Entry 709: A Week In Oz

It was the kids' spring break this past week, so we went to S's parents for a visit. S's sister was there too, so it was a full bungalow. They live in a gated, quasi-retirement community near Tampa, and it's a culture shock every time we go down there. The area surrounding the community is your typical, suburban American sprawl -- miles of intersecting arterial roads lined with pockets of shopping centers, filled with chain stores. There's a Walmart nearby, a Publix, a McDonalds, a Chick-Fil-A. But if you want to sit in a coffeehouse and work for a few hours (as my sister-in-law did), the Panera down the road is your best bet.* If want to grab a drink, you can probably find a bowling alley or a Buffalo Wild Wings within driving distance. If want anything more interesting than that, you will have to drive the half-hour to Tampa (which does have some really cool neighborhoods).

*They are soon opening a Starbucks not too far away, and we all got way too excited about it.

There are not even any parks or public greens spaces in the area, and the only way to get around is by car. Basically, everything is designed for old people, who live in gated, quasi-retirement communities and only go out when they need something. It's not for parents with school-age children, or anybody who wants to enjoy what a city has to offer. Your gated enclave is your city. And as far as that goes, S's parents' "city" is quite nice. It's on a little man-made lake with a geyser in the center, palm trees line the streets, and everybody you pass smiles and says hi, even if they're total strangers. My sister-in-law and I were joking that when you drive through the gates its like entering Oz. Everything goes from black-and-white to color.

But like Oz, so much of it is superficial. There's not a lot of there there. After a few days, once you've gone to the pool a few times, you realize there's really nothing to do here. My in-laws like it, and so that's cool,* but I just can't imagine ever wanting to live in a place like that, even when I'm in my eighties. Also, it's way too hot, and there is almost no shade anywhere. You're on sizzling concrete the instant you step outside. No solar panels either. Every time I'm there I get so annoyed by the fact that people live in one of the best possible places in the country to get cheap renewable power, and they just don't take advantage of it. Maybe things would be different if they had a governor who was more interested in energy policy than fighting stupid culture wars.

*They have a lot of friends in the community, which is big reason why they moved, and I totally get that. 

I don't mind visiting though. Actually, I like it. I'm good at doing nothing, and S's parents are so good to us. (Her mom's cooking is amazing!) I usually bring my computer and work, since we have so much downtime -- save my vacation days for other times. This time, however, I did take one day off, Tuesday, so that we could go to Sarasota beach. It was quite nice. We rented some beach chairs and an umbrella and just laid on the beach. Lil' S1 did not come because he had an earache, so we had three-on-one adults-to-kids with Lil' S2, and we all took turns going into the water with him, which was the perfect amount of in-water time.

Whenever I go to the beach, I just sit there and watch the water and the people and maybe doze a bit. I don't read or look at my phone or anything like that. It's one of the few places where I prefer to do nothing other than absorb the environment. There was this old guy -- an obvious local with his telltale bleached white hair and leathery, bronze skin -- sitting not too far from us, blasting yacht rock from a bucket speaker. So, at one point I took a weird psuedo-nap, in which I was half-asleep, half-groving to Steely Dan. There are worse ways to pass the time.

The next day, I worked, and S, bless her heart, spent 14 hours taking people to the doctor. Her dad has some sort of vascular ailment that is causing his ankles and feet to blister and swell. It had gotten to be quite bad, so he had to see a specialist about an hour away, so S drove him there at 7:00 in the morning. Then, when she got back, she immediately took Lil' S1 to urgent care, because of his earache. They didn't get back until about 5:00 pm. Both my father-in-law and my son got some medicine and seem to be on the mend, so that's good. It sucks for Lil' S1 because he couldn't go in the water the entire time we were there, and we had to fly back with his ear still bothering him a bit, but so it goes.

S nearly had to make a third trip to the doctor for me, because I strained my hamstring, but it wasn't quite that bad. It's been a little sore the past few weeks, but seemingly nothing major. I mean, I'm nearing 50, so just about every body part is a little sore all the time. But it started really nagging me while I was running on the treadmill, so I stopped and tried to stretch it out, and as I was doing so, I felt a pop. It was a little pop, but it was a pop nonetheless. I just thought, Great, that's me laid up the next few weeks. 

I've had the full-on hamstring blowout, where you are in constant pain and can barely move, and this ain't that, but I certainly won't be running anytime soon. And that sucks because vigorous exercise is my main form of stress relief. Without it, my mental health and mood really are adversely affected. I can still do pushups and upper body weightlifting, so that's good, but I need something cardiovascular to get that good sweat going. Maybe I'll dust off the road bike and take it for a spin. I don't think I've used it since the lockdown. I don't really enjoy cycling as a form of exercise -- I much prefer running -- but it is much easier on the hamstring, and it's better than nothing.   

On Thursday, we went to a matinee showing of Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire and were literally the only people in the theater. It was fine. It's not going to win any Oscars, but it was a decent enough way to pass a few hours. I put it third on my Ghostbusters film ranking. It goes the original Ghostbusters, followed by a big drop to Ghostbusters: Afterlife and Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (they are about the same), then another big drop to the girl Ghostbusters, and then a final big drop to Ghostbusters II, the worst of the bunch by far. S could not convince everybody to watch Dune: Part Two in the theater with her, but she was able to stream it and watch it on my in-laws' big screen TV, while I occupied the kids, so that worked out okay.

We did a new thing this time and flew into and out of Sarasota airport, instead of Tampa, and it was like, Why didn't we do this before?! It's much easier to get to and navigate. We just didn't know about it, but now we do, and I suspect we will use it every time from now on. There is chatter about sending Lil' S1 back during the summer by himself, and the fact that he could arrive at a smaller airport like Sarasota (and one my in-laws could drive to without going on a major interstate*) is a big reason why we might be okay with it. We will see though. The thought of him taking a flight by himself understandably makes me nervous. Although he is pretty good about being independent and handling himself in those types of situations. In many ways, he's still very much a little kid, but in other ways he's quite precocious.

*At one point Lil' S2 and my mother-in-law had the following conversation, after she asked him if he wanted to go to the store with her.

Him: Wait, Avva, you still drive?
Her: Yes, I do, Bujji.
Him: Oh, you just aren't very good now? 

On the flight home, I watched The Greatest Night In Pop, a documentary about the making of the song "We Are the World." It's really good, especially if you are a child of the '80s and want to take a trip down memory lane. I never really liked the song -- I always thought it was saccharine and corny -- but I have a newfound appreciation for it. If anything, it's worth listening to just for the vocal arrangements. It's probably the greatest collection of voices on a single song in music history. If you're into pop music at all, I highly recommend the doc.

Okay, that's all for now.

Until next time...

Entry 708: ACPT and NPR

It's been a few weeks since I posted something here because I've been pretty busy. Last weekend was ACPT, and if you click the link and scroll down to the "Judges and referees" section, you can find my name listed among many others in small print. It was awesome. As I describe to you what I did for pretty much the entire weekend -- scanning thousands of puzzles into a computer and checking that they are scored correctly -- it probably doesn't sound awesome (I literally did not leave the hotel for even a millisecond from the moment I checked-in Friday evening to the morning I checked-out Sunday afternoon), but it was. It's the people and the energy -- so many brilliant, fun, weird people to talk to; such a interesting, stimulating, festive atmosphere.

Will Shortz was there, which was wonderful. As you might know (I mentioned it in a previous entry), he had a stroke about two months ago, so there was some question about whether or not he would be able to attend the tournament. But he made it, and he seems to be doing well--or at least as well as possible for somebody who recently had a stroke. He's in a wheelchair, and there is no life in the left side of his body, but he can speak clearly enough, and most importantly he's still with it upstairs. The intellect is still there. That's the part I worry about as I slowly (and yet much too rapidly) ascend into old age. As far as I'm concerned, the body can go, as long as I can still think straight. I'd rather be like Stephen Hawking, only able to speak through a computer by twitching my cheek muscle, than get dementia and die not knowing who I am or who my loved ones are.

Of course, I'd rather maintain both my mental and physical faculties right up to the very end. That's the goal. It's possible. William Shatner is 93, and he was on Real Time with Bill Maher the other day. He's a little slower than he used to be, naturally, but he's still doing his thing -- performing, interviewing, adventuring. He said he's going to Antarctica soon. I doubt I would have much desire to go to such a place in my mid-nineties, but that's largely because I have little desire to go there now. But I hope, when I'm closing in on the century mark, to be in good enough condition and spirits that I could go there in theory.

Shortly after I got back from the tournament, S had to leave on a business trip. It was just two days this time, but Lil' S1 happened to get sick the night before she left. So, I had two kids on my own, one of whom was quite ill. He was hacking and wheezing and snotting it up all the while. It wasn't Covid -- I tested him -- but I treated it like it was Covid. I kept him home from school for two days and quarantined him in his room (he didn't have the energy to get out of bed much, anyway), and I wore a mask every time I went in there. S makes fun of me for this -- for being so worried about getting sick whenever the kids get sick -- but it's like, why shouldn't I worry, and why shouldn't I take precautions? Getting sick sucks, so if I can avoid it by keeping my distance and/or wearing a mask for a few days, mild inconveniences, it seems worth it to me. It's not like Lil' S1 cares. He didn't want to hang out with me, anyway. He just wanted lie in bed and watch, read, or sleep.

And anyway, I should be the one making fun of S, for always insisting that we give the kids "medicine" when they're sick -- Children's Dimetapp or what have you -- even though that stuff is total bunk. The only reason I give the kids that stuff or take it myself is so that I can say to S that I did so. Actually, this gets at a philosophical parenting difference between S and I. When our kids have a problem, often her first instinct is to do something -- anything is better than nothing, as far as she is concerned. Whereas my first instinct is often to do nothing -- sometimes things just need to work themselves out on their own. 

It's like, when the ship gets rocky for your child, do you help steady it, or do you just provide them moral support until they reach calmer waters? S is more the former; I'm more the latter. But we are able to co-parent pretty well together, because neither of us is too militant about it. Ultimately, we both just want what's best for our children, even if that means that things aren't done our "way." In parenting as in baseball, the only rule is it has to work. Unfortunately, in parenting, unlike in baseball, there is nobody keeping score, and most the time you have absolutely no idea if what you did worked or not.

In other news, if you run in the same political/cultural circles as I do, you probably came across this piece by NPR editor Uri Berliner about how NPR has "lost America's trust," by becoming too ideologically-driven, too focused on identity-based restorative justice, too homogeneous in perspective. And this, in turn, has led to a dwindling audience. It's impossible to say for sure if he's right or not, on the whole -- there are myriad reasons a huge content creator like NPR might struggle to maintain its massive consumer-ship in today's media landscape -- but I can say for sure that he is right for me, personally. I used to love NPR, and now I only listen to one of their podcasts, It's All Politics, and that's mainly because it's so short, I can burn through it on 1.5-speed in under ten minutes. The reasons I mostly stopped consuming NPR content are exactly the reasons Berliner gives in the article.

Basically, over the past ten years or so, NPR has transformed itself from a media organization with a reasonably broad (perhaps left-of-center) appeal, into one that only serves a niche demographic -- highly educated, upper class individuals, who put "In this house, we believe..." signs on their lawns. And if your content is designed for a niche demographic, you are going to end up with a niche audience and the revenue numbers to go with it.

The thing is, if NPR loses its broad appeal, it's not that big a deal, but, as I've written about before, I fear this same sort of thing is going on with the Democratic party, and this is that big a deal. It's not even so much the party itself, as it is institutions that are associated with the party by being left-coded -- like universities and certain media companies (like NPR) -- but in an election, what people think a party stands for matters more than what a party actually does stand for. Biden has a lot of liabilities as the first Tuesday after the first Monday of November approaches -- his age, inflation, the border, the war in Gaza -- and I think this perceived "nichefication" of the Democrats is just one more.

 And on that fun thought... until next time...

 

Entry 707: Shuffling The Deck

I heard something the other day that really blew my mind.

Imagine a deck of cards that has been fully shuffled so that its order is totally random. Now suppose you record its ordering from the top card to the bottom card. It'd be something like king of spades, two of hearts, seven of hearts, nine of clubs, queen of diamonds, so and so forth. Now suppose you do this every time a deck of cards is shuffled at a casino. How many times throughout a typical day do you think that you would hit upon the exact same ordering more than once? The answer is almost certainly never. Every ordering would be different.

Now suppose you extend that not to a single casino but to all casinos in the world, and you extended the time period from a day to a year. How many times now do you think you would record the same ordering? The answer again is almost certainly never. That's pretty crazy, huh? Even considering every shuffle at every casino in the world for a year, you are very unlikely to find two exact same orderings.

But here's the truly mind-blowing part: If you extend this experiment not just to casinos, but to any shuffle* anywhere in the world, and you extended the timeline to all of human history in both directions, past and future, you are still almost certainly never going to record two orderings that are the same. Every shuffle that has ever been and ever will be almost certainly has a unique ordering -- no two shuffles have ever or will ever produce the exact same ordering. 🤯

*For this to be valid, we only consider shuffles that are actually in random order. Obviously, if you manipulate the order or don't mix them up very well, they could be the same.

Somebody said this at a conference, and I found it unbelievable at first, but I did a smell test, and it totally passes.* The reason is because there are 52! (52 factorial) distinct orderings of a deck of cards, and 52! is 52 times 51 times 50 times 49 times every integer all the way down to 1, and that is an unfathomably large number. Doing some back of the envelope math, I calculated that 52! is larger than 2^203, which is larger than 10^60. So, 52! is larger than the number 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, and this is more than the estimated number of atoms in solar system.

*When I get a bit more free time, I'll calculate the actual percentage of hitting upon the same ordering at some point in human history, given some reasonable assumptions.  

So, if, instead of shuffling cards, we imagine we are randomly picking atoms in the solar system (there are roughly 5,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms in a droplet of water, by the way), then, yeah, it's completely believable -- obvious even -- that we could basically never pick the exact same same atom, even if every human who has ever existed and will ever exist did nothing put pick atoms all day for their entire life.

Here's another absurd example of how big 52! is. If you counted 10 billion numbers a second, and starting counting the moment the big bang happened, you would not even be one third of the way to 52! as of today. Like I said above, it is unfathomably large, and I mean that literally -- I don't think we as humans are capable of completely fathoming a number that big. Anything beyond a certain value just qualifies as nutty large. For example, I don't think we have any deep intuition about the difference between 10^15 and 10^21 even though one is a million times the other.

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Here's something fathomable, but still weird. I was telling the family about this gorilla who lived at the B&I shopping center in Tacoma, when I was a kid, named Ivan, and Lil' S1 told me he knew of that gorilla because he read a book inspired by his story: The One and Only Ivan. I did not even know that such a book existed, let alone that he had read it, but the coincidence isn't the part that's weird. The weird part is that a gorilla lived in a shopping center in Tacoma, Washington throughout my childhood. Lil' S2 asked me if I would go see him, and I was like, yeah, because you would just go to the mall, and he'd be there. I would be tagging along with my dad to get some sleeping bags,* or what have you, and we would stop and look at the gorilla in the cage for a few minutes.

*We didn't go to the B&I often, but I specifically remember going there once with my dad once to buy camping equipment. They also had a sports card kiosk there that was a really treat for me. I think they held a big swap meet there every so often too.

That would never fly today. It didn't really fly back then either, to be honest. Ivan was near the end of his time in the Tacoma when I last saw him, as animal rights activists eventually facilitated his move to a more suitable environment in the early '90s. Still, it's weird to think back on it today.

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Speaking of gorillas, we saw Godzilla x Kong today. I went in expecting it to be terrible, and my expectations were met. It's just a stream of violent CGI pap. Poor S, all she wants is to see Dune: Part Two, and nobody wants to see it with her. Actually, I would have today, but we had the kids with us, and neither of them was very keen on seeing it, but they did want to watch Godzilla x Kong. We probably could've cajoled them to see Dune instead, but cajoling preteens to see a nearly three hour movie is likely not the wisest thing to do, if you want to enjoy yourself. Godzilla was an hour shorter, and Lil' S2 still started getting antsy toward the end. 

The worst part about the whole thing is that it cost $85. When I was buying the tickets, I selected 3-D I-Max, thinking, If the movie is terrible, at least we'll be getting a cool theater experience. I mean, why not? And then I saw the price, and was like, Right, that's why. The 3-D didn't even do much for me because I had trouble keeping my eyes open for large stretches of the film. I kept dozing off, which is crazy considering the volume was seemingly set to 200 decibels. Next time I'll bring a pair of earplugs. 

The best part about the movie is that it had a few good old songs in it -- not like good good, but campy good -- that Loverboy song* that goes I gotta do it my w-a-a-a-ay or no at a-l-l-l-l and that Badfinger song that starts I remember finding out about you.

*This video looks like it was made today to parody a rock video from 1981.  

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Speaking of old, campy rock songs, I went in to Dick's Sporting Goods during my lunch break the other day to buy some boxer briefs, and then when I went to Krav Maga that night, the (old) black shorts I was wearing got a big hole in them, so I had to go back to Dick's a day later to get some new black shorts,* and when I went in the, the same song was playing that was playing the first time I went in: "Surrender" by Cheap Trick. Mommy's alright, daddy's alright, they just seem a little w-e-e-e-i-r-d...

*Black shorts are the only color that goes with my black tights, which I wear to wrestling class to alleviate mat burn. I only had one pair -- much to S's bewilderment ("Why do you only have one of things?! Why don't you have a backup?!") -- so it was imperative I get a new set. This time I listened to my wife and bought two pairs.

I went in at the same time of the day, so I'm sure they just have one of those prepackaged playlists that they turn on at opening and just let run. Those things suck for the employees. We had one when I worked at The Sports Authority back in aught-zero, and I grew to mark the time of the day by how annoyed I was at hearing the same song I heard yesterday, and the day before that, and the day before that, and the day before that... It was mostly filled with the same type of inoffensive arena rock from the late '70s and early '80s, but, for some reason, it had that David Bowie/Trent Reznor song "I'm Afraid of Americans." It was such an outlier both in genre and lyrical messaging. I always wondered how it got on there.

That's all for today.

Until next time...   

Entry 706: Anniversary Olio

Today is my and S's 14th wedding anniversary -- our legal one, per the state of Virginia.* We have another anniversary in August of our Indian ceremony, which some of S's family members think is our real wedding date, but we don't celebrate that one, and I can't even remember the exact date. It's August, 2011, maybe the 6th? We also have a third anniversary date that we used to cite in certain company -- sometime in late summer 2010 -- because, since we got married so fast (for visa purposes when we went to Australia for a year), there were some political/familial considerations about whom we told and when, and so it was easier at that moment to announce to some people that we were getting married, not that we already were married. I figured it was an okay lie to tell because soon enough nobody would care and everybody would forget all about it. And so, verily, here we are, whereby even I've forgotten the date, and it was my fake anniversary.

*We picked Virginia instead of DC because, at the time, you had to get an STD test in order to obtain a marriage license in DC. It sounds weird, but it's true. Even weirder, I believe it was just the woman who had to get tested when we were looking into it. Virginia had no such restrictions. (Sexist, I know.) Also, when S and I first met we both worked near the Courthouse Metro stop in Arlington (she had a real job; I was doing a summer internship), and would sometimes meet for lunch, so we had a connection to the area. 

It's funny how our anniversary works. S kinda treats it more like her birthday than our anniversary. Today, she kept asking me to do things with/for her, and then she would add, "as an anniversary gift." After about the third thing, I was like, "Y'know, it's actually my anniversary too." But I was mostly joking. I hate planning things, so I appreciate she does it, and making my wife happy on our anniversary is a gift of its own.

It is also Holi, the Hindu holiday of color, today (tomorrow, technically), so we went to a Hindu temple to celebrate. I'm not usually down with the religious stuff, but I am down with the notion of community, so I'll tag along sometimes. It's fine. The Hindu ceremonies are way better than a mass or a sermon, if you're an interloper like me, because you don't have to sit there in silent boredom for hours. Everything is out in the open, there's a bunch of people chanting, and you can sit on the floor or just mill around, looking at the displays of the various gods, saying a little prayer (or pretending to) and even offering a piece of fruit, as you pass by. You can come and go as you wish, so you never feel trapped. Also, today they had half-decent dosas, which was nice.

Sometimes I think that I should give religion a try, like a real try, but the thought passes pretty quickly. It's like when I think I should become vegan or take up quantum physics. The thing is, I have this thing about me that I absolutely cannot make myself believe something that I don't believe. That's why I've never found Pascal's wager particularly compelling. Betting that there is a God, even behaving as if there is one, is not the same thing as actually believing in one, and my understanding of most major religions is that it's that belief that gets you into eternal paradise. So, if you can't make myself believe, the entire proposition seems moot to me. Also, you not only have to wager on whether or not there is a God, but what is the right way to worship. After all, as Homer Simpson said, "And what if we've picked the wrong religion? Every week we're just making god madder and madder." So, I think I'll just stick to my pseudo-intellectual skepticism.

Alright, short post this week. It's late, and I need to get some sleep. Monday is an in-office day for me, and I haven't slept well the past few nights. I think it's our flannel sheets. S loves them, and they are really soft, but they are so goddamn hot. It's like there's a trapped pocket of heat under my back at all times. I've woken up in the middle of the night drenched in sweat the past two nights and have had trouble getting back to sleep (in part because there was a mini puddle of perspiration on my side of the bed). We had to wash the sheets, and I convinced S to replace them with non-flannel ones, so I'm hoping tonight will be less moist and more restful.

Until next time... 

Entry 705: Layover From Hell

RIP, Richard Lewis, who died of a heart attack a few weeks ago. He was the comedian who coined (or, more likely, popularized) the saying "____ from Hell." I was never a big fan of his work, to be honest, until his regular appearances on Curb Your Enthusiasm. He was low-key brilliant as an exaggerated version of himself, often playing something of a straight-man to Larry David's over-the-top, petty megalomaniac. Here's a clip of him from a recent episode. He had Parkinson's disease, and you can see that it had really started to take its toll. Years of substance abuse and an eating disorder as a younger man surely didn't help matters either. Lewis' death provides yet another time-marches-on example, as I remember him being something of a heartthrob back in the day. It's just so weird to see hip, hot celebrities from your youth wither away and die.

On the flip-side, however, Larry David, who was born only a few days after Lewis (at the same hospital), seems to be as healthy and spry as ever, so he's a good counterpoint. He has that thing going on, where you start looking old when you're actually still young, and then when you actually are old, you look pretty good for your age. My father-in-law is like this a bit too. He's in decent shape for a soon-to-be 82-year-old, but in pictures from his wedding day, he looks like a middle-age man, and he was only in his early thirties. I guess, there are late bloomers, and then there are late bloomers.

Anyway, I just got back from a work trip to Palm Springs early Saturday morning -- so early that it was more like Friday night. I like Palm Springs -- it's a beautiful city and a cool place to visit -- but it's one of the more annoying places in the continental US to get to from DC. There are no direct flights, which is extremely irritating, especially so when your work is paying the airfare. Also, I never seem to be able to find that Goldilocks hour-and-fifteen layover--they are all either 45 minutes or four and a half hours. This time I was able to get an hour layover both there and back, which is decent, but only by departing from and arriving at different DC airports. This meant I couldn't drive, which, again, is especially irritating when your work will pay for parking.

I also made a mistake by buying an "economy basic" ticket, which meant I couldn't bring a carry-on unless it fit under my seat. I do not remember selecting this option, and I didn't even know that there was a type of ticket below economy,* but apparently select it I did. It turned out to be fine. I actually prefer to not have a big carry-on, as it's a pain to lug it through the airport, and it's nice to not have to worry about overhead space. But I will usually bring one, in lieu of checked luggage, for short trips (especially with layovers), because if a flight gets cancelled, or you miss a layover, or something like that (which has happened to me several times before), it's way way more convenient and way way less stressful to have everything with you.

*S books all the family flights, because she's some sort of premier United flyer and frequently pays for our tickets using her miles. This is a huge perk of her traveling all the time for work.

On the way there, everything went smoothly. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the return trip. The trouble started Tuesday evening when I got an alert from United telling me they were expecting snowstorms in Denver on Friday afternoon, which would affect my layover, so I should book a new flight through a different city. It seemed a bit hasty to me to make this call three days in advance, but better safe than sorry, I figured, so I arranged a new flight through Houston. It got into DC much later than my original flight (10:30 pm versus 3:00 pm), but it also left at noon, instead of the ungodly 5:30 am, so I didn't mind the later arrival too much. Also, it allowed me to eat a delicious breakfast (something called migas) Friday morning with some colleagues at a quaint, trendy little joint in Palm Springs called Farm. So, that was cool.

When I got to the airport Friday afternoon, I noticed there was a flight leaving to Denver, so apparently they didn't get hit too hard, but, whatever, I had already changed my ticket. It didn't matter much to me one way or the other. That is, until we were about to land in Houston, and the pilot made an announcement that we would be circling for a little while because they were having thunderstorms in Houston and landing would pose a safety risk. What? You gotta be kidding me. Rain on your wedding day is not ironic. Rain at the airport at which you specifically rescheduled a layover, lest your travel be disrupted by inclement weather, is ironic. Immediately I got worried about missing my layover before thinking: Hey, dum-dum, your layover is going to be delayed too. You should be worried about getting out of Houston!

Indeed that proved to be the appropriate worry. Upon landing, I get a *ding* your flight is delayed one hour, and when one ding comes, you know there are more. Those things are like mosquito bites. The issue isn't so much that you got bitten once, it's that you know you're going to feel about a dozen more bites in a few minutes. Sure enough... *Ding* your flight is further delayed by a half hour. *Ding* your flight is delayed 40 more minutes. *Ding*... *ding*... *ding*...

It gets up to a three-hour delay for a flight that is already getting to DC late in the evening. But we finally board, and then the toilet breaks. It starts leaking that weird blue sanitary fluid, so they have to bring out a mechanic to try to fix it. They allow us to deplane in the meantime, which is extremely deflating, but I actually appreciate it because I wanted to get some water and a snack. (I was really counting on getting some pretzel mix and that quinoa chocolate thing with some seltzer water soon.) Nothing is open except for one of those tech-dystopian cashier-less kiosks, so I ring myself up a bottle of water and a small bag of almonds for $15.67.

We reboard and finally take-off, arriving in DC around 2:15 am. I book it through the airport, grab my bag from the carousel, reserve an Uber, and get home at 3:15 am. It's a pretty impressive time, to be honest -- one hour from a cabin door at a gate in Terminal C in Dulles to my front door -- but it's only because the airport and roads were virtually empty. The thing about airport delays, however, is that once they are done, they are done. You don't have to think about them anymore. You can rip up your boarding passes (or delete them from your phone as the case may be), throw away your luggage stickers, and wash your hands of the whole situation. It's kinda nice, in a weird way, to have a problem in your life that is completely solved.

Also, the advent of the iPad makes travel delays much more palatable than they used to be. In all my flights combined, I crossed off five movies from my massive "to watch" list -- American Fiction,* Dune, The Holdovers, 1917, and Born on Third Base (a Gary Gulman comedy special). They were mostly all excellent. I couldn't really get into Dune, though. I wanted to see it so that I could be all caught up to watch Dune: Part II in the theater, but now I'm not super excited about that proposition. I don't know what is was exactly, but the movie just didn't grab me. I think it was too Game of Thrones-y -- too many characters and tribes and magic, not enough explanation for anything. I'm just not a fantasy guy. Although, I did enjoy the 1984 version of Dune, starring Kyle MacLachlan and Sting. I mean, I never actually saw that film, but for many years my family owned a copy of the book -- not the Frank Herbert novel, but a pictorial book based on the movie -- that was autographed by MacLachlan, and I really liked looking through it as a kid. I wonder what happened to that book. It's possible it's still somewhere in my parents' house.

*Technically, I watched this one before I left.

The best of the five movies was probably American Fiction. The performances in it were so good, especially that of Sterling K. Brown. His Oscar nomination was well-deserved. I also quite enjoyed The Holdovers. It made me nostalgic, not for the early '70s when it was set -- I wasn't alive then -- but for the time in my life when people would actually go see something like the The Holdovers in the theater, and it seemed like a mainstream movie, not a little arthouse film. This was right around the time Richard Lewis was at his peak.

And now that I've brought it full circle... until next time...

Entry 704: The State Of The Household

The state of the household is... good, I guess. I mean, it's definitely good on the macro-level, but this week has been a bit rough. There were some parenting things that I won't get into, so as to respect the privacy of my children. (As I mentioned before, the older they get, the weirder I feel writing about them without their knowledge.) And also the closet thing I mentioned in my last post has turned into a colossal headache. What was supposed to be a few hours of inconvenience has turned into a week-long (at least) ordeal. We've certainly gone through worse -- like that time we had giant mounds of dirt in our basement, as workers laid down new pipes to stop shit-water from spewing onto our basement floor -- but that doesn't make this any better now.

What happened is the installation guys came over and started ripping out the old shelving, but they stopped because some of the drywall started to crack, and they got scared about causing damage. They told us we had to get a contractor to finish the demo job, plaster the cracks, and apply a new coat of paint before they would do the installation. Then they packed up and left us with a half-destroyed closet.

I specifically did not even want to get our closet redone -- in fact, I actively argued against it -- so it's safe to say I was pretty irked by this. However, I knew S was also very annoyed, and it's not like she planned for this to happen, so I tried really hard to bite my tongue and not show any rancor towards her for it. I mostly succeeded. I did make one comment, something like, "well, that's on you," when she was lamenting about how this was happening at the worst possible time. She really did not like that but thankfully didn't hold it against me for too long. I mean, look, if you push to do something that your spouse really doesn't want to do, and then that thing goes horribly wrong, they are allowed to make a comment about it. Plus, I wasn't wrong. S had to leave town for work again on Wednesday, so she really tried to thread the needle with this remodeling job and didn't leave much leeway if things went sideways, which, not surprisingly, given things frequently go sideways with these types of home improvement jobs, they did.

S, to her credit, immediately found somebody who could come out the next day to do the work for us. It's this guy she's used since she had a condo before we met. He did a few jobs at our old house, but he does kinda shoddy work sometimes, so we don't trust him for big jobs. But he's actually semi-responsive and reliable, which is a huge rarity for contractors in this area (maybe any area), so he was fine by me. Plus, it was an easy job. It's something even I, a DIY moron, could have managed, had I wanted to spend the weekend doing it, which I did not.

Anyway, the guy came and did the demo on Wednesday and finished the paint job this morning. He was supposed to do it yesterday, and he left me hanging when I texted him (note the "semi" part of the adjective "semi-responsive" above), but he apologized for it, so, whatever... no harm, no foul. The closet installation guys are scheduled to come back on Tuesday, so everything should be done by the time I return from my work trip next Friday. Let's hope.

In the meantime, however, it's a nontrivial disruption. We (well, I, S didn't have time to help before her trip) piled our clothes that were in the closet onto the bed of the guest bedroom in the basement, so I have to go down there and hunt through everything to get dressed. Also, our bedroom reeks of paint at the moment, and it gives me a headache to be in there for too long, so I probably won't sleep there tonight, and since our spare bed is currently buried under clothes, I'll likely be resigned to the not-super-comfortable sofa bed* in our living room. Oh, and there's a giant pile of boards and nails and other debris on our porch that we will have to get rid of somehow. Fun.

*Update: I did in fact sleep on the sofa bed, and it’s actually quite comfortable. The couch part is uncomfortable—the kids have warped the cushions through repeated misuse, so they’re saggy and mushy—but the bed part is great! We will likely get rid of it over the next year or so because we rarely use the bed, but now I’ll be sad to see it go.

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In other news, Biden gave his State of the Union address last night. I didn't want to watch it because I knew I'd just be filled with anxiety, waiting for him to make a major gaffe, but for some reason I turned it on anyway and actually thought it went pretty well. He definitely looks and acts like an octogenarian, but he was cogent and energetic and made a strong case for his reelection. His I'm the only sane option argumentation played just as strongly for me last night as it did four years ago. He upset a few people by referring to an illegal immigrant as "an illegal," but I don't think the bulk of the population actually cares. Probably some people even find it refreshing that Biden doesn't kowtow to the language police. Personally, I find a lot of these new progressive language rules pointless, pretentious, and annoying, but in this case I'm with the scolds. I really dislike the word illegal as a noun. It does sound dehumanizing to me. But I'm willing to let it slide if the term slips out of an 81-year-old man in reference to an alleged murderer. Biden also mispronounced the name of the victim calling her "Lincoln Riley" instead of "Laken Riley," but unless you happen to know that there is an actual semi-famous person named Lincoln Riley, you probably didn't even realize this.  

The big question now is, Will this performance actually help Biden in any meaningful way? And my answer is, I have no idea, but it certainly can't hurt.

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In other other news, New York Times crossword editor Will Shortz recently announced he is recovering from a stroke he had about a month ago. I'm happy to hear that he is alive and on the mend, but this one hit me kinda hard. In part, it's because I know Will personally, not well, but we've met a few times, and I've always found him to be a total mensch. But it's also because I can't help but think of my own parents and in-laws who are roughly Will's age (older, even). They all seem to be in pretty good health at the moment, but, as the saying goes, father time in undefeated.

Anyway, best wishes to Will and his husband (also a great guy). I will hopefully see both of them in good spirits at this year's ACPT.

Until next time...         

Entry 703: Busy Week, Busy Weeks Ahead

Busy week, this past one, especially so since S was traveling for work. I don't get much of a break either. S is leaving again on Wednesday for two days, and then I'll be traveling for work the following Monday (the one work trip I take each year), and then S will be leaving again for a few days, and then I'll be headed out shortly thereafter to a crossword puzzle tournament (the one non-work trip I take each year), and then soon after that, we will all be going to Florida to visit S's parents. It's too much.

To add to everything, the kids both seem to have a bunch of activities this time of year -- we have five birthday parties over the next three weeks -- and S is having our closet remodeled on Tuesday. It supposedly will only take one day, but still, that's one day of chaos in our house that I don't need right now. A new closet would be like 150th on my list of household improvements, but once S gets something in her head like this, she just wears me down until finally I relent. What she would say, I'm sure, is that she has to do this or else nothing would ever get done, and it's a fair point. Plus, I have to admit, after the things she wants get finished, I almost always find myself thinking: Actually, it is much better this way.

The other thing that is on the horizon for me is Lil' S2's flag football season. I "volunteered" to be the coach, so it's a lot more work for me than last year, when all I had to do was get him to his games on time. What happened is that they split up 2nd and 3rd graders this season. His previous team was composed of 2nd and 3rd graders, and the coach was the dad of a 2nd grader, so when they made us split the team, somebody had to coach the 3rd graders (Lil' S2's team), and I was the obvious candidate.

"Hilariously", however, not enough 2nd graders signed up to fill out the league, and for some reason the powers-that-be still kept the teams segregated by grade, so each 2nd-grade team is playing most their games against 3rd-grade teams. The other coach was legit pissed off about this. They made us break up our team, comprised of a bunch of friends and neighbors, who've all been playing together for two years, and then just mixed the league anyway. That's some bullshit. Plus, from a competitive standpoint, they took away all the 2nd-grade teams' 3rd graders, only to schedule a bunch of their games against all 3rd-grade teams. It makes absolutely no sense. Whatever... I'm definitely annoyed by it, but it's elementary school flag football -- I'm not going to get too worked up over it.

As I mentioned before, football is Lil' S2's only extracurricular activity, and we are struggling to get him to try something -- anything -- else. His school put on a concert for Black History Month about Black musicians, and it was super cute, and he got really into it, even though he only had a bit part. (He was one of the non-Michael members of the Jackson Five.) He told me that it was actually really fun to practice it, and he was super excited about his costume and all that. So, I suggested he take drama classes, and he immediately said no. Like, before I could I could even finish the question, he shot it down. I'm super tempted to just sign him anyway -- I took drama class every summer as a kid and loved it* -- but then if he really doesn't want to do it, we could get into one of those situations where the half-hour before class turns into a regular fight with him refusing to go and us insisting that he does, and there are few things I like less about parenting than that. So, I guess I'll just continue to ask and hope that as he gets older, he'll be more willing to try new things.

*One of my biggest regrets is not ever auditioning for the big play in high school. My senior year, the drama teacher asked me specifically to try out after she had already made first cuts, so I likely would have gotten a decent part. But I said no because I wanted to train for the upcoming wrestling season, which, in retrospect, is such a lame reason. You just don't realize at that age that you will likely never again in your life have the opportunity, the free time, and bandwidth to do cool things like be in a play. But that's the problem with youth: It's wasted on the young. 

When things get busy like this, the first thing to go, sadly, are my workouts. As part of my plan to beat back old age and death for as long as possible, I really try to get adhere to a schedule of daily vigorous exercise. Under normal circumstances, I have my routine down pretty good, but when S leaves or there is some other disruption, everything gets thrown out of whack. Too often it'll be like: I'll go for a run later; well, I'll at least do a yoga video; okay, maybe just a few minutes of weights; wait, how is it 9:30 at night already?

I don't eat great when I get busy either -- too much carryout and frozen pizza, too much snacking, too many sweets at the end of the night. The scale has not been kind to me of late. I don't really care about the number so much, per se -- it's much more about how I look and feel -- but if the number gets too high, it's the indicator that need I really to get after it again (which I probably already know).

On a similar subject, I read a pretty interesting article about plus-size influencers who got shamed by their community for losing weight. I like this article because it's a good example of what I hate about pretty much every movement these days, especially left-coded movements. They have good causes at their cores, but they get coopted by their most extreme adherents, who act more like religious sectarians than advocates, and they cast out or intimidate into silence everybody was does not completely accept their (usually dubious) dogma, often labeling them as traitors or [identity]-phobes in the process. The irony, I think, is that this works directly against a movement because it totally shrinks the tent and paints everybody in it as an unreasonable zealot.

In general, I find the older I get, the more anti-activism I get. I don't know if this is because I'm changing, or activism is changing, or some combination thereof -- probably the latter.

Until next time... 

Entry 702: Miscellanea

Alright, the wife and kids are away for about an hour, so I'm just going to fire through as many topics as I can in that time.

More on Age

My last post was largely about age and aging. Age, of course, has been a hot topic in the news because our current president is quite old (81) and is seeking reelection, so he would be really old when he leaves office (86) if he served another full term. His age isn't the issue per se, but rather his changes in behavior, as caused by the effects of aging, are proving to be a potential weakness in his candidacy. Even the most ardent Biden supporters, if they are being honest with themselves, have to admit that he has slowed down considerably in his speech and demeanor. He presents publicly as much frailer than he did even two years ago. His verbal gaffes, which he has always made, now come off as senior moments rather than personality quirks.

According to those close to him, he's still on top of things mentally, and his policies and positions are the same as always, which is good, but a huge part of being (and running for) president is communication, and that's where Biden's outward feebleness really hurts him. It understandably makes people uneasy. I'm not an ageist, by any means. If anything, I think our culture is too youth obsessed (and I thought that even when I was a youth myself). If an old person can still do the job, then their age truly doesn't matter -- and some old people can do the job right up to the moment they die. I remember listening to an interview with Carl Reiner when he was 95, and he was completely lucid and cogent, telling stories from his past, making salient political points, and promoting his new memoir. If Biden presented that way, I don't think his age would be a huge political liability.

Personally, I'm not concerned with Biden's ability to do the job -- except for what I consider his main job: beating Donald Trump in November. It's getting a bit scary how close this race is (most polls actually show Trump with a slight lead, but I'd put it at 50-50 at this point). Biden just doesn't seem to be able to, and his advisers don't seem willing to allow him to, effectively make the case against Trump as he did in 2020. One thing that really helped him back then, I think, is that his opponents way overplayed the doddering old man, "Sleepy Joe" persona, so it was very easy for him to outperform expectations in the debates and other public appearances. I don't think that same phenomenon will be in play this time around.

There have been many, many calls for Biden to drop out -- Bill Maher has taken to calling him "Ruth Bader Biden" -- but unless he becomes seriously ill over the next few months, I don't see that happening. He's almost certainly going to be the nominee. I am slightly in favor of him dropping out and being replaced by Generic Democrat X, but it is a risk. Because we are already past the point of having a normal primary, Generic Democrat X would have to be somebody not selected by the voters, and so there is a very real chance that whoever gets selected would be even less popular than old Biden. I wish he had stepped down a few months ago, but he didn't, and he's not going to, so for those of us who don't want to see a repeat of 2016, our best course of action is to support him and vote for him and hope distaste for his opponent carries the day as it has in the past.

Love is Blind

From the depressingly serious to the frivolously fun.

Love is Blind is S and my trash TV show of choice. Last season was so bad and boring, we almost didn't watch this season, but we decided to give it another try, primarily because it's one of the few shows we actually watch together,* and what else are we going to do during our rare moments alone -- talk to each other? It turned out to be a good decision, as the latest season has been quite entertaining thus far. I definitely would not watch the show on my own, but with S, it's fun.** 

*Part of this is because we have different taste. She's not going to watch Curb Your Enthusiasm, for example (new season has been excellent thus far). But a bigger part of it is because I just can't keep up with her on the TV watching front. When I'm doing household chores, I listen to podcasts, but she watches TV on the iPad. She also watches a lot of stuff on her work trips. There have been many times when I hear of a show and suggest we watch it together, and then she tells me that she's already seen the first three seasons, but that if I can catch up in the next week, we can watch season four together.

**Another thing I like about it is that Mina Kimes does a recap show about it on YouTube (Love is Kimes), and in general, I really like Mina Kimes, so it's a good way to consume more of her content. And if you don't know who Mina Kimes is, she's an NFL analyst (Seahawks fan!) at ESPN, who also dabbles in pop culture commentary. I think her podcast is probably my second favorite football podcast at the moment. My top choice in Minus Three, but only when Kevin Hench is on -- love listening to that guy.

Keys

Lil' S1 has taken up keyboarding. He does this thing called School of Rock that a few of his friends do. He just started, so we will see how it goes. I could totally see him getting bored and abandoning it in a few weeks, but that's okay. I just want my kids to have the courage to come out of their comfort zones and try things. If they don't like it and quit, so be it. We bought a keyboard so that he can practice at home, and so far it's hard to say how it's going. He does play a bit (Weezer's "Island in the Sun"), but he seems to peter out pretty quickly. Also, when he's bored, and I suggest he go practice, he often makes excuses ("I don't have the app on my phone."), which doesn't bode well. But, like I said, we shall see.

Lil' S2 is apparently going to start playing keyboard as well, but I will be surprised if he actually follows through with it and absolutely shocked if it sticks. He's only doing it because we're making him chose another activity in addition to flag football, which is all he wants to do. He's obsessed with football, which I don't mind (I am too), but I want him to try other things, as well. He doesn't even want to play other sports. I tried to get him into baseball (he has a very good arm) or basketball or soccer, but he refuses to play them and gets weirdly bent out of shape when I bring them up. Then I tried a bunch of individual sports -- tennis, swimming, jujitsu, etc. -- but he doesn't want to do those either. The thing is, I suspect that if he actually gave some of these things a chance, he'd really like them, so I'm tempted just to sign him up for one, but then I'm the parent who's forcing his kid to play a sport, and I have little desire to be that guy, so I'm kinda stuck.

S and I discussed it, and we told him he has to chose one other activity that isn't football. It doesn't have to be a sport. He picked Mathnasium, which is this thing his brother did for many years, but then he threw a fit when he found out we could only sign him up in monthly increments. ("I just want to try it for two weeks!") We told him that he only had to go once a week, so a month was actually only four sessions, but it didn't assuage him one bit. So, then he said that he would do keyboards as his other activity, and that's where we left it. Who knows, by the time you read this he could have given up on that idea entirely and told us he wants to try kabaddi instead. Actually, I'd be down if he wanted to try kabaddi. It looks cool, and it would help him keep in touch with his Indian roots. We would probably have trouble finding a kabaddi league in this area, though.

Taxes

We -- well, mainly I -- did our taxes this week. We haven't filed yet because we are still waiting on a form, but they're pretty much done. I get so resentful every time I do taxes. It's not because of the amount we have to pay -- I really don't care that much about that. It's because of how byzantine and maddening the process is. I would gladly pay a few percent more each year, if it were possible to understand exactly how everything works without needing a CPA degree. The fact that we have to pay to know how much we have to pay is absolutely ridiculous. I mean, just basic TurboTax is like $100.

The other thing that drives me crazy is that I'm constantly suspicious that if I were savvier, we would be paying way less, and that makes me feel like a chump. It's not about the money; it's about my ego. The amount we owe is a bit more than what we were guessing, and I think that's because we simply don't qualify for some of the deductions we used to (humblebrag!), but I'm not sure. We've been thinking about just going to H&R Block and paying somebody to do everything for us. It's possible we would come out ahead because the accountant's fee would be less than the amount of savings they could find for us. But it's also possible we would just end up paying somebody a few hundred dollars, and wasting even more time and energy on this dreadful task, to do what we already did in TurboTax. It's tough to say, which is why it's so infuriating.

I don't agree with much of what Paul Ryan (remember him?) had to say about taxes (or anything else), but one thing I did like was when he said that the tax code should be simplified to the point that a tax return is no bigger than an index card. I'll take it a step farther: How about people who aren't self-employed don't even have a return? There are no deductions, nothing to itemize or declare, just x% comes out of your check each pay period, and we all get on with it. Why couldn't that work?

Until next time...      

Entry 701: A Post About A Post About Ageism

I've been thinking a lot about aging these days. In part, it's because it's a hot topic in the news. In part, it's because I'm training to take the test to level-up in Krav Maga, which has made me even more acutely aware than usual of my gradual, but inevitable physical decline. (I'm fighting it tooth and nail, though -- believe you me!) In part, it's because I've been reading a lot of my parents' Storyworth stories about their past selves, which naturally makes me think of the passage of time.* In part, it's because of an email that came through on the listserv for parents of children at Lil' S2's elementary school.

*One thing that is a total trip is thinking back to events I remember very well and doing the math and realizing my parents were significantly younger than I am now when they occurred.

My kids' district does a thing for the 100th day of the school year: Dress like you're 100 years old. Kids are encouraged to come to school wearing "old people's" clothes -- thick glasses, old-time trousers and nylons, shawls and flat caps, etc. It’s a fun little thing to do, like PJ Day (which I've never liked) or Silly Socks Day or what have you. To be honest, I didn't even know our district did this until last week, and that's only because a woman posted a message to the listserv -- a listserv, mind you, that is used almost exclusively for school logistics; it's not a place where people typically air grievances or voice political opinions -- averring that having kids dress like they are 100 years old "feels quite ageist, and by extension, can be ableist as well." Later she says that she told her children that they were not allowed to participate because "it was not respectful to our elders to treat their age as a costume (any more than it would be to treat race or sexuality or other types of identity as a costume)."

My first thought upon reading this was Obama saying a few years ago that Democrats need to stop being buzzkills. This, I believe, is the exact type of thing he was referring to. There is a strong tendency among folks on the left* to turn everything into an offense against a marginalized community. It's like we should never feel too good about things, or we become complacent about how terrible our society actually is. It's very puritanical, in it's way: We mustn't ever feel good, lest we forget our sins.

*I'm making an assumption that this woman is on the left politically because clearly she is. Although, it would be hilarious if I later find out she's a hardcore Trump supporter.

My second thought was Have you seen little kids dress up like old people? It's frickin' adorable! Then I remembered that my niece's school district actually does this same thing, and I had pictures of her from my sister-in-law, so I went back and looked at them, and they are in fact the cutest damn thing you've ever seen. My dad, who is pushing 75, commented on the pics, and surprisingly he didn't mention anything about his identity being treated as a costume. He actually said the pictures were "so much fun" and really "brightened up [his] day." So, here's a thought experiment: If you took a random sample of 100 senior citizens who live in a school district that does this type of 100-day celebration, and you showed them pictures of the kids dressed up as old people. How many of them would respond like my dad? 60? 70? 80? How many of them would be offended by kids using their identity as a costume? If you set the over-under at 5, I would probably take the under.

The thing is, age is not really an "identity" in the sense it is used today, and if it is, it's not one that any group "owns," because we all will be old someday, or we will die young, which is way worse (despite what Roger Daltrey -- who, by the way, will turn 80 in a few weeks -- might say). Given the alternative, being old is one of the greatest privileges a human can experience. Of course, old people can be, and sometimes are, discriminated against, but that's true of literally any definable group of people. And that's clearly not what's going on here. Kids dressing up like old people is just goofing off and being silly. It's poking fun at aging, I suppose, but everybody has license to poke fun at aging, the same way everybody has license to poke fun at death. Getting old and dying is the ultimate joke, and it's a joke on all of us. I don't see how it's at all apt to compare age with race or sexuality as the listserv poster did.

Plus, the kids aren't even dressing up like actual old people who are alive today. They are dressing up like old people from 70 years ago. I mean, my dad dresses pretty much the same way I do. In fact, sometimes I look in the mirror and startle myself, because I see my dad in it. Actual old people don't dress like they are from the 1940s. They pretty much just dress like every other adult does today, so the kids' "costumes" aren't even of people who are alive today. Complaining about this seems quite ridiculous to me.

But that's okay.

There is nothing wrong with being ridiculous. We are all ridiculous about certain things. I bet at least a quarter of the content on this blog is me complaining about things that make everybody else roll their eyes. So, I have absolutely no issue with somebody finding kids dressing up like old people distasteful. What I do take issue with, however, is somebody trying to stop it for everybody and for calling out others for participating -- and that's what this woman did. She contacted the district chancellor and encouraged others to do the same so that "we can begin to change this practice." And then she concluded saying that she meant "no shame," but that we should take her thoughts into consideration because this was one of the "subtle forms of discrimination" in our society today.

Nobody responded to her post, and I hope the chancellor doesn't act on her complaint. S said that she appreciated the last part, but I thought it was kinda condescending. A better way to show you don't mean any shame is to just not post anything at all. You could just think not my cup of tea and move on. Nobody is forcing your children to participate. In general, we need more not my cup of tea-ism. There's no moral imperative for us to speak out against everything that rubs us the slightest bit the wrong way. You gotta pick your battles, and if one of your battles is preventing kids from make-believing they're old people, then you need to pick new battles.

What this listserv poster should have done is written this letter, and then started an anonymous(ish) blog and posted it there. That's the way you do it.

Alright, I think that's way more than enough on that topic.

Until next time...

Entry 700: Super Bowl Sunday

My 700th entry comes on Super Bowl Sunday. Too bad it couldn't be a better matchup. I mean, the game itself has the promise to be very exciting, which is good, but my interest in seeing either of these teams win is pretty low. As a Seahawks fan, I naturally root against the 49ers, so I'm pulling for the Chiefs, but it's not like I have any great affinity for them. I've only known one Chiefs fan in my life, and he wasn't exactly my favorite person in the world. So, I'm kinda like, meh, whatever.

We are going to some friends' house for a party tonight, which should be fun. We've gone in the past, and we usually leave at halftime. The problem with the Super Bowl on the East Coast is that it starts too late. Kickoff isn't until after 6:30, which means the game isn't over until around 10:00 or 10:30. That's way past the bedtime of most children (and many adults!) on a school night, and that's assuming you hop under the covers the moment the game ends, which nobody actually does. Lil' S2 loves football now, and he's really pumped about this party, and he's already asking if we can stay until the end of the game, but then he wouldn't be going to bed until around 11:00 or 11:30, which means he will be super tired tomorrow morning to start the week, and he gets cranky when he's tired. So, I dunno, we have balance that with the potential of making memorable childhood moments. Remember when your parents let you stay up to watch something special? Nothing was better than that.

It's super annoying that the NFL does it this way. I'm sure they've done the market research on the optimal start time, given who watches in what time zone, but it just seems like you could start the game at 5:00 or even 4:30 eastern time and nobody but children on the East Coast would be affected, and they would be affected positively. Also, maybe I'm giving the Shield too much credit, assuming they've correctly optimized things. This is the same organization that for years thought it was a good idea to black out home games on TV in the local market if they didn't sell out. As it turns out, punishing your fans for not wanting to attend your games doesn't make them want to attend your games. It just makes them follow other teams instead, which is what happened. A game on TV isn't just a game, it's also the best three and a half hour commercial for your product you could possibly get. More exposure means more interest, which means more consumers and more money. How the NFL failed to see that for so long is beyond me. Then again, they've basically minted money in profits the past quarter century, so maybe I should defer more to their judgement. Then again again, maybe they just won the lottery, with football being so popular at this moment in history for some reason, and now they think they have a unique skill in guessing random numbers. I'm never sure how that all shakes out.

Anyway, back to this particular Super Bowl, Lil' S1, who has no interest in football whatsoever, is pulling for the 49ers tonight because he doesn't like Taylor Swift. This makes me a bit uneasy, being that he is unwittingly aligning himself with the incel wing of MAGA world,* but whatever. He doesn't know anything about the culture wars (lucky him). He's just being different because all his little girl friends love Taylor Swift, and he thinks it's annoying, which it almost certainly is, because just about all kids that age are annoying with their interests, very much including Lil' S1. I can't tell you how many times I've tuned him out, as he explains in excruciating detail the plot of The Evers or whatever is the latest book he's read. 

*This is another weird way in which the politics have almost completely inverted from when I was a youngster. Back in the day, the jocks and popular chicks were mostly right-coded, and now they're mostly left-coded. I remember a funny tweet from back when Colin Kaepernick kneeling was a hot-button issue, something like: In America's divorce, who would have thought the liberals would get football?

Also, it's fine, healthy even, to occasionally agree with people whose views you otherwise deplore. If you don't do this, you end up taking positions that are contrary to your values and making decisions that only hurt yourself. One of my favorite quotes is by The Cure frontman Robert Smith about the singer Morrissey, who is notoriously difficult to get along with: "If Morrissey says not to eat meat, then I'll eat meat...that's how much I hate Morrissey." I like it because it's funny, but it illustrates a terrible principle to actually live by. And yet that's what I see going on so much in culture and politics these days, on both sides of the coin. Vegetarians eating meat because people they don't like said not to. I mean, look no further than the Super Bowl itself, in which all the right-wing agitators are pulling for... San Francisco?

It's all so stupid. So, I'm not going to try to talk Lil' S1 out of his anti-Swiftie position. As for me, I really admire Taylor Swift and like everything about her... except her music. 

Until next time...

PS -- If you want to listen to good music, hit up the Tracy Chapman/Luke Combs duet at the Grammys. There was a bit of (very stupid) culture-war controversy over this also, but it's instantly put out of mind when you hear the song. It's such a beautiful composition, it transcends all the bullshit. 

Entry 699: More On Kids And Phones

This is something of a followup to my previous entry about kids and phones. Coincidentally, earlier this week, I heard The New York Times columnist Pamela Paul on The Lost Debate podcast discussing this very topic with host Ravi Gupta. Throughout the conversation they reference an article of Paul's from November titled "It's Not Kids With the Cellphone Problem, It's Parents." I don't remember reading this when it came out, but I went back and read it after listening to the podcast. They are both pretty good and worth a read/listen.

If you read my last entry, you know I am quite concerned about my kids' becoming addicted to their screened devices, particularly Lil' S1 to his cell phone. (I'm concerned about this with society overall, but, as the saying goes, it starts at home.) So, I came into the episode expecting to be in lockstep with Paul on pretty much everything. However, I found I'm only with her on about 80% of it. Big picture, I agree with her, but there are a few things I think she gets wrong -- or at least doesn't give enough credence to.

But first let's say what she gets right: Cellphones and other similar personal devices should be banned from school, up to and including high school, full stop. There's very little upside to allowing them, and the downside -- that they are extremely distracting and impede learning in almost every possible way -- is massive. Paul is right that the parents are the problem here,* by not only abiding their children's device usage during school, but in some cases demanding it. The convenient "lies" that parents use to justify this are indeed just that.

*Aren't the parents pretty much always the problem, though, since they are, you know, the parents? On what societal issue are parents allowed to say, "Hey, that's not our fault, blame it on our kids!"

At Lil' S1's middle school, they have to lock their phones in a Yondr pouch* when they arrive and then get them unlocked before they leave. This seems like a decent way to do it. Kids can have their phones on the way to and from school, when they might need them and aren't in class, but can't use them during the actual school hours.

*For some reason, I always want to call it a bota bag, even though I know that this is something totally different. 

And this is where I diverge a bit from Paul. She argues not just that kids shouldn't have phones in school but that they shouldn't have phones at all. I respect this position, and if it's what works for your family, then terrific, but I don't think it's realistic for society on the whole, and I don't think parents are wrong or "the problem" if they want their kid to have a phone.

Phones are bad, but they are also good, which is what makes them bad, as if they were only bad, we would just ban them like DDT and not even be facing this dilemma. But phones for kids have one huge thing going for them: They are incredibly convenient for parents. Paul acknowledges this, but dismisses it, or even implies it's a negative. I see this idea come up sometimes -- this notion that anything parents do for their own "convenience" is necessarily wrong if it adversely affects their children in any way -- but I don't understand it and don't subscribe to it. In life, after all, as Thomas Sowell once said, and I frequently repeat, "There are no solutions; there are only tradeoffs." If you substitute the phrase "sanity" for "convenience" above, you see what I mean. If you and your spouse are both working (which is common), and you have multiple kids doing multiple activities (also common), it can be very difficult and stressful to try to keep up with everything, and having the ability to track your kid, or call them, if need be, goes a long way in keeping your stress levels to a manageable level. Yes, it's not good for kids to have wide-scale access to cell phones. It's also not good for them to have parents who are at their wits end all the time.

This argument about parents just wanting their kids to have phones for their own convenience reminds me of the hardcore pro-lockdown scolds who said that parents just wanted schools to be open for the free childcare. In both cases my response is Yeah, so? Those are good reasons. A parent's mental well-being is super important, not just for themselves, but for their kids. I'm absolutely at my worst as a parent when I'm super stressed.

Another thing Paul does that I take some issue with is she frequently compares now to when she (and I, I can tell we're roughly the same age) was a kid. Those comparisons only go so far because the world has changed quite a bit. For example, back in 1985 there were a lot more two-parent families in which one of the parents (usually the mom) didn't work or only worked part-time, and they were the coordinators of their kids schedules, so there weren't the same difficulties as there are today. I mean, look at my situation, which is somewhat common today and was not very common forty years ago, in which my spouse is gone about six weeks out of the year (she just got back a few hours ago, actually), and I have to work full-time and be on top of my kids' schedules. Lil' S1 having a cell phone and Lil' S2 having an Apple watch are sanity-savers during these times. And I'm not even the best example. Single parents have to do that everyday of the year.

There's also another huge difference between now and when we were kids, and it's something Paul never mentions even though I was screaming it in my head while listening to her talk about her childhood: payphones. Payphones! They used to be everywhere, and now they're about as common as telegraph posts. But that's how we used to contact our parents: "Hello, you have a collect call from pick me up at the Gottschalks in the Lakewood Mall do you accept the charges?"* How are kids supposed to contact their parents now if they don't have a phone? Go around asking strangers if they can borrow theirs? It was easy to not have a cell phone when society was designed as if nobody else had a cell phone.

*Actually, I never did that collect call trick because we had a calling card I could use if I didn't have a quarter. But I had friends who would do it all the time.

Times are different in other ways too. One thing that Paul says is that kids can't actually learn to be independent if their parents are tracking their every movement, and I think this is just a failure to recognize that the definition of independence is changing. Everybody is tracking everybody. It's not just parents and children. I was just listening to a woman on a different podcast talk about how she and her girlfriends keep tabs on each other for safety reasons while they are on dates. I mean, my parents can track me now at age 46. We did Find My Friends once when I was visiting and never turned it off because there is no reason to. It's not like I ever even look at it. (Oh my gosh! They're at Trader Joe's!) I don't even really look at it for my kids either, to be honest, unless I need to for some reason. It used to be when I would go to a friend's house, my parents would say, "call us when you get there," now there's no need for that step. I don't see this as some sort of arrested development with today's youth. It's just how things are now for everybody, and we seem to be mostly okay with it.

The last thing I'll say about this is that I've just laid out a good case for getting a kid a low-tech flip-phone (or a watch like Lil' S2 has). There's still no good justification for getting Lil' S1 a smartphone. He doesn't need the internet and the apps and all that. He only has an iPhone because S's mom got a new one and gave him her old one, and then S did the same thing when that old one broke. That's the only reason, and it's not a very good one. This is where I have to tell myself the type of convenient lie Paul calls out in her article: This type of technology is the future, and so we all need to teach our kids how to use it, even if we don't like it. It's a half-decent lie, because there is a grain of plausibility to it, but it's a lie, nonetheless. 

Alright, I think I've spilled enough virtual ink on this topic for now.

Until next time...

Entry 698: Weather Insanity

We've had some bonkers weather the past few weeks -- probably the craziest I've ever experienced. As I mentioned in my last post, it was bitter cold a week ago, as we were in the aftermath of a couple of snowstorms that dumped almost a foot of powder on us. Then, this week it was unseasonably warm. Within six days, we went from a high in the mid-20s to a high in the low 70s. I've never been somewhere that snapped between temperatures that extreme that quickly. You could see the snow melting in real-time. It was like watching one of those nature documentaries where they film a wintry area for several months, and then speed up the tape so that the ice thaws and the flowers bloom in a few seconds, only nothing was sped up. I'm sure it's a sign of impending climate doom that we had June temperatures in January, but it was nice to go running outside--in shorts and a tee, no less.*

*The gym in my sister in-law's apartment complex, which she gave me a key to, has gotten weirdly crowded of late. For the first time ever, both of the operational treadmills were occupied when I got there, so I had to do the elliptical machine, which feels like a fake workout to me compared to the treadmill. Actually, it's not that weird. It was probably crowded because of the bad weather.

In other news, S is out of the country again for work, so I have the boys to myself. They've totally flipped on me, so that now Lil' S2 is the easy one and Lil' S1 is the difficult one. Well, Lil' S2 is still a bigger headache we he's home, but that's the beauty of it: He hangs out with his pals so much that he's either not here or he's here with a friend and they are occupying each other. Last night he had a sleepover at his little buddy's up the street, so I didn't have to deal with him at all at night, and then during the day, I took him to the park to play football with some other kids, which I don't mind, because I will either play with them, which is fun, or I'll just walk around and listen to my podcasts, get some steps in, and maybe even do some calisthenics.

But with Lil' S1, it's different because he's so loath to leave the house. I'm mean, he will if he has an activity, and he does do a decent amount of activities--he went to coding class yesterday, for instance--but he when he's home, he's just home. He doesn't seem to want to go anywhere or do anything, even with his friends.

I'm not sure why this is. There are two possible reasons I can see, either of which could be worrisome or could just be part of growing up today. The first is that he's not actually that close with his friends -- not in a bad way, just in a normal changing-of-relationship way. You know how you have people in your life that you like and you're fine hanging out with when circumstances put you in the same place, but you would never actually contact them to do something? Of course, you do -- this is probably the majority of adult friendships. Maybe that's how Lil' S1 is with his friends. They are friends mainly because they've been friends, but now things are changing, and it's not enough that they are all the same age and their parents get along, like it was when they were littler. It would make a lot of sense if this was the case. That's how friendships work. I didn't really find my ride-or-die BFFs until I was a few years older than Lil' S1 is now. So, maybe he'll make some new friends that he will take more initiative to hang out with when he gets a bit older. We will see.

The other possible reason is that he just likes being by himself. He has solitary interests and wants to pursue them in his spare time. This in and of itself is not necessarily a problem, but it has me concerned because I'm worried he's already getting sucked into the virtual vortex of inevitable despair. It's one thing if you just like doing things by yourself in your spare time, and it's part of an otherwise balanced and happy life. It's quite another if you are addicted to your devices and crave their ersatz company over real-life relationships. That, to me, seems like an almost guaranteed path to unhappiness and dissatisfaction.

It is hard, though. I understand because I have to fight the same urges. We all do. That's how society is structured now. Everything is too easy, and that makes it hard. It's so easy to live a lazy device-life and not have to bother with the annoyances that are other people. But it's making us all miserable. That's the thing about it. The verdict is in when it comes to this type of super online, device-oriented, shut-in, lifestyle: It's bad for us, and we don't even really like it, but we do it anyway. Most adults, with fully-formed prefrontal cortices, struggle to fight back against this. What chance do children have left to their own, um, devices?

So, when S gets back, we're going to have to seriously lay down the law with device usage. We've said this to each other before, but now we actually have to follow through with it. It's only going to get worse as he gets older and discovers how easy it is to see naked people on the internet (if he hasn't already). Can't wait for that to come down the pipeline. That will be fun to navigate. *Sigh.*

Until next time...

Note: I edited this entry because I thought my first version was too personal concerning Lil' S1. Not many people actually read this blog, and it's anonymous(ish), but still, my kids don't give me permission to write about them and don't even really know. So, their privacy is something I have to be mindful of going forward.

Entry 697: Snow And Water

When you think about it, snow is nothing but frozen water vapor.

We got hit with a couple of snowfalls here in DC this week-- nothing terrible, but legit storms. It looks like there's about nine inches on the apron of the trampoline in our backyard. The streets never got that bad. Contrary to what people might say,* DC seems to be pretty good about plowing the roads, especially if you live in the mayor's neighborhood like we do. They are super cautious when it comes to schools, though. If there is any new snow on the ground whatsoever, it's at least a late arrival -- we got one of those on Wednesday -- and often a closure. There was no school both Tuesday and Friday this past week. 

*Is there anything more ubiquitous than people complaining about city services? Every city is the worst-run municipality in the country according to the residents of that city.

I'm of two minds about snow days. On the one hand, they're super inconvenient, made much more so in recent years by Zoom culture. This is when a flex-schedule backfires. In the olden days, if the office was closed, not much was expected of you. Yeah, you might check some email or log into your laptop for a bit, but for the most part things were shut down. Now, for the vast majority of traditional office jobs, there's no difference between a snow day and a regular day. You're working from home in a business-casual top and PJ pants, regardless. We workers demanded this flexibility, and we mostly got it (thanks, Covid!), but we have to take the good with the bad. You don't have to sit in daily rush-hour traffic anymore, but, on rare occasions, you do have to keep your children occupied, while simultaneously putting in something that passes for a full day's work.

[Snow day view of the field with the big hill]

On the other hand, snow days are fun and make me happy. They bring people together. In our neighborhood, during snow days, everybody goes to one of two fields for sledding and frolicking. If you have small children, you go to the field with the small hill; if you have big children, you go to the field with the big hill. We are definitely a big hill family, so I took the boys there on Wednesday, and S took Lil' S1 there on Friday.* We live a little too far from the field to walk to it in the snow and cold (it makes for a lovely promenade on warm days), and they wanted to go at different times, so I spent the afternoon shuttling them back-and-forth and standing in the freezing cold, chatting with parents I kinda know. But it was really cool to see all the kids out and about. That's something I didn't get much of growing up. There were only a couple other kids in my neighborhood (nobody I was really tight with), so the spontaneous mass gatherings of childhood revelry were few and far between. I was always jealous when I'd go to a friend's house who lived in a "happening" part of town, and we could walk somewhere with decent odds of chancing upon some random classmates. 

*Lil' S2 was refusing to go for some reason. Perhaps because it was 25 degrees out, and he outgrew his boots, so he would have to wear sneakers, which fill with slush 20 minutes after going outside. Actually, that's a pretty good reason.

[Lil' S1 racing down the hill against some other kids, with me providing excited commentary. If you listen carefully, you can hear him proclaim "I win," after completely wiping out.] 

So, I'm not mad at DCPS for cancelling school for two days, even though it was not that difficult to get around either day. (As I said, the roads were almost completely clear, and everybody could have driven to school fairly easily.) What I'm mad at them about is their makeup day schedule. Instead of designating a few of the numerous off-days students have between now and the end of the year as makeup days (there's no school next Friday, for example), they tacked them on at the end of the year. What's more, school ends on a Monday, but the makeup days aren't until Thursday and Friday, so two days of snow effectively extend the school year a full week. I'm sure DCPS could give me reasons why it had to be that way -- the off-days are actually professional development days for the teachers or something like that -- but why can't you turn those into makeup days, and then make them up at the year's end, if need be. Staff would have to come in all the days either way. Also, I see at least two days on the schedule between now and June that are just marked as "no school for students or teachers." They aren't holidays or development days or parent-teacher conference days or anything. Why can't those be makeup days?

The thing is, it's DC, we get snow here fairly frequently. It's not some rare occurrence. It's about 50-50 we will have a snow day in a given school year. They need to have a better contingency plan that doesn't involve extending the school year a week for one or two makeup days. Now, one could argue that no matter how the schedule works, the school year has to be extended in some way to account for snow days. If you want to have built-in makeup days throughout the year, like I do, then you would have to push back the scheduled end date, thus extending the year. But that's okay. People would rather know up front.

Part of it is psychological. If you tell somebody they have to wait for something for an hour, they will be a little annoyed. If you tell them they have to wait for a half-hour, and then you add 25 minutes once the half-hour elapses, they are going to be really annoyed, even though they actually waited less time than in the former scenario. That's just how humans are, and parents are humans.

But part of it is practical. Parents have to make plans for their children for the summer -- camps, vacations, summer classes, etc. -- and it's difficult to do that if you don't have a set end date. But maybe I'm just particularly salty because the makeup days could actually mess up our summer plans this year. Waiting around those extra four days could force us to rearrange a bunch of things. We could always just skip the makeup days, which is probably what most parents would do,* but our kids already racked up a bunch of unexcused absences from our India trip. I don't want DCPS social services showing up at our door wondering why our kids are delinquents.     

*This is another point: If you have in-year makeup days, they will likely be treated as real days that actually advance the curriculum. If you have makeup days two days after the "final" day of school, they will likely be treated as bullshit goof-off days. My conspiracy theory is that the teachers' union intentionally pushed for it to be this way to make it easier on them. I'm sure this isn't actually true and is incredibly insulting to hardworking teachers across the city. But ever since they fought so hard to keep schools closed for Covid after vaccines were widely available and after it became clear kids were low risk and not great vectors for spreading the disease, this is where my mind goes first.

 

[Lil' S2 preparing to punt a football in the snow]

Anyway... Thursday was the only full day of school for the kids, and it turned out to be the most stressful one of the week. I woke up and turned on the faucet to brush my teeth, but no water came out. Instantly, I thought a pipe was frozen, which made me super nervous, as we had one freeze and burst at our old house, and it was a huge headache to get everything repaired and dried. But that turned out to not be the case. Something was wrong with the pipage on our street, and the water was turned off in several houses while they worked on it.

I was actually relieved -- to me, that's much better than a frozen pipe -- but it made S really anxious. Whenever our water or power goes outs or something like that, she worst-case-scenarios it and starts thinking about staying the night at her sister's or going to a hotel. I've learned to just not say anything and let her work through her disquietude* on her own. Nothing I say will help. If I agree with her then, then I just add fuel to the fire. If I disagree with her, then I invalidate her feelings (not my intention, but that's how she perceives it), which really makes her mad. So, I say nothing but think to myself: We could do that, or we could just wait a few hours until everything comes back on, as it almost always does.  

*I think this is the first time I've ever used this word. It's a great word -- way underutilized.

But this time S was totally right to be so worried -- well, maybe not totally right, but certainly not wrong. The issue turned out to be much bigger than just "the water went out for a few hours and now everything is back to normal." There was some sort of major leak in our neighborhood -- for the past few weeks we've seen sitting water in the street at the bottom of our hill, even on dry days -- and it apparently proved quite difficult to fix, if it's even fixed now. Since Thursday, our water status has intermittently fluctuate between totally off, a tiny trickle, low but tolerable, and normal. Right now it's normal, pressure-wise, but also undrinkable. We got numerous messages from DC Water (which prompted a very funny text chain between all our parent friends in the neighborhood) that we're in an area of the city -- a big area, containing probably a third of the total population -- that is under a "boil" advisory for the weekend. Do not drink the water without boiling it first. Awesome.

I did not expect to be more concerned with safe drinking water after we returned from India. But here we are.

Until next time...