Some sort of stomach bug going around these days. I and both the boys got it. It hit me Tuesday night. Driving back to S's parents' house from Disney World I started to feel some, um, unnatural movement in my bowels, and then I spent most of Wednesday sitting on the toilet. There's never a good place to get a stomach bug, but S's parents' is among the least worst places. It's a one-story bungalow with three bathrooms, so there is always a toilet nearby, and, most importantly, said toilets are equipped with bidets. That's huge. You don't have to use rolls and rolls of toilet paper nor do you have to rub yourself raw to keep clean.
In general, the bidet is a way underutilized contraption here in America. I don't understand why they aren't more popular. You can get near shower-level cleanliness after each dump, and it saves toilet paper. What's the issue? The only reason I can figure that they aren't a societal standard is because people think they're weird. But everything is weird until it's not. Why is spraying water on your bootie hole any weirder than wiping it with tissue? (In fact, if I didn't know any better, I would definitely think the latter was weirder than the former, as it requires you to interact much more intimately with your poop.) I think I'm going to get a bidet attachment for the toilet in our master-bedroom bathroom. The kind my in-laws have looks easy enough to attach and works great. If that turns out to be the case here, then I'll get one for every other toilet in the house, and then I'll proselytize about it to everybody I know. It'll be the American bidet revolution!
Despite the sicknesses, we were miraculously able to get in a relatively healthy day at Magic Kingdom. Lil' S1 felt a bit under the weather when we first arrived, but he really perked up as the day went along. Space Mountain was one of the first rides we went on, and I was really nervous going into it that he was going to get really sick and throw up. (I made sure not to sit behind him.) But instead it gave him the adrenaline dose his body needed or something like that because he was totally fine after that.
The day was pretty much as expected. Theme parks like this are fine but don't do much for me. I don't really like the rides, and I resent the lines and costs. S's parents gave the kids some money to spend (I'm embarrassed to say how much), so that defrayed expenses a little bit, but just a little bit. We still had to pay for the tickets and the parking and the gas to get there, etc., and that's a lot of money.
We went cheap(ish) on the food too. S's mom made, like, ten PBJs and packed them with a bunch of snacks in a little cooler that could fit in a backpack. I don't think any of the kids ate them (we met another family there, so there were five kids total), but I had at least three myself. It's better than the food you can get there, honestly. I mean, there's probably some decent grub there if you want to look for it, but all I saw was ballpark fare -- subpar chicken fingers, greasy fries, and plastic-container salads consisting of little else than lettuce and croutons. I got this pineapple float made with "soft serve whip" as my sweet treat for the day and was supremely disappointed with it. To make matters worse, we got the kids ice cream later (real, delicious ice cream), and it looked so good, but I felt compelled to abstain.
Just being at Disney World made me want to go on a diet. I spent a good portion of the day dodging obese people on those Rascal scooters. Distressingly, many of them didn't look that much older than me, and there's no way they all got that big from thyroid issues. That's mostly shit eating and lack of exercise. I get the idea behind the "healthy at any size" movement, and I'm not into body shaming (it doesn't help), but everything has its limits. At some point we have to face the fact that, much like we were with cigarettes a generation ago, we are losing a lot of quality years by eating so much junk food. It really is the public health catastrophe we know about but kinda pretend we don't. We've all read articles like the one I've linked to above, and we acknowledge them, and then we all kinda nod our heads and shrug our shoulders and go right back to eating (and feeding our children) the same ultra-processed food and drinking the same sugary drinks as we did before. How can we not when they are at our fingertips 24/7?
Alright a lightning round and then I'm out.
- My digestive system seems to have overcompensated and now things aren't moving fast enough down there. I've been hitting the psyllium husk pretty hard the past few days.
- We watched the movie Everything Everywhere All at Once recently. I don't get it and didn't really enjoy it. I pulled a bait-and-switch on myself. I only looked at the cast, not the plot summary, and thought I was settling in to watch a tale about immigration and intergenerational differences, and that's what I got at first, and then it turned into David Lynch directing The Matrix. (Michelle Yeoh's presence should have tipped me off that some martial arts would be involved.) I was into it for about a half-hour and then it became borderline unwatchable. (In fact, S literally stopped watching. I stubbornly finished it.) I haven't been this disappointed in a mid-movie genre transformation since From Dusk Till Dawn, which switches from super compelling to crime story to super stupid vampire movie halfway through.
- If you love movies (like me), but don't watch many (like me), sitting through a bad movie is especially painful because it's a wasted opportunity. We were trying to decide between Everything Everywhere All at Once and The Banshees of Inisherin, and clearly we made the wrong choice. To make matters worse, I downloaded Banshees on my iPad to watch on the flight back, but the app glitched, and it wouldn't play. So annoying.
- I was able to watch the three-part documentary Stolen Youth: Inside the Cult of Sarah Lawrence this past week. It's so fucked up and would probably be too bleak to watch if not for the fact that the leader will almost certainly die in prison, and all but one (maybe) of the abused subjects has denounced their abuser and now recognizes the cult for what it was (and has seemingly started the healing process). I really recommend the doc if you can stomach scenes of psychological, and in some cases physical, abuse. It's very interesting, and there is so much real-time footage, because the cult leader is a paranoid nutjob who filmed his misdeeds thinking they somehow illustrated a conspiracy against him. (In a nice bit of irony, they instead provided crucial evidence in the case against him.)
- I've been kinda following the controversy over Roald Dahl's publisher making some changes to his books. Like many children of the '80s, Dahl was my favorite author back in the day, and I read (or had read to me) most his books. I have no issue whatsoever letting my kids consume his work. (We started James and the Giant Peach last summer, but lost the copy and never resumed.) He was openly anti-Semitic, but he's also dead. For me, a lot of the conflict of "separating an artist from their art" goes away once they die and can no longer personally profit from my consumption of their work.
As for this censorship stuff, I see both sides. On one hand, counterintuitively, sometimes you have to change something to be true to its roots. I'm thinking of baseball (stay with me), in which the reluctance of the powers-that-be to change the rules of the game, has allowed it to morph into something different (and less interesting) than it was when I first found it 40 years ago. (Starting pitchers no longer matter as much; guys don't steal that many bases; fewer balls are put in play; etc.) Things exist within their context, so if context changes and the things don't change, then they do change within their context. Some words mean different things today than they did in 1970, so if you want to convey the same feeling as back then, you might have to use different words. It's not necessarily censorship; it's updating it for a new audience.
On the other hand, I think we do our children a disservice trying to sanitize everything for them. They need to hear words like "fat" and "stupid" in a low-stake setting because they're going to hear them at some point in an adversarial context and need to be able to handle it without crawling into the fetal position. That's one reason I hate all this booking banning bullshit that's going on in schools in Florida (and other places). I think it's a net positive if kids have access to literature, even stuff that is problematic or explicit and arguably not age appropriate. It's like, they are going to be exposed to this stuff at some point. Would you rather it be from a book in a school library or some other, much less safe, situation? - Perhaps worse than being sick for a few days, I developed a canker on the roof of my mouth. It has been driving me crazy. As soon as it starts to feel better, I eat something (because, you know, I have to eat to live), and it gets inflamed and bothers me again. It's in a spot where there is no way I can chew and avoid it. I also can't help but subconsciously rub my tongue against it compulsively, which certainly doesn't help. I think it's finally, maybe almost gone, but I've thought that everyday this past week, and it's still frickin' there. So... *resign shrug*.
Until next time...
