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...