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...