Entry 612: 10,000 Minutes of Solitude

My week in quarantine is over -- yay! I tried to test out after four days, but, despite feeling totally normal, I was still positive. So, I took a test every morning thereafter and finally got a negative result on day seven. It's good to be back upstairs; the basement was getting lonely. And it reconfirmed for me that although Covid is still out there, and we should be aware of that, we absolutely cannot go into anything close to a shutdown again. The isolation is worse than the disease, by a wide margin. I started to go a little stir crazy, and I have a family I could talk to through the door (admittedly not easy when you have 6- and 9-year-olds). I can't imagine the emotional and psychological toll a person who lives by themself must endure in quarantine. It must be so much worse than having a sore throat and feeling a little logy for a night or two.

I think most people get that, but it's still not really the "correct" position to hold in polite society, which is why we are seeing think pieces with tones of admonishment about how Americans are making "little effort to contain a still-raging pandemic" and how "experts urge caution ahead of Memorial Day." The latter article contains the following quote:

"That is the hard thing to reconcile,” said Gabe Kelen, chair of the emergency medicine department at Johns Hopkins University. “I get it that people are willing to take a personal risk, but it is not a personal risk. There are a lot of people who are older, who are immunocompromised who can’t fully participate in society” because others “are not willing to do the right thing.”

The country has moved so far to, ‘I’m only concerned about me,’” he added.

Pretty judgy, no? I'm seeing more and more of this type of thing -- impugning people's motives who don't see eye-to-eye with you. Like, you can't merely disagree and say why; you have to denigrate the character of those on the opposite side of the issue. In this case, what is the "right thing" that people should do so that elderly folks and immumocompromised people can fully participate in society? Because I don't think such a thing exists. At this point, the only way to stop the spread of Covid is to lock down again, and, as I mentioned above, that merely shifts the problem from one of physical health to one of mental health. Also, if we lock down, there isn't much of a society for anybody to participate in.

Seriously, what are we supposed to do? It's always the same three things: vaccinate, wear a mask, and socially distance. One is already done; two has its own problems; and three isn't always realistic. I discussed mask wearing in a previous entry. I personally don't have a problem with it, but masks do have some downsides, and you can't wear them all the time in all activities. That's the main problem with them, and that's also the problem with social distancing. You can't, say, take martial arts class while wearing a mask and social distancing. You can't really play contact sports at all. You can't drink at a club. You can't eat school lunch. You can't meet a friend for coffee. You can't sing at church. You can't really have much of a life and only do activities in which you can wear a mask and socially distance. So, what are we talking about here? Telling people to wear a mask and socially distance is, in effect, telling people to go into a quasi lock down. I mean, do you really think requiring people to wear a mask from the front door to the table of a restaurant is going to make dining out safe for vulnerable people?

There's no right answer to this disease. But treating it like the flu, which it basically is for the vast majority of vaccinated people (actually probably even less severe), is a reasonable way to proceed. If you disagree, that's fine. I will hear you out -- I've been hearing you out -- but let's stop it with the moralizing. It's not selfish, given what we know at this moment in time, to think we are better off as a society to accept the risk of Covid for the reward of a return to relative normality.

Speaking of moralizing, I watched Ricky Gervais' Netflix comedy special SuperNature. I've never really been a huge fan of his standup (nor his emceeing), but the original The Office is absolutely brilliant, and his conversations with Stephen Merchant and Karl Pilkington (The Ricky Gervais Show) are among the funniest things I've ever heard. So, when I heard he had a new special out, and it was "controversial" I decided to see what all the din was about. Meh... I give it a B- grade for the comedy, and rate it a 6 out of 10 on the offense scale.

I didn't think the jokes were all that offensive. This is definitely a case of something's profile being increased drastically by its critics. If all the usual suspects didn't write a think piece about awful it is, it probably would not have crossed my radar. That's why I have trouble taking people seriously when they argue that it goes beyond jokes and that a comedian's words actually do real tangible harm to certain people. If they really thought this, then they wouldn't be amplifying these words by tweeting about them and writing articles about them. It's called the Streisand Effect, and it's a well-known phenomenon, especially by people who work in media. I mean, you know who has a new comedy special out that isn't at all offensive? I don't because there aren't scathing headlines about it blowing up my news feed.

If you don't want to watch somebody tell offensive jokes then don't watch it. I sometimes want to watch this. It's not because I'm a secret racist or transphobe or misogynist. It's because I just don't get offended easily, and I think twisted shit is funny. Often that's why it's funny. Some people need this type of dark, offensive humor to deal with the ruthlessness of reality. If you don't get it, I probably can't explain it to you. It's the same reason I like Todd Solodnz and Quentin Tarantino movies.

Alright, I've run out gas, and I need to go to bed.

Until next time...

Entry 611: Covid Redux

First the bad news: I got Covid again.

That's it. There is no good news.

Well, I guess you could say the relatively good news is that it's not very bad. I'm, like, one fiftieth as ill as I was the first time I got it. It feels like I have a cold and not even a particularly bad one. Also, nobody else in my family tested positive, so that's good. Although it means I have to quarantine in the basement. If we all had it, at least we could all hang out. But still, it's better that they don't have it.

I don't really know what else to say about this. On the one hand, you could say I had it coming because I have been very incautious in my behavior -- I've been going to gym, going out for drinks, going into the office, etc. On the other hand, that's just living life. I'm healthy, youngish, vaxxed, boosted, and I already got Delta last summer. If people like me aren't supposed to do normal life things, then we should basically be in full shutdown mode again, and I don't think that that's the solution. Now, maybe I could do some things around the edges, like wear a mask more often, but I don't know if that would help. I mean, I usually do wear a mask to, like, pick up coffee or to ride the Metro or whatever, but it's not practical to wear a mask to martial arts class (it just falls off) or to eat at a restaurant. You either have to unmask or just not go.

The fact of the matter is that with where we are in the pandemic, the possibility you might get sick is just part of the calculus. And, frankly, if this is as bad as it gets, it's totally worth it. I'll gladly exchange a night or two of feeling a little bit crummy for nine months of "freedom." Of course, it's not over yet, though. I could feel a lot worse tomorrow than I do today, but I doubt it. My trend is toward feeling better. Friday night I would describe myself as actually sick (enough so that I took a Covid test). Saturday night I was just kinda out of it. And tonight I feel almost totally back to normal. In fact, I have to fight the urge to take another Covid test in hopes of getting a negative result. It's too soon and would probably just be a waste of a test -- maybe tomorrow night.

The bigger fear for me is long-term Covid. It's very scary, but what can I do about it now? You can't be scared into paralysis. There are no guarantees one way or the other with any of this. We all just do the best we can with the information we have. There are no solutions; there are only tradeoffs.

One thing I do wish, in retrospect, is that I didn't rush to get the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. Had I waited a few days, my number would have come up to get Moderna or Pfizer. But this is just hindsight, and it might not have even mattered. At this point, most people I know have contracted Covid, regardless of the vaccine they got. Plus, I got the Pfizer booster. The bottom line: This disease is just ridiculously resilient, and the only way to avoid it is to get super lucky or literally isolate yourself completely from outside company.

Well, being quarantined did give me a chance to watch a movie on our TV, which is something I rarely get to do (unless it's a kid's movie -- Paddington, not half bad). I rented Licorice Pizza, which was very good, but not quite as good as I was hoping it would be. I have high hopes for Paul Thomas Anderson movies. Other than Tarantino (the GOAT), he's probably the only filmmaker going whose films make me think I definitely gotta see that one when they come out.

Of the six PTA films I've seen so far, I'd put Licorice Pizza third. The complete ranking is thus:

6. Hard Eight: To be fair, I've only seen part of this movie, and it was a long time ago.

5. There Will Be Blood: If only the movie itself was as great as the performances of Paul Dano and Daniel Day-Lewis. Somehow the whole is less than the sum of its parts.

4. Magnolia: The weird-ass ending didn't work for me -- rest of the movie was fantastic though.

3. Licorice Pizza: I get the feeling I would have liked it more if I was 10-years older. It's of an era I'm a bit too young to fully appreciate.

2. Phantom Thread: The best review I heard of this film: "so beautiful, so boring." It worked for me though.

1. Boogie Nights: You've got the party, and then the hangover, and both are super compelling to watch.

Alright, I think that's all for this post. I gotta go eat dinner. I'm just waiting for my family to go to bed so I can use the kitchen in peace without infecting anybody. Then I got a big night of sports watching ahead. S said I can't watch Severance without her (we are only one episode in, but it's very intriguing already), so I'll have to settle for basketball -- and hockey, actually. I've been keeping up with NHL playoffs a bit. I forgot how fun hockey can be. I think I'm pulling for the New York Rangers for some reason -- original six, maybe -- but it would also be cool to see the Calgary Flames pull it off. I loved their 1989 team -- old man Lanny McDonald and his mustache, Doug Gilmour, Joe Nieuwendyk, Al MacInnis, a young Theo Fleurry, Joe Mullen, the terrifically named Hakan Loob, Mike Vernon between the pipes -- super fun team. And it's amazing how I can remember almost a full roster from over 30 years ago, and yet I can't tell you a single player on their current team that I just watched play two nights ago. Wait, yes I can -- they have a Tkachuk on their team, and I only remember him, because his dad Keith Tkachuk was actually in the league 30 years ago. I don't even know his first name. Ah, it's Matthew. Cool.

Until next time...

Entry 610: Life Hack: Stay Away From Unidentified Mexican Narcotics

We had an interesting night, a week ago, here at the G & G house. Our friend FB called us with a bit of alarm in his voice telling us his wife SB (also our friend) had to be admitted to the emergency room, and he wanted to go there to be with her, so he wanted to know if he could bring his twins (one boy, one girl, between our boys in age) over to our house for the night. Of course we said yes, so it was a little slumber party. The kids loved it. It's funny sometimes how self-absorbed children are. It's a quasi-emergency -- their mom or their friends' mom is in the hospital -- and all they care about is what Pokémon they should trade.

I added the qualifier "quasi" above because SB didn't appear to be in any immediate danger according to FB. She just started acting really strangely -- slurring her words, not making any sense, not being able to focus, etc. -- so they went to the doctor, and the doctor said to go to the ER. She has some chronic health issues, so my mind immediately went there, but FB seemed to think they were unrelated. S speculated that she was having an adverse affect to medication, and indeed that turned out to be the case, but not exactly for reasons one might think. What happened is, on a recent vacation to Mexico, she got a rash, and unbeknownst to FB, she bought some pills for it from a pharmacy. Either something got lost in translation, or they treat rashes very differently down there, because she tested positive for some sort of narcotic. She had unwittingly drugged herself. They didn't notice it earlier because she also got heat stroke in Mexico (rough trip!), so they chalked up any strange behavior to that.

Anyway, she's all good now. She's sane again and presumably got that rash checked out too. The kids stayed with us until, like, 5:00pm the next day, just because they didn't want to leave. It's better for us, actually. It's so much easier to parent when there are other kids around to occupy your kids' attention. The cleanup afterward isn't fun, but it's worth it to be mostly left alone the entire day.

In other news from this weekend, S and I went out for a Mother's Day brunch at a chichi restaurant -- and by chichi I mean it was in a nondescript brick building in an alley, they grill the food in a stone pit in the middle of the restaurant, and you're served by beautiful people of indeterminate gender and ethnicity.* It's a Middle Eastern place, and it's one of those deals where they have a set menu and just bring you dish after dish, and you're totally stuffed, and then they say, "Are you ready for your mains?"

*Actually, our server was just a normal-looking white guy, but that doesn't sound as cool.

You do actually get to pick your main, one to share for the table, and S let me pick because it was almost all red meat, so she wasn't going to eat it anyway. I rarely eat red meat myself these days (it's really bad for the environment), but, you know, it was a special occasion, so I figured what the hell? and ordered up some goat. It was good, but right after I ordered it, I saw the steak being prepared for another table and instantly regretted not ordering it instead. My thought process was when do you ever get goat? take the opportunity when you have it, but as I said, I hardly ever eat red meat of any variety, so that same logic could have been applied to steak. More saliently, I've eaten goat before, several times, and I like steak better. It was a missed opportunity, but once dessert came -- a divine mocha chocolate pudding -- it was a moot point. I feel like pudding is an underutilized dessert. A good pudding is on par with, maybe even better than, a good piece of cake or pie, but you don't see it on menus as much.

We at ate around 2:30pm, and since I'm still doing my intermittent fasting diet, it turned out to be my only meal of the day. It was more than enough. Overall, the diet is going pretty well. I've dropped a few pounds, and I've been keeping up with the weight training, so I think it's fat, not muscle weight. I haven't noticed any dip in energy levels, and I actually don't get insanely hungry throughout the day like I thought I would. I also thought I would miss the ritual of eating a before-bed snack, but I don't. On the contrary, it's nice to finish my second meal around 8:00pm and think to myself that's it belly; you're done for the day. For whatever reason, this regimen is pretty easy for me to stick to. So, I'll keep going with it, I suppose.

Anyway...

I do this daily trivia game called Apocalypse Sports Trivia, and I've come to realize that I have some pretty big gaps in my sports trivia knowledge. For some reason, whoever writes the questions loves asking about international soccer, and I know next to nothing on the subject. Here are my overall stats:

Notice there are just as many soccer questions as baseball questions. What the hell?! Is this not America?! Actually, I love soccer, and the team I root for, the Seattle Sounders, just became the first non-Mexican club to win the CONCACAF Champions League under its current format. But I started following soccer as an adult and pretty much only watch US teams in big games (if that), so I don't have that base of knowledge built up. Looking at this now, I'm flummoxed by how I have a higher percentage in hockey and country club sports than in basketball. The basketball questions must be harder, as I know way more about basketball than those other sports. 

The best stat, of course, is the one at the top: 21 / 21 in baseball. I came very close to missing my first one yesterday. Here's the question:

In June 2005, the 810 Zone restaurant was opened in the Kansas City metropolitan area, and held a contest to let fans name food items after local sports legends. The punny two-word name of one item happened to contain the names of two different characters from (very similar) promotions held in the middle of every home game in two different (non-KC) MLB stadiums. What was the name of the food item?

I had no idea at first, as I've never heard of this restaurant and have never visited the Kansas City area (save that time I had to rent a car there and drive it to my cousin's wedding). But I started thinking of KC sports legends and common baseball promotions, and I was going put something like Bret Saber-Hoagie, thinking maybe the question is referring to a Star Wars promotion. But why would a team have a Star Wars promotion at every home game? That didn't seem right. So, I thought of a promotion the Nationals do, a Presidents Race, and thought of the names of the characters in it -- George, Tom, Abe, Teddy, etc. -- and then I remembered that the Brewers have a similar promotion in which they race sausages, and it hit me: George Brat! That had to be it! Indeed it was, and I won my match.*

Until next time...

*By the way, if you click the link above, you'll get a video of a man telling a story that really makes me laugh. It's not because the story is funny -- it's not really -- but because it's a grown man (a baseball icon!) telling this story, in great detail, to some other, seemingly totally uninterested, grown men.

Entry 609: Oh No, No Roe

Warning: I'm going to discuss the likely reversal of Roe v. Wade. I'm going to do this from the perspective of somebody who is staunchly pro-choice, but also somebody who is a not-very-woke, cis, straight, white, middle-age man. I'm going to engage in some serious "solutionism." If you aren't interested in hearing this perspective, simply click the little X in the corner of your window, and I will magically go away.

If you're still around, here are my thoughts.

The first thing is to recognize that this is not the death knell for reproductive rights. Women will still have access to abortion in all the blue states and some purple states. And the red states in which it will be outright banned have, sadly, been very effective at limiting abortion access so that it's practically banned already. Even if the Supreme Court leaves Roe in place (highly unlikely), they've made it clear they are not going to be the bulwark against anti-abortion laws they've been in the past. In some ways, a straightforward ruling is better than a convoluted patchwork of decisions effectively reversing Roe without actually reversing it. At least now everybody knows what time it is.

The flip side of this is that if the court is so bold as to overturn something as longstanding and popular as Roe, what's next? Gay marriage, birth control? That's the part that freaks me out. What does this bode for the future? And it would be different if I thought this was a principled states rights decision, but I don't think that. I have zero faith that this court would be similar deferential to the "voters" if it was overturning a law conservatives held sacred. I fear that the Supreme Court is now effectively a wing of the Republican party.

What to do about all this? Well, there's court reform, but that's not going to happen anytime soon. There's also legislation; Congress could pass a federal law legalizing access to abortion. But that also is not likely to happen. Democrats will very likely lose one or both chambers in the fall midterms, and they don't have the numbers to break the filibuster to pass such a law before then. You can rant and rave about Joe Manchin all you want, but he probably doesn't care. He's from a state Trump carried by, like, 40-points. If he's not there, some super right-winger is. Progressives have no leverage over him whatsoever. (Sinema is another story; I don't know what her deal is.)

There's not going to be a quick fix. We need to start playing the long game. It took conservatives four decades to get here after all. If we aren't willing to put in the same sustained effort then we will lose even more ground. We need to vote in every election for candidates who prioritize abortion access. We don't need to "hold Democrats accountable" because they didn't deliver everything (anything?) we wanted. That's not how things work. As I said above, Dems don't have the numbers right now -- and not voting for them will make these numbers smaller. The options to replace them are much, much worse. It makes no sense to punish a candidate in a House race in Indiana because Senators from Arizona and West Virginia won't end the filibuster.

This ambivalent attitude toward voting for "establishment" Democrats -- or voting at all -- by some folks on the left is likely what got us into this mess in the first place. Trump got to appoint three Supreme Court justices. Very likely at least two of these would have been Clinton's had she won and then this entire thing is moot. You don't think there is a tiny sliver of pro-choice people in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania who refused to their hold their noses and vote for Hillary in 2016? Do they regret it now? 

So, for God's sake, vote! Let's try to keep the House, let's try to get enough Senators to change the filibuster rules, let's try to keep a Democratic president in the White House to appoint future justices. If we lose, we come back harder the next election; if we win, we come back harder the next election. And state and local elections become even more important now because abortion access might have to be won at the state level. We might have to go state-by-state the way we do with, say, marijuana or minimum wage laws. Again, it won't be easy or fast, but again, this is a hard, slow fight. But we don't have time to wait for your incremental change bullshit! Well, it's pretty much that or a further erosion of reproductive rights, so I don't know what to tell you. The revolution ain't happening, and, frankly, if it's anything like what's portrayed in this article,* it sounds quite terrible, anyway.

*This article is so awful I'm hoping to make time to do a separate entry just on it.

One of the biggest problems pro-choice folks like myself face is one we don't really like to admit: Abortion access isn't that popular in the US. It's definitely favored by over half the country, but it's probably more like 60-40 than 80-20, and it's heavily dependent on what exactly you mean by access. Also, I suspect that percentage drops significantly if you only consider people who have really strong feelings about it one way of the other. I think if we want to make the country more pro-choice, we need to start persuading more people our side is correct. This doesn't mean changing people's minds on the issue (usually impossible), it means getting to people before their minds are made up.

To that end, here are some of my suggestions.

Recognize that while some people are only "pro-life" for political reasons, other people really do have deep-seated moral objections to killing (in their view) a fetus. I think even a lot of pro-choice women feel some sense of this, and of the women I know who have gotten an abortion (and talked to me about it) most of them felt at least a little bit of sadness and guilt over their decision. It does no good to belittle people for feeling this way, and we should at least acknowledge that there is a big difference between an abortion and, say, removing a cyst. Even I -- one of the most unfeeling, rational people I know -- don't like the "it's just a bunch of cellular matter" framework, nor do I like assuming every anti-abortion activist is acting in bad faith or some sort of fringe nutjob.

To me, the key messages should be: Abortion is a very difficult moral decision that only a woman can make for herself; government should not intervene in an individual's personal choices pertaining to their own body; safe and legal access to abortion will prevent more suffering than will outlawing abortion and creating a black market.  

Also, don't frame the issue as the white-supremacist patriarchy oppressing women of color. For one thing, it's simply not true. It's been an annoying tic of the left over the past half-decade or so to frame every social ill as something white people are inflicting on BIPOCs, even if it is not at all apt to do so. In the case of abortion, there are plenty of Black people who echo the thoughts of Clarence Thomas that abortions by Black women are akin to "eugenics." I remember football commentator Tony Dungy cosigning a tweet by NFL player Benjamin Watson that basically said the same thing. (Both Dungy and Watson are Black.) And a lot of Latinos are anti-abortion because they follow the canons of the Catholic Church. When it comes to whom is most affected by abortion bans, it's poor women much more so than women of color. A wealthy Black woman is much better off in this regard than a destitute white woman.

As for the patriarchy, yes, that's part of it, but I sure see a lot of women in pictures of anti-abortion rallies too. You've probably heard the line that if men could get pregnant, the right to an abortion would have been constitutionally protected a long time ago. I think that's true, but it's also true that if women were as overwhelmingly pro-choice as pro-choice women often imply, you could say the same thing. One of my friend's mantra is No man should be able to tell me what I can do with my body. Right on. But what if it's Kristi Noem? Because if you live in South Dakota, that's probably going to happen.

For another thing, we need a broad pro-choice coalition and language like this turns off a lot of white male could-be-allies when they are at an impressionable age. Not me -- I honestly am not offended in the least by this type of rhetoric, but I know a lot of white dudes who are, even if they don't announce it publicly. And really, why shouldn't they be? They have feelings. No matter how much privilege you have, you're still subject to the same human frailties as everybody else. If you feel people are stereotyping you and blaming you for holding views you don't hold, or lumping you in with people with whom you don't agree (and may not even like), then, yeah, you might feel some kind of way about it, especially since doing this for any other combination of race and gender is considered a grievous transgression.

Also concerning language, just say "woman" when talking about abortion, don't say "birth-giver" or "uterus-haver" or "female-bodied person" or some other such gender-neutral neologism. Most people don't talk like that and don't understand why you are doing so. I get that you want to include trans men who can get pregnant, but just remember this analogy -- women : reproductive rights :: Black men : police reform. It's not exclusively for them, but we can just say it is as a shorthand.

Here's another uncomfortable truth: There is a strong contingent of pro-choice advocates who aren't really down with trans people. Poking around various threads a bit outside of the traditional left-leaning media sources, I've been surprised at how many women either straight-up identify as TERFs or espouse some TERFish ideology. This isn't my cup of tea, but presumably these people are very pro reproductive rights, and we probably should work with them on this issue, maybe under some sort of tacit DADT agreement. Broad coalition, remember.

Politics makes strange bedfellows. To quote Frederick Douglass, “I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong.” We need to bring back the one-issue coalition -- people uniting around a common goal even they if they disagree (or worse) with one another on other things. I mean, look at the type of people who are likely to be pro-choice -- neo-liberals, democratic socialists, "squad" members, BLM activists, hardcore libertarians, tech bros, centrist Republicans, LGBTQ activists, gender-critical feminists, "dirtbag" lefties, new-agey spiritual folks, skeptics/atheists, etc. There's a decent chance these groups don't have anything else in common but being pro-choice.

The last thing I'll say, in reference to the Defector article I linked to above, don't riot, don't be violent. It doesn't work, and it's not right. It will turn so many would-be allies against you, and it's a great way to inflict suffering on innocent people and put yourself in jail or a grave. You know what's worse than a woman not being able to get an abortion in Mississippi? Burning Portland to the ground because a woman can't get an abortion in Mississippi.

Until next time...

Entry 608: A DC Gala

We went to our elementary school's gala last night. It was pretty fun. It was a legit shirt-and-tie, ball-gown event at a pricey restaurant. We weren't expecting it to be so formal, so we were a bit underdressed -- not uncomfortably underdressed, but we definitely would've kicked it up a notch had we known. The whole thing was very last minute on our end. S was in Iceland this past week for work, and she didn't get back until Friday, so we weren't really communicating, and I'm a bad parent who doesn't keep up with all the emails and alerts we get from the kids' school, so I didn't even know what or when the gala was. But at the playground Friday afternoon all our parent friends were talking about it, so I asked S about it when she got home, and she said she actually already bought two tickets just to support the school but was ambivalent about attending. I was feeling some FOMO, however, so I texted S's sis, and she agreed to watch the kids for the night -- so it was all set.

Things didn't get off to the best start. S was jet lagged and kinda (read: very) grumpy by the time Saturday evening rolled around and not really in the partying mood. This has increasingly become the case when S travels. She used to have super recuperative powers, in which she could somehow seamlessly transition from time zone to time zone with little ill-effect. But now in her mid-40s, I've noticed she doesn't bounce back at quite the same pace. (Still way better than me though.) So, when she has to go somewhere for work, she'll say something to me like, "Don't worry, it's only Monday through Friday." And I'm thinking Yeah, plus all day Saturday when you're groggy and irritable.

Believe it or not, I never complain, though. I never tell her she can't go somewhere, and I never make her feel guilty about leaving. I dutifully take care of the kids on my own when she's gone. There are several reasons I don't object. For one thing, I know she still likes traveling, even if it's getting a bit more taxing on her; for another thing, she takes the lead on so many day-to-day household management things that it all evens out; and for yet another thing, she's very successful in her career, and we all reap the benefits of that, myself included, so if that means I have to solo-parent for five or six days every few months, so be it.

But it's not always easy. We got into a little snit right before we left for the gala because either I was unnecessarily rushing her (her view) or she was being snarky and snide when I was merely trying to figure out our timeline for the evening (my view). It was a bit of an icy drive to the gala, but I don't stay mad for long, and S isn't one to air our dirty laundry in public, so I figured once we got there she would at least pretend everything was cool with us, and then at some point in the night, it actually would be. Fake it till you make it, see.

And so it went and we had a pretty good time.

That is until the drive home when S's sister texted that our upstairs smelled like gas, so they opened up all the windows and went to the basement. This is obviously a very disconcerting message to get. I was hoping she was making much ado about nothing, but if anything she undersold the situation. It didn't just smell like gas, it fucking reeked of it. Like, you walk in and are instantly nauseated by it.

We once had a legit gas leak in our old house, and the only thing you can really do about it is call 9-1-1 and have the fire department come out to inspect everything. That seemed like a less than ideal plan at 11:00 pm, but it did seem better than, like, our house exploding, so I was about to do it, but then Lil' S1 told us he noticed earlier that one of the knobs for a burner on our stove was askew, and he fixed it. That clearly seemed like the cause to me, so I decided to not call 9-1-1 and instead to amp up the air-out effort, open more windows, get a big fan involved, put everybody to bed, and watch Better Call Saul. If the smell was still as strong when the show is over then we'd have to evacuate and call in the emergency response team. Thankfully, however, as suspected, it had dissipated almost entirely by the time Jimmy had manipulated Kim in a way that made her feel simultaneously disgusted, pleased, and a little turned-on.

Unfortunately, that wasn't the end of our headaches. Lil' S2 woke up today complaining about a hurt leg, and it became clear throughout the morning that this was a real injury, not a "little kid injury." It sounded like a strained muscle to me, but I took him to the doctor, just to be on the safe side, and it is indeed a strained muscle. The doctor wrapped it, and we can ice it and give him kiddie pain meds, if need be, but really the only thing we can do is wait for it to heal. This is hard for any little kid, but especially one like Lil' S1 whose entire modus operandi is bouncing off of walls (which probably explains how he got the strain in the first place).

Well, the good thing is he's got those amazing little kid healing powers going for him. If this were me and I strained my quad, I'd have to put a freeze on gym membership for six weeks. He'll probably be feeling better by six tonight. Let's hope.

Until next time...