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...