Pretty normal week here at the G & G household. There's still some drama going on at Lil' S2's school, but nothing I can't put my head in the sand about. The teacher who responded to the "racial incident" I mentioned in my last entry got put on indefinitely leave, which I don't love for several reasons, one being that now all three of the teachers in his grade are substitutes. His original homeroom teacher, a would-be newcomer to the school, couldn't get certified in time or something like that, so she never even started; his ELA teacher is out on maternity leave (as is the principal); and now his math teacher is out on leave because of the incident. It's not great.
But I'm also not that worried. Maybe I should be, but I take the attitude, He's a smart kid; he'll be fine. Plus, we have the resources to ramp up his education outside of school, if need be. We already enrolled him at this place called Mathnasium, and I'm optimistic he will put more effort into it than he did into guitar.* He's pretty good at math and analytical thinking and shows interest in it, often without even realizing he's doing so. For example, he'll have me twist a solved Rubik's Cube a few times and see if he can put it back in place (which he usually can), or he'll want to count S's hand when we play cribbage (which we've gotten into lately), or he'll study fantasy football numbers (we're in a dads and sons league together) to figure out which players to pick up, or how likely he is to win.
*He took lessons for about six months, but he rarely practiced and clearly didn't like it. That's fine--he tried it out. Not everything is for everybody. I highly suspected that this would be the case, so I was hesitant to spend the money on lessons and equipment in the first place. But, if you can afford to do so, you have to give your kids a chance, at least. That's my philosophy, anyway. It seems like 75% of parenting is spending money on things your kids will immediately want to quit.
I particularly like that he's getting into sports, because it gives us something to do together, and because I'm convinced that that's how I got good at math -- or rather I should say that's how I built the foundation that allowed me to get good at math. I got good at math because I studied it extensively at the college level for like 13 years. But I think I was already primed to develop those skills because I had a basis of analytical thought, cultivated in no small part from studying sports stats. To give a concrete example, I remember once solving a combinatorial problem that keyed off the fact that in every directed graph there must exist a node in which at least half it's adjacent edges are pointing into it. I used this fact without explanation, and the teacher marked me down a tiny bit, saying that it wasn't obviously true. I said it was to me, and when he asked me why, I said, "Not every football team can have a winning record." My love of sports provided me with the intuition to solve the math problem. So, I don't think things like fantasy football and Madden are necessarily a waste of time.
But then again, a bunch of my friends liked sports just as much as I did, and they didn't parlay it into a math degree and a job in R&D, so maybe the causation goes the other way. Maybe it was my proclivity for analytical thought that attracted me to sports stats. Who knows? Who knows anything when it comes to this type of stuff?
All of this is to say, Lil' S2's schooling is not my biggest worry at the moment. My biggest worry at the moment is the potential reelection of Donald Trump, but that's an overarching worry that I'm doing my best not to think about for the next month and half.* One good way to do this, I've found, is to fill my mind with smaller worries, and lately that's been mosquitoes. They've been so bad in our yard this season. We screened in our porch a few years ago, and that's proven to be one of the best investments we've ever made, but there are times when I want to go outside in the yard for longer than 30 seconds, and I cannot do that without slathering on the deet or getting savaged with mosquito bites. The other day I was putting air in my bicycle tires, and they descended upon me like raindrops in a thunderstorm. I don't know what happened. I didn't think they attacked in packs, but this time it was as if I had shaken up a wasps nest. I thought they were a swarm of gnats at first, so I was just kinda casually batting them away, and then I started getting bitten, and I was like oh no! I ran inside, but the damage was already done. I stopped counting after the 25th bite.
*I'm trying to avoid the forecasts this election. In part, this is because they haven't been very reliable the past few elections; in part, it's because it's so close there's nothing really to look at. You can study the polls all you want, or you can just figure it's a coin toss and arrive at the same place with a fraction of the effort. It helps that Nate Silver took his model to Substack and paywalled it, so I can't impulsively look at it.
I've also started noticing random bites on my body when I haven't even gone outside. That's even more infuriating. It's one thing to get bitten when I'm in their territory; it's another to get got in my own house. It turns me into a lunatic. If I see somebody leave the door open for more than two seconds, I scream "Shut the door! Shut the damn door!" like a madman, and I take vengeful glee every time I kill a mosquito. It's not healthy.
I've even developed my own signature method of killing them: I snatch them with one hand, open my fist a tiny bit, no bigger than a pinhole, and run water into it. It might sound overly complicated, but it's not. Most people try to smash them by clapping their hands together, but that's a very low percentage maneuver. When you do that, you create a puff of air that often pushes the mosquito to safety. I have a much higher snatch percentage using one hand. The thing there, however, is that while sometimes you crush them with the snatch, sometimes they stay alive within your hand, even if you squeeze it together tightly. Many a time I've opened my fist, expecting to find a dead mosquito, only to watch the little sucker (literally) fly away. That's why I use the water. Either you wash off their guts or you drown them -- win, win. The other thing you can do is let them land on you and then slap them, but that's risky, because you'll get bitten if you're too late. Also, you can smash them against a wall or a piece of furniture, but obviously they have to be in the right place to do that, and it's pretty gross to splatter them on something light-colored as they often perish in pop of blood.
I saw an advertisement for this thing you plug-in, and it attracts and catches bugs, and I'm going to buy one. I don't know if it will work, but it's worth a try. We also need to spray more, either professionally, or I need to buy the stuff you connect to your hose and do it. One of my dad friends is really into gardening and sustainable ecosystems and whatnot, and he's adamantly against mosquito spraying, but, I dunno, getting swarmed every time I go in my backyard doesn't seem like a proper equilibrium to me.
Well, I think that's enough for today. Until next time...
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