I got a new dish brush this week. I mention this not because it's a particularly exciting life event, but because of what it reveals (or doesn't) about my psyche.
I do the dishes pretty much every night. S is usually busy with other things, and I don't like the way she packs the dishwasher, anyway. (It's as if she's trying to fit the least amount of dishes possible. She's obviously never studied the bin packing problem.) I use one of those scrub brushes with the soap in the handle for all the pots and pans that don't go in the dishwasher. It's a convenient implement that usually lasts for a while. The one I had been using, however, got a leak in the handle, so every time I used it I got soap on my hand -- not a lot, but enough that I'd have to rinse off my hand periodically. It got to be really annoying, and I hated using it.
So what did I about it? Nothing. I just lived with it, and kept using it for weeks, months even, while it leaked soap on my hands.
Why did I do that? I don't know. That's what I've been trying to figure out.
Eventually, I did order a new one. It came, like, a day later (Amazon Prime), and I threw out the old one and started using the new one. When no soap got on my hand, I just thought: Why? Why did I wait so long? Why didn't I do this the instant I noticed the leak. It's not like the notion of getting a new brush completely escaped me. I thought about it every time I washed dishes. I told myself -- you should get a new brush -- but I didn't do it for a preposterous long time. Again, why? It took, literally, less than a minute to order on my phone and cost $9.99. So, it wasn't time or money. It was something else. Maybe I spent so many years as a cash-strapped grad student I conditioned myself to always make do with what I had; maybe it's just the power of inertia; maybe it's something else altogether. Like I said, I don't know.
In other news, I've been plowing through some content I put off until after the election. I listened to Slate's Slow Burn podcast series on David Duke. The parallels between Duke's rise to power and Trump's* become very apparent in listening to series trailer, which is why I put it off until after the election. I told myself I'd only listen to it if Trump lost; otherwise, it would have been too depressing for me to handle.
*The ways in which they are the similar: the constant playing of the outsider, anti-media, us-against-them card; the big, unhinged, be-aggrieved-be-very-aggrieved! rallies; and the constant, unequivocal lying that their supporters defend, paradoxically, as "telling it like it is" or "saying what other politicians are afraid to say." A big difference between the two, however, is that Duke was (is, I should say, he's still around) way more ideologically driven than Trump. I mean, he's ego-driven, without question, but he also sincerely believes his white supremacist garbage. Trump, on the other hand, is more amoral and seems to be completely in it for himself. There's no larger cause or great good with him.
I also started a book about the USFL, a professional football league that was around in the mid-'80s. It was a legit league that actually stole some good football players away from the NFL (Hall of Famers like Steve Young, Reggie White, and Jim Kelly) and had a decent following. I was a little young at the time (I was only seven when they folded), but I remember watching their games. I almost certainly would have been a fan had they stuck around.
But they didn't. They originally played spring football, so as not to compete directly with the NFL, but then one of the owners convinced the league to move to a fall schedule in 1986. His hope was not to actually grow the USFL (which he infamously called "small potatoes"), but to somehow parlay the fall move into a merger with the NFL, so that he could own an NFL franchise, which is what he really wanted. When it all fell apart -- very predictably so -- he got the league to sue the NFL. They "won" the lawsuit, were awarded $1 in damages, and promptly went defunct. The commissioner of NFL at time, Pete Rozelle, reportedly told the owner who spearhead his league's demise that he would never own an NFL franchise as long as he (Rozelle) or any of his descendants had any say in the matter.
Who was the rogue owner who led the promising young USFL on a suicide mission for his own personal benefit? Yep, you guessed it: Donald J. Trump.
The funny thing about it too is that a bunch of the owners knew that taking on the NFL was an insane plan that would never work. But they went along with it anyway. (A few were smart and got out before the ship went down.) That's the weirdest thing about the Trump phenomenon: All the people who admit how awful and incompetent he is, but still vote for him. I used the word funny above, because that's what it is. I just wish I wasn't inexorably caught up in the joke. As I've said many times: January 20 can't get here soon enough.
Until next time...
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