Entry 692: Last Post Of 2023, Perhaps

There is a good chance this will be my last post of 2023. We are leaving for India next week and will not return until just before the new year. Maybe I will post something else before we leave--probably not, though. So, let me officially wish everybody in my double-digit readership a happy holidays right now: Happy Holidays!

I'm simultaneously eagerly anticipating and anxiously dreading our trip to India. It's one of those things where I want to have the experience of something without actually doing it. Like, if I could just implant the memory in my head of the trip, Total Recall style, I would probably do that. Actually, I would also have to genuinely believe I did it, and everybody else would have to believe that as well, for that to be satisfying for me. So, I'd need some sort of Total Recall/Matrix combo technology to really do the job right. If I had that, then I'd probably pick that option instead of actually going.

There are three main things I'm apprehensive about. In order from most apprehensive to least: 1) getting sick; 2) long travel times; 3) being abroad for Christmas. With respect to 1), the only other time I've been to India was for my wedding in 2011, and I got terribly sick and was completely out of commission for two days. (Thankfully, I recovered in time for all the important stuff.) I'm super nervous about that happening again. I'll be careful, of course, but I was careful last time and still caught something awful. Hopefully, my immune system remembers that battle and will preemptively fight off any similar bugs this time. That's what the optimist in me is trying to hang his hat on. Even if I don't get sick, however, I still have to worry about the kids. They have never been to India even once, after all. We will definitely be bringing lots of tummy medicines with us. But if do we get sick, well, I guess it won't be the first time we spent Christmas in the bathroom.

On 2), we have done what we can to make the travel smoother. We have all been approved for Global Entry, so we can use the shorter lines at security and customs, but we will still have to wait in some lines, and more to the point, we will still have to sit on planes for 15 hours. There's no way to get around that. We have a layover in Frankfurt (that's Germany, not Kentucky) for a few hours, and S says she knows that airport really well, and there is a by-the-hour hotel in it, so maybe we will do that--we will see. I'm just going to have an iPad full of movies and a Kindle full of books (or maybe just one sufficient long book) and make the most of it. 

To 3), I love Christmas time, and for me it's a season of hominess, not adventure. I like hunkering in, being cozy, watching football, eating cookies and drinking eggnog. In India, I don't know if there will be eggnog, or any nog, period. The bottom line: There's no place like home for the holidays, and India is almost diametrically opposite home for me. Not to mention, we already took a big vacation to Hawaii this year, so I used up a bunch of my leave and don't have enough to cover the extent of our stay in India. So, I'll have to bring my work computer with me and work remotely a few days, which is super annoying.

With all that said, I totally get why S wants to go and why she was so adamant about doing it this year. I'm completely on board, for as much as I'm complaining about it. (That's just how I roll, and S never reads this blog, anyway, thankfully.) We actually were planning on going three years ago, but as you might recall there was an outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2, which made traveling to foreign countries ill-advised or illegal. Since then, we've put off this trip several times to do other things (spend a summer in UP, go on a cruise, go to Iceland, etc.), and S's point is that each time we put it off, it gets worse, because her aunties and uncles in India get a little bit older, and not to be morbid, but there is no guarantee they will all still be around if we put it off again.

The same goes for her parents. They're in decent health, all things considered, but her dad is 81. That's not nothing. S really wanted them to come with us, and they are (they're there already, actually), but she's thinking this will be their last trip out there. Her mom already has to use a wheelchair in the airport because her knees are so bad, and she struggles to walk long, or even moderate, distances. We really do need to do this before it's too late.

So, we will be off to the other side of the globe next Thursday. It might not be the cozy Christmas I desire, but at least when people ask me what we did for the holidays, I'll be able to say we went to India, with an air condescension in my voice, like I'm some sort of jet-set elitist. That will be nice, I guess.

Until next time...    

Entry 691: A Parent's Worse Nightmare

Scary news this week here in the neighborhood. A girl who goes to school with Lil' S1 -- a friend of a friend of his -- got hit by a car while walking to the bus stop in the morning. She's alive and will likely make a full recovery, but it messed her up pretty good from what I understand. Apparently, her jaw is broken and currently wired shut. She broke both arms and both legs and got scratched and bruised to hell. She's bedridden for the time being and is not expected to be able to walk for at least six weeks. The bright-side is that kids are super resilient,* and it usually is true that what doesn't kill them only makes them stronger. For adults, this is a silly old saw (my shoulder arthritis is most definitely not making me stronger), but for children it's quite apt. 

*I also got hit by car when I was a child. It wasn't nearly as bad as the one this poor girl was involved in, but I did badly sprain my leg and was supposed to wear a splint and walk with crutches for about a month. After a few weeks, however, the splint came off, and I was using my crutches to help me run up the wall and do quasi-backflips. One weird thing, though, is that although I recovered in-full fairly quickly, to this day I can still "feel" the sprain in my heel somehow. It's like a ghost pain that doesn't hurt. I don't know how else to describe it.

When something like this happens, I think every parent immediate thinks of their own children. This one particularly hits home for me because I know exactly how it could happened, and I worry about it every time Lil' S1 walks through the neighborhood. There's one street that is super busy--it's a major DC artery--and it keeps me up at night, because the unsettling truth is that there is very little you can do to keep your kids safe from cars. Of course, you can drill into them all the safety rules--look both ways, use a crosswalk, etc., and we do--but they're not going to follow every rule every time, because they're, you know, kids. And even if they do, it won't matter much if they happened to encounter the wrong driver at the wrong place and time. It's quite frightening to think that luck--or perhaps lack of bad luck--is the main thing keeping your children safe from cars, but it's kinda true.  

In this case, it's unclear whether or not the girl was jaywalking. Lil' S1 says she was, but his source is a sixth-grader who may or may not have even been there when it happened. It does seem that she didn't cross at a stoplight, which is now safety rule number one for my kids on that street: Only cross at a stoplight, no matter what!

There are other crosswalks on that street that are not at a stoplight, but using them is no safer than jaywalking. In fact, it might be less safe. Those types of crosswalks--the ones with no stoplight that stretch across arterials with multiple lanes in each direction--should not even be allowed, in my opinion. They are supposed to be for the benefit of the pedestrian, but in some cases they make it worse for them. When I'm driving, I actually don't stop to let people cross at such crosswalks when I see them waiting on the sidewalk (if they are already in the crosswalk then of course I stop). I used to, but what often happens is the cars behind me, not seeing the pedestrian (perhaps because my car is blocking their view) and not knowing why I'm stopping, go around me in the other lane -- or cars that are already in the other lane just don't stop, for whatever reason. This creates a super perilous situation for the walker, because I'm blocking their view and cars are zipping around right into their path.

Plus, when a pedestrian sees you stop, they often feel socially compelled to cross and might put themselves at risk out of a misguided sense of politeness. It's just a bad scene all-around. I wish all cars would always stop for street-crossers, but they don't, and it makes things worse to pretend that they do. So, now, if I see somebody waiting to cross, I'm like, Sorry, pedestrian, you can wait until it's totally clear or walk the extra few blocks to the stoplight. It's for your own good.

In other news, it was family Covid booster day for us today. It kinda sucked, but now it's done. S had a difficult time finding us appointments for some reason. The only thing available within the search radius was at a CVS in a kinda shady part of the city, and a CVS in a kinda shady part of the city is never a fun place to spend an afternoon. They are always super crowded and understaffed and anything costing more than $10 is locked away in a plastic case like you're in a prison commissary.

Our appointment was at 4:00 pm, and the lady giving the shots was ready around 4:10, which isn't terrible, but there was one kid ahead of us, about nine or ten years old, and he refused to get his shot. It was so aggravating. I was experiencing kid-shot PTSD watching it. I was about 30 seconds away from asking if we could go ahead of him (I was going to frame it as if I was trying to be helpful, "Maybe it would be good if he saw all of us get our shots first"), but then he looked at me, and I gave him a smile and big thumbs up, and he got his jab. I'm not saying I was the reason why, but I'm not not saying that either.

We all got our shots and could have been on our way fairly quickly (somehow Lil' S1 is okay with shots now, which is weird and good; he didn't freak out about his flu shot either), but of course the kids wanted to buy something, and of course S said they could, and of course there was a long line and no self checkout and an incredibly slow guy working the cash register. We probably were actually only there about 45 minutes, but it seemed like an eternity. I was like Dirk Diggler in the middle of this scene. Sir, we gotta split, man. We gotta go.

So far, no ill effects from the booster. Everybody else has a sore arm, but I don't even have that. Although, I got the jab in my right arm, the one with the arthritic shoulder, and it could be the case that that arm is so messed up already that I can't discern pain from the shot and normal everyday existence. That's probably not a good thing in general, but in this case it works out in my favor.

Until next time...

       

 

Entry 690: Thanksgiving Weekend 2023

It was a pretty good Thanksgiving this year. S's parents came into town on Thanksgiving Day, and they're staying with us through the end of the month. We used to go visit them every Thanksgiving when they lived in South Carolina, but ever since they moved to Florida, we usually only go when the kids have at least a week off from school -- midwinter break, spring break, and the like. S's mom usually does the cooking when she's here (or anywhere else, for that matter), but since they flew in on the actual holiday itself, we decided to go the carryout route. We got a meal from a DC restaurant called Unconventional Diner. I thought the food was excellent, but I might have been the only one. The kids ate a little bit of turkey and mashed potatoes (and bread rolls and pie, of course), but wouldn't touch any of the other sides; S is always on some sort of weird diet, so she didn't eat a bunch of the dishes; and S's parents are vegetarian and only really like Indian food, so they had only very small portions of a few things. S's mom cracks me up--she dumped a bunch of crushed pepper flakes on her Brussels sprouts,* but still didn't eat them because she said they were undercooked. They weren't--they were a delightful, firm, but yielding consistency--but she likes her vegetables cooked almost to a paste so that you can easily eat them with dosas or chipatis.

*It reminded me of the time we went to IHOP, and she order a three-ingredient omelet and picked jalapeños for all three. 

I've been trying to be more chill this year with the wasted food. It drives me crazy to throw out food, but it's almost impossible to avoid in situations like this. We have a bunch of leftovers, and as I just laid out, I'm really the only one who eats it, and I can't eat it all. As much as I love turkey and stuffing, I don't want it every meal for four straight days. Plus, I want to eat S's mom's food too. I love her cooking. So, here's the plan: I froze a giant tray of turkey and a container of this really good soup that came with the meal. Then I'll eat what I can throughout this weekend, and Sunday night I'll compost whatever is left and try not to be annoyed by it.

I've already accepted the fact that throwing away desserts is totally fine, since they aren't good for you anyway (except for your taste buds)--alcohol, as well. In fact, Thanksgiving Day, I poured myself a whiskey for my yearly whiskey and soda, but we didn't have any soda, so I figured I'd just drink whiskey on ice, but it was so harsh (I've never been big on hard liquor), I tossed it down the drain after one sip. Then S and I had some wine with dinner, but we each wanted only one glass, so I dumped out about half the bottle. In my younger days, I would have finished it, but now it's like, why give myself a hangover? It's better off to pour it down the sink than down my gullet. I also could save it, but it would sit in our fridge and turn to vinegar before we'd have the occasion to finish it. Plus, new bottles of wine are never in short supply around here. They always just show up in our cabinet. I think the same wine bottles just get passed around and around in our friend circle. Each time somebody has a get-together, everybody else takes a bottle of wine they got from a previous get-together at their house and brings it to the house of the people having a get-together this time.

In other holiday weekend news, we went to see Trolls Band Together yesterday. It's fine. It's tolerable because it has a bunch of singing of songs from boy bands back in the day, so it's got the nostalgia thing going for it. We went to a matinee showing, and going to a matinee showing at a mainstream movie theater is kinda depressing, in the same way shopping at a big-box store in the middle of a weekday is kinda depressing. For one thing, there's no box office, anymore. They are all boarded-up, and you buy tickets from the little machine (or online, as we did, and presumably most everybody else). At the theater we go to, the box office is downstairs and the lobby and theaters are upstairs, so there was nobody even there when we walked in. It felt like going into an abandon building. Then the escalator was broken, and the place just looked run-down in general. There is popcorn all over the lobby carpet. The little arcade is full of old, shabby games. A bunch of urinals are out-of-order in the bathroom. There are only two people working the concession stand, and they're both completely uninterested young adults, surely making minimum wage. Then, when you walk back to the theater area, you see an entire other concession stand, totally and permanently shut down, and that's the part that really gets me. Once upon time, this theater was so lively that it made sense to have a second concession stand, and now it's just empty space. It's like seeing pictures of those abandon Olympics venues.

In general, the decline of the movie theater is one of the sadder aspects of modern life for me. It was surely happening before the pandemic (as a kid there were at least five theaters within a ten minute drive of my house, when I went back for a visit about ten years ago, I realized there were none), but the shutdowns definitely exacerbated it. I like it better the old way, but maybe that's just me being an old man about it. I mean, the flip-side is that we live in an absolute golden age of streaming,* and that's pretty cool in its own right. Also, if you go to the theater on a weekend night for a popular movie, it is still quite popping.  

*In fact, with streaming I have the opposite problem, in that there is too much of it. I can't sort through it all, and if something isn't good right away, I totally get FOWAISWABOISOT: Fear of watching an inferior show when a better one is surely out there. I'm not saying the writers' and actors' strikes were good, but the fact they slowed things down a lot has really helped my alleviate my FOWAISWABOISOT.

Alright that's all for now. I gotta get up and stretch. I can feel my back and legs stiffening up on me. My back has always been temperamental, but of late my upper calves have started randomly getting really tight on me too. It's always something. I can't complain too much though. I'm in reasonably good health at the moment. I just busted out five miles on the treadmill, and then did 50 pushups, 50 sit-ups, and 50 squats, and got to and from the gym in my sister-in-law's apartment building before my hour of parking expired -- not too shabby for somebody old enough to reminisce about a time when moviegoers purchased tickets from actual human beings.

 Until next time...

Entry 689: Community

I've got about an hour to crank something out, so let's do this. S took the boys to this Hindu mission thing they've started doing Sunday mornings. She's making a concerted effort to get them into more Indian activities, which is fine by me -- as long as I don't have to participate. Well, that's not exactly how it is. I don't mind doing a lot of the cultural things, in fact I enjoy them, but the Sunday mission is expressly Hindu, and I'm not really down with the whole religion thing.* I would go if S really wanted me to -- like if it was going to cause a rift in our marriage -- but she seems more to just prefer I go, not require me to go. I feel I can say no and not spend past my limit of emotional capital.

*I'm also not very spiritual. There are a few other non-Indian dads I know who go to the mission, and they tell me it's more spiritual than religious. S tells me this too. Personally, I have trouble drawing a distinction between the two. I've tried to get into things like this -- mindfulness and meditation and whatnot, and they just don't take for me. 

And I really don't want to go. We only get so much free time in our lives to do the things we enjoy. Spending three to four hours every weekend to listen to fairy tales and pretend like they have some sort of deep meaning, just doesn't seem like an efficient use of my dwindling time on this mortal coil. I remember once, on an episode of Six Feet Under,* somebody was complaining that the mom's boyfriend, played by the actor James Cromwell (Ewan from Succession), didn't have to go to church, and he replied something to the effect of, "Yeah, that's the best part about being an atheist." I so identified with this line. (Although, I prefer the term "nonbeliever" to "atheist," but I don't get too bogged down in semantics.)  

*Remember that show? Underrated gem from the twenty-aughts.

That said, it might surprise you to know that I'm actually pretty pro-Church/Temple because I'm very pro-community. Increasingly society is moving toward a place where nobody ever has to leave their house. Most people can work from home, shop from home, watch new movies from home, even date from home. There are fewer and fewer reasons to physically interact with other people. There are also more and more people struggling with mental health issues, and I would guess those two things are not independent of one another. So, I'm in favor of almost anything that promotes adult socialization. I really like the community building aspect of religion -- people physically coming together for a common cause. That really is a beautiful, increasingly rare thing in today's society. That's the part of religion I like. The parts I don't like are the dogma, the piety, the hierarchy, the bullshit. Basically I like religion, without any of the religion.

The challenge for us nonbelievers, then, is to find other ways to build community that don't involve religion. For most my life, this was automatic for me. I was in school until I was, like, 33, and I've always had a strong friend group outside of school. In my twenties and early thirties, there was always a crew around -- always somebody to watch a game with, always somebody to meet for brunch, always somebody to get a beer with. I could walk into a certain coffee shop or a certain bar and be instantly surround by people I know and like. I so took that for granted. And that stage ends. You have kids, everybody else has kids too, and suddenly you don't have time for all that other stuff and neither do they. Everything changes. The baristas and bartenders you knew get different jobs; your favorite establishments close; and, most of all, people move. That's the real killer. I'm still friends with almost all the people I was friends with twenty years ago. Unfortunately, I live in DC and they live in Seattle and LA and San Francisco and Hartford and New York and Blacksburg and Columbus and so on.

I definitely wish I had more close friends -- true homies -- who lived near me, but I think I'm doing okay building community. I just have to work at it a bit more than I used to. There are a few things I do to this end. The main thing is that I almost never turn down an invitation to a social event unless I have a scheduling conflict. A few weeks ago, for example, I went to my friends' Halloween party, even though S couldn't go, and I didn't have a good costume, and they live in a part of the city where street parking is nearly impossible to find. It would have been so easy to just bail and stay in for the night, but I forced myself to go. I threw on a lucha libre mask, drove to their neighborhood, paid $45 to park in a garage,* and had a great time.

*I justified it by telling myself it was cheaper than taking a Lyft/Uber there and back. This is true, but it was much, much more expensive than taking the Metro, which I also could have done. I justified that by telling myself that walking to and riding the Metro home late at night sucks, which is also true. In retrospect, what I should've done is taken the Metro there and ride-shared back. Maybe next year. 

Other examples of things I try to do as much as possible: dad drinks, game nights, pub trivia, dinners with friends. I also will do the special Hindu events with the family if S wants to do them. We recently went to two Diwali events. One was at the mission and involved listening to traditional music and dancing in a circle. It was fine. Then we did Diwali dinner at some friends' house. That was actually really fun -- delicious Indian food and sparklers. (Diwali is the festival of lights.) In fact, it got a bit legit dangerous -- so many kids of different sizes holding burning sticks. It was outside on their lawn, and you could see big embers falling off the sparklers onto the foliage. Thankfully, it had recently rained, so everything was pretty damp. Nothing caught on fire and nobody lost an eye.

The last thing I will mention about community building is that being a member of the same gym for the past six or seven years has really helped. The mental health benefits are twofold: 1) You feel part of group, 2) You're motivated to exercise more. Recently, I thought about quitting my gym and finding a place that's more convenient. It's near my work, which made more sense when I was going into the office consistently three days a week. But since Covid, I've only been going in two days a week, at most, and so it makes a lot less sense. But I don't want to lose that sense of community -- I know everybody there, and they know me, and it's a really positive, rewarding environment. There's no guarantee I could replicate that somewhere else, and it would probably take a long time even if I could. So, I decided to just keep going with it. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Alright gotta run -- by which I mean I'm literally going to go running. It's been beautiful here lately. If climate change is going to happen, might always take advantage of it.

 Until next time...        

Entry 688: Polls, Buses, and Seals

Interesting past few weeks for stateside politics. A very disconcerting poll was dropped recently showing Biden trailing Trump significantly in five of the six biggest battleground states, and yet on Tuesday Dems won pretty resounding electoral victories in purple (Virginia), and even red (Kentucky), states. What to make of it all, I'm not exactly sure, but Occam's Razor suggests that people don't like Joe Biden, and they do like reproductive rights. It also shows the limitations of the Republican cultural-grievances-only strategy. Living in DC, I was inundated with ads for the Virginia candidates, and every Democratic ad was seemingly scripted by Planned Parenthood, and every Republican ad was seemingly scripted by Tucker Carlson. Sanity prevailed this time. So, I'd rather have this result than the opposite (Biden ahead in polls and Republicans winning elections), and it's a fool's errand to read too much into one poll a year away from an election when so much will change -- keep in mind, at this time four years ago, Covid wasn't even a thing yet -- but still, it doesn't make me feel good.

And if you want to feel even worse, consider that this poll was conducted before the October 7 massacre in Israel. This issue is dividing liberals, and it has the potential to further erode support for Biden. It will be very difficult for a Democrat to win a national election without broad support from both American Jews and American Muslims. But is there anything Biden -- or anybody, for that matter -- can do to satisfy both constituencies right now? It doesn't seem like it to me. As I wrote in my last entry, Israel-Palestine is a true moral conundrum, in which there are no good solutions. Perhaps, in a year, with emotions lower than they are today, a common detestation of Trump will carry the day for Dems, as it's did in 2020 and has done in many elections since then, but... I don't know. Nobody does.

Anyway, on to other topics.

S and I have really been racking up the photo-enforced traffic violation fines. We've payed $800 in tickets over the past six months. Those things are such a scheme. They have nothing to do with traffic safety. They're in effect a tax on driving because they are so tacky-tack, and placed in such strategic locations, everybody will get one at some point. I mean, S got two in a row for going 42 in a 30 zone at, like 6:00 am, on her way to work when nobody else is around. Then I got one for failure to stop behind the line when turning right on red. I did stop, mind you, but my front tires were a bit over the line, so they sent me a ticket. I actually tried to fight that one, but it didn't work. It's such bullshit, and I've heard rumors that most people don't pay them and nothing happens, but I'm too scared to test it. So, whenever I pay one, not only am I annoyed because I'm losing money, I'm also annoyed because I feel like a chump.

I should say, to be fair, $500 of that $800 was levied not by DC, but by Montgomery Country, MD. I got two $250 tickets, within a week of one another, for disobeying a school bus' stop sign. That sounds worse than it was. I'm not some maniac driver who endangers children. What happened is, there's an apartment complex along my morning commute on the opposite of the street from the direction I travel. It's a four-lane, double-yellow-line street, and crossing it would be completely illegal (and very unsafe) for anybody, especially children. Occasionally, there will be a school bus at the complex picking up kids. Despite the fact that nobody can cross the street, the driver puts out the stop sign, which stops all lanes of traffic in both directions. Fine, he probably has to do that. But then after all the kids are on the bus, he just sits there for some reason, backing up traffic as far as the eye can see. Every time he does this. Usually, I'm not in the front the of line, so I just have to sit there and wait. But as luck would have it (bad luck, as it turns out), twice within a week I was in the front of line, and so after waiting for, I don't know, two or three minutes I just went. Apparently buses today are equipped with cameras, and ten days later I received a citation in the mail for $250. This was doubly disturbing because I surmised another one was arriving shortly. Indeed it was.

S usually gets the mail, so she saw the first citation, which I didn't mind. But I was a bit embarrassed about immediately getting a second one, and it came while she was out of town, so I didn't tell her about it. Then I paid it with the one credit card I have that's not in a joint account, so she doesn't ever look at the statement. She will notice probably when I use money from our shared checking account to pay off the card balance, but I use that card for subscriptions, and a lot subscriptions automatically renew this time of the year, so she probably won't think much of it. And if she does, and she asks me about it, I'll just fess up. This isn't like a deep dark secret. It's just something, all things equal, I would prefer not to tell her. Such omissions are a key part of a successful marriage, if you ask me.

Final topic: seals. No, not the sea animal, the adhesive material used to preserve foodstuffs. I hate most seals. They are way more trouble than they should be. They are like smoke detectors, in that every time I use one, I'm astounded that we haven't figured them out yet as a society. I don't know if it's companies being cheap or if material science has not advance enough to get seals completely right (probably the former), but so many of them are terrible. The glue on them is very often too strong, which causes one of two problems: The seal won't come off at all; the seal shreds immediately everywhere except along the rim of the container. 

An example is the Wegman's snack-size hummus containers. The seal has a little plastic tab sticking out on it, and about a quarter of the time, you cannot grip the tab firmly enough to pull the seal off at all, and another quarter of the time, you tear only the tab off, leaving a perfectly intact seal with nothing to grab.  

The Orgrain protein powder container is even worse. If you look at the picture closely below, you will notice paper remnants around the lip. This is because when you tear off the seal, only the top half of it comes off, leaving a thin paper covering totally in place. This happens 100% of the time. I have to get a knife and run it around the lip of the container to cut out the paper.

The absolutely worst seal, however, goes to Costco peanut butter. It's a guaranteed mess trying to get that thing off. You have to pull it off section-by-section and then get a putty knife and scrape off the debris on the rim. This is peanut butter, mind you, the organic kind, so it has massive amounts of oil in it, and as you're spending half your morning trying to jimmy the seal off, that oil is sloshing over the sides and getting all over the jar and the counter and on your fingers -- like I said, guaranteed mess. Well, I guess it forces me to conserve. When the peanut butter gets low, I scrape out every last iota. I'm not trying to be less wasteful; I just don't want to open a new jar.

Until next time...

Entry 687: More Empathy, Not Less

We will see where this entry goes. S is gone again for work -- she left yesterday -- so I have the kids by myself for the week. Sometimes this means I have less free-time because I have more dad things to do; sometimes it means I have more free-time because I have less husband things to do. Today very much falls into the former camp -- not a ton of time, but I'll write what I can.

As I've mentioned on this blog before, I've been thinking a lot about the Israel-Palestine conflict the past few weeks. I've now read thousands of words on the subject and listened to dozens of hours of podcasts. I consider myself an expert -- not really, but I can recommend some expert material. Ravi Gupta at the Lost Debate did two excellent episodes on the history of the conflict. His stated goal is to present the material in a way in which somebody listening to it would not know his personal opinions on the matter, and I think he did a very good job of that. Also, Coleman Hughes has two episodes on his podcast feed, one with a pro-Israel commentator, one with a pro-Palestine commentator . I found both of them very compelling and persuasive, which speaks to why this is such a difficult problem.

In fact, my personal view on the matter is that not only is it a difficult problem, it's an impossible one under current conditions. It's a catch-22 where one side says violence against Israel is inevitable until Palestine is completely free and autonomous, and the other side says Palestine will not be completely free and autonomous until the violence again Israel ends. So entrenched is the acrimony and distrust by each side toward the other that I don't envision anybody's position changing any time soon, and so I don't see a peaceful resolution coming anytime soon. Very sadly, I think the status quo of hatred and bloodshed will continue indefinitely.

As to who I think is "right" and "wrong," I don't think anybody is really right and only Hamas is really wrong. I understand and support the White House line on Israel having the right to defend itself, and I fully stand with Jews across the world who just want to exist in peace and are constantly subjected to threats, harassment, and violence. I cannot imagine what it would be like to live in a country in which your neighbor is constantly bombarding you indiscriminately with rocket fire and terrorist invasions, and the largest country in the region has repeatedly pledged to destroy you. 

With that said, it's undeniable that Israel's government -- particularly in the past few decades under Benjamin Netanyahu -- has done some fucked up things itself, completely contrary to the promotion of peace. The ongoing construction of settlements in the West Bank is probably the most egregious (but not the only) example. And the thing about this is that it also directly impacts Israel's ability to defend its contiguous borders. It takes resources to fortify and supply these island communities, and we saw what happens when Israel spreads its defenses too thin. My opinion: Bibi needs to go, and given that his whole thing is hawkishness in the name of self-defense, and he just oversaw perhaps the worst breach of Israeli's borders in its history, I don't see how anybody could disagree.

As for what's been going on stateside, I've been pretty dismayed by the public response to everything. It's one thing to protest the treatment of Palestinians by Israel's government; it's quite another to cheerlead for Hamas and claim Israel is fully responsible for a horrific massacre of its innocent citizens, as we've seen people do at rallies in lefty spaces like college campuses. It's also pretty fucked up that people are ripping down signs honoring those who were killed or captured in the October 7 invasion. Maybe it's a political statement (but so what?), but maybe it's a form of communal grief. I mean, these were just normal everyday citizens. I don't understand the mindset of somebody who would feel compelled to desecrate posters in support of innocent victims, regardless of what country they happened to be born in.

Although, I also don't really love the effort to videotape the people tearing the signs down to shame them on social media or attempt to get them fired. We need more, not less, empathy, all around. I feel the same way about the doxxing of the college students. People do stupid shit in college, and a lot of them are still trying on different identities. I don't like branding 19-year-olds as antisemitic over a statement criticizing Israel (not Jewish people in general), even if it is poorly timed, incredibly insensitive, and, in my view, just plain wrong. It's possible a lot of those students don't even really understand the issues and didn't know their leadership was releasing such a statement.

I actually once unwittingly participated (perhaps) in a Free Palestine rally as a grad student. I was a big Ralph Nader guy, and I briefly attended local Green Party meetings near my university. There was a demonstration in Seattle that I thought was a "peace march," so I tagged along to it with some other members in the group. (It didn't hurt that one of them was a fellow grad student I was attracted to and would briefly date.) It was really fun and exciting to march, but halfway through it, everybody around me started chanting "Israel out of Palestine!" I was so naive at the time, I literally didn't know what they were talking about, and I also didn't know if I had somehow ended up in a breakaway group of the protest, or if this was what the entire thing was about and I just didn't realize it. I'm still not sure to this day.

After going with crowd for a bit, I started to feel uncomfortable and dumb not knowing what I was marching for, so I bailed and went to see some friends who lived in the area. This was before cellphone cameras were really a thing, so there is no footage of me at the march or anything like that. Also, it seemed to be a pretty respectful protest. But what if it wasn't, and what if I was filmed in the middle of it, with everybody around me chanting "from the river to the sea" or "glory to our martyrs," pumping my fists with no idea what I was even doing? I certainly would not have wanted that to define me.

In general, whenever I feel the urge to call somebody out or join in a public pile-on, I think about things like this from my own life, and the urge typically subsides. More empathy, not less.

Until next time...

Entry 686: Farkle, '90s Music, and Chips

Man, it was a dire news week -- war, more war, a mass shooting, and the election of a nutty right-wing Speaker of the House. See, that's the problem with current events right now, the bad isn't just bad, it's bad with no end in sight. The war between Israel and Palestinian extremists has been going on, in some form, almost nonstop for the last 75 years, and nobody has a workable solution. The indiscriminate killings in Maine illustrate, yet again, the devil's bargain we've made with guns in this country, and it's not going to get better anytime soon given our current political climate and Supreme Court makeup. I mean, just look at whom the Republicans finally settled on for speaker, a hard-core religious right-winger -- and this is their compromise guy. The dude who lost the vote before him was worse. Oh, and if all that stuff I just mentioned somehow gets resolved, there's always climate change to keep you up at night.

It's enough to drive you insane, if you let it, but you can't let it. You need to take solace in the good things in your life and find joy where you can. To that end, I shall shift gears and write about the game night we had at our house last night. It was super fun. Lil' S1 has a little crew of friends he's known forever -- they've been dubbed the D&D group, even though they rarely actually play D&D -- and we know, and get along with, all the parents of the kids, so every now and then everybody will meet at somebody's house, and the adults will play board games and kids will run off and do whatever it is kids do these days. We had one of these events at our house last night.

Game nights can go one of two ways, depending on the makeup of the participants and the games you're playing. They can either be game-first, where you play something requiring attention, like Scrabble or Catan, and then the other aspects of the night (music, gossip, food) are kinda in the background, or they can be game-second, where you play something requiring little attention, like Farkle or Sevens, and then the other aspects of the night are in the forefront. Last night's was very much the latter. It basically just turned into a '90s music nostalgia-fest.

Fran Lebowitz once said that she could only really understand people from her generation. There is something about living through the same cultural events at the same age as somebody else that can instantly connect you to them. (This fits in with a definition of intimacy I once heard: shared experience.) Music is a huge part of this. If you get people together who are in their mid-40s today and play certain songs for them, they are very likely to vibe to them in a positive way, even if they didn't even (and still don't) particularly care for those songs. There are the mega-hits, of course, "Motown Philly" by Boyz II Men, "Jeremy" by Pearl Jam, "Smells Like Teen Spirit" by Nirvana, "Wannabe" by the Spice Girls. But there are also the lesser hits and one-hit wonders that speak to people even more so: "Flagpole Sitta" by Harvey Danger, "You Get What You Give" by the New Radicals, "Add It Up" by the Violent Femmes, "Been Caught Stealing" by Jane's Addiction, "Linger" by the Cranberries. And then if you can find the niche songs that somebody listened to, that's when you really hit the nostalgia sweet spot. I put on some Ned's Atomic Dustbin last night, and one of moms there was like, "Omigosh! 'Kill Your Television'! This is so my jam!"

Another woman there said she was really into '90s gangsta rap, so I played a bunch of Dre and Snoop and some Warren G., and then we did that thing white liberals do, where you rap along with the song but get quiet every time there's a racial or gay slur. It's a skill I've really honed over the years. You should hear me do "Forgot About Dre." I can nail both Dre's and Eminem's parts without uttering a single epithet. It's kinda funny that this particular woman is into gangsta rap because she's a completely unassuming, kinda granola in appearance, middle-age mom -- the type who has a pride flag in her yard and a nonbinary child. But it just goes to show you the power of culture. If you were a 14-year-old in 1991, you probably smile every time "Nuthin' but a 'G' Thang" of "Fuck Wit Dre Day" comes on, even though they are largely about slapping bitches and imploring your foes to perform fellatio on you.

Anyway, I'm going to end this post with something that has nothing to do directly with '90s music: chips. It is apropos in that I ate some Ruffles last night for the first time in I don't even know how long. They were pretty damn good. Chips, like soda, are something I've largely cut out of my diet (with one exception, as noted below), but I still appreciate a good chip from time to time. Here's my top-10 list.

10. Doritos: Nothing was better as a child than Doritos. Cool Ranch was my favorite flavor, but I also liked regular Nacho Cheese and the now discontinued Jumpin' Jack. I definitely do not feel that way about them now, but the other day, the kids got some, and I had a few, and they weren't bad.

9. Fritos: I don't know that I will ever sit down and eat a serving of just Fritos ever again, but they're pretty good with other things. Throw some Fritos on chili, and that chili instantly gets 25% better. Also, Fritos are really good with bean dip.

8. Ruffles: Classic, delicious. The flavored ones are decent, and they are really good with French Onion dip, but I like them even as standalone.

7. Miss Vickie's Sea Salt & Vinegar: Salt and vinegar chips are an acquired taste, and I've acquired it. If you eat more than like five chips, though, your lips start to pickle.  

6. Skinny Pop Popcorn: Is popcorn a chip? Technically, perhaps not, but it certainly is in spirit. It's sold in the chip aisle, and if you bought a sandwich that came with a bag of chips, you wouldn't think it was weird if popcorn was one of the options. I like Skinny Pop because it's not too greasy.

5. Baked Barbecue: Same thing as above -- sometimes I'll go with baked chips because they aren't so greasy. Barbecue is the best of the baked flavors. There was a period in my life, circa 1998, when I was living at home for the summer and my lunch (which I would eat at 5pm because I didn't wake up until noon) was a hamburger, from a Costco chub pack of patties, and a pile of Lay's Baked Barbecue chips.

4. Tim's Cascade Jalapeño: This was my go to chip in high school. I could easily house an entire bag while playing NHL Hockey for Sega Genesis. They do light up your mouth, though.

3. Sun Chips: These are great for when you want a snack that probably is just as unhealthy as any other chip, but feels healthier. Garden salsa is the best flavor, but cheddar and French onion are both pretty good, as well. 

2. Kettle Krinkle Cut Salt and Fresh Ground Pepper: These are the most addictive chip on this list by far. As far as pure flavor goes, they're the best. The problem is that they are too good. I can't help but gorge myself on them, and then I feel like shit afterwards. 

1. Tortilla Chips: This is the one chip I still eat regularly. The thing about tortilla chips, however, is that they are extremely dip-dependent. Unadorned, they fall off this list completely. With salsa, they move into the top spot, and with guacamole, they belong on a whole other list altogether, as they are so much better than every other option. So, there is some debate in the chip world (the crisp world, in the UK) about whether or not tortilla chips should be ranked at all, since they do not rate as a standalone snack. I understand both sides of the argument, but I ultimately I think tortilla chips with dip do count. They're number one with a bullet.

Until next time...   

Entry 685: Less Important Matters

I've been contemplating doing a long post about the atrocities in Israel, but I'm not going to do it now. The main reason for my reluctance is that I would want to really get into the nuance and ambivalence of my thoughts, which would require thousands of words, and I just don't have it in me to do this at the moment. I've been mostly blogging at night these days, because that's when I have free time, and I've found I'm much less inclined to write about serious things at night. It's a corollary of my "mullet strategy" for news consumption: business in the morning, entertainment at night. That's the best way I've found to stay informed and stay sane. So, I'll just give you the tl;dr version of my thoughts on the whole thing: I agree wholeheartedly with President Biden.

Now, on to much less important matters.

We watched Napoleon Dynamite with the kids last weekend, and I gotta say, that movie is frickin' hysterical. I had only seen it once, when it first came out 20 years ago (!), so I had forgotten so much of it. It made my laugh all over again. S likes it too, and I think the kids mostly enjoyed it. There were some parts that went over their heads, like the whole thing with the breast enhancements, but it's a pretty good movie for kids their age, overall. The scene where Napoleon throws the orange at Uncle Rico got the most laughs, but the chicken factory was a close second. So, of course, after the movie, I had to show them the video of my favorite ever Scripps National Spelling Bee moment (although the kid fainting and then still getting the word right is pretty good, too).

Before we watched the movie, I saw online that Uncle Rico is played by Jon Gries, a name I recognize because he was Greg on White Lotus. That just about blew my mind. I watched both seasons of White Lotus fairly recently and did not recognize him at all. (He looks quite different.) I wish I had not seen the actor's name because it robbed me of the chance to make a great actor connection. I might have recognized him when we watched Napoleon Dynamite, and then turned to S and said, "Omigosh! It's Greg from White Lotus... You know, Jennifer Coolidge's husband... The guy who works for the Bureau of Land Management..."* And then she could have just stared at me blankly, before getting annoyed and telling me to be quiet. But I never got the chance for that satisfying moment.

*One of the funniest parts in the first season is when Greg says he's with BLM, and Jennifer Coolidge thinks he's talking about Black Lives Matter.

In other news, S is away for work again this week, and she's not coming back until late Sunday evening (or perhaps early Monday morning). Usually, she comes back Friday evening or Saturday morning, so it's a few extra days of solo-dadding for me. The good news is that it's domestic this time, so she won't be super jet-lagged. Also, Lil' S2's basically lives with his friends' up the street on the weekend -- today they took him to an apple orchard all day -- so it's just Lil' S1. He's pretty easy for the most part, but when he's home for too long, he just nags me for screen time. He didn't have school on Thursday or Friday because of staff days or something like that, so it was a lot of, "Can I watch now? How about in five minutes? Twenty minutes? An hour?"

That kid really needs to get a another hobby, preferably one that doesn't involve sitting on the sofa. He loves to read, which is great, and he loves doing screen time, which is fine, a few hours a day, but he's reluctant to do much else. So, when he's home from school and has 14 hours to kill, and only two or three of that is screen time, it can get to be a problem. For even the most avid readers, 11 hours in a day is tough. He used to make stuff with this 3-D pen, and he was getting pretty good at it, but he said he doesn't like it anymore for some reason.

What I would really like is for him to take up a sport of some sort. It doesn't have to be a team sport or anything competitive, just some sort of physical activity -- anything in which he has to exert himself and burn calories. The only thing he will do is walking and only if I reward him with extra screen time. Actually, this transactional method has been fairly effective -- he walked over a mile and a half almost everyday this week -- but that's only because I was around to walk with him and the weather was nice. There's no way that will continue once my schedule goes back to normal, and it gets too cold for walking. (If it gets too cold, I should say. With global warming, I no longer take that for granted.) 

He just needs something to counteract all the sitting and the garbage eating. Actually, his diet is getting a bit better as he gets older and likes more things. Now, it's Lil' S2 who's the bigger problem there. They both eat way too much junk food though. I've found it's basically impossible for a parent to limit the crap intake and still allow their children to have a normal social life. Even if you don't have it at home, they will just get it at school or a friend's house or buy it with birthday money, and you often can't say no without turning them into the weird kid who can't have cupcakes with the rest of the class, or what have you, and that might not be healthy long-term. I was kinda friends with this Jehovah Witness girl growing up, and she could never celebrate class birthdays, and then when she graduated and went off to college, she got way into partying and drugs and drinking and all sorts of self harm. I'm not saying the former caused the latter, but I'm not not saying it either.

Case in point, on Friday, we went to an ice cream social for this math club Lil' S1 does, and they got two massive servings of ice cream. If it was up to me, I would have given them about a fifth of what they got. But what was I going to do? Not let them get ice cream at the ice cream social? Not let them go at all? It was fun, and they had a blast. Plus, it's math. I, of all people, should encourage that as much as possible. (Lil' S1 once selected me for mathematician of the week, which was really sweet.) So, what to do? Just allow it and hope they don't get diabetes, I guess.

By the way, they are both getting pretty good at math. Lil' S1 tested into the higher level class, and Lil' S2 is like a little calculator. The other day, we were doing this thing where I started him with 1, and then I had him double the number each time: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, etc. I was using a calculator to check the answer, so he could see the number, but he wasn't allowed to use pencil or paper, just his head. He went all the way to 2,147,483,648 before we stopped. That's 2 to the power of 31, and he could have kept going. I really don't think most eight-year-olds could read that number correctly, let alone double it in their head.

Here's a video of him doubling 2 to the power of 25.

Until next time...

Entry 684: Overrated (*Clap, Clap, Clap-Clap-Clap*)

I want to talk about something particular today. It's not the most important thing in the world right now (not by a long shot). It's not the most interesting. It's not the newest. What's more, I don't have any original thoughts on it, no novel insights, whatsoever. But it's something I've been thinking about and wanting to write about for a while. And the other day, I realized the only reason I haven't written about it is because I've been apprehensive about social backlash, and once I realized that, I decide to force myself to write about it. So, here it is...

Taylor Swift is way overrated.

I don't say this to denigrate her as a person or a businesswoman, and I'm not even talking about her place in pop culture, writ large. I have no issue with her being popular and making lots of money. I don't care that so many people seem to have an oddly personal stake in whom she dates, and I don't even mind that you can't watch a prime time football game now without seeing her on-screen more than you see most the players. That stuff is all good by me.

I'm just talking about her music. It's totally mediocre, right? People are just pretending to like it because of social pressure, the same way I pretended to like Poison back in the day. That's the only way all this makes sense to me. I listen to her songs, and I'm like, this is it? This is what everybody is crazy about? I mean, it would be one thing if she was just a normal, of-the-moment pop star, one of those artists with a song you hear thirty years from now and quiz your friend on who sings it and then get nostalgic for that time in your life. But she's so far past that. She's like The Beatles, Madonna, and Garth Brooks rolled into one. I just don't get it.

Now, you might be thinking that I'm not in her demographic, so of course I don't get it. But actually I very much am. Middle-aged white family man is a huge piece of her audience. I have a bunch of dad-friends who started off listening to her with their kids and now are just straight-up fans of hers, and I seemingly can't go a week without hearing a podcast episode or reading an article about a father taking his daughter to a Taylor Swift show (and this is "sports" content I'm talking about). For some reason, guys like me love her, and they love telling everybody that they love her.

You also might be thinking that her style of music just isn't the type I like, personally. But that's not it either, because there are many pop divas I'm a huge fan of. Madonna, I've always loved her music. Gloria Estefan, I mentioned my affinity for her in a previous entry. Whitney Houston might have the best pipes of them all. Lady Gaga, Rihanna, Dua Lipa, Cardi B -- I like all of them. Even the artists I don't really know or am not super into, they have at least one song where I'm like, Actually, this kinda rips. I'll take Ariana Grande's "Into You" or Miley Cyrus' "Flowers" over any Taylor Swift song, and it's not even close.

I started listening to Spotify's "enhanced" version of my playlist when I run. So, it mostly plays songs I selected, but it mixes in some other songs it thinks I might like (which, I must admit, I usually do -- damn you, AI overlords!). Sometimes it gets on a little pop diva run, and almost always I'm like, Hell yeah, turn it up. Then I hear a Taylor Swift song, and halfway through, I skip it. Like I said, I just don't get it.

You want to know what else? I kinda feel the same way about Beyoncé.

And now I'm almost surely getting canceled. Well, at least I didn't say anything negative about BTS.

Until next time...

Entry 683: Just A Rant

FYI: this entire post is a totally pointless rant. I need to get something off my chest, preferably to an audience who couldn't care less and is just humoring me out of politeness, and, for reasons that will become clear later, S, my usual sounding board in such situations, is not an option this time. So, you, dear reader, are up.

Lil' S1 had a field trip a few days ago at a ropes course. I signed the permission slip and paid the fees but didn't think too much about it, until the night before when S told me he has to be at school by 8:10, so she was going to drive him instead of him taking the bus like he usually does. It's a city bus, not a school bus, and like most city buses, it's usually on time but sometimes a little late and occasionally a lot late. He typically gets to school on the bus around 8:00, but once he got there at 8:30, which is fine (first period bell isn't until 8:45), unless you are supposed to be there by 8:10.

The entire thing seemed kinda strange to me. It didn't make sense that they would schedule a field trip so that every student taking the bus (a lot of students) would have to find alternate transportation. So, if it was up to me, I would have just put him on the bus and taken my chances. But if S wants to drive him, fine, no skin off my back -- except that she checks her schedule and realizes she has a conflicting meeting and can't take him and wants me to do it instead.

I really don't want to do it, so I ask Lil' S1 how often the bus is late, and S overhears me and gets annoyed. She says that she will try to rescheduled her meeting, which, in effect, forces me to say that I'll just drive him. I'm thinking ahead to the next morning when she's rushing Lil' S1 out the door, after switching her meeting, and I'm still in bed or chilling, drinking coffee and playing Spelling Bee. That does not sound like a path toward marital bliss to me.

So, the next morning I get up and get ready. It takes about 15 minutes to get to Lil' S1's school when there is no traffic, but there might be traffic, so I check the travel time on my phone and it says 16 minutes -- good. I'm aiming to leave at about 7:40, but I mistime things a bit, and Lil' S1 is a little slow getting ready, and we don't get out the door until about 7:45. That still should be plenty of time, but when we get in the car, I notice a lot of yellow on the Maps app and the estimated travel time is now 24 minutes, making our arrival time 8:09 -- a little close for comfort.

Then, we back out of the drive, turn off our street, and immediately -- I mean immediately -- hit a backup that there's no way out of. There is nothing more infuriating than being stuck in a traffic jam on a residential street, a tenth of a mile from your house. You get this false sense of entitlement, like people should have to let you through: Get off the road, you interlopers! I live here! As we slowly creep along, I'm seeing the arrival time on the Maps app go up like that giant national debt calculator: 8:11, 8:13, 8:16, 8:17, 8:21, 8:25, 8:28...

I'm under the impression that the bus taking the kids to the ropes course is leaving the school at 8:10. I don't know if S or Lil' S1 actually said that, or if I just inferred it, but that's my working assumption. There is no way we are getting there anywhere close to 8:10, so now I'm thinking I might have to drive him to the ropes course myself, which would put me in another time bind, as I have to be in the office for a meeting in a few hours, and the ropes course is not close to his school or my office. I call S, explain we're stuck in traffic, and ask her if it's the same ropes course we've been to a few times for birthdays (it is), but she tells me to just go to school anyway (I am), because -- and this is actually what she says to me:

"You might still beat the (city) bus to school, and I don't think they will leave for the ropes course without all the kids coming to school on the bus."

I'm gobsmacked and blurt out, "That's exactly why I wanted him to take the bus in the first place!" before hanging up in frustration.

We finally make it to school sometime between 8:25 and 8:40. I honestly don't remember exactly when. At some point during the trip, I just stopped looking at the clock, trying to trick myself into being chill -- no use stressing about it now, we'll get there when we get there -- even though that never works. I park illegally because there are no spots in the lot, and we both hop out, frantically trying to figure out if the bus has left yet for the ropes course. We hustle through security (we basically just cut the line) and talk to somebody in the main office, and she's completely nonplussed as to why we're there.

"No," she says, "the bus hasn't left yet. It hasn't even arrived."

"Whew," Lil' S1 exhales, "I was worried I missed it."

"No," she half-chuckles, "you haven't missed anything. School hasn't even started yet."

As we're leaving the office, Lil' S1 happens to see some of his friends, who are going on the trip with him, walking down the hall, so he joins them. I hurry back to my car before it gets towed.

I head out to my office, stewing while I drive, wondering where that 8:10 came from. Clearly, the bus wasn't leaving then -- it wasn't leaving until after school starts (which is what I would have thought in the first place) -- so why did S say he had to be at school by then? At a red light, I pull up an email from one of his teachers about the field trip. It has a list of "important reminders" and one of them is 

• Students should arrive at school by 8:10 am.

So, it doesn't say the bus is leaving at 8:10. But still, WTF?! Why is that there? Why are you instructing kids to get to school 35 minutes before it starts? My working theory is that the teacher has to do a lot of prep before they leave for the trip, and if everybody shows up two minutes before class starts, it's much more difficult to do this. But 35 minutes early?! I just don't understand. Like, if it said, "Students should try to arrive to school by 8:30" then it would make sense to me. As it is, I don't get why 8:10 is the specified time.

And the thing is, when you do something like this, you disincentivize parents from following the instructions, or even reading them, at all. Something similar happened to me somewhat recently with Lil' S2. We wanted to get him a "Kids Ride Free" Metro card, which, according to the school newsletter, were supposed to be available after an open house. So, I went to the open house, waited around until the end, and went to the place where it said to go, and none of the teachers there knew where the cards were, or even that they were supposed to know. I'm admittedly pretty bad about carefully reading messages from the boys' schools, but this is part of the reason why. They are very often either not relevant or not helpful, and sometimes they make things worse. Actually, I just remembered an even better example of a time Lil' S1 did an entire poster board project for something that wasn't actually assigned, because of an erroneous message, but I think you get my point without going into the details there.

Anyway, back to my story, I'm super annoyed the entire drive to my office. I want to take it out on somebody, but there's nobody to really be mad at. I mean, I could be mad at the teacher who said 8:10, but what am I going to do about it -- write an email settling her hash because my son didn't miss the bus but I thought he might? Sure, that's sane behavior. And I could be mad at S for not letting Lil' S1 take the bus to school in the first place, but she was just doing what she thought was best, given the instructions in the email. Also, she could say I should've left earlier (which I should have). Also, also, I kinda already got mad at her on the phone, and I'm hoping she's not sore about that.

So, I try to let it go. But I do need to give S an update on the situation, so I think about what type of text I should send. Do I let on how annoyed I am? Do I rant about 8:10? Do I mention anything about any buses at all? I decide no on all accounts. I'm going to play it zen. I'm just going to let her know Lil' S1 made it, and then not bring it up again.

"All good" I text.

"Good!" she replies.

And that's that.

My wife and I aren't quarreling; my kid made it to his field trip; and I got some material for this blog. So, I guess this story has a happy ending, but it didn't seem like that at the time.

Until next time...

Entry 682: Seven-Year Itch

Actually, for me it's more like the 20-year itch. Once every two decades or so, I break out into hives for unknown reasons. I remember when I was about eight, I went to a banquet for my soccer team and ate a bunch of desserts and woke up the next morning covered in itchy red blotches. They were all over my body and didn't go away for over a week, as I recall.* There's a decent chance they didn't have anything to do with desserts or the banquet, but my parents thought I might be allergic to chocolate, so they didn't let me eat it for a few weeks. Thankfully, that turned out to not be the case, and it's a total mystery what caused them. 

*I remember trying to sooth them with a heating pad. As a kid, I utilized a heating pad somewhat frequently. But I can't ever remember using one in my adult life. I did try to use one once. I bought one for my shoulder, but it didn't actually get hot for some reason, so I threw it away and never bought a new one.

Then, when I was in my twenties, working construction for the summer, I got out of the shower after a long, sweaty day on the job, and again noticed my entire body was covered in hives. They were so multitudinous and uncomfortable that I had a friend take me to the emergency room. The doctor gave me a shot of something that made me super sleepy, so I went to bed early, and when I woke up the hives were gone -- no trace whatsoever. It was like a miracle cure. But again, it was a mystery what caused it. The doctor guessed it was "prickly heat" but admitted he wasn't really sure.

This brings me to a week and half ago. S was out of town on business, so I was sleeping alone, and I kept having this weird dream that wasn't a dream about my chin itching. After I woke up, I figured it was just a bug bite and didn't think about, but it didn't go away, and then I noticed in the mirror that I had a mini breakout on my left eye and temple and neck and presumably the back of the my head which was itching like mad. So, I went to the doctor, who unsurprisingly couldn't say what caused it, but he prescribed me a steroid.

But it still didn't go away. I took the entire does of the steroid over the course of a week, and the next morning I woke up with the back of my head feeling like it was on fire. I went back to the doctor at S's behest (she was back), but I wish I hadn't. It was a total waste of time and money. Somebody different saw me this time, and she was "just" a nurse practitioner. Normally, I wouldn't care about such labels that much, but it really did seem like she wasn't very good.  At one point, while I was describing my symptoms, she said, "now, you're making me feel itchy," which is funny in retrospect, but seemed pretty unprofessional at the time. It's like something Dr. Spaceman on 30 Rock would say. (Remember that show? I gotta go back and watch some of those old episodes. I remember it being hilarious.)

Eventually, she prescribed me some antifungal pills, but when she left for a moment I googled the condition she put on the scrip, and it was obvious I didn't have it. The symptoms looked nothing like mine, and I could tell she wasn't very confident in her diagnosis. When she came back I said, "I'm probably not going to take the medication for a few days and hope it clears up on it's own." And she replied, "Yeah, that's probably a good idea." The visit cost me almost $100 in copay, and that's not counting the copay from the first visit -- such a waste.

I didn't take the medication and eventually it did clear up on it's own. I think. There's still something funky going on with my eye -- it was kinda swollen this morning -- but I think it's unrelated. I'm just getting old is the bottom line. I also hurt my hamstring about a month ago -- the tiniest of tweaks, something that wouldn't have kept me out for more than a day or two ten years ago -- and it's just now starting to feel normal again.

Well, the timing was good, at least. I didn't really want to go to the gym with a splotchy face, anyway (although it wasn't super noticeable if I wore glasses). I guess if you're going to get hives, might as well be while you are nursing a sore hamstring. It's just like that old adage about killing two maladies with one rest period.

Until next time...

Entry 681: When Is It Wrong For A Storyteller To Tell Stories?

I was going to wrap this into my previous entry, but I feel it works better as a standalone post, so you get a double dose of me this week. Yay, you.

If you are familiar with Hasan Minhaj, you probably know why I asked the question in the title of this entry. If you are not familiar with him, I'll give you the quick skinny: He's a comedian who does a lot of standup, a little acting, and he hosted a Netflix talk show called Patriot Act for a few years. Most of his act consists of personal anecdotes, so much so that it might be more accurate to describe him as a humorous monologuist. He's a first-generation Muslim Indian-American, and a lot of his comedy is centered around the religious and racial discrimination he faces in a post-9/11 America... or doesn't. Last week, Clare Malone of The New Yorker dropped a profile piece detailing how pretty much none of the stories he tells in his show actually happened. They are either outright fabrications or exaggerated to the point that there is no meaningful difference between them and outright fabrications.

This raises some interesting ethical questions about when storytellers are allowed to lie and when they are not. Minhaj's defense of his act is that, although it might not be factually true, it's emotionally true, and comedians frequently use hyperbole for effect. Some people buy this argument, others do not. Thinking on it a bit, I've found myself very much in the latter category. I don't think it's right what Minhaj did. I think it was fraudulent at worst, and manipulative and phony at best. I agree that it's okay for comedians to make things up sometimes -- it's entertainment, after all, not a legal deposition --  but they need to ask themselves some questions and earnestly consider the answers first.

Will the audience think it's true, and will they feel let down if they learn otherwise?

This is where Minhaj's specific brand of comedy is relevant. Nobody cares if Mitch Hedberg actually has a package of Life Savers in his pocket or if Brad Williams really scared a guy away during a fight, because those are clearly just jokes -- the humor is the humor. But in Minhaj's act, a lot of the humor comes from a previously established buy-in from the audience. It's emotionally based, trust based. He makes us feel one way, and then flips it, and we laugh at that incongruity. That initial buy-in from the audience is incredibly important, and it is much more powerful if we believe what he's saying is literally true.

I really liked a lot of Minhaj's stuff. In fact, I once wrote a fawning entry about him on this blog, about a story he told on a podcast. It was very funny, but also incredibly moving and thought-provoking, and, yes, I feel let down that now I suspect it's total bullshit. There is a gravitas to something true that is much more difficult to achieve with something fictitious. And I think Minhaj's knows this, which is why he never let on that his stories weren't real, until he was exposed. Comedians like Jerry Seinfeld openly say that their comedy is all a put-on, and I believe Minhaj should have done the same a long time ago.*

*I find his defense that his stories are emotionally true to be extremely weak. He sounds like Jesse Eisenberg in The Squid and the Whale saying that he could have written the Pink Floyd song he plagiarized.

I actually went through something like this in my own little way. I wrote a crossword puzzle book, in which I include a short personal anecdote with each puzzle. I very quickly learned that it is almost impossible (for me, at least) to write something compelling, concise, and totally truthful. So, I just put a disclaimer at the beginning of the book saying that my stories were not completely factual. Had Minhaj done something like this with his comedy from the get-go, this whole thing would be a complete non-issue. But he didn't. On the contrary, he reiterated accounts from his act, as if they were fact, even in non-stage settings, like interviews. It's tough to defend that.

Is your work just for entertainment or also for making broader social and political points?

Minhaj's comedy definitely falls into the latter category, and this is another reason why I think it was unethical for him to present his anecdotes as true. One can very easily see what I mean by flipping the politics. If a conservative comedian told stories on stage in the same manner as Minhaj, but they were about being mugged by immigrants or seeing drag queens perform adult material in front of children, and then when it came out that these things never happened, the comedian defended them as emotional truths, would liberals shrug and say Fair enough, it's your lived experience that really matters? Of course not. They would be decrying it as propaganda, which it would be. But then shouldn't the same standard apply to Minhaj? Or is it only wrong if somebody you don't like does it?

 Are real people falsely depicted in a negative manner in your stories?

This is another reason I wanted to admit up-front in my book that the things I was saying weren't true. If you lie about other people, that seems way worse to me than lying about yourself or inventing people whole-cloth.* And Minhaj did lie about real people. He said a real FBI informant "Brother Eric" infiltrated his mosque, and it never happened, and worse, he said a girl spurned him on prom night, because her parents didn't want their daughter dating a brown boy. That also never happened -- she broke things off with him before prom night and says it was because of typically teenage shit and didn't have anything to do with her parents or his race. (She's now married to an Indian man, if that matters to you at all.) Minhaj never called her out by name, but he gives enough details about her, including showing a picture with only her face blurred, that Clare Malone didn't seem to have any trouble figuring out who she was. That's a pretty fucked up thing to do to somebody.

*I used a lot composite characters in my book so that it would be difficult for any single person to identify themselves in it.

The last thing I'll say about this is that there is a cost to be paid by others in your community when you lie about being victimized. It needlessly scares people and causes unnecessary mental anguish. This is something I wish liberals took to heart more often. How are Indian-Americans served by believing that society is more racist than it really is? It seems to me, the only real beneficiaries of Minhaj's tall tales are himself and right-wingers who say elite Hollywood liberals are obsessed with fake victimhood. This is the biggest gift they've received since Jussie Smollett.

Anyway, there's some other stuff in the article about how Minhaj didn't like the female fact-checkers* who worked for Patriot Act and would frequently ice them out of the production process, but you can read about all that if you like. I think I've said enough on this issue.

Until next time...

*They have alleged sex-based discrimination against Minaj, but now he has a really good defense: I'm not sexist; I just don't like facts!

 

Entry 680: Things I'm Consuming In The Media

Thought I'd do a political entry today, as it's been awhile since my last one. Talking politics isn't enjoyable for me these days, but part of what I want from this blog is for it to be a time capsule of my thoughts -- the good, the bad, and the ugly -- and it will be glaringly incomplete if I don't occasionally write about politics. So, here we go.

I'm going to format this post by linking to things in the media I've recently consumed and then giving my thoughts on them.

Mitt Romney Announces He Won't Seek Reelection In 2024

Remember when "binders full of women" was considered the most awful, sexist thing a presidential candidate could say?* How much would you give to go back to those days? Sorry, Mitt, for all the unkind things I said and wrote about you back in 2012. It was probably all true, but if I knew how much worse it could get, I would've let it slide. I wouldn't even have mentioned the fact that you ran expressly on repealing Obamacare, even after implementing the same basic plan in Massachusetts and calling it "a model for the nation" just a few years earlier. Such commentary seems so petty now, when we are all wondering what happens if somebody is elected president while in the midst of multiple criminal trials. 

*I joke, but even at the time, despite not being a Romney fan, I thought this was a silly thing for people to get exercised about. 

It's funny, I was thinking about when I first got interested in politics, as an insufferable Nader-ite, back around the turn of the millennium, and the biggest problem with our political system, as I saw it, was that our two parties were too alike and too beholden to corporate interests. As Noam Chomsky put it: "In the US, there is basically one party -- the business party." But, oh, do I long for those days now. I'd take them in a heartbeat over our current shitshow. The business party sounds just fine to me.

It's gotten so bad that while listening to an interview with Chris Christie on NPR the other day, I started fantasizing about somehow skipping the election and just instating him as president. Can we do that? Is there a clause in the constitution that would allow us to agree as a country to just make him president? I mean, I don't really want him to be president. Of course I don't, but neither does his own party, so it's fair. Both sides go away unhappy. But since we would be guaranteed to not get another term of either Trump or Biden, both sides would also go away happy. It's an adequate compromise. If only...

Biden Is Losing Ground With Black and Latino Voters

The linked article is actual somewhat "positive" for Biden, in that it is mainly about how, although Biden has a slimmer lead over Trump in national polls than he did in 2020, he seems to be maintaining the same edge in battleground states.* But one thing that caught my eye is that Trump seems to have gained support among nonwhite voters overall. I wish that this surprises me, but it doesn't. Part of this shift is probably just the push-and-pull of coalition building. When you gain in one area, like Biden did with suburban women in 2020, you might lose in a different area, because, given real-world constraints, it's impossible to keep everybody happy all the time. Also, it should be noted that Biden still holds a significant -- although reportedly not as significant as three years ago -- advantage over Trump among nonwhite voters.

*With the stated caveat that any analysis this far out has to be taken with a huge grain of salt. Although, it did make me entertain the possibility of Biden losing the popular vote but winning the election. Wouldn't that be a doozy?

Still, it's a bit disconcerting for those of us dreading the prospect of another Trump term to see such data. And I suspect it's not so much that he's gaining nonwhite voters as it is that Biden, Democrats in general, are losing them. I further suspect the reason for this is something I've expressed concern over in the past: Democrats are becoming increasingly incapable of winning over anybody but highly-educated, affluent voters. They've already lost almost all the white voters who don't fit this criteria, and my worry is that now we're seeing that happen with nonwhite voters.

Why is this my worry? 

A little bit of bad policy and a lot of bad messaging.

On policy, I think Dems mostly dropped the ball by not reopening things quickly enough after the Covid shutdowns, and this has had a disproportionately negative effect on working-class folks, who can't work from home, can't afford nannies and tutors, and don't have much savings to fall back on. I remember shortly after the 2020 election listening to a Latino woman in Florida speak about Ron Desantis, and she spent a solid two minutes blasting his awful, dehumanizing immigration stunts, and then at the end she said that she voted for him. When asked why, she replied that she owned a nail salon, and if the Democrat won she thought she'd go out of business.

Another policy position that might be bad -- kinda sneaky-bad -- with working-class voters is Biden's college debt relief decree. Before it was blocked by the Supreme Court, I was reading a thread about it online, and the non-college-educated commenters did not like it. Is this representative of a wider sentiment? I couldn't say, but it makes some sense: By definition, tuition debt relief only helps the highly educated, and if you're somebody who specifically chose to not incur debt, to not go to college, to possibly put yourself at a disadvantage in the job market, then, yeah, it's understandable that you'd be peeved about it. It would be hard not to feel like the chump in that circumstance.

School choice might be another one. Dems are mostly against it (teachers' unions don't like it), but I've heard working-class families sing its praises. Again, it's tough to say with certainty whether they speak for a larger contingent, but again it makes sense if they do: The traditional neighborhood system forces poor families in underperforming districts to attend their subpar local schools, while affluent families can move to districts with higher-achieving schools (which is exactly what we did). In practice, the neighborhood system is one of choice -- but only for people who can afford it.

On messaging, I think left-coded institutions, not even necessarily Democratic politicians themselves, but universities, advocacy groups, and certain media and online spaces, increasingly speak in a way that only resonates with highly educated, affluent liberals -- nobody else seems to like it or understand it. The epitome of this is Latinx, which I hear from time to time on places like NPR, despite the fact that it polls terribly among the people to which it's referring, and Hispanic Democrats like Ruben Gallego constantly plea with progressives to stop using it.

And there are myriad other vocabulary examples like this. Many institutions put out their own equity language guides filled with them. Personally, I can't think of a better way to alienate people who might otherwise be open to your cause. Implying that pretty much all of society speaks the wrong way, and that everybody should adopt your more evolved vocabulary, is just about the worst way to win influence with people I can think of. The way we speak is very personal, and we can be very defensive of it. It's just terrible, terrible politics to tell people from on-high that they speak incorrectly.

Getting back to the article linked at the top of this section, they had a conversation about it on Political Gabfest, and Emily Bazelon said she found it surprising that Trump had gained ground with nonwhite voters, because he does so many racist things. I think this provides another example of what I mean about highly-educated, affluent liberals speaking in a way that other people don't really get. To the type of people who work on (and listen to) Slate podcasts, the term racism is used by default to refer to systemic racism. By this definition, a racist is somebody who contributes to -- or perhaps just doesn't actively oppose -- social systems that produce disparate outcomes between racial groups. So, you can be a racist without holding any animus toward nonwhite people. This has so become the working meaning of racism among this circle (my circle) that we use it this way without even really thinking about it.

But I don't think this is the case for most people outside the Slate-podcast demographic. To them, the term racism refers to interpersonal racism. So, racists are people who actively discriminate against or disparage other people based on their skin color -- bosses who pass over people of color for promotions, sports fans who chant racial slurs at the opposing team, people who hang out on Neo-Nazi websites.

By the former definition, Trump does and says a lot of racist things; by the latter definition, it's not so cut-and-dried. For his many faults, he doesn't disparage people explicitly because of their skin color, and he's so all-over-the-place-all-the-time with his rhetoric that people can take from it almost anything they wish. (For example, tweeting “When the looting starts, the shooting starts” immediately followed by "Honor the memory of George Floyd!") He is very consistently anti-immigration and "tough on crime," but such positions seem to not be as disliked by nonwhite voters as I once thought -- perhaps because they're the ones who feel the most threatened, job-wise, by immigrants, and the ones most likely to live in neighborhoods in which violent crime is a big problem. (And I'm not making any value claims here; I'm just calling it as I see it.)

I think a lot of nonwhite people -- not a majority, but not a tiny sliver either -- see Trump working with Ice Cube and supporting Herschel Walker and receiving endorsements from Jim Brown and Geraldo Rivera and ostentatiously praising Black people ("Look at my African-American over here!") and tweeting how much he loves Mexican people while eating a taco salad, and they don't hate it. It kinda works, and a big part of why it works is that the messaging from the other side doesn't speak to such people anymore at all. Plus, liberals can also be very cringe on race, including the man at the top of the ticket.

Moralists vs. Pragmatists

I could be completely wrong about everything I wrote above. The only thing I believe with certainty when it comes to political analysis is that nobody can say anything with certainty. It doesn't mean it's all useless; it just means if you're trying to honestly assess things, you should always keep an open about changing your prior beliefs. One thing that I'm trying very hard not to do in this entry is commit the "the smart things to do politically are the things I like" fallacy. In a vacuum, I don't have super strong feelings on a lot of the issues I discuss above. The main thing I want politically at this moment is for Democrats to win elections -- or more specifically for Trump-supporting Republicans to lose elections (which, given the current state of affairs, is pretty much the same thing). So, for the most part, what I consider good policy and good messaging are what achieves this end. That is to say, I'm a pragmatist.

And this brings me to the linked article above entitled "The Two Kinds of Progressives: Moralists vs. Pragmatists" by Matthew Yglesias. I found it quite interesting, in no small part because, as an avowed pragmatist, I often experience the tension described in the article first-hand. In the past decade or so, I've really come to embrace the idea that politics (life, really) is a series of imperfect compromises. Nothing we do is totally right or totally wrong. Pretty much everything we do hurts some people, at least a little bit, and helps other people, at least a little bit. So, being a good person boils down to negotiating a never-ending stream of impossible decisions in a way that best serves society overall.    

Now, "best" obviously is a super vague, subjective term that can mean a million different things to a million different people. But I don't think that that's what's at the heart of the moralist-pragmatist divide. It's not the "best" part that's so divisive; it's the "negotiating" part. Moralists believe there are things that are simply not to be negotiated. They have a collection of moral certitudes that we pragmatists lack, and these certitudes form the basis of their political positions. If you want to summarize things with a pithy pseudo-cliché: For the moralist, the heart informs the head; for the pragmatist, the head informs the heart. And sometimes those inverted ways of thinking can come into conflict, even when the end goal is basically the same.

Anyway, I could probably write a couple thousand more words on this topic, but this entry is already quite long, and I want to hit one more thing. Actually, I'm going to post this now and save my next topic for its own standalone entry.

Until next time...