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...