Entry 643: Christmas 2022

It's been a fine Christmas, this one, 2022. We did normal Christmas things -- opened presents, listened to Christmas music, ate too much. We got these Merci chocolates, and I've been hitting those things up hard. They're so good. This definitely isn't going to help my quest to shrink my waste line, but, on the plus side, I gained access to a gym. S's sister Sw has one in her apartment building, and she said I can use it whenever I want (and we have an extra fob, so I can just come and go as I please). It's good timing as it was 10 degrees here yesterday. They gym isn't very big, but it's got a few treadmills, which is all I need. I ran on one the other day -- got going pretty good, 7.5-minute-mile -- and guess what happened. Yep, I broke it. It just shut down on me and wouldn't restart. So, I've come to two conclusions: 1) A lot of treadmills just suck (there are four at this little gym and now only two of them work); 2) Because of number 1, if I'm using one of the other two treadmills, I don't go above 6 mph. I care a lot less about breaking a treadmill that doesn't belong to me, but it would be pretty lame if I wiped out multiple machines in my sister-in-law's building.

Anyway, we're at a bad age now for Lil' S1 when it comes to gift giving. He wants expensive hi-tech gifts, but he's not old enough yet to really figure out how to set them up and maintain them properly. So, it's like, if we get him what he wants, we are actually buying ourselves a package of stress and headache. Today, for example, he got a Fitbit, which is fine, encourage physical activity and whatnot. But you have to link it with an app, and he can't download apps on his phone without permission, so S has to set it all up for him. Then, the charger is just missing -- nowhere to be found. He claims it didn't come in the box. I suppose that's possible, but it's more likely he just didn't pay attention to it when he opened the box (I wasn't around), and it got misplaced or thrown away. Either way, now we either have to buy him a charger or he just never uses his brand new gift. I already put in an order on Amazon for a charger. Thankfully, they're not that expensive, assuming I got the right thing. (Is the Inspire compatible with Inspire 2, and is that the same thing as the Inspire HR?) Also, it's not coming until after the New Year, so maybe his original one will show up by then.

The best way to avoid all this would be to simply not get him any expensive hi-tech presents until he can actually figure them all out himself. But, the truth is, we're just not strict parents in that way. We are only willing to fight it for so long. I'm especially bad. If you ask me for something for long enough, chances are I'm going to cave eventually. S knows this and uses it to her advantage all the time. But the kids are learning it too. And even if we say no, they'll just ask S's parents, who will gladly say yes, so if we really don't want them to have something, we have to say no the grandparents too and completely be the bad guys. Unless it's something that would require a major lifestyle change (like a pet), I usually don't have it in me to do this.

And that's why we now have a PlayStation 5. Lil' S1 has been asking for one (or an Xbox) for like a year, so when S's parents said they wanted to get the kids something big, that's what we suggested. It seemed like a good idea, and it still might be, but the first day didn't go super smoothly. I don't play video games, so I don't now how consoles work these days, and I wasn't prepared for the amount of set-up and sign-in-age required to get things rolling. Each player needs their own profile which requires their own email address, and of course you have get the app, because everything has an app, and then it doesn't actually come with any games, except this kinda lame one-player game, so I bought them Minecraft which required me to register a payment method, which took like five tries to do for some reason, and then to play Minecraft, you have to sign-in to a Microsoft account for some other reason, and then they're trying to find their cousin on the game, and they're asking me how to do it, and I have no idea (and no desire to figure out).

Then, with all this going on, Lil' S1's chair collapses, and he breaks his headset on the first day he has it. It's one of those things where it's not exactly his fault, but kinda his fault because he's not sitting properly on an obviously rickety folding chair. (I felt bad though. He was crying and legit upset about it.) Then S finds out about it, and she gets mad at me for consenting to get this device and "not doing enough research," but really she's just annoyed that something we just got is already broken, and she's taking it out on me. Like, I said things didn't go super smoothly. But it's only the first day. My hope is that we will have this system for many years, and the kids (especially Lil' S1) will figure everything out with it as they get older, so that we don't have to worry about it at all.  We shall see.

Alright, time to watch my new show. I liked The White Lotus so much, I decided to stick with the Mike White theme and try Enlightened. I'm three episodes in and really enjoying so far.

Until next time...

Entry 642: My Top 100 TV Shows (100-51)

I finished season two of The White Lotus today. I really enjoyed it. I thought it was maybe just a touch below season one, but just a touch. I was wondering where I would put it on my list of all-time favorite TV shows, and then I just decided to make such a list. I did it for movies a few years ago and enjoyed the process. So, below is my rankings of my 100 favorite TV shows. The two criteria are: a) how much did I enjoy it when I first watched it; b) how much has it stuck with me through the years. And all the usual caveats with lists like this apply: They are impossible to make and heavily dependent on the mood and whims of the ranker at the time they did the ranking. If I made this list next month instead of today, it would look different.

Okay: The list 100-51. (I'm breaking this up into two parts because I remember the movie one taking me way too long.)

100. Love Is Blind: This is a good example of what I was talking about above. Probably the only reason this made the list at all is due to recency bias. It's not very good, but we just watched it and had fun, and that's fresh in my mind.

99. The Arsenio Hall Show: The only late night show I ever watched consistently, and I only did so for a very short period of time. It was a thing at my school for a hot minute. Hoo Hoo Hoo Hoo Hoo!

98. He-Man & Masters Of The Universe: My favorite action-figure show as a child by far.

97. Game of Thrones: Watched a season and a half, thought it was okay, but never really got into it. I stopped watching when a woman shot a smoke monster from her vagina, and I realized I had no clue what was going on and didn't much care, anyway. Fantasy just isn't my bag.

96. The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air: Very briefly my favorite sitcom, circa 1991.

95. Perry Mason: I think I've seen every episode without ever watching an entire one all the way through. It was my mom's favorite show, so it was frequently on at my house as a child.

94. Roseanne: It's funny how there was once a show that featured John Goodman, George Clooney, and Laurie Metcalf, but the star was Roseanne Barr.

93. Cheers: A bit before my time, but I still watched it and enjoyed it. RIP Kirstie Alley.

92. Lingo: It's not just letters; it's lingo! S and I used to watch this together back when we were just dating.

91. Scrabble: Another word game show hosted by Chuck Woolery. This was appointment watching whenever I was home sick.

90. Entourage: Watched the entire series, never think about it now.

89. Extras: Another one I watched and never think about. I couldn't even remember what it was called. I had to look it up on Ricky Gervais' Wikipedia page.

88. The Brady Bunch: I watched it as a child a bit, but then there was a summer when I was a teenager, and I watched it every day, half ironically, half as comfort content.

87. Parker Lewis Can't Lose: Some kids in my sixth-grade class used to watch this, so I started watching it too, so that I would be in on things. I remember it being kinda cute: "Synchronize your Swatches!"

86. Married with Children: I never really liked the cynical alternate reality of the show, but I really liked Christina Applegate. She's a big crossword puzzle fan, by the way. She's also had some crazy bad-luck with health issue -- breast cancer to MS. That's rough.

85. The Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling: The actual original wrestling program, not the Netflix series based on it. I used to watch it religiously. It came on after...

84. WCW Wrestling: Which came on after...

83. WWF Wrestling: Every Friday night for a few years in the mid-'80s, I would watch three hours of wrestling and then sleep on the sofa in our living room.

82. Saturday Night Live: Never watched it regularly, always thought the full program was kinda boring, but can't deny that it has had some funny skits through the years: It's my dick in box...

81. Silicon Valley: The interplay between Kumail Nanjiani and Martin Starr was my favorite part of the show.

80. Call My Agent!: Halfway decent French drama/comedy about movie agents. It's called Dix pour cent in France, which means "Ten Percent." I've always wondered why they didn't just keep the title for the English-speaking audience.

79. The Last Dance: It's basically just Michael Jordan hagiography, but still fun.

78. Welcome Back Kotter: As a sophomore in college, I used to watch it at the same time everyday between classes. I don't remember a single episode, but I remember it fondly, nevertheless.

77. The Big Bang Theory: Really funny in the beginning, petered out more quickly than your typical silly sitcom, which already peter out very quickly.

76. Around the Horn: I went to grad school with this guy M who would always say the funniest, randomest shit, and one of his lines was, "Time to go home and watch Around the Horn and wish I was doing something else."

75. Pardon the Interruption: A small step-up from Around the Horn.

74. SportsCenter: It's been made totally obsolete by YouTube, Twitter, etc. Nobody wants to reserve a time in the day to watch sports highlights anymore. But it was a staple in my life for many years.

73. Star Trek: The Next Generation: Only watched it for a bit but did enjoy it -- not enough to get totally into it though.

72. Welcome to Earth: Very beautiful. Will Smith is a good host, and he doesn't slap anybody in any episode.

71. Drive to Survive: I liked the first few seasons, but probably won't watch it now that I kinda keep up with F1 in real time. Also, I don't really care much for Max Verstappen. I'm a Lewis Hamilton guy all the way.

70. Boardwalk Empire: I always felt like I should be liking it more than I actually was.

69. The Mandalorian: The only Star Wars spinoff TV show that S and I got into. We quit The  Book of Boba Fett after one episode (that was basically just a 45-minute torture scene), and can't get into Andor at all.

68. Sesame Street: A kid classic, which I loved, but my hot take retroactive to 1983 is that...

67. The Electric Company: ... was better.

66. In Living Color: The world's introduction to Jim Carrey. I used to do a mean Fire Marshall Bill impersonation: Let me show you something! Pretty much nothing on this show would fly today.

65. Project Runway: The second best of the reality TV shows S dragged me into.

64. Indian Matchmaker: The best of the reality TV shows S dragged me into.

63. Broad City: Solid raunchy comedy.

62. Batman: The original Adam West version. The same summer I watched The Brady Bunch I also watched this.

61. Family Guy: Never been a huge fan, but it's definitely made me laugh.

60. Ted Lasso: You can file this one in the "Good, But Way Overrated Because Everybody Acts Like It's the Greatest Show Ever, and It's More Like Top 100 But Not Fifty, Which is Still Pretty Good Because There Have Been a Lot of TV Shows" folder.

59. America's Funniest Home Videos: Super corny, but I loved this show as a tween. RIP Bob Saget.

58. The Beatles: Get Back: Does this count as a TV show? I'm counting it.

57. Lost: Really great show that totally fizzled at the end. I actually never watched the finale, which led me to formulate the Lost Principle of TV Watching: Never feel compelled to watch a show to the end of the series. Bail once it starts getting consistently bad. You will be so much more satisfied than you will seeing it through to the bitter end. Trust me, this principle can change your entertainment world.

56. Homeland: Excellent first few seasons. I heard it got bad at the end. I wouldn't know.

55. Friends: Never a big fan; somehow seen every episode. Well, it was like the biggest TV show in the world for a solid decade, during a time when everybody pretty much watched the same five channels, so I guess it's no mystery as to why I've seen so many episodes.

54. The Muppet Show: A favorite as a child. It's still pretty good when I watch clips on YouTube.

53. Unsolved Mysteries: The theme music still creeps me out a bit. I wonder how many of the mysteries would've been revealed as total bullshit in real-time if people had the internet back then.

52. Winning Time: One funny thing about this show is the name: Winning Time. It should be Showtime because it's about the "Showtime Lakers," but it's on HBO, so they didn't want to promote that name.

51. Atlanta: Really liked it the first few seasons, then S kinda soured on it, and I haven't been properly motivated to get back into it by myself. 

Until next time...

Entry 641: No-Kids Party

S and I went to a no-kids party last night, which is a rarity these days. Actually, I guess we just went to one for Halloween, but it was different because that was a party thrown by people who don't have kids. This was a party with our parent friends, whom we only know because our kids are friends, but it was without kids. And we haven't been to party like that since... ever?

It was pretty fun -- nothing too wild just hanging out and chatting but with great company. We stayed for about three hours, and I had three (maybe four) beers, which is the closest I come to tying one on these days. And I paid the price: I felt like a zombie all day today. That's how much my alcohol tolerance has diminished in middle age -- done in by a few Pacificos. Although, to be fair, my grogginess was as much due to lack of sleep as to beer consumption. I woke up this morning about 7:45 am with Lil' S2 jumping on me demanding I make him breakfast. Sometimes S handles the kids and lets me sleep in on the weekends but she was at Orange Theory this morning. That's one of the things about her travel schedule -- she's always like "it's just n days," but n is just the number of days between her flights. It doesn't take into account that her sleep schedule with be messed up for a few days after that,* so she will be going to sleep at like 7:30 pm before the kids even have on their PJs. Also, she'll want to get back into a good gym routine, so even on the weekends it'll often be on me to get up and make the kids breakfast. She got back from a huge trip a few weeks ago, and it seems like I'm still feeling with the reverberations.

*And this is getting progressively worse. She used to bounce back immediately and barely suffer from jet lag at all. Now, each time she takes a trip, you can add a half a day to her recovery time. Getting old is a bitch, man. Father time is undefeated, as the cliche goes.

But it's okay. I never complain (except on this blog, which she doesn't read) because she has to do it for work, and she has a good job, and that benefits our entire family, including me, so it just comes with the territory. You gotta take the bad with the good. Those are the facts of life. Plus, today it's entirely on me for not getting enough sleep. We were home by 11:00 pm, but I stayed up until after 1:00 am watching White Lotus. I've heard so much about season two, I figured I had to get rolling on season one and catch up. It's so good so far (four episodes in). I was pretty sure I would like it. People whose opinions I trust rave about it, and I'm a fan of Mike White. He does a lot of character driven stuff, which is typically what I prefer in a movie or "prestige" TV series. A bunch of weird, fucked up, rich people get together at a resort with an abundance of sex, drugs, and booze -- sign me up! Plus, the show has those little superfluous nuggets of mundanity that I find absolutely hysterical. (The Sopranos was perhaps the king of this type of thing: "I like the one that says 'Some Pulp'".) Like, on White Lotus there's a part when a guy says he's with BLM, and he means Bureau of Land Management, but Jennifer Coolidge's character thinks he's talking about Black Lives Matter. There's no real joke there, but it made me laughed out loud -- literally. I've done it a few times even though I watch it alone.

S and I also started watching Andor together, which is supposedly also fantastic. It hasn't reeled me in yet (S neither, I think), but I'm not giving up on it. Everything I've heard of it from critics is like It's the best of the Star Wars spinoffs by far! And I'm thinking to myself When does that happen? Like I said, though, we're only two episodes in -- you gotta give things a shot.

Alright, I'm still dragging, and I just heard a car door shut. A few of S's friends are in town and staying with us and they all went out to dinner, and I think they're back. I gotta socialize for an appropriate amount of time until I can abscond to a quite place and watch more White Lotus. This is when it's good to have a wife who goes to bed early. It's very unlikely they will be up and hanging out super late.

Until next time...

PS--Somebody messaged me this. Speaking of laughing out loud... https://mobile.twitter.com/RexChapman/status/1600150740235800576

Entry 640: Doc, Note, I Dissent, A Fast Never Prevents A Fatness; I Diet On Cod

Just watched the US get eliminated from the World Cup by the Netherlands. It wasn't an absolutely terrible performance, but it certainly wasn't a good performance. The problem with our country when it comes to men's soccer is that we aren't as good at it as other nations. That's very understandable when you consider that soccer is the most popular men's sport in most other countries by a huge margin, and here it probably doesn't even crack the top five. It's definitely behind football, baseball, and basketball, which are dominated by the US on the international stage, but also likely behind other big-money sports like hockey, golf, MMA, and even (somehow) NASCAR. Then if you toss in all the niche sports the US is good at -- swimming, track and field, lacrosse, skiing, snowboarding, skateboarding, etc. -- the resources/interest/attention in sports are spread very thin, so it's going to be tough to be really good at such an internationally competitive sport as soccer. (Australia, the only country in the world who rivals the US in terms of athletic depth and breadth, also isn't great at soccer.)

But I do think that the US is on the ascension as far as men's soccer is concerned. MLS is reasonably popular, and a lot of younger people are getting into English Premier League since access to its games are now readily available. Also, the women's team is the best in the world and becoming increasingly popular.  So, all that indicates the arrow is pointing in the right direction. On the other hand, we've been hearing about soccer's American takeover for the past 40 years, and it still hasn't happened. On the other other hand, sometimes we write things off because they haven't happened on the timeline we initially foresaw, but then they actually do come to fruition. I'm thinking of the electric car which was right around the corner at the turn of the millennium, except it wasn't, and so everybody was like, it's dead now, but 15 years later and it's very much alive and thriving and has been for the better part of a decade.

Along similar lines, I think (hope) renewable energy is following this same trajectory. Green energy has long been touted as a climate change solution by environmentalists, but we are currently in a "we can't get by on renewable energy alone" phase. However, it seems to me like we might actually be relatively close to doing just this. The reason I say this is because we have solar panels on our house right now that generate about 5 MWh per year. The annual average for a family is around 10 MWh. So, we generate roughly half of what the average family uses, and we only have panels on half our house (the other half is behind trees), and we live in an area where the sun doesn't shine brightly all year round (although it does shine more than in other parts of the country). If you take into consideration that technology is only going to get better and that this is just solar (not wind). It seems like we should be able to, at the very least, make a giant dent in fossil fuel consumption and be well on our way to phasing it out completely.

I mean, I visit my in-laws in Florida, a place where the sun in blazing like ten hours a day all year round, and I rarely see solar panels on roofs. How much energy could you produce by having a massive campaign to get everybody in Florida solar panels? Why don't they do this? I mean, I know why -- Republicans are in charge and only seem interested in fighting pointless "culture war" battles (solar power is probably seen as "woke" energy or some other such nonsense), but you'd think at some point pure pragmatism would win out over politics, and maybe it will -- or maybe I'm hopelessly naive. It could go either way.

In other news, I'm back on my 16-8 diet. I stopped at the end of the summer because we went to Iceland, and it was too hard to maintain while traveling, which is fine, but then instead of getting right back to it when we returned, I was like nah... I already messed it all up, which is a totally ridiculous rationalization that we all do for some reason. I call it the all-or-nothing fallacy. I almost did it again this time. After eating copious amounts of food over Thanksgiving break, I was thinking I should start intermittent fasting again, and then I thought yeah, but I don't want to do that over Christmas, might as well just wait until next year. But there's, like, a month between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Even if I want to pig out for a day or even a few days, I could still do my diet the other 25 days. But we all play these little games with ourselves to justify doing what we want to do in the moment, even though we know it's not what we want to do in the long run.

I got on the scale the other day, and I was the heaviest I can ever remember. To be clear, I'm definitely not a slave to the scale. I don't think it's an accurate measure of how healthy you are. I mostly subscribe to the healthy at every size philosophy. Some people are just fatter than others, and it doesn't necessarily mean they're less healthy.* With that said, gaining weight is an indication for some people (like me) that they should make some changes to be more healthy. A lot of times it's the symptom of the issue, not the issue itself. For me, it was proof I was eating too much crap -- housing entire sleeves of Ritz in one sitting, raiding my kids' Halloween candy for the mini Twix bars, downing spoonfuls of ice cream before I go to bed, cleaning up all the kids' leftovers at restaurants, etc. So, no more. Now, I'm back to only eating two big meals a day, which, for me, is the most effective and sustainable way to cut the crap.

*Within reason -- if you get to be too fat obviously it will adversely affect you health. Like, if you get to be so heavy you struggle with day-to-day movement then that's a problem. But that's well beyond what we typically classify as "fat." So, "healthy at every size" is a pithy way to convey a more complex idea, not an absolute truism. It's like "honest is the best policy." Sure, but we've all been in scenarios in which it's actually more ethical to lie.  

To be honest, the main reason I want to lose weight is because I don't like looking at my big belly in the mirror. That's somehow where all my excess weight goes. My belly isn't fat in the normal sense where it's soft and flabby and hangs over my pants. It's just massively distended. It's like I have a literal food baby. I've been hitting the weights pretty good, so I'm in decent shape and looking alright, but for this basketball I have stuck to my abdomen. There are other problems with having an oversize stomach -- for example, clothes that used to fit are now too snug -- but vanity is number one on my list.

What can I say, looks do matter. Often associated with the "healthy at every size" movement is the "redefining the beauty standard" movement, and I'm less bullish on that concept. It strikes me as seeing the world as you wish it was, not the way it is. Yes, people of all different shapes and sizes can be beautiful, and many people are into those who aren't conventionally attractive, but... there's a reason your best-looking friend gets more attention than you and hot people get all the best acting roles. Most people would rather gaze at Sofia Vergara and Joe Manganiello than the schlubby couple in the condiment aisle at Costco. It's like, go ahead and "redefine" things however you want -- my loins aren't going to get the memo.

That's the other thing: People can't help who they're attracted to. I thought this was well-established by now, especially among the type of people who would push back against traditional norms of beauty and attraction. I mean, all my life, a pillar of the gay rights movement has been the "born this way" argument -- the idea that sexual attraction is not a choice. And it's absolutely true. But it's true for boring normies too. Women who like tall men with chiseled muscles, and dudes who like slender women with big boobs, can't help that that's what they prefer, and nobody should be made to feel ashamed for being attracted to the "wrong" type of person.

What's more, there's no reason to make anybody feel this way because no matter what you look like or what you weigh, there is somebody out there who would really like to have sex with you, and the internet makes it possible for you to easily find them. So, let's not worry that most people would rather get with the person in the "after" photo of the Jenny Craig advertisement. There are more than enough lids for every pot.  

Until next time...

PS -- The title of this entry is my second favorite palindrome of all time. My first favorite: Tulsa nightlife -- filth, gin, a slut.

Entry 639: Good Vibes Only

Nice little Thanksgiving break, this one. We -- well, I, actually -- cooked a traditional Thanksgiving dinner, and it came out decently. The turkey was a little dry because I overcooked it a bit, but that's why God created gravy. I was worried that I was going to really botch the turkey, so I'll take a little bit overdone. What happened is, I bought all the food last Wednesday, so as not to try to do it at the last minute. But at the time it was possible I would be cooking for nine adult and four kids, so I bought a 15-pound turkey. However, it ended up being just the immediate fam (including my sister-in-law), so there were only three adults and two children, only one of whom (me) is a really big eater. A 15-pound turkey was now way, way too big.

And that would not have been a problem, except that I somewhat absentmindedly put the turkey in the freezer immediately after I bought it, and I didn't think about thawing it until Tuesday before Thanksgiving. I guess I just figured two days would be adequate time to do so. Au contraire, the internet says that one must thaw a frozen turkey in the refrigerator or an ice bath below 40 degrees, and for a turkey that big, one should allot at least three days to do it in the refrigerator, and an ice bath requires, like a half day, and you have to constantly monitor the temperature.

Now, I bet this is mostly bullshit. We treat raw meat in this country like it's radioactive. I mean, I know the threat of salmonella and other food borne infections are extant, but if they were really as likely as we're led to believe, I suspect meat-eaters would just be getting sick all the time because there's no way everybody who prepares meat follows the safety rules meticulously all the time. Unless you're vegetarian, I bet you've eaten tons of "dangerous" meat in your day, and your body handled it fine.

With that said, I certainly don't want to be the dad who ruined Thanksgiving by poisoning his family. And actually I'm usually quite anal about raw meat. Having worked for four different food service businesses before turning 20, I had to take the same food safety certification course a bunch of times, and it made me paranoid about raw meat. So much so that if I stick a fork into a cooking piece of chicken to see if it's done, I'll scrub the fork before I even put it in the sink on the off-chance somebody will use it before it gets washed. So, I certainly wasn't going to disobey the guidelines about defrosting a turkey.

Anyway, I'll spare you the details, but I utilized a combination of refrigerator and ice bath (waking up at 5:00 am in the process), and got it mostly thawed by the time it had to go into the oven. There was still some ice on the inside around the bone, but the meat all felt soft as deep as I could feel. It took way longer to cook than anticipated though (leading to some temporarily grumpy family members) -- I kept getting really inconsistent measurements from my meat thermometer -- and I think I was overly cautious and cooked it for too long. So, like I said, a little dry, but still decent. I'll do better next year.

I also made mashed potatoes, stuffing, bread rolls, cranberry sauce, gravy, and corn, and all that came out well. The funny thing about Thanksgiving is that the stuff that takes ten minutes to make (stuffing, gravy, bread rolls) is just as good as the stuff that requires actual preparation (turkey, potatoes). We have a lot of leftovers, which is fine -- I don't mind eating it for the next week.

So, Thanksgiving dinner with the family turned out to be good vibes in the end. Here are some other good vibes things in my life right now.

• I'm healthy, and I don't mean that in the macro-sense, like I don't have cancer or ALS (although I am very grateful for that too); I mean, I'm not currently sick. A bug is going around, not Covid, but something else, and also there's Covid, and somehow I've managed to avoid both this holiday break. This woman came into my fitness class the other day and was like, "Ugh... I had to force myself to come in here. I feel like shit," to which the instructor asked the obvious thing, "Why are you here then?" and she replied, "Because I can't sit in my house anymore. I need to do something." Uh, so, that something is exposing everybody else to your miserable illness? It couldn't be a solitary walk through the woods? She was totally wheezing too and not even wearing a mask. I kept my distance from her the entire class. I guess it worked. 
  
  
• I saw some good movies the past few days. I streamed Weird: The Al Yankovich Story, which I quite enjoyed, and then we went to see Wakanda Forever today as a family. It also was quite enjoyable, other than being way too long (the problem with almost everything these days). I saw somebody online say: "Wakanda Forever -- it felt longer."
  
  
• I'm reading a good book right now: The Ninties by Chuck Klosterman. It's basically a book written for and about my generation, so I'm finding it very relatable. One of the first things the author discusses is how important it was in the '90s to seem "authentic," and how kinda weird that was. For some reason, being a poseur or a sellout was among the absolute worst offenses. This is epitomized fictionally by Ethan Hawke (not Ben Stiller) getting the girl in Reality Bites, despite being a miserable jerk, and it was illustrated in real life with bands like Nirvana and Pearl Jam hating their own success while simultaneously making conscious decisions to become more successful. The book also has a (somewhat surprisingly) captivating essay on Ross Perot.
  
  
• We got a Christmas tree this year -- the first time we've ever had one. We haven't had a Christmas at home since 2015 (when Lil' S2 was 0 years old), so it's not that strange we usually don't have a tree. We got a synthetic one. Real trees are too much work and mess. My parents made the move to a fake tree many years ago. It's one of those things where I thought not having the real thing would matter a lot until I actually tried it and realized it didn't matter at all. It's like doing a crossword puzzle on an app instead of on paper, or using an e-reader, or sitting in front of a gas fireplace. The only problem now is that we have to amass enough decorations to fill out a tree. But Lil' S1 is happy. He's been asking for a tree for a while, so hopefully this will placate him. I mean, it's definitely easier than a dog.
  

 Until next time...

Entry 638: Bad Vibes Only

Being that next week is Thanksgiving, I figured I could do a post this week about some things for which I am not thankful. I call it Gripesgiving, and I'm thinking about making it a new annual tradition -- by which I mean I'll do it in this entry and then never think about it again.

The main thing I'm not thankful for right now is that the Orange Menace, Tangerine Idi Amin, announced he is running for president again. Ugh... can't this dude just die already? With the Dems not performing horribly in the midterms, political news was just becoming tolerable again, and then we dive right back into the cesspool. It's possible he doesn't even get the nomination (I have no idea what will happen on that front and don't believe anybody who says they do), and he probably won't win the presidency even if he does, but no sound-minded American will be hanging their hat on that probably. Hopefully all this Ron DeSantis noise turns out to be for real. He's awful in a lot of ways, just as petty and vindictive as the small-handed vulgarian himself, but at least he doesn't seem like the type to inspire a mob to try to hang the vice president and prevent Congress from certifying an election he lost.

In other news of ungratefulness, I had to swallow my pride, cut my losses, admit defeat, and trash my treadmill. I literally threw it away. It broke for the third time in nine months, and this time the company said they weren't going to fix it for free. I called them, and after being on the phone for literally (and I mean that literally) two hours, a combination of being on hold and relaying the same information over and over in different ways, the denouement of the conversation went something like this.

Her: Okay, sir, I can set you up with an appointment to have a technician come out to service your machine.

Me: Thanks.

Her: However, because [company-specific mumbo jumbo about service codes and policies] there will be a charge of...

Me: No! Hell no! There's not going to be any charge!

Her: Well, you see, for this type of service...

Me: I don't care. I'm not giving you guys a single cent more of my money. You guys are the worst company I've ever dealt with. You sold me a treadmill that's broken three times and I haven't even had it for a year. Each time it takes two hours to set up a service appointment and then that doesn't even work. And now you're telling me you want me to pay you to fix it. Hell. No.

Her: Well, you see, for this type of service...

Me: I said I don't care what the type of service is. Look, I know this isn't your fault, and I'm sorry you're the one who has to hear this, but I'm so frustrated, and there is no way I'm paying you for a damn thing. Either you guys fix this for free or I'm just gonna hang up and... I dunno... trash you guys on social media or something.

Her: I understand your frustration...

Me: I don't think you do. Do you have a manager? Can I talk to your manager?

Her: Yes, I will transfer you to her.

Then I got put on hold for another few minutes, and then i just hung up. I actually didn't even really want to talk to a manager, anyway. I doubt it would've done any good. I talked to a manager before when they wrongly charged me for their monthly service, and it was hell just to get her to give me a $16 refund. I probably wasn't going to get shit from the manager, and even if I did, even if they agreed to another round of free repairs, it would likely just break again.

I called a repair shop not affiliated with the manufacturer, just to see if a (presumably) more competent company could salvage things, but they told me it was going to be almost $200 just for the diagnosis. No thanks. That's what they call throwing good money at bad. It's the sunk cost fallacy. So, I got off the phone, disassembled the sumabitch, and booked an appointment with DC bulk trash. This is the last I saw of it.

 

I think I actually know the problem. I'm too fat for it. All treadmills have safety devices in them so that they will automatically slow down or stop if they get too hot internally. I've had it happen at gyms before, and every time just before mine would die completely, it would get really temperamental whenever I got on it -- to the point I usually couldn't go above 5 mph without it stopping (and sometimes I'd smell a slight burning odor when I was done) -- but it would work fine whenever the kids got on it. I think I was just flat-out too heavy for it. This is very annoying, being that the stated weight limit is 250 pounds, and I am well below 250 pounds, but I do think that's the explanation.

Whatever the case, do not -- I repeat, do not -- buy any equipment that is NordicTrack or that is affiliated with the company iFit in anyway. They are the worst.

It sucks too because I actually really liked using the treadmill when it was working. I need something inside that gives me a good ass-kicking cardio workout, especially now while the weather is turning. I really struggle to find the motivation to run outside when it's 45 degrees, dark, and blustery. And I'm also not the type to just bust out a body-weight WOD in my basement without somebody leading the way. (My Krav Maga gym stopped doing Zoom workouts some time ago.) But maybe that's what I'll have to do. I also could join the gym up the street for like $10 a month, but then I still have to go somewhere, and one of the big reasons I got the treadmill was so that I could work out when I wasn't able to go anywhere.

It's a real tragedy.

So, I gotta log off now, but I wanted to give you all one more gripe: my eyesight. It's terrible now without my glasses. I feel like it's gotten way worse just in the past year or so. I can still see decently far away, but anything up close is super blurry without my specs. I've never had good eyesight for reading, but it used to be at least passable. Now, I struggle to read the tags on the fruit when I'm at the self-checkout machine at the grocery store. The other day, I actually took a picture of a tag on my phone and zoomed in on the number to read it. I mean, I could have just searched for it by name on the machine, but my way was a little bit faster and much more clever. But getting old is a bitch.

By the way, how old can you be before you have to stop complaining about getting old because you should just be happy to be alive? I'm thinking somewhere around 85, so I still got four decades of grousing ahead of me.

Until next time...

Entry 637: On Many Topics

So, as it turns out nobody really knows anything about the future. It's like a twist on the old saying: Some people can get it right a lot of the time; a lot of people can get it right some of the time; shit happens.

I've been doing a lot of thinking the past few days, and now I'm going to write as much of as I can in the next hour or so.

Elon's Twitter

I've been spending a lot of time on Twitter since Tuesday, following the election results. I didn't think things would change much when Elon took over, but I wasn't really basing that on much other than his own boiler-plate vision statement. Now some people -- seemingly legitimate sources (Pwnallthethings sounds legit, right?) -- think the site could actually implode over the next few weeks. Apparently, the main issue is that Musk needs cash quickly to start paying off the interest on his massive loans. 

 

That's why he's laying off so much staff, and why he rolled out the $8 check mark, which was ridiculous and hilarious, giving us gems like...

Elon is such a weird dude, and he's fucking my shit up because he's making it not cool to drive a Tesla anymore. I just bought that thing. Can I at least get a year of social cachet out of it?

But he actually might be on to something about voting republican. Anybody who tweets this should not be president.

 

 

The House

In my last post I jumped the gun a bit by saying that the Republicans had already effectively taken the House. It ended up being a lot tighter than I thought, and there is still a miracle shot the Democrats could hold on, but major networks are calling it for the Reps now. The final margin is TBD, but it will be much smaller than most people were anticipating and than what historically happens during midterms. Ironically, New York -- blue ass New York -- did the Dems in. They fucked up the redistricting, and then they lost a bunch of winnable races.

Well, the good news is that House terms are only two years, and a majority in the House isn't needed to do a bunch of things, like, most notably, confirming judges. Of the two chambers, you'd rather have the Senate.

Speaking of which...

The Senate

Not only did the Dems retain the Senate, but they have a very good chance (I'd say about 75%) to add a seat, with the Warnock-Walker runoff next month. Ted Cruz is going to tour with Walker, which sounds good to me, being that of the candidates he stumped for mentioned in this article only one of them (JD Vance), actually won. The others (Yesli Vega, Kari Lake, Blake Masters, Karoline Leavitt) all lost. It's, like, if your record is currently 1-4, and you honestly want your guy to win, wouldn't you be inclined to just sit it out?

(Do yourself a favor and watch this video for 15 seconds starting at 1:10. Cruz nodding along like a dipshit is my favorite part.)

Other Races

Abortion rights and anti-election-deniers are the big winners this election (and in my heart). All the major bills protecting abortion access passed, and almost all the election deniers outside of deep red states lost, including, most importantly, the ones running for positions that would give them control of future elections. That's huge. Also, the Dems won a bunch of governors races. The big one is Kari Lake versus Katie Hobbs in Arizona. I cited Lake as a loser above, but that race hasn't been called yet. Lake is one of those "rising star" Republicans, who's mostly awful in every way, so it will be glorious if she loses (probably tomorrow).

Democrats

I can be pretty critical of Dems on this blog sometimes. I stand by what I say, but maybe sometimes I overstate it a bit. I certainly was too pessimistic coming into this election. The D brand might not be as off-putting (outside of super red areas) as I thought it was two weeks ago. I do think they need to do a better job of building a broad coalition, and results in certain places (ahem... Florida) demonstrate that.

I've learned I have a very Obama-ian view of what the Democratic party should be. I didn't really appreciate this while he was president. But listening to him speak recently and listening to podcasts about him, I find myself in lock step with what he says the messaging and policy should be. I guess a lot of it goes back to a guy named Bayard Rustin. The key is patronage over principle. Do things that are popular and work for the people, not things that make you feel good and pure.

Republicans

What a shit show. I worry that the D brand turns off too many swing voters, but I know that the R brand does. In discussions about why the red wave never materialized, you might have heard the phrase "candidate quality" used a lot, but that's a euphemism for "don't run a bunch of weirdos and nut jobs". I mean, just look at some of these people.

• Dr. Oz never even lived in Pennsylvania, and he released an add trying to appeal to the common man by talking about how expensive crudité is, while shopping at the store "Wegners" without using a basket or shopping cart.
•  Yesli Vega suggested she believes that a woman can't get pregnant through rape, and then denied that she ever said it, even though it's on tape.
• Blake Masters released a random video of himself firing a "James Bond" gun while talking up the virtues of a silencer, because, you know, American Psycho is totally the vibe that appeals to suburban soccer moms. Who doesn't want a senator you could envision as an incel school shooter? Or as somebody said on Twitter:
  
  
  
  
  
• Then there's Joe Kent who decided it was a good move to denigrate one of the only things people on the left and right love equally: professional sports. He lost a House race in Washington (my home state making me proud!) he was heavily favored to win.
  
  
  
  
  
•  Lastly, this guy (name omitted, so as to not given him any recognition), who didn't run for anything, but pretty actually sums up the vibe of a lot of Republican campaigns. I feel pretty confident that dudes like this do more than their fair share to "manufacture" single women.
  
  
  
  
  
  

Until next time...

Entry 636: A Non-Devastating Election Night

I'm glad big elections only happen once every two years. They are quite stressful. The smart move is to be zen about it, but I'm a not a very zen man. Pretending to not care or forcing myself to not pay attention is actually more agonizing for me than constantly toggling back-and-forth between FiveThirtyEight and the NYT needle (not all that helpful this year, as they stopped it in place at 4am and never started it up again). Elections are also one of the few times I go on Twitter. But I find that it's showing me a lot of old tweets. Votes are being counted! Ten hours is an eternity ago! Get those antiques out of my feed! 

Twitter seems different now for some reason. I can't put my finger on what could have changed though.

My instincts were definitely wrong about the election. This is a good thing, as I was really down on the Dems chances, but it turned out to be, at the very least, a not disastrous midterms. I'll upgrade this to a satisfying midterms if Dems retain the Senate and a good one if they also beat Kari Lake in the Arizona governor's race and unseat Lauren Boebert in Colorado. Everything is really close, so it could take days to declare winners in all these races, and the Senate could once again hinge on a Raphael Warnock runoff. I can't say it was a great midterms because the Dems have effectively already lost the House. They were done in mostly by newly gerrymandered Republican districts and their inability to effectively gerrymander their own districts (a judge threw out a map in New York that would've been more favorable to Dems), but also they lost some winnable races (a few in NY, as it were), which almost always happens to the in party during the midterms. Based on the fundamentals -- Biden's unpopularity, inflation, etc. -- it could have been much, much worse.

Democrats were helped tremendously by the fact that Republicans fielded a lot of terrible candidates. This is something I wasn't wrong about, and I said as much in a previous entry. Probably the best result of the night is that Trump's candidates mostly got smoked in all but the deepest of red areas, and the non-Trump-endorsed candidates did much better. This is best illustrated by Oz and Mastriano losing fairly handily in Pennsylvania, and Kemp and Raffensperger winning comfortably in Georgia. Also, Ron DeSantis (who I was dismayed to learn is younger than me), Trump's possible rival in the 2024 primary, had a huge night in the Florida governor race. I'm no fan of DeSantis, and I think it's tragic how Florida has somehow gone from the quintessential swing state to solidly red in the span of six years, but if he actually decides to take on Trump and beats him (both realistic possibilities), then I will be much less of a non-fan than I am now. In fact, if you told me right now that I could guarantee Ron DeSantis would win the presidency in 2024, I would be tempted to take it; I probably would not, but I would be tempted.

Pretty good election for the polls too despite what you might hear. They weren't super accurate, but they were much more accurate than the prevailing narrative. The result we are seeing now was considered unlikely by poll-based models, but it wasn't some crazy outlier event. The polling error was just in the Dems favor this time. I'm kinda kicking myself for being so bullish on the red wave, but I was intentionally not really following the polls and just going with my gut, and my gut was probably acting as a defense mechanism for a worst case scenario. It's kinda like when I was saying the Mariners weren't going to make the playoffs even though I knew on some level that they probably would (and they did). The point is, your gut is shit... literally, if you think about it.

Anyway, I gotta wrap it up because I'm super tired. (S is gone right now, and Lil' S2 is kinda sick so he wakes up in the middle of the night and starts doing this weird congested whimper, and then I have to get up and give him a shot of children's Dimetapp to get him to go back to sleep, so I haven't been sleeping well.) I'll just conclude by giving my main takeaway from the night: Voters want access to abortion and normal elections. Also, I think anti-Trumpism is still a powerful motivating factor. So, thanks for that, Don, I guess.

Until next time...

Entry 635: A Relative Low-Stakes DC Ballot

I filled out my ballot and mailed it in. Yo voté, as my sticker says. It felt very low-stakes given the other races around the country. As I said in a previous entry, I'm not optimistic about the Democrats' chances. The polls have all the key races super close. I have intentionally not been following them intently, but I heard somebody on a podcast say we are a normal polling error in one direction away from a huge red wave and a normal polling error in the other direction away from a successful blue defense. Given the polls have hugely underestimated Republicans in almost every high-profile election over the past six years, I think my pessimism is warranted. 

I remember when I formed my first political opinions, back in the late '90s, I thought the biggest problem with our system is that the two political parties were too alike and too corporate. As Noam Chomsky once put it, "In the US, there is basically one party - the business party." Man, what I wouldn't give to go back to those days -- back to when almost every politician governed somewhere between Bill Clinton and John McCain, and when an Exxon-Mobil executive was the epitome of evil, not a relative beacon of probity and rectitude. But to quote another great thinker, "the thing about the old days: they the old days."

One thing about DC elections is that a bunch of major races were already effectively decided in the primary election. Muriel Bowser is going to be mayor; Phil Mendelson is going to be council chair; the candidate for attorney general is running unopposed. Another thing is that there just doesn't seem to be that much difference between most the candidates running for other seats. I read through the profiles of all the at-large candidates for city council, and I found it super hard to draw big distinctions between their positions -- like on crime they didn't all say the exact same thing, but nobody wanted to defund the police and nobody wanted to implement stop and frisk either. I ended up picking two people, not at random, but not exactly based on a whole lot.

The most interesting thing on the ballot is an initiative to end tipped wages. Currently, DC establishments can pay certain workers (like servers and bartenders) well below minimum wage with idea that these employees will make enough tips to cover the difference. If they don't, then their employer has to cover the difference for them, so workers at least make minimum wage, tipped or otherwise. The initiative would end this practice and compel employers to pay minimum wage pre-tips.

I went back and forth on this one. On the one hand, socially mandatory tipping is a very silly way to compensate people. It's not at all an extra reward for a job well done. It's probably more correlated to how conventionally attractive (and flirty) you are than how well you perform your job. It also can be a bit of a tax scam in that most people don't declare all (if any) of their tipped income.

But it's at least a tax scam that helps working class people.* Having friends that made the bulk of their salaries from tips, I saw first hand how important they are to workers. In fact, a lot servers and bartenders oppose the initiative because they (understandably) think people would tip less. What would probably happen is that an establishment, not wanting to raise its sticker prices, would add on a service charge, in effect a forced tip (some places already do this), and then patrons wouldn't tip beyond that. The service charge would not go directly into the server's/bartender's pocket like it does now. So, if you're somebody who rakes it in from tips, this is a terrible law for you.

*I also wonder if everything being cashless is making it more difficult for tipped workers to not declare all their tips.

On the flip side, if you don't make that much above minimum wage from tips, then you probably want the stability of a steady wage. So, lots of strands -- some winners, some losers like with any bill. I see both sides, but I voted no, meaning I voted to uphold the status quo. I don't think there is any way establishments can afford to do this without raising prices somewhat, and now is not the time to raise prices. Also, I think customers prefer the "freedom" of choosing to tip or not over the service charge, which just feels like a straight-up price increase (especially if the service isn't great). DC establishments are still hurting from the Covid shutdown -- people got used to staying home, and giving them more reason to do so, just doesn't seem smart to me right now.

I also think, instead of eliminating tipping, this bill will just make it more confusing. Do you tip on top of the service charge? And what if you just get a single drink, is there going to be a service charge on that, and if there isn't, will you still be expected to tip like before? 

We probably will find out. A similar bill passed a few years ago (2018, I believe), but the DC city council nixed it. They said they won't do that this time. But it only passed with 55%, and, as we've established already, things change. So, we shall see.

Until next time...

Entry 634: Friday Night Blogging

It's a rare one, this Friday night. I actually have some time to myself before 9:30. S is having drinks with some mom friends, and both the kids are at friends' houses. So, what do I do with this bonus time? Write a blog of course. Actually, I've been thinking that I need a TV show to get into. I'm thinking White Lotus. I've been meaning to watch it, and now season two is coming out soon, so it's good timing. S watched it and said she thinks I would like it. It's a Mike White project, and I watched Buck & Chuck fairly recently and thought it was bizarrely good, so I'll give White Lotus a shot. Maybe I'll watch an episode later tonight during my usual alone time. I was also thinking of finally getting into Mad Men. It's the only one of those big early "prestige TV" dramas that I've never seen.* But it feels so daunting to actually get into it. It's like, I missed that cultural train and there's not another one coming.

*There's kind of a "Big 4" of shows in this category: The Sopranos, The Wire, Breaking Bad, and Mad Men.

The only show I've been watching of late is Love Is Blind, and it's pretty vapid. I mean, the vapidness is kinda the point. S likes those types of shows, and so it's something we can watch together. It's fine. I'll even go so far as to say I enjoy it, but it's only because I'm watching it with her. I assure you, I would never watch an episode on my own. Even now, mid-season, I'm not really that invested. If for some reason we couldn't finish the rest of the episodes, it wouldn't bother me in the least. I wouldn't even look up what happens online. If I never find out if Cole and Zanab actually got married, I'll still be able to die in peace.

And actually I have been watching one other show. The boys and I usually watch an episode or two of Bluey each night. It's a pretty good show -- very good by kids show standards. Sometimes -- often times, actually -- it gets too precious by half, but I suppose that's part of the charm. Interestingly, a bunch of the episodes actually get censored before they stream on Disney+. In fact, an entire opening sequence of an episode was removed because it centers on Bluey's dad Bandit possibly farting on her as he gets out of bed. I don't like that they change the writers' original work, but I do feel nostalgia for the time kids shows got censored for referencing bodily functions, instead of whatever Twitter is mad about this week.

Speaking of Twitter, ol' Elon has taken over, I guess. I really couldn't care less, and I don't get the freak out at all. Like, how could you make Twitter -- a cesspool of awfulness in its worst moments; an addictive, unproductive time-suck in its best -- any worse? Plus, I mostly agree with Musk's vision regarding what Twitter should be. I will say, life is slightly more pleasant without Trump being able to tweet, but he says he's not coming back anyway. That might not be true, but maybe it is -- who knows? That last thing I'll say is that if you invested a lot time and emotional capital into a soulless, mega-billions tech company that makes its money off of selling your data and forcing you see ads, then that's kinda on you. And if you fit this mold, getting off Twitter -- if that's really what you're going to do -- is probably a net positive in your life.

Actually, I'll say one more thing. Elon is a good example of what I was talking about in my last post about how Democrats are increasingly becoming incapable of building the coalitions needed to consistently win elections. He made an announcement a while back about how he was going to vote for Republicans in future elections because he felt Dems had become the party of "division and hate." This is extremely misguided, in my opinion -- I couldn't disagree with it more. But it is indicative of how the Democrats are losing voters by constantly making them feel judged and unwanted. The sentiment toward Elon should be "come back, we'll find come ground and work together," but instead it's "good riddance, douche." And the frustrating part is that it's not even the party leaders who are doing this. Many Democratic candidates seem to be reasonable people who want a broad coalition and don't want to engage in all this culture war stuff, but they can't escape their association with the nuttiness of left-wing media, social media, academia, and so on, that's become so prominent over the last five.

The reason I've become so critical of liberals is because we need a strong Democratic party to combat the derangement and danger of the Trumpist Republicans, which manifested itself recently in the form of a brutally attack on Nancy Pelosi's husband that was meant for her. The enablers of this type of violence -- the election deniers, the conspiracy theorists, the civil war agitators -- these people need to be roundly rejected at the ballot box, but they aren't, and part of the reason for that is that Dems have been so bad at branding and at focusing on things people most care about. And to be clear, the Reps aren't much better (if at all) at coalition building. When it comes to politics in this country, sometimes I feel like I'm watching that badminton match in which neither side is trying to win.

Anyway...

You might notice that this is not being posted Friday night despite me saying it's Friday night at the beginning of the entry. Shortly after I started writing, I got a message from Lil' S2's friend's dad asking if I could come get him. Well, he more implied than asked -- it was one of those "Looks like things are winding down here" texts. So I had to get him, and then I had to get Lil' S1 from his party, and I haven't been able to get back on to finish this post until now.

I guess Lil' S1 had an incident at the party. As I understand it, some kid was bothering him and trying to steal a cookie he was saving for Lil' S2, so Lil' S1 hit this kid, and then the kid's mom yelled at Lil' S1, even dropping an F-bomb. The mom later apologized to Lil' S1, and Lil' S1 apologized to the kid, and then the party went on as normal, and nothing seemed out of the ordinary when I went to pick him up. (The party host didn't tell me about the incident when I came to get him. She called S later. She told S it was too hectic to talk to me, but I think maybe she just felt more comfortable talking to S and not in person. Whatever. I don't mind.)

So many layers here to unravel. The first is that the adult needs to act like an adult. You shouldn't swear at a ten-year-old, especially it's not your child. That's a definite transgression in the parenting world. You can talk to them and tell to stop, but really laying into them and swearing at them is a no-no. (Ironically, in this case, the mom was modeling the exact behavior -- lack of self-discipline when responding to somebody you're angry with -- that she was mad about.) S, understandably, was quite upset about this. I was too, but not to the same extent. For one thing, I remember having adults who weren't my parents bitch me out when I was his age, and it sucks, but it's not like super traumatic. For another thing, we weren't there, so we don't know exactly how it all went down, and we don't know this mom, so unless we are going to get her number from the host and, like, settle her hash, which seems like it would only exacerbate things, there's not really much we can or should do about it now.

Then there's the other issue of Lil' S1 hitting this kid in the first place. He's been having problems with this, with not being able to get along with other kids. I can't even explain it. He's so sweet in so many ways, but he has this weird temper sometimes where he'll just start yelling at other kids or getting physical with them. It usually with kids who are younger than him, which makes it especially bad (he says the kid in this incident was his age or older, but we don't know for sure). It's to the point where if Lil' S2 has friends over, we have to tell Lil' S1 to just not play with them. I'm really hoping this is just an immaturity thing. He's still very much a "little kid" emotionally, and so maybe, probably, he'll grow out it.

The other thing is that he's not very big or strong physically, and I'm worried that one of these days he's going to do this to a kid who's tougher than him or has an older sibling, and they're going to fight back, and it's not going to go well for him. On the flip side of that though, I also don't want him to be a pushover. If some other kid is harassing him or trying to take his stuff, I want him to be able to stand up for himself. You can't always rely on adult intervention as a child. Like I said, layers, it's just a tough situation to navigate all around. We already have one kid in therapy, maybe we need to make it two.

Anyway, we are moving on to happier things like ghosts and monsters! Halloween is upon us. S and I went to a party last night. I dressed up as Walter White, and she donned a hazmat suit. It was a pretty decent costume pair -- not very topical, but easy without being a total cop out. We're taking the boys out trick-or-treating tomorrow night. It will be the first year that we split up. I'll take Lil' S2 with his friends and his friends' parents, and S will take Lil' S1 with his friends. I'm not sure if I'll wear my costume out. Without S to put things into context, I might just look like a guy in a pork pie hat.

Until next time...

Entry 633: The "It's All Politics" Post

I haven't written much about politics of late. Largely this is because I mostly write at night, and I don't like thinking about politics at night. (I follow the mullet strategy of content consumption: News in the morning; entertainment at night.) But also it's because I'm pretty much a "blue no matter who" voter, and I don't think the midterm elections are going to go well for people like me. There was a period a few months ago when things looked a bit more promising for the Dems, but that mini surge has faded, and it's looking like a red wave could very much be in the cards.

So, I'm doing my best not to invest too much emotionally (nor financially) into these upcoming midterms. Plus, none of the big races are occurring where I vote (in DC the primaries are typically more important than the general election), and I question how much outside energy and money can influence an election anyway. Anecdotally, all the Senate candidates I donated to in the last election lost, so I specifically didn't donate to either Dem in the Georgia runoff, and they both won. I know that it takes money to run a campaign, and every candidate will tell you they need more, but, after a while, I think the returns are seriously diminished and possibly even counterproductive, as voters might be resentful of outsider influence.

And if the Reps don't run roughshod over the Dems in the midterms, it will only be because, despite their reputation, they actually aren't all that great at politics, and they nominate bad, extreme candidates in races in which more normie Reps would probably perform much better. But it might not matter this cycle because the Dems have too many things working against them -- one of which is that their brand has become utterly poisonous to a large segment of the population.

I was thinking about why this is the case -- why so many voters recoil in disgust when they see a D on the ballot next to a candidate. It's easy to understand the other way. I won't vote for a Republican because of Donald Trump, full stop. Unless a candidate openly disavows Trump and Trumpism, I'm out. But there's nothing like this on the Democratic side -- there is no cult leader. Instead, I think there are several reasons why so many people see the Dems as toxic. One reason is that it's "white lash" against a party (and a country) that's becoming more racially diverse. This phenomenon certainly exists, but I now think it's a much smaller part of the picture than I used to. After all, Trump actually increased his share of the vote among non-white voters in 2020. Another reason is that this is the result of a now decades-long bad-faith assault on Dems by right-wing media, such as Fox News. This is indeed a huge factor, I think, and it seems to only be getting worse as "news" becomes even more siloed and less trustworthy.

I think liberals like to cite these reasons because they are mostly outside their control. But there is a third reason that should warrant some soul-searching among people who don't want to see red waves become a regular occurrence: Dems are increasingly becoming unlikable to, and unrepresentative of, all but a very narrow segment of the population -- urban, affluent, highly educated, and woke. Too often the messaging from liberal spaces implies that, not only is there no need to appeal to anybody outside this cross-section, but such people are morally bankrupt and only worthy of contempt. This is the big problem with woke liberalism as a political movement: It's terrible at building the coalitions needed to win elections. It unnecessarily alienates too many people. I heard Barack Obama on Pod Save America, and he basically said the same thing. He criticized the hyper-focus on language rules that most people, especially older people, can't understand, and he called Democrats "buzzkills". I unfortunately agree.

A great example of this is the Covid response. It's ironic that this is now such a liability for so many Democratic candidates in the midterm, as it was a huge part of why Biden won in 2020. But I think Dems took the wrong lesson from it. What people wanted was responsible leadership to take Covid seriously, mitigate the risks, yes, but return us to somewhat normal life as quickly as possible. Few signed on for seemingly endless shutdowns and nonsensical masking rules. (That weren't even always followed by the people who made them.) Then the Dems really lost the issue when they didn't universally get behind schools reopening even after teachers had the opportunity to get vaccinated. The was just a total gift to Republicans. (Glenn Youngkin says thanks.) And it wasn't just the policy, but also the attitude, that parents only wanted their "babysitters back" (as if the child care schools provide is a luxury service and not a vital public resource that millions of parents rely on to go out and earn a paycheck), and the learning loss wasn't that bad, and that anybody who was weighing priorities differently was being reckless or not believing the science.

Another thing is that many of the people who were hurt the most from Covid shutdowns were poor service industries workers (often non-white people), who didn't have any savings to fall back on and couldn't work from home. On a podcast segment, I heard this Hispanic woman in Florida who was talking about how she absolutely hated Ron Desantis' bullshit immigration stunts but was going to vote for him anyway because he kept things open when other states were shutting down and that allowed her to keep her job in a nail salon. Can you really say she's wrong? I mean, I would never vote for Ron Desantis, but I understand where she's coming from.

Dems did get a big Covid relief bill through to help ease some of the shutdown hardship, but nothing comes for free, and we are now seeing the inflationary effects of giving people all this money for staying home. This is certainly not the only reason inflation is high right now (there's also that whole war in Ukraine), but it is a contributing factor. And inflation is the issue right now that is giving Democratic candidates the biggest problems.

Anyway, I have several more examples of the buzzkill Dems, and maybe I'll get to them in the future, but I'm out of time for now.

Until next time...

Entry 632: Sunday Scaries

• Apparently, what I call the "Sunday Night Blues" have a "real" name: the "Sunday Scaries". I like my name better because the word scary makes me think of ghosts or serial killers or nuclear war and those aren't the things I associate with Sunday night. It's more a feeling of ennui and sadness, a little anxiety and dread, sure, but not, like, shutter-inducing fear. Now, Sunday Scaries does have the alliteration going for it, but Sunday Night Blues rolls off the tongue more smoothly. Also, you could come up with parody to "Summertime Blues" called "Sunday Night Blues".
  

  Well, I'm gonna feel sad and I'm gonna feel sorrow
  And I'm gonna have to go back to school on the morrow
  Every time I put my feet up and try to clear my head
  My brain says, no way, bud, and fills me up with dread
  Sometimes it feels like a terrible flu
  Cuz there ain't no cure for Sunday Night Blues

• The Mariners lost last night 1-0 in an 18 inning (!) game, which eliminated them from the playoffs and ended their season. It's kinda disappointing, but not totally devastating. Making the postseason for the first time in 21 years was enough to make it a successful season in my eyes.
  
  
• Also, the Seahawks won today to go to 3-3 on the season, which isn't great, but they were supposed to be terrible this year. They traded their superstar quarterback Russell Wilson in the off-season and replaced him with a longtime backup named Geno Smith. Everybody thought this would make them much worse on offense, but in a crazy twist, they've gotten better. They are much more fun to watch than they were last year.
  
  
• Speaking of football, Lil' S2 is playing flag football right now. It's going pretty well. He's actually a grade ahead of the other kids in the league. I signed him up for the 1st grade league (he's in 2nd grade) because I wanted him to play with his friends who are in 1st grade. He's right on the grade cutoff anyway. He's decent, but he has yet to catch a pass this season. There have been only two completions total on his entire team. The coach is the QB, and he's not great at the short passes the kids can actually catch. He has them running too deep. I'm watching from the sidelines like They're seven years old. They aren't catching the corner post. They don't officially keep score, but it's not hard to do the arithmetic in your head, and they haven't won a game yet. I was a bit apprehensive about putting him in the younger league, thinking if the team was good, other parents might raise an eyebrow, but that should have been the furthest thought from my mind. Lil' S2 seems to like it though, and he's pretty good, and he's always bothering me to play catch with him, so it's working out okay.
  
  
• Derry Girls is back with a new season. I love that show.

That's all I got today -- busy weekend, so short entry. Until next time... 

Update: I was reading the Wikipedia page for Derry Girls after I wrote this, and I learned that two of the actresses who play high school girls are 35 -- 35! I know that it's routine for actors in their 20s to play teenagers -- Ralph Macchio was 23 when he made Karate Kid, for example -- but 35? I've never heard of that. Not even Gabrielle Carteris was that old on Beverley Hills: 90210, and it was a huge joke how old she was back in the day.

No shade by the way. As I said above, I think the Derry Girls is great, and it's a testament to their acting ability that they can convincingly play teens. It's just surprising is all.

Entry 631: My Name Is Alexander Hamilton

S and I have apparently started a new tradition whereby every seven years we go see a show at the Kennedy Center that was super popular five years ago. In 2015 (we remember the date because S was pregnant with Lil' S2), we saw Book of Mormon, which was good-but-not-great, and last night we saw Hamilton, which was absolutely phenomenal. I now get the ridiculous amount of hype that has surrounded this show for the better part of a decade. I loved every moment of it. It wasn't the original cast, of course, but the music and lyrics and concept are so brilliant that it doesn't even matter. (And the actors we did see were really good anyway.) A few months ago, we almost watched the movie version on Disney+, but decided not to, so as not to spoil the stage version, and I'm very glad we made that decision.

The other thing is that it's just nice to go out sans kids and do "cultured" activities. The Kennedy Center is a cool landmark in and of itself (right next door to the infamous Watergate Hotel), so it's especially neat to see a show there. We got there early, which was nice, as we were both hungry, so we had a chance to get some overpriced charcuterie before the show. We had excellent seats, almost perfectly front and center, which I'm sure is part of what made it such a fun experience. Although I'm a little worried now that I can't go back to "normal" seating. Oh well, if we only do this once every seven years, we should be able to splurge for the good seats.

The Kennedy Center still has a mask mandate, making it one of the few non-medical establishments I've seen that has one. It didn't seem to be enforced at all, however, which is fine by me, as it's quite silly how they do it. It's only required (putatively) in the theater proper, so you are supposed to wear it when you are sitting next to the same few people, looking straight ahead, but it's not required when you're milling around, rubbing elbows with dozens of different people in the lobby or waiting in line for concessions or the bathroom. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense. But the Kennedy Center has a certain clientele, and rich liberals seem to be the last holdouts when it comes to nonsensical masking rules.

On the flip side, Covid is still going strong -- or at least strong enough that people I know are still getting infected regularly (if not virulently). S's sister, Sw, is that latest victim, testing positive earlier this week. This is especially bad timing as she was planning on taking Lil' S1 to some woodsy getaway for the long getaway. It was going to be a auntie-nephew bonding experience, and Lil' S1 was really looking forward to it. We decided to let him go anyway, which might have been irresponsible, I don't know. The thing is, it was a really mild case, and she isn't really feeling symptoms anymore (otherwise she would've stayed home herself), and it's right on the edge of when she's allowed to go back out in public, and they both said they'll do their best to wear masks in the car and when they're together indoors, so... whatever. We will hope for the best.

S is also out of town -- she took Lil' S2 to visit a friend in Boston -- so I have the house to myself for the weekend. That sounds nice, and it is, but it also is an obligation. I have a list of tasks I've been putting off, things that are too difficult to find the time to do when kids are around (or so I tell myself, so that I don't have to do them), and now I have no excuse.* So, while I would like to just spend the weekend watching sports, I at least have to make some progress on my list, so that I don't feel like a total goldbrick. But I definitely am going to watch sports too. The Mariners are in the playoffs (and ahead in their series!), and my old friend and fellow baseball lover RB is in town, so I'm going to meet her in about an hour. I am going to crack down on my list tomorrow though.

*Reminds me of this classic article in The Onion

Until next time... 

Entry 630: On Three Mostly Unrelated Topics

We had a birthday party for Lil' S1 today, even though he turned 10 over a month ago. End of the summer birthdays are tough. A lot of families aren't around -- we might not even be around -- and those who are often already have last-chance-of-the-summer plans -- pool parties and cookouts and whatnot. This year his birthday fell between our return from the PNW and our departure to Iceland, so we didn't really do anything for it. Well, actually we did. S's parents and sister were here, and we had an ice cream cake and sang and everything, but we didn't invite any other kids. He wanted to have a kids b-day party, so, sure, why not? Let's take some kids to play laser tag and pretend it's the end of August.

It went pretty well, I guess. I didn't actually play. I didn't really find laser tag that fun when I was a kid. They also have arcade games, but they're less fun than laser tag. And they're so expensive. Forget the price of gasoline, we should measure inflation by the cost of games of Halo: Fireteam Raven. Every kid burned through their card in, like, 15 minutes, and that's including a $5 refill. Arcades were so much better when I was a kid, and I don't think that's just nostalgia. Arcades now are basically casinos for children. In fact, some of the games are literally gambling. Like that one that's a bulldozer that pushes coins over a ledge. How is that anything but a game of chance? I do like pop-a-shot, but it was out of order.

------------

In my last entry, you might recall, I was pretty down on the Mariners, and thought they were going to blow their golden opportunity to make the playoffs for the first time in 21 years. Turns out I needn't have been so concerned. Those models saying they were virtual shoo-ins were spot-on, as the M's qualified for the postseason last night, rather dramatically, but quite easily, clinching with six games still on the schedule. I knew I was being overly pessimistic last week, but baseball will do that to a person. It's the weirdest sport, in that bad teams can look great for ten or twenty game stretches, and good teams can look terrible. The Mariners recently went 3-8 against the dregs of the league, including losing a game in which they were winning by nine runs, and then immediately after that, they won four in a row to make the playoffs. It makes no sense, and I've known my entire life as a baseball fan that it makes no sense, but knowing something and feeling something are two different things.

Anyway, I was so excited about the Mariners making the playoffs that I wrote a song about it. I'll only subject you to the first verse. It's a parody of Bill Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire", so get that tune in your head as you read it.

Alvin Davis, Ichiro, Kyle Seager, Zunino
Refuse to Lose, Harold Reynolds, Robinson Cano
Lou Piniella, Dustin Ackley, Richie Sexson, Kaz Sasaki
Alex Diaz, Edwin Diaz, Luis Castillo

I gotta say, it's pretty good. I listened to the original song verse-for-verse a bunch of times and got the cadence down for each line, and then I fit Mariners-themed lyrics to it. I won't say how much time I spent on it because I don't know, and also because I'm not sure I should be proud of how long it took me. I'm a 45-year-old man making up songs about a baseball team getting a wild card spot. And I can't even perform it. I don't know how to do that, and even if I did, my rhythm and voice are so bad, it'd sound like shit. So, I'm a 45-year-old man making a song about a baseball team getting a wild card spot that nobody will ever sing. I'm basically a character in the Beatles song "Eleanor Rigby". Well, I did post this magnum opus, in full, in the comments section of a Mariners blog, and it got 109 likes, which is the most I've ever seen, so there's that. Maybe if Father McKenzie had the internet at least a few people would have heard his sermons.

------------

Lil' S2 lost a tooth today -- or, I should say, Lil' S2 had a tooth yanked out today by me. It'd been loose for a few weeks now, but it was super stubborn, so we just left it in there, but it got to the point to where it was actually bothering him. It hurt, and it was bleeding, and it got in the way when he was trying to eat, so I knew it had to come out. But I couldn't get it. One half was almost completely separated from the gum, but the other half felt like it was bound by cement. I would yank and yank to no avail, and then my fingers would get slippery from the blood and saliva, and I'd lose my grip and have to start over. Lil' S2 was starting to wince and squirm, and he's the one who prides himself on being stoic when he has to get a shot at the doctor's office. (Unlike his older brother who screams "I can't do it" over and over and tries to run away.)

I wiggled and twisted it a bunch (which Lil' S2 did not like), and then finally I felt it detach a bit, like the end of a Velcro strap, and I pulled that sucker right out. It felt so satisfying. I had him put it in an envelope and then tuck it under his pillow, and then I set an alarm for later in the night to go swap it for some money. It's a good thing I did that too because I totally would've forgotten had I not. I actually did forget once, and the next morning he was wondering why the Tooth Fairy hadn't come. I clandestinely put some bills in the crack between his mattress and the wall and told him that she probably did come, and he accidentally knocked the money off the bed in his sleep. So, he went back in there and found the money, which only seemed to make him more confused. "Well, why didn't she take my tooth then?" he asked. I had no good answer.

Whatever. I don't really like tricking my kids into believing in things like Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy anyway. I like the tradition and the story telling, and I want to participate in it, but I kinda think kids should know it's actually their parents. Like, would it really ruin things if you did the whole production and pretended like they were real, but then you told your kids in advance that it was all make-believe? I don't think so. I think it would still be super fun and magical for them, but you wouldn't have to lie to your kids, and you wouldn't prime them to believe in shit that doesn't exist. It's all fun and games until they grow up and start putting up posts on Facebook about guarding angels protecting them.

The other thing about kids' teeth is that I never know what to do with them after they come out. Do you keep them? I know a lot of parents do that, but I find it kinda gross/weird. I guess I should just toss them. I decided to keep this latest one for now, in case S wants it, so I went into my dresser drawer to put it there, and what did I find? A Ziploc baggy with the last tooth he lost in it. I think I previously went through the exact same thought process I just had, and then forgot about it. That totally sounds like something I would do.

Until next time...

Entry 629: Downward Spiral

The Seattle Mariners have really got me down of late. I've been a fan of terrible sports teams most my life, so it's usually not that big a deal when my team blows it. It's part of the charm, I tell myself, and it makes it that much sweeter when they do come through. But this time is different -- it's really bumming me out -- and explaining why requires a bit of backstory.

The Mariners and I were both born in 1977, and I became a fan in the summer of '84 (Alvin Davis!). I loved some truly putrid squads as a child, such as the 1986 team that lost 95 games (Lefbvre Beliebvre!) and the 1990 team, who came in much hyped and then started the season 2-10, including a loss in the home opener, which I attended (I remember Rickey Henderson led-off the game with a home run), and it didn't get much better from there.

Then, in 1995 -- when I was legally an adult -- they had a great/lucky finish to the season and not only made the playoffs but won a series against the Yankees in dramatic fashion. They stayed pretty good for a few years, peaking in 2001 by setting a record for most wins in a season (116), but losing to said Yankees in the American League Championship Series (sad trombone).

They haven't been back to the playoffs since then, the longest drought in the "Big 4" of American sports (MLB, NFL, NBA, NHL). They haven't always been bad either. They've come close several times, but always the rug always gets pulled out at the last minute. For example, in 2014 in the thick of the race, they had a 2-1 lead in the fifth inning over the Blue Jays and their best pitcher, Felix Hernandez, on the mound. He proceeded to inexplicably give up seven runs and lose the game, and the M's missed the postseason by one game. In 2018, they had a huge lead in the standings at midseason, but the Oakland A's got super hot and passed them easily. They were decent last year, again narrowly missing the postseason, but they were bad in 2020 when the league temporarily expanded the number of playoff teams because of the weird Covid schedule. If they had done that in 2021 (or this year) they M's would have been in. But the timing didn't work -- it never works. It's like the universe is conspiring to keep Mariners fans unhappy.

So, this year they are legitimately good, and the season is super fun, and they build up a good lead in the standings to the point that with 20 games left they have a 99.8% chance to make the playoffs. There are only easy games left on the schedule. But then, because it's the Mariners, their two best players randomly get hurt, and suddenly they just suck. They struggle to score runs and can't even beat the bad teams. They have only won two of their last eight games, and with only 12 games left, although still heavy favorites, in my heart of hearts, I think they are going to blow it.

I usually follow their games on my phone in real-time, but I'm going to stop doing that now. It gives me more anxiety than doom-scrolling Twitter. I'll probably still check whether they won or lost, but I'm done with the soul-draining Game Day prompts: In play, out(s). Haniger grounds into double play. Crawford out at second, Haniger out at first.

Tonight I'll have something else to focus on anyway. We are taking the kids with S's sister to see Avatar in IMAX 3-D. S and I thought it was the new one when we went to get the tickets, before realizing it's just the rerelease. (The new one comes out in December.) We decided to go anyway, because the kids have never seen it, and S's sister still wanted to go. I'm lukewarm on the idea. I thought it was just okay the first time I saw it, and it's kinda pricey, and I don't know if Lil' S2 will be able to sit through the entire thing without getting antsy. I'd just as soon do something else as a family, but I don't really have any suggestions.

In other bad news -- real bad news, not sports bad news -- I had a distressing conversation with a friend a few days ago. I hadn't heard from him in a minute, and he told me that a few weeks ago, he had two seizures in succession and had to spend a week in the hospital. I asked him what happened, and he told me that since the start of the pandemic, his drinking had crept up to the point he was having four or five drinks every night and had been for several years. He knew it had gotten to be too much, so he stopped drinking for a few days, and it was such a shock to his system that it sent him into withdrawal seizures.

Super scary, but he seems to be doing okay now, thankfully. He said his body still feels a bit weird -- his ab and leg muscles failed to the point he couldn't even get out of bed for a few days -- but he can now do normal daily activities and even exercise a bit. He also said he's done drinking for a very long time, probably forever, which is a very good thing.

All this made me think on a few things. For one, it underscored what a pernicious drug alcohol can be, even if you think you've got it under control. My friend was not a drunk in the usual sense. He wasn't going out to bars and blacking out and making a fool of himself. He wasn't even doing anything that affected his life in an ostensibly negative way. He just gradually, seemingly benignly, increased his alcohol intake each night to the point his body developed a dangerous dependency on it. I suspect this type of thing could happen to many people I know. The big joke during the pandemic lockdown among my friends was how everybody started drinking more to cope with the weird combination of stress and boredom we were all feeling. But it wasn't really a joke.

And that's the other thing. I don't think this happens if not for the pandemic. It's impossible to prove, obviously, but that's my feeling. The lockdown was awful, and it's why I was a pretty staunch advocate of reopening everything pretty early on in the whole ordeal. There are no solutions in life, just tradeoffs.

Well, at least when something like this happens, it underscores how frivolous it is to worry about something like baseball. But still, Mariners, don't go breaking my heart.

Until next time...