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...
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