Entry 648: Honey, I Blew Up The Baby

Was single-dadding this week. It's over now, but I start anew in another week. (S has a lot of work trips on the docket over the next few months.) This iteration went pretty well. Only one mistake -- I missed an online therapy session for Lil' S1.* I'm still annoyed by it because I checked the calendar around 2:00 pm (it starts at 5:00 pm), and said to myself, "Set an alarm so you don't forget." And then I said, "Nah, I'll remember," which is the dumbest thing I do on a regular basis. My success rate is like 10% when I tell myself "I'll remember" to do something, and yet I still tell myself this frequently.

*We recently stopped sessions for Lil' S2 and started them for Lil' S1. Apparently we always need to have one kid in therapy. I don't think he really needs it. But S wants him to do it, and he seems to actually enjoy it, and he participates willingly and immediately (unlike his brother who would take 20 minutes of a half-hour session just to warm up). So, whatever, it can't hurt.

I probably would have actually remembered this time, but I got caught up in something somewhat time-sensitive at work. Usually what I do is not time-sensitive at all, so when I get a task that even kinda is, I feel compelled to get it done ASAP. Like, I probably could've finished this particular bit of work the next morning and nobody would have cared, but I really wanted to do it before the end of the business day. And I did (that's how you get those raises!), but when I finished, I immediately left to pick up Lil' S2 from school, and when I returned it was 5:25 pm, and that's when I remembered Lil' S1's session, but it was too late.

I was kind of annoyed at Lil' S1, to be honest. He was just sitting on the sofa reading the entire time. He could've given me a head's up. But he's not at that stage yet, where he can manage his schedule in that way. He should be, but he's not. I've been trying to get him to be better about it, but he's a very reluctant learner when it comes to certain things. There are still many mornings, in which we will need to leave for school in five minutes, and he hasn't even gotten dressed yet.

Lil' S2, despite being three years younger, is actually more advanced in this area. He gets up and gets dressed immediately and is almost always ready to go on time without being nagged. He usually watches the clock carefully. It's his analytically mind. He's got a lot of his pops in him, I can tell. He has a chance to be really good at math if he wants to be. And memorizing spelling words is almost effortless for him. He gets 100% almost every test, and he only looks at the word list once or twice before taking it. Contrast that with his brother who would have to spend literally hours every week to have a fighting chance. It's so weird -- same genetics, same upbringing, totally different strengths and weaknesses. Although maybe it's just as simple as Lil' S1 takes after S and Lil' S2 takes after me.

In other news, since S was gone, I decided to get Madden for the PS5 a few days ago. It's been fun to play it, but it's been even more fun to watch the boys play it. They were on the same team, and despite never showing any interest in football whatsoever, nor even knowing the rules, Lil' S1 picked it up super fast. (Lil' S2 not so much, but he's not terrible.) He was the quarterback,* and he was totally running the offense and dominating the computer. He was picking the right plays and correctly reading the defense pre-snap. He doesn't know any of the players, so he would just call them by their corresponding shape on the controller: "I'm gonna throw it to box; they aren't really covering him." Lil' S2 was the running back and his brother gave him the ball enough to keep him interested, but whenever they needed a big play he would throw it to a computer player. I totally got a kick out of it. This is my gateway drug to getting them to be real-life football fans.

*Dak Prescott -- for some reason, Lil' S2 loves the Cowboys and picked the team. Actually, I know why he likes them. It's because his friend up the street likes them because his dad is a fan. I would prefer he like the Seahawks, of course, but he's got a bit of contrarian in him, so I don't want to push it. The funny thing is that both he and his friend live in DC and don't even entertain the possibility of being Commandeers fans. I cannot explain to you how much the local fan base for the Washington football team has eroded since I first moved out here nearly 20 years ago. Daniel Snyder must be on the short list for worst franchise owner in sports history -- and there have been some bad owners.   

Since S came back, we had family movie night and watched Honey, I Shrunk the Kids tonight. It's not bad, and more importantly it's not very long. It was about as good as I remember it. It has a sequel called Honey, I Blew Up the Kid, which I've never seen but remember. Only I recall it being called Honey, I Blew Up the Baby. After some initial googling, I thought I was going crazy, or having one of those "Berenstein Bears" false memories, but then I found this on IMDB:

Was originally going to be titled "Honey, I Blew Up the Baby", but was changed due to fear of negative feedback for the title.

So, maybe I saw a trailer or something before the name change. I'm not sure why "Baby" is any more (or less) negative than "Kid," but whatever.

A few other HISTK fun facts:

• One of the kids in it is the best friend from Big. I don't remember knowing that back when I originally saw it, but I pegged him instantly tonight.
  
  
• The neighbor guy in the movie is played by Matt Frewer, who also played the titular character on the old MTV show Max Headroom. S said that he reminded her of Jim Carrey, which I came to find is not an uncommon sentiment. You can see, for instance, this Reddit thread, which was among several webpages I found discussing Frewer's similarity to (and possible influence on) Carrey.
  
  
• Apparently there is going to be another movie in the franchise coming out soon called Shrunk. Rick Moranis is going to come out of a two-decade retirement to reprise his role of Wayne Szalinski in the film. Why this movie would prompt him out of such a hiatus, I have no idea. Maybe retirement has been a bit more costly than he expected.
  

Until next time...

Entry 647: There Are Sicknesses Other Than Covid?

It was a wasted day today -- but maybe that's too harsh an assessment. It was a recovery day is a better way to put it. It was a recover day, so it's understandable that basically all I did was watch YouTube videos on my phone. In my last entry, I mentioned that I had started feeling some Covid-like symptoms, and said symptoms intensified a hundredfold immediately after I posted. I woke up Tuesday morning and went on auto-pilot -- I got out of bed, got dressed, and started making the boys breakfast, moving via pure muscle memory, and then about five minutes into the process I realized I was going to pass out if I didn't lay down soon, so I called up S, who was working downstairs, told her I was sick and asked if she could do morning and get the kids to school. She told me she could, so I got back into bed and basically didn't get out until noon the next day.

It was brutal. Even when I was sleeping I somehow still felt sick. I kept having this weird fever dream where I had to solve this numerical code but couldn't do so. There was this big screen of numbers, and I had to arrange them, but no matter how I did so it was wrong. (There was a very Severance vibe to the whole thing.) I had specific symptoms -- sore throat, headache, chills, etc. -- but the main issue was that I physically just could not function. It was a chore to go to the bathroom, and taking a Covid test -- opening the packaging, doing the swabbing, mixing the solution, etc. -- was a monumental task, seemingly on par with administering a shot of adrenaline to the heart of a woman od'ing on heroin. I didn't have Covid, but I probably would have felt better if I did.

By Thursday, I thought I was on the mend -- and I was, I could do basic tasks, at least -- but then on Friday, I woke up with a sore throat to end all sore throats. It was like a woodworker's file had been dragged through my esophagus. My lymph nodes were swollen and throbbing with pain and just taking a sip of water felt like swallowing a burning ember. It was so brutal. I tried sucking on lozenges but all that did was leave me with a sore throat and a worn away roof of my mouth. There's really nothing you can do but wait it out. On the plus side, I dropped like seven pounds.  Apparently, eating nothing but a few cans of soup and a handful of Ritz crackers over the course of three days really makes the weight melt away.

Anyway, it still hurts today -- quite a bit, actually, like if I felt this way a week ago, I'd be like oh man, I got a sore throat! -- but it feels so much better than it did yesterday that it doesn't really bother me. I think tomorrow, Monday at the latest, I'll basically be back to normal. Although, I feel like I kinda always have a sore throat, at least in the morning. I often wake up with a very dry mouth and throat. I guess I'm a mouth-breather when I sleep. Speaking of which, I've recently become a snorer, which S "loves". It's apparently only when I sleep on my back, which I've started doing a lot lately because the arthritis in my shoulder prevents me from lying on my side for too long. It starts to ache even when I'm lying on my opposite side, somehow. The joys of aging.

In other news, we had a little episode happen a few days ago that would have been funny, had it not cost us some money. There's been a car parked in front of our neighbor's house for the last two-weeks, and nobody knows whose it is. So, our neighbor calls the District Department of Transportation (DDOT), and they tell her it hasn't been reported as stolen, and they can't just tow it for no reason, so they will come out and ticket it, and then if still nobody moves it after n days, or whatever, they can tow it. Our streets are technically zoned, so you need a parking permit to stay for longer than two hours during the day, but it's not enforced. We never bought a permit, and we once parked on the street for five straight weeks (this summer when we stayed in UP), and didn't get a ticket. But we weren't so lucky this time. The traffic cop came out, didn't ticket the car in front of our neighbor's house for some reason, but ticketed our car. So, the mystery car is still there, unticketed, and we have to pay a fine for parking in the same spot, right in front of our house, we have parked at for the last four years, without issue. Thanks, DDOT -- you guys rock!

Until next time...

Entry 646: Watching Mrs. Doubtfire

The good news is that I'm probably getting a raise. I don't want to jinx it, but I'd put it at about 90% in my favor. It's not to the amount I asked for, but it's close enough to make me happy (assuming I get it). With the way tech is going at the moment just having a job -- let alone getting a raise -- is something to feel lucky about, and I do feel lucky. But at the same time, it's not like I cashed a lottery ticket. I spent years and years cultivating skills and gaining knowledge that not a lot of people have (even in tech), and then even more years making myself valuable to my company. I feel like if I really got lucky, I'd be a multimillionaire tech bro right now -- the kind of guy whom everybody immediately thinks is really douche-y, but then can't help but like once they get to know him. That's my truly lucky path in life.

I think about that a lot: What even is luck? What do people deserve in life, and do we assess that? I don't have any answers. And my train of thought almost always leads me to free will, and the question: Are we mostly responsible for our own lives, or was all of history preordained the instant the universe began (or something in between those two extremes)? And that's when I hit a wall because not only is that question impossible to answer, it quickly becomes not that interesting to ponder. There's just nowhere to go with it. I feel the same way about the "Are we in a simulation?" question. It's cool to think about once, and then it's like Okay, let's say we are, then what?

I mentioned good news above, so you probably ascertained bad news is coming also. It's ultimately pretty minor bad news, thankfully. I started feeling kinda sick this evening with Covid-like symptoms, but I'm testing negative. Also, I'm kinda stressed out because we're supposedly building a screened-in deck in place of our non-screened-in deck, and we're having some issues with the contractor to whom we've already paid a non-trivially deposit. I think it will all get resolved, and we will get our mosquito-resistant asylum, but I'm not going to breath totally easily until it actually happens.

Anyway...

We watched Mrs. Doubtfire today with the kids. It kinda holds up. It's sorta funny, but it's actually much more reliant on schmaltz than it is on jokes -- and that's not really a criticism. It's a genuinely heartfelt take on parenthood and divorce, and Sally Field is kinda brilliant in it, to be honest. She has to be enough of a hard-ass to deny her ex-husband custody to their kids but not a villain. The movie doesn't work if she's the antagonist. There's really no bad guys in it -- even kinda snooty Pierce Bosnan is a decent enough chap. Yeah, he calls Robin Williams a loser, but he puts up with Mrs. Doubtfire's straight-up insults throughout the entire movie, and then he's surprisingly sporting at the very end when Williams very nearly kills him (literally).

There are definitely some cringe scenes, though. In fact, I bet if I google "Mrs. Doubtfire" right now, I would find at least a few links talking about how transphobic it is. I don't think the premise is transphobic, per se, but it does play transgenderism for a few cheap laughs (and the joke is always that it's weird and creepy). The thing is, at the time the movie was released, I think it was viewed as socially progressive because it features an obviously gay couple (the brother and his partner). But, you know, things often look very different in retrospect. Needless to say, we didn't have everything figured out in 1993.

I mean, we don't have everything figured out today. A lot of this stuff is still very confusing. I'm amazed at how often the new progressive, social-justice thing to do is the exact opposite of what I would expect it to be. I ran into a situation like this recently. I had to write a little mini bio for this thing I'm doing, and in the instructions it asked to include your pronouns. No problem -- it's a bio, after all, so just about every sentence is going to include my pronouns. (He lives in DC with his wife and two kids.) So, they're included. Done. Didn't think twice about it.

But then the bios are posted, and I see that everybody else -- literally everybody else -- has their pronouns explicitly stated after their names in parenthesis. John Doe (he/his) grew up in The Bay Area... So, now, it looks like I intentionally didn't do it, like, to be different, or as some sort of political statement. But that's not the case. I just thought it was implied. I didn't know pronouns were an explicit part of the bio format (and I didn't read the sample bios, which I clearly should have done). I emailed the guy who's in charge of the bios and explained this all to him and told him he could add my pronouns if he wants, but that was a few days ago, and I haven't heard back from him, and last I checked, everything was still the same on the site.

I don't love having my bio look different from everybody else's -- I do wish I had just known and followed the format -- but ultimately I guess I don't care that much one way or the other. Getting back to my point about the new progressive, social-justice thing to do being the opposite of what I would expect, I would have thought that having a bunch of obviously cisgender men list their pronouns would have been not cool. It's like we're trying to get in on oppression we've never experienced. It kinda makes me feel like a poseur, to be honest. I've never been misgendered in my entire life. I've never experienced that hurt/embarrassment, so it doesn't seem appropriate for me to even imply that that's something that could happen to me, because it hasn't and it won't.*

*For what it's worth, I've also had women in my field tell me they hate giving their pronouns, as a matter of course, because they are already self-conscious about constantly being a minority at work due to their gender, and so they don't like constantly highlighting it. 

I guess it's about allyship, but that's a fraught, confusing concept in and of itself, especially when it's something that's clearly just symbolic. It's kinda like: Hey, you absorb all the slings and arrows; I'll change my signature line. I'm not sure how I would feel about that if I was the former person in that scenario.

Ultimately, the conclusion I've come to is that you'll never get it right because what's right is different to different people, even among those who are in the affected group. No matter what you do, somebody you're supposed to "listen to" will tell you you are doing it wrong (and that's okay). With that in mind, I say we should all just live and let live and have a lot of compassion and kindness for those who don't live the exact way we do. And maybe most people feel the same, and so I shouldn't worry that my bio is different.

Until next time...

Entry 645: A Post About Future Posts

No real post this week because I've been busy with other things, which you can read about here, if you are so inclined. 

I'll be back again soon with my mundane ramblings, occasional political commentary, and captivating lists. I still haven't forgotten about the second half of my Top 100 TV shows list. I know you all have been waiting for that with bated breath, and it will be coming out soon. But not today.

Until next time...

Entry 644: Is It Really 2023 Already?

Happy New Year, readers.

It's hard to believe that it's 2023 already (this blog is almost a teenager), but here we are. We went over to some friends' house to celebrate last night. It was one of those adults upstairs, kids downstairs type of parties. So, every 15 minutes or so, a kid would come up crying and then an adult, or multiple adults, would have to intervene and figure out what's going on. It's was all boys (nine of them), and things were going along fairly smoothly until they started playing dodge ball in the basement. This led to several fights, and we had to split them up into two groups. The younger brothers, who were the primary instigators, had to go upstairs, and the older brothers had to stay downstairs.

The older kids just watched a movie, but the younger kids played chess. A few of Lil' S2's friends are in chess club, so I thought him how to play. He's not bad. The main problem is that he's also not good, and I'm worried he will get discouraged and quit. I don't want to push my kids into things that they don't want to do, but I also don't want them to give up on things right away because they aren't instantly awesome at them. There's a chess club he can join at school as part of his aftercare program, so I'll see if he wants to do that. It'd be cool if he got into chess, as I'm kind of a fan of the game, even though I've never been a particularly strong player. I did crush Lil' S2's friend, who's the best of their little crew, but he's only in second grade.

We didn't make it until midnight, none of the families did. We did a mass exodus around 11:00. S and Lil' S2 went to sleep pretty shortly after we got home, but Lil' S1 really wanted to stay up to watch the ball drop, so I stayed up with him until midnight, but we didn't actually watch the ball drop. I was watching the Georgia-Ohio State game, and it came right down to the final play. Ohio State was setting up for a make-or-break, last-second field goal, and it looked like they were going to snap it at 11:59, just in time to watch the ball drop, but then Georgia called timeout -- so annoying! (That's what you call foreshadowing, by the way.) I looked over at Lil' S1, and he was totally absorbed in his Kindle, so I made an on-the-spot decision to watch the final kick, knowing full well it would mean we would miss the ball drop. I watched the Ohio State kicker shank it badly, and then I immediately flipped over and saw the crowd in Times Square in after-midnight revelry.

"Shoot, we missed the ball drop," said Lil' S1.

"Oh, oops, guess we weren't paying attention," I replied.

I feel good about my decision. Lil' S1 wasn't just wanted to stay up late. The ball drop was just the excuse. He didn't really care that he missed it.

The PS5 has been much less of a headache this week, which is good. My brother-in-law gave me some good advice to get a Plus Extra subscription, which gives us access to a bunch of games, and the kids have been playing a few of them. Figuring out all the parental controls is still super annoying. I had to change Lil' S2's profile so that he could play a Ben 10 game. It's, like, c'mon, man, it's Ben 10 -- it's specifically for kids! Also, I can't figure out how to get Minecraft working on-line. They can play locally, but they can't play with their cousin in Washington State. I tried a bunch of different things, but can't figure it out. Again, it's some sort of permissions issue, only it's even more confusing because you have to go through Microsoft for some reason, so everything is designed to easily work for an X-Box, not a PS. Whatever. I can now send them off to play video games for a half-hour, and they won't bother me, which is the entire purpose of getting a high-priced console in the first place.

And it's good that the PS hasn't been annoying me because plenty of other things have. Here's a rundown.

• There's currently a pile of leaves at the curb in front of our house, which is very annoying when trying to park. We have a lawn service that does a bunch of houses in our neighborhood. They're cheap and easy, but we never know exactly when they're going to come. (They also have only billed us once in the three years we've been here. So, we didn't pay anything and then suddenly got an invoice for almost $1,000.) They did a good job gathering all the leaves and piling them at the curb, but they did so after the city had made its second (and last) leaf collection in our neighborhood. At least, I think that's the case. I can't really tell online. I tried to report a "Leaf Collection Missed" to 311 -- because that's what the website tells me to do -- but when I go to do so, that isn't even an option. So, now, we just have these leaves sitting out in front of our house for who knows how long. We can't even get a private company to come pick them up right now because they're so backlogged.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  [Where's leaf collection?]
  
  
  
• In other city related annoyances, take a close look at the schedule below and tell me if you think this means that we will have our trash collected tomorrow (Monday is our usual day) or not. I would have said no, but they did come last Monday, despite it saying they will slide to Tuesday for Christmas. At least, I think that's what it says. The main problem is that December 26 and January 2 are not Tuesdays, as the graphic would have you believe. (Some of the other dates are Tuesdays and some aren't.)
  
  
  
  
  
• Lil' S1 lost his Kindle a few months ago, so we bought him a new one for Christmas. (It's as much a gift to us as to him.) But then his old Kindle turned up, so, since I've been wanting a new Kindle for a while, I just took the one we got him for Christmas. It's a kids' Kindle, which doesn't really matter because you can pretty easily turn off kid mode and just use it like a normal Kindle. But I did have to accept a free year of this kids' subscription service, which I obviously will never use (and we already have it for Lil' S1 through S's account). So, I went to make sure that I don't renew the service when the free period elapses, but there's no way to do that. You have to cancel it, but you can't cancel it when it's free. I asked a customer service rep how you can avoid being charged, and they told me you can't. You have wait to be charged, cancel, and then request a refund. Now that's annoying!

Until next time...