposed to do?  And it could work, if you think about it.  If major Democratic-run states -- California, New York, Washington, etc. -- don't accept a government as legitimate and just don't abide by their laws, how can they be forced to do so?  In theory, the military could be deposed to hold these places by force, but would our military turn against its own people to fight for an unpopular wannabe dictator who's trying to stay in power after losing a democratic election?  I don't think so.  I mean, this would lead to a civil war -- not a contentious political battle that we half-heartedly follow on cable news while football is on commercial, but a literal, blood in the streets, civil war.

And on that cheery note...

Until next time...

Entry 529: It Just Doesn't Make Sense

Raging fires caused by climate change wrecking havoc up and down the entire West Coast; a seemingly interminable pandemic that still is not under control; the very real possibility of election-related violence a few months from now: Americans have a lot on our plate at the moment and most of it really sucks.  Like everybody, I’ve been coping in my own ways – trying to take care of myself, physically and mentally, while doing what I can to help my family and others close to me.  I’ve been doing mostly okay.  The fact that S and I are both gainfully employed is a huge boon, but finances are but a tiny sliver of the overall health-and-happiness pie.

There are things which aren’t going as well.  A big one for me is sleep.  I’ve mentioned before on this blog my love-hate relationship with sleep: I love doing it; I hate trying to do it.  What I wouldn't give to be one of those people, like my wife and several of my friends, who are lights-out when their head hits the pillow.  But I’m not.  I’m not an insomniac, but I’m a fussy sleeper.  I need everything to be just so to fall asleep.  If I can set my own schedule, and sleep from, like, 2:30 am to 10:30 am then things would be much better, but obviously having kids and a “normal” office job makes that impossible.  (I think this is a big reason I liked college so much.  I could synch up my schedule with my inner clock.) 

So, what typically happens now is I go to bed around 1:00 am, I wake up at 6:30 am, because S and the kids are up, and I sense my household is abuzz, then my youngest son gets into bed with me and rolls around annoyingly for a half-hour, and then he leaves and I doze lightly until 8:00 am, at which point my alarm goes off, and I hit snooze twice, and then I bolt up at 8:18 am and get the kids ready for virtual school at 9:00 am.  One weird thing is that I always have amazing sleep for the two nine-minutes snooze sessions.  It’s that amazing, deep dreamland, REM sleep.  I really think those 18 minutes are the difference between me being zombie-like exhausted all day and being just normal very tired.

[Speaking of REM... They are high on my list of bands I used to listen to a lot that I almost never listen to now.  They're a good group, but too, I don't know what the right word is -- twee? -- for me to really enjoy anymore.  By the way, here's a link to the video.  Blogger changed how you embed videos, and they don't show up on my iPhone anymore.  I love it when "improvements" make things worse.] 

Sleep is something that makes no sense to me – or at least the fact that it can be so difficult makes no sense.  If you have food it’s easy to eat; if you have water it’s easy to drink; if you have to poop or pee it’s easy poop or pee (for the most part).  But sleep is in a different class: It’s a necessary physiologically act that, for whatever reason, is not very easy for a sizeable section of the population.  It just makes no sense.

Here are a few other things in a similar vein.

Why do people, especially kids, love sugary, unhealthy foods instead of nutrient-rich healthy foods?  I’ve heard it posited that this is how we evolved because our ancestors desired calorie-rich foods when calories were scarce.  However, I don’t really buy this, because I don’t think it’s ever advantageous, from a survival perspective, to eat shit food.  Like, if you could only have one meal, and your options were a bag of cotton candy or a bag of broccoli, you’d always be better off eating the broccoli, no?  But every kid would take the cotton candy.  It just makes no sense.

Why are miscarriages so common?  One-fourth of pregnancies end in utero.  That is an insanely high number, if you think about it, and one that causes much consternation and sadness in this world.   It also, to me, is a pretty good argument against the religious, “pro life” classification of fetuses as people.  So, by such people's logic, God – this magnificent, perfect, all-powerful entity – wipes out a quarter of humanity before it’s even born?  It just makes no sense.

Why are we so isolated in the universe?  Space: the final frontier.  Except there’s nothing out there.  Yeah, I know, there’s cool stuff like planets and asteroids and black holes and stuff.  But where are the aliens?  Where are the other inhabitable worlds?  Where's the life?  Why are we so alone?  Imagine a universe like Star Trek, where we can move about from planet to planet, from star system to star system.  It’s not sci-fiction.  Well, it is, but only because of our place in the universe.  We would’ve had people on Mars 30 years ago if it could sustain life.  We could go to other solar systems, but for the fact the second closest star to us is four light-years away.  (So, it would only take 150,000 years to get there, using slightly better technology than we have today.)  The really deflating part: We can see and hear much, much further than we can travel, and we don’t see or hear anything out there.  There’s no indication there is any life within contact range, and we're exploring using light, which is faster than we can possibly go no matter how good our technology.  I mean, I suppose we could discover shortcuts through the fabric of space (wormholes), or learn how to harvest resources from space, or recycle so efficiently, that we could create a society that could float through space for hundreds of thousands of years, until we reach somewhere cool.  But it seems more likely to me that humans will go extinct first.  It's cosmically annoying.  In theory, we could be partying with Martians and moon-hopping for the summer.  Instead, we are stuck here, on this pale blue dot, no longer having even the capability to go to our lone moon, because there’s no reason to maintain our rockets, because there's no reason to go back to the moon.  It just makes no sense.

Until next time…

Entry 528: More School and Sad News

Another week of school in the books -- only, like, 95% of the year left to go!  I'm guessing that it's going to be remote learning until 2021, probably Fall 2021.  I've become more and more pessimistic about the prospect of in-person schooling as the virus has lingered.  The vaccine picture doesn't look particularly rosy to me.  Even if we can get a safe one sometime soon, the logistics of inoculating, in a timely fashion, a huge portion of the population -- especially in a country rife with anti-vaxxers and other Big Pharma/Big Government conspiracy theorists -- just doesn't strike me as very likely.  If I were in charge (if only...), I would probably start shifting resources toward disposable at-home testing.  If we got a semi-reliable, affordable Covid test, similar to a pregnancy test, where you could swab yourself and get a result back in ten minutes -- and my understanding is that this is well within the realm of possibility -- that would be huge.  With such a test and the continuation of distancing and mask-wearing, I think we could get that infamous R-value under 1, meaning the disease would peter out.  A vaccine or other treatment would accelerate the decline, and of course we should continue developement along these lines, but I think it's foolhardy to pin all our hopes on this.  But we have a foolhardy president (to put it mildly), so... we'll see, I guess.

I'm trying not to stress about school.  I'm mostly succeeding.  The kids are actually better at sitting in front of a computer all day than I thought they would be.  Whether they're actually learning effectively is another question -- but, whatever.  S does enough worrying for the both of us.  Actually, I shouldn't frame it that way.  She's been pretty mellow, for the most part, but she has intense moments where she gets super annoyed/stressed with something.  It's usually justified, but the thing is, nobody is good at doing school this way.  Not the teachers, not the students, not the parents, not the administrators.  It's going to suck.  It's going to be confusing.  People are going to send the wrong links or say the wrong thing or not show up to the right meeting.  You just have to roll with it as best you can.

As an example, S started an email chain with Lil' S1's teacher about turning in homework, on which I was cc'd, and it kinda went off the rails, not in a hostile way, just in a talking-past-each-other type of way, so S was annoyed, which I get, but my thing is "why are you even worried about homework right now?"  (I mean, everything is homework at the moment -- isn't it?)  If the teacher sends us an email saying Lil' S1 needs to start turning in homework, then of course we need to get him to do that.  But let's not go out of our way to create new things to worry about.  Let's just focus on getting him to the right meeting at the right time each day.  Let's get that down first.

Another thing about S that makes times like this more stressful for her is that she's a consumate comparer.  You don't know how many times I've heard about what other families have or do that we don't.  This family is doing special tutoring; this family is sending their kids to private school; this family bought a portable schoolroom for their backyard.  And it's not just about school and it's not just during coronavirus.  It's about everything, all the time, and it's often framed as if we should be doing that as well.  Actually, that's not entirely fair, it's more framed as, Should we be doing this?  With a question mark at the end.  So-and-so has their kids in gymnastics, should we put our kids in gymnastics?  Should we get a membership to a private pool?  Should we put them in tennis classes?  Should we have them take French?  Should we get them bigger bikes?  Should we rent a house on the beach for a month?  Should we get an electric car?  Should we get rid of a car?  And so on and so on.

On one hand, this is a good quality.  There's nothing wrong with being ambitious or wanting what's best for your family.  On the other hand, it's, like, just stop: stop comparing what we have to what everybody else has.  For one thing, you don't even know if other people are even happy with what they have.  People often pretend as if things are better than they actually are, especially on social media.  For another thing, if you cherry pick the best parts about everybody you know, and use those as points of comparison, then you're setting yourself up for inevitable failure.  Nobody can possibly be as good as a best-of composite of all their acquaintances.

Anyway...

In other news, sad news, I found out today a guy I went to high school with died of cancer a few weeks ago.  This marks, like, the twentieth person I know from high school who has died.  That's abnormally high, right?  It seems like it, but I don't know for sure.  One factor in this might be that I knew a lot of people in high school.  I wasn't the BMOC or anything like, but I had my irons in a lot of fires, so to speak.  I did jocky and nerdy and arty things in high school, so if you picked a kid at random, there was a decent chance I knew them.

This guy who died recently, for example, he was two grades ahead of me, but we were on the wrestling team together, so I knew him.  We weren't buddies -- I don't even know if he would have remembered me -- but I remember him.  He seemed like a good dude.  He was an excellent athlete.  Football was his main sport, and I once saw him on TV playing in a random bowl game in college.  (He played for Air Force, and I think it was this game I saw him in.  So, it probably wasn't "random."  It was against my boyhood team the Washington Huskies, which is likely why I was watching it.)  His obituary made me sad, as obituaries often do.  He had kids and a wife and did a lot to help out veterans in need.  You hear clichés about how life goes fast, and how you take it for granted when you're young, and then you have kids and reach middle age and come to find it's all too true.

My dad forwarded me the obituary and included in the email was a photo of the wrestling team, in which I happen to be standing right next to this kid.  It also made me lament, just a tiny bit, that I didn't try harder in wrestling or stick with it after high school.  At the time the photo was taken, I was a sophomore and he was a senior, and we were pretty evenly matched, despite the fact he had two-years and thirty pounds on me.  I had so much promise!  I mean, I fulfilled it to some extent (district champion at 168-pounds in 1996), but with a little more dedication, I probably could have been really good, like, one of the top wrestlers in the state.  The flip-side of this, however, is that it would have taken some serious sacrifice, and maybe it wouldn't have been worth it.  Maybe I was better off doing other things, like hanging out with friends or learning how to code or reading books.  Those things are important too.  At the very least, however, I wish I would have gotten into martial arts earlier.  It's cool now, but at 43 I'm just never going to do be able to do the things I could do at 23, and I almost never got sore back then.  Youth!  Such a shame it is wasted on the young.

Alright, I started out talking about a guy I once knew who tragically passed away and ended up having a mini-midlife crisis.  I think it's time to quit.

Until next time...

Entry 527: Back to School, Virtually-Speaking

Back to school week here at the G & G household.  It's 100% virtual, and it went about as well as could be expected, I suppose.  The kids did better staring at their computers all day than I though they would, but I don't know how much they are actually learning -- like, if we just put PBS Kids on all day, would there be any major difference?

We certainly could save ourselves some money if we did that.  We're paying a new babysitter a pretty hefty chunk of change, and I'm not sure she's worth it.  She's really nice and the kids seem to like her alright, but she's either distracted by her own schoolwork (she's a college student) or she's in over her head or something, because she's not "on it" the way she should be.  As an example, on her first day, the kids finished a bit earlier than scheduled, so they started playing, which is fine, but then they started fighting and screaming at each other to the point S had to leave our make-shift home office and sort things out.  I poked my head out, and the sitter is literally sitting -- she's just at the table on her computer.  WTF?!  It's literally her first day!  If you are ever going to hustle, or try to impress your employer, isn't this the time?  I'm not sure if she thought she was off since the kids were done with school or she got distracted or just needed a break (she is entitled to take breaks, just preferably not while the kids are screaming and fighting) or what.

Also, she was late today -- just by a few minutes, but that matters because the kids have to log-in promptly and we're on a tight schedule in the morning -- and she left ten minutes early for a dentist appointment.  These aren't huge things, but they add up, and they don't bode well for the future.  We might have to have an awkward conversation with her.  We pod with one other family -- two days here, two days there (we're on out own on Friday) -- and they haven't been super happy with her either.  Apparently,  during "recess" at one of the days at their house, the kids were just playing Minecraft, and she was on her computer, and our pod-mate mom asked if she could take them outside or do something that doesn't involve even more screen time.  I wonder if we need to ask her to not bring her own computer.  I'm hesitant to do that, because I don't want her to be resentful toward us.  She still has to take care of our kids after all, so even if we would totally justified in such a request, it's not worth it if it's going to engender bitterness.  If it gets to that point, I'd rather just let her go.

We do have somebody else we could call too, maybe.  We interviewed one other candidate in addition to the one we chose, and I get the feeling we chose unwisely.  It was basically a tie.  We all really liked both candidates.  I was actually leaning a tiny bit toward the one we didn't pick, but everybody else was leaning a tiny bit toward the one we did pick.  If I would have come out really strongly for my top choice, I'm sure we would have picked her, but I didn't, because I didn't have reason to.  It's just not really possible to tell who's going to be good at the job, until they actually start doing it.  (That's what a recent episode of Revisionist History is all about.)  You kinda have to get lucky.

We've also been spoiled by our last sitter, who is the best.  I so, so wish she was available, but, alas, she's a kindergarten teacher, so she can only do summers.  She's so good that it's not really fair to compare our current sitter to her.  I mean, it's a demanding job, and certainly not one I would ever want to do.  It's understandable that somebody wouldn't be spectacular the first week.  I'm not ready to give our sitter her pink slip, but I am looking at her side-eyed, just a bit.

In other news, politics has been going on.  I'm not going to talk much about it in this post.  I've been trying to follow things without getting sucked into the morass of farce.  I'm almost completely off social media, which is very helpful, and I've been staying away from all the forecasting models.  I don't think much is going to change in the polling between now and November.  I think Biden is going to be the favorite, 65-35 or so, and then things will either go as expected, like in 2018, or they won't, like in 2016, and that will that.  This doesn't mean, however, that everything people do until then is pointless.  I'm not nihilistic about it.  I've been donating to various groups designed to help Biden get elected, and I will continue to do so right up to the election.  You should too if you can spare it. 

In other other news, I'm feeling super old in this, the first week of my 43rd year.  Keeping the kids back on a steady schedule is tiring, and it doesn't help that I'm tired all the time anyway.  Also, I tweaked my hamstring on a run yesterday.  It's not a full-on blowout -- I've done that before (the other leg) and it's excruciating -- but it's enough to keep me on the shelf for a week or so.  Then, I also apparently did something to my knee, because when I crouched down this morning to pick something up, I felt a shock of pain right on my patella.  Add that to my ever-present back and shoulder issues, and I'm all fucked up.  Well, maybe I'm just getting everything out of the way now.

And at least I have some good basketball to watch while being laid up.  The "bubble" playoffs have been pretty fantastic thus far.  Great game after great game after great game.  It helps that I only watch a game if it has potential to be great.  I usually follow things online for the first three quarters or so, then I turn it on for the fourth if it's interesting.

The end of Utah-Denver Game 7 on Tuesday was off the hook.

The Houston-OKC Game 7 ending on Wednesday was nearly as good.  (Suck it Zombie Sonics!)

And then tonight the Raptors' OG Anunoby hit the game-winning shot in under half a second to keep his team in their series against the Celtics.  (And this was after Kemba Walker made an assist to put the Celtics up.)

The NBA: Come for the social justice, stay for the basketball!