Entry 774: Octogenarian Mom

We went back to the South Puget Sound region a week and a half ago for a relatively short trip to celebrate my mom's 80th birthday, and it was wonderful right up until the very end. The afternoon before we flew out, my 12-year-old nephew broke both of his ankles, and he and his father (my brother) spent the night in the emergency room. He was at one of those trampoline/foam pit/fun-zone places, and he apparently landed awkwardly and hit the ground too hard and got a hairline fracture in each ankle. It sounds like it was pretty fluky. He had already fallen into the pit like a dozen times (it was an American Gladiators style joust setup) before he got hurt. He's a very tall kid for his age, and it sounds like he unluckily found a crevice in the foam and hit the bottom with his feet. He literally slid through the cracks. It was a total bummer to end what was otherwise a fun and festive vacation.

But the good news is that my brother and his wife just bought a van, so they are decently equipped to transport a child in a wheelchair. Also, kids heal quickly. In a few months, my nephew will likely be back on his feet, running around, and it will be a "remember when that happened" topic of conversation. By contrast, if something like that happened to me, I would probably walk with a limp for the next half-decade. I mean, a few years ago my father fell off a small ladder and broke his foot, and he was laid up for many months and needed multiple surgeries just to get back to semi-normal.

Before all this went down, however, it was a good trip of seeing people I hadn't seen in a long time. I saw a handful of family members I hadn't seen since July 2017, a few more I hadn't seen since January 2017, and yet one more I hadn't seen since summer of 2007. I also randomly ran into two friends from high school I had mostly lost touch with. It's funny, when we came out to visit my family for a month a few summers ago, I didn't have a single chance encounter like this with anybody, and then I come back for just a week and have two of them.

Everybody came out for my mom's 80 birthday celebration. It was really a great event -- a lot of fun and the right amount of sentimentality. I feel so fortunate to have such a great family and friends (a few of my best buddies came down from Seattle with their families for the party) and that we are in a position financially/PTO-wise to fully take advantage of it. It really is a blessing, and not everybody is going to be around forever, so it's ultra important to take it all in now while it's still possible.

There were two big surprises for me this trip. One, which is not so great, is that my uncle has Parkinson's disease. He's in his late 60s, I believe, and he's always been quite healthy and spry for his age, so it was a total trip to see him at my parents' house shaking uncontrollably. He's still quite fit -- he says he runs or hikes almost everyday -- but he's much less outgoing and communicative, understandably so. His jaw quivers a lot, which, I can only assume, makes talking much less fun than it used to be. There is a genetic component to Parkinson's, which, being that my uncle and I share a direct ancestor (my great-grandfather, his grandfather also had it), isn't the most comforting thought for me, but I'll cross that bridge if/when I come to it. I'm not the type to go out and search for early warning signs. Yes, I might catch something sooner than I would otherwise, which would help with treatment, but I also might not and think I did, and then I will be living with that undo mental stress. I'll keep it in the back of my head, but that's where it's staying unless circumstances change.

The other surprise is that one of my longtime childhood friends has transitioned (is in the process of transitioning?) into a woman. This definitely threw me for a bit of a loop at first -- I had no idea she had any sort of gender dysphoria or anything like that -- but it's cool. She seems happy, and if that's the case, then I'm happy for her. To each their own, live and let live, and all that. It's trite but true. Also, I think I adapted to my new-old friend pretty quickly. I only misgendered her once (and she was cool about it), and after a little while talking to her it was like, Wow, you're a woman now! ... So, what else is new?

Alright, gotta go. But first, obligatory pic of Chambers Bay.

Until next time...  

Entry 773: Rabbit, Run... Please

I had the rudest of awakenings Friday morning. Well, technically, I was already awake but barely. My alarm had sounded, and I had arisen, but was not yet fully dressed, when S barged into the room in a panic. 

"Lil' S2 left his bike out and a bunny is stuck in the wheel!"

"Wait... what?"

"It's just stuck! It's bleeding! I think it's dead!"

"Uh... okay."

"Just put some pants on and get it out! I don't want to touch it!"

"There's a dead rabbit in Lil' S2's bike wheel? And I have to get it out?"

"Yes... I'm going to a Solid Core class. Bye!"

"Okay, bye... thanks for leaving this for me."

"Sorry!"

Then she was gone.

I peeked out the window, and S's description was accurate. A rabbit had somehow gotten its head stuck in the spokes of Lil' S2's bike* and was lying there bloody and lifeless. Now, just the sight of roadkill squigs me out a little bit, so I was dreading the idea of touching a dead animal and then doing... something with it. But the thought of it just sitting there on our walkway was worse, so I got dressed, grabbed a paper sack, found some old gloves we bought for a ropes course, and went out the door to get this thing over with as quickly as possible.

*It should have been stored in our shed. Lil' S2 forgot to put it away (because he's 9), and neither S nor I noticed it to remind him. When I told him later that a bunny had gotten stuck in it because he left he out, he replied indignantly, "That's the bunny's fault!" which I found morbidly humorous for some reason.

I was pondering what to do with a dead rabbit -- burying it near the creek seemed like the best option -- but as soon as I touched it, I realized it was a moot point. I could feel warmth and life still inside of it. So, then my mind turned to the question of what to do with a badly injured rabbit, but first I had to get it unstuck from the spokes without injuring it further.

And I'm not sure I succeeded in that regard. It's head was really wedged in there, so much so that a spoke had cut into its eye, which was causing the bleeding. I had to really pry to get it free. Once I did, I was hoping it would up and run away, but no such luck. It just laid there, staring at me with its haunting, bloody eye. I picked it up and put it in the paper bag, and it did fight me but very feebly. Once in the sack, it made no attempt to get out. This poor thing was not doing well.

As I saw it, I had four options: 1) Find an animal hospital that will take it (or do the equivalent of dropping it on the porch, ringing the doorbell, and running); 2) build it a habitat in a cardboard box and nurse it back to health, kids'-book-style; 3) go old-school, conk it with a shovel and bury it near the creek, using the justification that I would be "putting it out of its misery"; 4) release it near the creek and walk away, telling myself that that's just nature, but also feeling a bit guilty that I was too lazy and uncaring to do option 1 or 2.

I went with option 4. I'm mostly okay with it. I mean, it could move a little bit, so it's possible that it found a safe place to rest and gather enough strength to survive, and if it didn’t, well, Mother Nature is an evil hag, isn't she? Billions of living things die every second -- that's just way it goes. Also, I had a bunch of work to do and just wanted to get on with my day ASAP.

So, that was that. I'm still trying to figure out how it got stuck in the first place. Obviously, it didn't know any better, but something drastic had to have happened for it to wedge its head into such a tight area, especially since there was seemingly nothing there of interest to a rabbit. It's not like there was a carrot on the other inside it was trying to get to, and even if there was, a rabbit would have good enough instincts to go around, I think. My best guess is that it got spooked and ran full-speed ahead into the bike wheel without even seeing it, hitting it in the perfectly right-wrong way to get its little head stuck. It doesn't seem very likely, but it's the best I got.

The whole ordeal put me in a weird mood for the day. It's not like I was totally bummed out, and I didn't even think about it that much, but every now and then I'd get a tinge of -- I don't even know what to call it -- unease, I guess, and would think to myself, Why am I feeling this?, and then I'd remember, Oh, yeah, that's right: maimed rabbit. It did get me out of an errand at least. We ordered carryout, and S wanted me to go pick it up, but I was in the middle of a workout, so I balked at it a little bit, and so she started into a whole soliloquy, "I have to go to two different places, and I'm tired of driving kids around all day..."

"Sorry to cut you off, babe, but I had to pull a half-dead rabbit out of our kid's bike spokes this morning, doesn't that buy me anything?"

"Actually, it does. I'll get the food."

Nice.

In general, I feel like these types of things I do go underappreciated. Whenever there is something gross or physically taxing or technical that needs to be done, it's just assumed that I'm the one who has to do it. S will sometimes feel put out that she's doing "all the work" with the kids because she does most of the registration and appointments and stuff like that (although now that Lil' S2 does so many sports leagues and camps, which I almost always sign him up for, it's not that lopsided), but my response is always that that's not the only work that needs to be done. I mean, I could give a whole list of things that I do fairly regularly that S has never done -- clean the gutters, sweep debris off the roof and pick up the yard after a storm, clean the maggots out of the compost bin, put air in the tires, unclog a toilet or clear a drain, change a lock, carry bulk trash to the curb, reset the router, resync the controllers with the PlayStation -- but I won't because that would be petty of me.

Alright, that's all I got. Until next time...

Entry 772: Work Trip

I mentioned in my previous entry that I had a work trip on the horizon that I wasn't exactly jumping for joy over. Well, said trip has come and gone now, and other than some bullshit delays on my return flight (or deplaning, rather), it went well. When it comes to travel, I'm usually glad I did it in retrospect. I don't really like traveling, particularly when it comes to flight, but I'm very tolerant of it because I like going places, and you can't go places without traveling there. Transporter/wormhole technology still seems millennia away (if it's possible at all), and despite advances in AI and bioengineering, Total Recall-style memory implants are not a thing yet either (and even if they were, I'm not sure I'd be up for conspiring with a creature living in a man's stomach to save the martian race). We are still just using big old jet airliners like it's 1977. And somehow air travel has actually gotten worse over the years--at least in terms of comfort. It's much cheaper now than it used be, and the inverse relationship of price to comfort is not just incidental.

The purpose of the trip was to attend a big industry summit hosted by my new parent company. My team was invited to present something, so a colleague and I gave a talk. As far as I can tell it was successful. We got a lot of engagement during Q & A, which is usually a good thing. Also, my colleagues in the audience told me it went well, and it didn't seem like perfunctory politeness. I don't mind public speaking, except for this thing that has started happening to me relatively recently, where immediately before I open my mouth, I feel like I'm not going to be able to get the words out. It's like that can't-move, stuck-in-mud bad-dream feeling. Thankfully, the words do come out, but it's like I'm speaking with a knot in my throat for the first half of the talk. I don't think it's super noticeable, and I'm able to power through it, but it's pretty annoying. I guess it's nerves, but it's weird because I don't feel anxious in any other way. Maybe it's a good thing, as my martial arts instructor said once before a test to level-up: "If you are nervous, good. That means you care."

I was also hopped up on acetaminophen, dextromethorphan, and phenylephrine, although I don't know if that mattered or not to the quality of the presentation. I caught a cold last weekend and by the day of the talk (Tuesday), I was in the snotting uncontrollably stage of my ailment. I typically do not take cold medicine. It's expensive and doesn't actually do anything to cure your ailment. But I do think it can help to temporarily suppress some of your symptoms -- even if it's just through the placebo effect -- and when you are blowing your nose and sneezing every ten seconds and have to speak to an auditorium of a hundred people, you take all the relief you can get.

It sucked at the time, but in retrospect it wasn't the worst time to be ill. I mean, it's never good to be sick, but I'd rather be sick away from home at a conference than be sick when I get back. I fought through it, and now I'm better, and I get to sit here in good health and blog, while I look outside at a beautiful day in the neighborhood. I'd much rather have it this way than have been healthy a few days ago and sick now.

Anyway, the fact that it's a beautiful day is notable, as we've been short on those in DC this summer. It's either been insanely hot or storming or both. Heavy rains and thunderstorms are in the forecast seemingly every other day. I get so many flood warnings on my phone, they've become meaningless (which is a legitimate problem; it's part of why so many people in Texas were caught off guard). The t-storms came on Thursday during my return flight, but we got in at the perfect time... almost. We landed safely -- there wasn't even much turbulence -- but they wouldn't let us out of the plane for three hours. Yes, that's right, we sat on the tarmac after landing for thee hours. That's an hour longer than the actual flight time.

The issue, as kinda explained to us and kinda inferred by me, was that due to lightning in the area, it was unsafe for the airport staff to set up the ramp needed for deplaning. (We were on one of those smaller commuter jets that don't pull right to the jetway.) So, we had to wait for the storm to subside. The problem with this is that the storm had already mostly subsided by the time we arrived and was only forecast to get worse again later. I kept looking outside at the concrete, watching it get dryer, because the rain had stopped, and thinking to myself If it's not safe enough to deplane now, when will it be? My phone app said a storm warning was in effect until 10 pm. We arrived around 2 pm. Are they going to keep us here for eight hours?

No, they were not, thankfully. Around 5 pm, they taxied us to different part of the airport, and we all just walked down the stairs and off the plane and that was that. Why we could not have done that when we first arrived, I have no idea. I also do not understand why they could not have set up the ramp. Yes, I'm sure it's less than ideal to wield around a giant metal object when lightning is nearby, but sometimes people have to do (slightly) unsafe jobs. That's what hazard pay is for. Give workers a big enough bump, and you will have a line of candidates. You could even charge the passengers for it. Put a $10.00 hazard pay deposit on the tab. If you have a normal flight, you get it back. If workers have to work in hazardous conditions, you use this money to pay them extra. I would gladly go for that.

I mean, when we deplaned, they brought the fire department out to help us down the stairs -- the fire department! How is that a better use of resources than finding somebody to set up a ramp? It's utter silliness. I'm sure it's part CYA, but it's also part "zero COVID" mentally, where decision-makers become overly focused on preventing one bad thing (in this case lightning hitting somebody) and create a more hazardous situation in the process. Is taking first responders away from their other duties to help some airline passengers down some stairs actually a net safety plus for society? Also, by waiting so long to let us off, I, and presumably many other passengers, had to travel from the airport while the storm was particularly bad. That's more cars on the road; more people not in their homes. Not to mention the physical and mental stress passengers are under, sitting in the plane, not knowing when they will be let off, feeling kidnapped. Like I said, it's completely baffling, and I have half a mind to write a sternly worded letter to somebody about it. But I have another half to not do that. They've already taken three hours of my life -- three and a half if you count the time it's taken me to write this screed -- they don't need anymore.

Until next time...   

 

Entry 771: Luray Caverns

S has been on this kick of thinking we don't spend enough time together as a family, and since last weekend's trip to the fancy movie theater didn't quite go as planned, she upped the ante and booked a two-day excursion to Luray Caverns and Shenandoah National Park. We actually met our friends there, so it wasn't just the four of us the entire weekend, but it was enough of just the four of us to qualify as quality time together (and then some).

It was a mostly successful endeavor. The kids fought a bit, which led to Lil' S1 embracing the role of martyr and sleeping on the floor, but kids will do that. Them sharing a bed, we've come to learn, is just not tenable. We're not at the point of booking two rooms (yet), but we definitely need a room with an extra sleeper sofa or a roll-away cot or something like that. They've never been good with sharing a bed, and we used to get around it by having S and I split up and each co-sleep with one of them, but I put the kibosh on that one a while ago. S doesn't mind, but it's a hard no from me. Lil' S1 is like 5' 5", 130 lbs now, and it's weird to spoon with your son when he's that big. Lil' S2 isn't quite that size yet, but he moves constantly in his sleep. It's annoying just listening to him jostle, let alone being right next to him.

We drove up Saturday morning and spent the afternoon at some sort of street fair that wasn't actually on a street but rather in a big field in the middle of nowhere. It was seemingly 1000 degrees outside, and there was no air conditioning to be found. We couldn't even sit in the car and cool off that way because we were precariously low on gas, not taking into account that there isn't a gas station on every corner once you get outside the city. Also, we didn't have any cell service, which has nothing to do with the temperature, but did make it much more difficult to navigate. It's ridiculous how reliant we are on smartphones with an internet connection now.

The kids had fun though. There was a nice creek nearby, so they all just hopped in that. I waded in as well, but the jagged rocks hurt my feet, and the ones that were smooth were even worse to walk on because they were hella slippery. I foresaw myself eating it in a very embarrassing manner, so I came back to the safety of dry land after only a few minutes. Lo and behold, not too long after my return, a dad about my age tried to fetch a toy his daughter dropped that was being washed away, and he completely wiped out, hard, soaking (and possibly injuring) himself in the process. I felt for the poor sap, but I also felt good about my own sagacity: Wise move getting out DG, wise move, indeed.   

After that we went horseback riding, which is something the boys had never done, and something I hadn't done in probably 29 years. I remember going with my cousins once when I was an older teenager, and we visited them in 1996,* so I'm guessing that was the last time. It was cool. If you don't spend a lot of time around horses (which I don't), you forget how massive and impressive they can be. But also, they never went faster than a walk (by design), so after a while, it's kinda like, All right, this is getting pretty repetitive, and I'm getting a little sore. The trip got cut short by a few minutes because it started to rain, and I can't say I was all that disappointed. The scenery was definitely interesting, though, including the people. As we were riding, we went past a couple who was driving through the trails in some sort of flatbed mini truck, and both driver (man) and passenger (woman) had a diaper-clad baby on their lap, and they had a half-rack of Busch on the flatbed.

*I remember the year because we watched Michael Johnson and his gold shoes win a bunch of races at the Atlanta Olympics.  

We stayed the night at a lodge in Shenandoah National Park, and then we went to Luray Caverns the next day (this afternoon). I'll have to cut this post short and end with some pics because I have to get ready for a work trip. I fly out tomorrow and return Thursday. Between you and me, I'm not exactly super excited about it, but so it goes.

Until next time... 

 

                                        

Entry 770: Wet Hot DC Summer

We had another huge storm here in DC a few nights ago. This one was not as destructive as last month's because it wasn't very windy. It was mostly just rain, but it was a lot of rain. The weird thing is that precipitation was not even in the forecast until much later in the evening according to my iPhone. I came upstairs around 4:30p and decided to go for a walk (the kids were both out of the house with friends, and S and I got into an argument earlier and weren't ready to make up yet, so I was on my own for the afternoon), touch grass, as they say, and it started raining. I looked at my weather app again, confirmed that it was supposed to be dry for another four hours or so, and waited, figuring it was just a little flurry. But I figured incorrectly, majorly so.

Far from petering out, the heavens opened up and unleashed a torrent the likes of which I do not remember. This probably wasn't literally the most voluminous rainstorm we've had since I've lived hear, but nothing heavier comes to mind. It was the type of rainfall where if you stepped outside for ten seconds, you might as well have jumped into a lake.* And it was the length of it that separated it from most other storms. Usually when the spigot turns on full-blast, it runs dry after twenty minutes or so. This time it went on for hours. Several times it lightened up only to then rage even harder than before. 

 *I've done that once in my life. When I was 15, we were visiting family at Chautauqua Lake, and I wasn't paying attention to where I was on the pier, and I stepped right into the lake, fully clothed. Few things are as disorienting as being suddenly, unexpectedly submerged in water.

Thankfully, the damage seems to be minimal. Some roads had to close temporarily because they amassed pools of water too large for vehicles to safely traverse, and surely a lot of foot trails around Rock Creek will be out of commission for a few days, but I think (hope) that's the worst of it. It was more than a bit scary for me, though. My mind went back to those girls' camps that got washed away in Texas. Lil' S1 was at a friend's house not too far from us, so I knew he would be fine. But Lil' S2 was at the movies with his friend and his friend's grandma, and the thought of a seventy-something-year-old woman driving through flood conditions with two kids is not the most reassuring thing one can imagine.

It also didn't help that Lil' S2's Apple Watch died, so I couldn't tell exactly where he was. If I could have tracked him getting home safely, it would have put my mind at ease. That's one big problem with using technology to keep tabs on your kid, when it goes out -- and it's going to go out because it's being operated by a child -- it makes you more worried than you would be if you just weren't tracking them at all.

In other news, we went to see Superman today. I wanted to see F1, but I got outvoted. In fact, the entire idea to even go to a movie got into people's head because I said I was going to take Lil' S2 to see F1 with me. I figured Lil' S1 and S wouldn't want to come because it's not their type of movie, and I was right, but then they said they would come, so we were all going to go to that, but then somebody suggested we see Superman instead, and then all three of them liked that idea better.

To make matters even worse (for me), they all wanted to go to a fancy theater where you get dinner while you watch, even though it's a half-hour drive from our house instead of five minutes like the regular theater, and I find the dining-while-you-watch experience vastly overrated. Not only do I not want to drive further and pay extra for it, I don't want to do it at all. It's distracting and annoying. I don't even like sitting next to S on the sofa when we're watching something if she's eating a snack. It's one of our ongoing sticking points. She saves food so that she can eat while she watches, and I'm like just eat it and then watch.

I kinda got my way on the theater inadvertently, as S bought tickets for the normal theater on accident. I say "kinda" because we had already driven to the other theater and paid $10 for parking before we noticed it. So, at that point, I would have just preferred to stay. Then we had to rush back to the other theater, and it is on the complete opposite end of the city, so there was no actual rushing involved -- just a steady plod through DC traffic. We got there about 35 minutes after the stated start time, and I would have preferred to just go in and watch -- we probably would have only missed five minutes or so of the movie, given how long the previews are -- but everybody was hungry (because we thought we were getting food while we watch), so we changed the tickets to a later showing. It cost $11, and then the kids still wanted shitty movie theater food, even though we were within walking distance of dozens of decent quick restaurants and had plenty of time to spare. So, we got them each a pizza meal deal, and I got a bag of popcorn, and our total was damn near $75 with the ticket switch. No wonder people don't go to the movies much anymore.

But the movie itself: enjoyable! I liked it. I had a good time watching it. Nothing earth-shattering (although the earth did shatter many times in the film), but it was fun, and Nick Hoult was really good as Lex Luthor. He's really come a long way since I discovered him in About a Boy.

Alright, it's late. I gotta go. Until next time... 

Entry 769: Broader "Vacation"

Last week we went on vacation, but it was a smaller vacation within a broader "vacation." I use quotes because it wasn't a real vacation. It just felt like one. The kids were still at camp this past week (S is getting them now as I type this), so, we were on our own, free to go about our schedules -- work, gym, errands, etc. -- at our own accord, and, I must say, it was pretty awesome. I love my boys and have literally zero regrets about becoming a father -- I don't even have the occasional kid-free daydream -- but a week off from having to plan everything I want to do around the schedules of two other people who can't drive and can't be home alone for extended periods of time? Yeah, I'll take that without compunction.

Actually, Lil' S1 can be home by himself, but we typically try to avoid the all-day nothing-planned summer days for him. For one thing, if I'm working home then he's just around, and it's distracting for me, even though he's not doing anything that has to do with me directly.* Like, when he pours himself some cereal for breakfast, I can I hear the bowls and silverware clanging, and I can tell he spilled some on the floor and didn't clean it up, and then he chews so noisily, because he's 12, and it makes it hard to concentrate on whatever it is I need to concentrate on at the moment. For another thing, he's not a great home-all-day-with-nothing-to-do kid, in the sense that he will just stare at his screens for hours on end. If we prod him to do other things -- call a friend, walk to the store, read a book -- he usually will, but we often can't/don't want to be on him to do things. That's the whole deal of it. 

*S is sequestered in the basement, so she doesn't hear it. During the COVID lockdowns, I tried to work down there too, but she takes so many meetings that it's worse than being upstairs and possibly dealing with the kids. 

On Tuesday, we went out for dinner and drinks with a group of other parents whose kids were also at camp (really fun, by the way), and we were talking about a common subject among Gen-X parents: How different parenting was when we were growing up. Particularly, we were lamenting the fact that we have to spend so much time, money, and energy finding summer camps for our children -- not overnight camp, which is it's own special thing, but the need-something-to-occupy-our-kids day camps they do the rest of the summer. When we were kids, we'd often just be home during the summer, and we had to figure it out ourselves. We might have a few activities here and there (I took drama and swim lessons every summer), but these all-day summer camps weren't the norm like they are today.

It's part of a bigger trend of parents becoming more involved in their children's lives. It's not really acceptable to let your child run free in "the wild" like it was forty years ago. Our neighbor won't let his son, who's going into sixth grade, leave our street on his bike without adult supervision, and he's a responsible kid, and we live in a decent neighborhood. I do think parents on the whole are overprotective now, and society would be better served if we all loosened up a bit, but there definitely are confounding factors. The aforementioned screens is a big one. If running free in the wild actually means watching YouTube shorts on your iPad, while you play on your iPhone all day, then it's not exactly preferable to the overly-structured alternative. It was a blessing in disguise that video games and other screens (basically just TV) weren't that good yet when I was a kid. Playing a season of Baseball Stars on Nintendo for the 100th time or watching another rerun of The Brady Bunch got old fast. We had to go outside and find other kids and be social due to sheer lack of alternatives. But there is no such thing as a lack of alternatives anymore, in this regard, and it seems as if that isn't a great thing.

Speaking of old video games, Lil' S1 has a Nintendo 3DS, and it has Punch-Out!! on it, and I've been playing it again. It's somewhat remarkable that the first time I played it in, like, 30 years, I was able to get all the way to Soda Popinski without being beaten. I still remember most the hacks and still have the muscle memory to implement them. Since then, I've beaten Soda Popinski (and the second Bald Bull and Don Flamenco), and I just beat Mr. Sandman last night, after many attempts, which means Super Macho Man is the only thing that stands between me and Mike Tyson (or "Mr. Dream" as he's called on this version). I've made it a goal to beat the game again. And I was thinking: playing video games like this as a child might actually have been greatly beneficial to me. The reason I say this is that the method that I use to advance in Punch-Out!! is the same one I've used to get good at everything I'm good at: Keep doing it over and over and over, even though you will fail and fail and fail. Don't get frustrated, and chances are eventually you will succeed. It's easy in theory, but it can be hard in practice because it sucks to fail repeatedly, and it takes time, and there is always something else you could be doing with that time (which is why, somewhat contradictorily, I'm a huge fan of quitting -- learning when to bail on something so that you can take up something else that might suit you better is a super valuable, underrated life skill). Maybe, instead of just playing a pointless video game, I was training myself to train, and this would help me immensely when pursuing more "important" things like mathematics.

Wait, did I just make the case for letting my kids play video games all summer? Actually, the truth is, I don't mind so much when the boys just play video games -- like, if they are just doing that one thing, playing one video game on the PS5, I kinda take that as a win. It's all the other garbage they do on screens -- the constantly being plugged in to a stream of bullshit, unhealthy stimuli -- that bothers me.

Alright, I gotta go, S is not that far away with the kids, and it won't be a good look if I'm blogging when they get home, given that she got up early by herself to get them, and I did nothing. Although, to be fair, I do things that she doesn't do. For example, cleaning out a grub-infested compost bin. We had a neighborhood kid bring in our trash bins from the curb while we were on vacation, and I think he moved our compost bin as well, but it hadn't been emptied yet (it gets picked up a few days after trash). So, it sat in the hot sun on our porch for over two weeks and was absolutely putrid when I opened it the other day for the first time since we got back. Despite being sealed, little worms and creepy-crawlies got in somehow (life finds a way!), and laid eggs, and it was like a biology experiment on decomposition when I opened it up -- pure nastiness.

And of course it was just assumed that I would be the one to handle it. The worst part is that they had laid eggs or something in the notches of the lid, and they were stuck on and wouldn't come off even after being blasted with a hose. I had to use an old toothbrush to scrub them off, but even that didn't completely work, so I had to use my fingernail and basically scrape these eggs -- or whatever they were -- out of the notches one by one. It was not the most pleasant activity I've even partaken in. Does this put me even with S? Maybe not, but if you ask people would you rather spend the morning picking up your kids from camp or cleaning up crusted maggot eggs with your bare hands, I suspect many would say the former.

Until next time... 

Entry 768: Four Days In Paradise

It was a weird juxtaposition of a week -- so much terrible news coming out my home country, while I'm off vacationing in a tropical paradise. But I suppose it was only ever thus. There's never been a time in the history of people in which everything was all good, not by a long shot. That's how the human experience works. It's misery and ugliness and death laid right on top of joy and beauty and life. Navigating this conflict is kinda the whole game. It's a game you play as best as you can but never win, or maybe never lose. I guess it depends on your perspective.

S and I went to Turks & Caicos on Monday and returned last night. We had two traveling companions but not our usual ones. We went not with our kids but with our friends FB and SM. And unless I'm forgetting something, it was our first real vacation without children since we've had children. It was nice. It went exactly how you might image it went. We spent a lot of time at the beach, a lot of time at the pool, and a little bit of time doing other things. We ate some good food, had a few sugary cocktails,* and spent too much money. 

*Literally just a few. Our partying days are long gone and none of us are huge drinkers. 

We arrived latish on Monday evening and didn't have much time to do anything other than eat dinner at a restaurant at our resort. When we arrived they asked us if we had a reservation, and we said no, and they said that's okay, but you should make one in the future, and I thought that was strange because it wasn't close to being full, and there were open tables every time I walked by the entire week. In general, I was pleasantly surprised at how not crowded everything was. I've been to resorts before where it's next to impossible to get a decent seat by the pool or at the beach, and that sucks because not only do you not have a good seat, but you're resentful about it because you're usually paying a lot of money to not have a good seat. S asked somebody about it and was told that it was a down period. It was during the week (not the busier weekend), and it was near the 4th of July, which isn't a big international travel time for Americans (by far the most represented guest, if my ear for accents is accurate). We didn't plan it that way. We were just lucky it worked out for us.

The big event the next day was massages all around. Actually, S didn't get one because there was some sort of error, and they only had three booked, but she didn't really want one anyway (or, more accurately, she didn't really want to pay for one -- they were pricey), so it worked out okay. I love a good deep tissue massage. It's a once-every-three-to-five-years guilty pleasure of mine. Although, I don't know if "pleasure" is the correct word here. She was burrowing into my leg muscles in a way that I could barely handle. More than once I had to stifle a yowl. I left with my calves feeling like iron rods had been inserted next to the bones. It was definitely not relaxing. But I'll damned if I didn't wake up the next morning feeling as loose and ache-free as I've felt in years.

On Wednesday, we rented bikes and rode them into town. SM didn't join us because she can't ride a bike very well, and it's probably a good thing she didn't, as the road was bumpy and narrow and the bikes were shot to hell. S, FB, and I made it there and back safely, but it was much more adventurous than a leisurely ride a mile down the road, on a completely flat surface, should be. When we got back, S took a nap, and the rest of us drank the local lite beer at the pool bar. I don't think I've ever sat at a bar stool that is actually in a pool before. It was quite nice. Afterward we at dinner at a place called Hemingway's. It's unclear to me if that's just a name or if Hemingway used to come there or something like that. He did spend a lot of time in the Caribbean. I had the curry shrimp, and it was the best thing I ate while I was there.

The next day, we went on a kayaking excursion. A little motorboat towed us out to some small islands, and then a guide had us paddle around to see the local flora and fauna. It was pretty cool. We saw baby sharks, giant turtles, barracuda, and even an octopus. The latter, we were told, was especially rare. The guide said, he'd never seen one up-close -- it was just chilling in clear, shallow water right by the shore -- in his five years of doing tours. The only thing I didn't love about the excursion is that it was quite long (three hours), and it was hard for me to sit in the kayak for that long. Also, they were two-people kayaks, so S was my partner, and she's not exactly the world's strongest rower. When I needed to take a break for a few seconds we would lag behind the rest of the group. Still, it was fun, and I got a good workout in -- my shoulders were sore the next morning.

Speaking of the next morning, it was our last one on the islands. We had an evening flight, which put us in that awkward limbo of not having enough time to do anything substantial but having too much time to do nothing. We went to the pool for a bit in the morning, and then showered (and tried to dry our wet suits in the sun) just before checkout. Then, after much deliberation, we took a cab into town to a burger joint called Big Al's because we were told it had AC (which it did). We ate there (great burger -- second best thing I had during the trip), and then we went to the airport and flew back home. S and I got to see a bunch of random fireworks from the beltway as we drove back from the airport. It was a nice little impromptu way to celebrate the 4th, honestly. And as I always say: The best part of any trip, no matter how fun, is returning home.

A few other things.

• FB and I both work out regularly, and we were joking that the only people who check out middle-aged men at the beach are other middle-aged men to see how they stack up.
  
  
• I also was keeping tabs on the types of bikinis women were wearing -- not in a lascivious way, but in a more anthropological way. I noticed four basic types of bikini bottoms -- the "full-on Brazilian thong" where all you can see is butt-cheek (only saw one of those); the "flared thong", which is quite skimpy, but does cover a small portion of the booty; the "normal" bikini bottom that covers pretty much the entire butt; and the "hot-pants" bottom, for women who want full-ass coverage, but still want to wear a two-piece -- and it's interesting to see what type of woman wears what type of suit. I saw a lady wearing a very skimpy "flared thong" with her child, which I thought was a bit strange, but then she spoke a language other than English, and it made more sense. Most other western cultures are less prudish about nudity than Americans are.
  
  
• The resort had a complementary breakfast buffet, which was a huge plus. Sure, you just pay for it as part of the overall expense instead of individually, but psychologically it's nice to eat as much as you want "for free". Also, you can work it. You can eat a massive breakfast, and then basically ride that until dinner, so that you are only paying the exorbitant island prices for one meal. That's what I did. Every morning I'd get an omelet with the works and a side of potatoes, all topped with a huge scoop of salsa, and then I'd eat whatever sweet thing they had (waffles, pancakes, or French toast), followed by a mound of fruit. And lots of coffee, of course. One nitpick is that they didn't have iced coffee. That would have really hit the spot in the warm weather. Oh well, it wasn't too hot in the morning, and the breakfast area was in the shade.
  
  
• The drinking water situation was a ecological disaster at the resort. Basically, they just gave out an endless supply of bottled water, so that in order to stay properly hydrated you had to created a load of plastic trash. They should have set up drinking water stations and let people fill up their own water bottles or put out paper cups. They could even sell water bottles or reusable cups, and I'm sure people would buy them. It makes no sense to do it how they do it.
  
  
• As we were waiting in the lobby for our friends to checkout, we were chatting with a couple from San Francisco, and the woman was looking at her phone, and she said, "Oh my gosh, they had a giant flood in Texas, and a bunch of girls at a camp are missing!" That is a truly horrific story. It makes me especially uneasy given that my kids are at sleep-away for the next week, and it's supposed to rain where they are pretty much everyday. There are no flood warnings, but still...   

So as not to end on that grim note, I'll post some pics.

Until next time... 

Entry 767: Camp

A lot going on this weekend, both personally and in the world. It seems like that's the new normal. On the personal front, school has ended, and we are getting ready to send the kids to sleep-away camp. It's for two weeks this time, which they've never done before. I'm not worried about Lil' S2, as he's good in these types of situations, and he'll be there with a whole cadre of his buddies, anyway. But I am a bit anxious about sending Lil' S1 for that long. None of his friends will be there, and he's aged out of the little-kids section of the camp, so he won't even be around anybody he knows, family friends and the like, as they are all younger than him. Given the type of kid he is -- quirky, nerdy, sensitive -- it could go really badly if he gets the wrong mix of cabinmates. He's not into sports (the cheat-code for male bonding), so if the kids are really jockish, he might struggle to find people to hang out with, and if they are mean kids who cope with their own insecurities by belittling others, he might find himself a target, which would be really awful.

On the flip-side, navigating these types of situations is a social skill everybody has to learn, and it's much better to be the awkward tween than the awkward thirty-year-old. Also, I don't know if kids are mean in the same way they were when I was that age. So much of the bullying we see and hear about now is online, and the kids at this camp won't have access to their devices. Maybe that's one of the few good things about everybody being addicted to their phones now: Kids aren't as adept at being mean to each other in person as they used to be.

It's also possible, of course, that he finds a kid or two to connect with and has a great time. I should allow for that in my hypothetical visions. But that's not typically my way. As I mentioned in a previous entry, I'm a bit of worrier -- well, to a point, anyway. I'm sure in this situation once we actually drop him off it will be "out of sight, out of mind." Plus, S is like ten times as apprehensive about this as I am, so I've been playing it cool and reassuring her, so as to forestall a full-on double-barreled freakout. That's a thing I've learned about being a parent. It's really bad if you're both crazy simultaneously. Anxious times are much more manageable if you can learn to stagger your neuroses.

In other news, there's a lot going on in the world and not much of it seems great. Hopefully I'll get a chance to comment on it all (I have thoughts!) at some point in the not too distance future, but not now. It's a busy weekend. In addition to getting the kids off to camp, S and I have to prepare for a little kids-free getaway we have planned. We haven't had one of these in forever, so I'm really looking forward to it. We meant to do it last year, but we ended up having to go to Florida instead to help out with her dad. He had some sort of mysterious ailment and needed to go to a bunch of doctor's appointments and neither he nor S's mom drive that much anymore. (He was properly diagnosed and is feeling much better now.)

Alright, gotta go. The rest of the family is watching A Minecraft Movie, and even though I have little interest in seeing this film, I should join them. If I don't, I will be shamed by them for sitting by myself with my nose in my laptop instead of spending time with the family before the kids leave for camp.

Until next time... 

Entry 766: Power Outage

We got blasted here in DC yesterday by a thunderstorm, almost completely out of nowhere. Storms were in the forecast, but only around 50%, and I didn't see anything predicting the ferocity with which we ultimately got hit. The worst of it didn't last long, only about ten minutes or so, but it completely fucked shit up. It seemed like just a "normal" thunderstorm at first, and then at some point it was like, Man, this actually pretty intense, and then Whoa, this is legit scary. It was the worst storm we've had here since the derecho of 2012.

But we're all good now. I hunkered down in my basement (actually, I just happened to be down there working but whatever), which was a relatively safe place to be, as it's mostly underground, and there aren't many windows. S and the boys waited it out in our car in a parking lot. We lost power, and it seemed like it was going to be at least a day until they got it back up and running, but at 2 am this morning we were rudely/pleasantly awakened by every light and electronic device in our house turning on simultaneously. I gotta hand it to our power supplier Pepco. They are pretty good about getting the lights back on. This was the longest our power has been out that I can remember, and when I saw the number of fallen trees out on the streets and sidewalks today, it's like, Yeah, that makes sense. Some power lines are gonna go down and some transformers are gonna pop. You can only do so much to safeguard against the wrath of the gods.

We actually hosted a party at our last night despite not having any power. It was an end-of-the-year celebration for Lil' S2's flag football team. The storm came through about 4:15, and the party was supposed to start at 5:00. So, we texted everybody on the team telling them that we didn't have power, but nobody had power, so everybody figured we all might as well hang out in the dark together. Also, we had a taco bar for 25 people, and I'm sure nobody else felt like making dinner. It worked out really well, actually. The kids just spooked each other out in our dark basement, and the adults hung out on our covered porch. And then eventually the rain stopped and the clouds thinned, and it wasn't that dark anymore, and the kids were even able to play outside.

But we still didn't have any power. Lil' S1 went to my sister-in-law's who lives about a mile away and never lost power, and Lil' S2 slept over at the house of the one kid on his team whose power came back on right away. (It was an impromptu slumber party -- very nice of the parents to do that.) So, it was just S and I, which made things much more tolerable, if not exactly pleasant. The main thing is the AC -- it's getting hot here, now (next week is triple digits... ugh) -- but thankfully our basement never really gets that hot, so we slept in the guestroom down there.

It's funny the little things that you just totally take for granted until they're gone. I formulated this grand plan to use my iPhone hotspot to download podcasts to my iPad, which was fully charged, light a couple candles, and tear through all the dishes from the party by hand, since obviously we couldn't use our dishwasher. But once I started washing things, all the food and gunk clogged up the drain and created a huge pool in our sink, so I flipped the disposal on, and of course nothing happened because it's electric. Damn. Foiled. I just left them for the next day and watched Tires instead.

Alright a few pics of the wreckage and then that's the post.

Until next time... 

Entry 765: It's Just Life

I can't say it was the best week I've ever had. It seems like when things are going well for me personally, the world at large is on fire, and when things seem (relatively) stable in the world, my own little nook is unsettled. That could just be perception, though, like we each have our own personal level of stability, and we inflate or minimize things in our own mind until we reach that level. That's why small things sometimes tip us over edge, or why we often just start feeling better about things that haven't changed. It's also why some people are constantly living life on the brink and others always seem to be even keel, even though the external circumstances of each person are roughly comparable.

In general, I think my baseline level of anxiety is relatively low -- or maybe I'm just good at coping. Because I actually do worry a lot, about everything, big and small, but then at some point I say, Fuck it, it's just life and get on with my day. But this week definitely pushed me above my norm. It started with the ICE raids and subsequent riots in LA, moved into a new war in the Middle East, took a quick detour into politically-motivated killings in Minnesota, and is ending tonight with a North Korean-style military parade about seven miles from where I currently sit. That's a lot. Oh, and don't forget, the robots are coming for all of our jobs and climate change is still an existential crisis.

It was a double-whammy earlier this week, too, as S was super stressed out for reasons I won't go into (other than to say it was nothing to do directly with me, thankfully), and when your spouse is stressed out it acts as force multiply to your own stress level. S goes to bed a few hours before me, so she's usually in deep sleep REM by the time I'm crawling in to join her, but on Wednesday when I came into the room, I heard those three dreaded words: "I'm still up." It's the worst, because a) it's painful to see someone you care about in distress, b) it's means I'm not getting any sleep any time soon. Even if she doesn't want to dump everything onto me talk things over, even if we're both just lying there quietly, I can feel the stress emanating from her and being absorb by me.

Although, to be fair, I don't think I was getting much sleep that night anyway. Right before bed I was listening to The Bill Simmons Podcast, which is usually relaxing, but he had Chuck Klosterman on, and they ended the discussion talking about AI, and it was extremely grim. I'm not totally convinced AI is going to completely upend society in a negative way, but I'm not not convinced of it either. I'm in the "it's a coin toss" camp, and the thing about coin tosses is that you lose them just as frequently as you win them. What I do know is that from a governmental policy response position, we are absolutely not equipped to handle it. Even if we had the best and the brightest in charge, we might still get it wrong, and we currently have nothing near the best and the brightest. We are at the mercy of the tech companies, and their message seems to be: This thing that we are making is absolutely going to destroy us all, but we have to keep making it, because if we don't China will destroy us all first.*

*It's like the opposite of the joke in Silicon Valley when the duplicitous tech CEO Gavin Belson says "I don't want to live in a world where someone makes the world a better place better than we do."

So, when I couldn't sleep Wednesday night, I thought about what I would do if I could do something about AI, and I came up with three things.

1. Outlaw driverless cars for transporting people or goods. We have drone airplanes that can fly themselves (or be controlled remotely), but commercial flights still need a human pilot in the cockpit (two of them, even). Let's make it the same for cars. It would protect jobs and add an extra layer of security and peace of mind. We can still use self-driving technology, but a human has to physically be in the driver's seat for the duration of the trip.

2. Make it explicitly illegal to make deep fakes of somebody without their permission or without clearly and repeatedly stating that it's not real. There is a thing now in sports social media where you will see a clip of somebody being interviewed, and they are giving strange answers, and you don't know if it's real or an AI-enhanced fake. It's only going to get worse as the technology gets better/more accessible. If something is obviously phony, either because it's clearly somebody acting (like Bad Lip Reading) or because it's labeled as such, then that's fine -- that's satire and should be protected by the First Amendment -- but if it's not, then it should be libel and/or fraud and subject to punishment. And it might be necessary to regulate social media companies for disseminating this stuff as well. Few things are more dystopian to me than living in a world in which nobody knows what's real and what's isn't. It's funny when it's a Nathan Fielder show,* not when it's just life.

*Loved the new season of The Rehearsal, by the way, speaking of humans in the cockpit.

3. Make a law that content creators get paid if their copyrighted material is used to train an AI algorithm. I have no idea how this could be done, but I bet somebody out there could figure it out. Just like an artist gets some money every time their song gets streamed, they should get some money every time an AI algorithm references their work. Like there's AI Spotify, and you give it a prompt "make a hip-hop dance song," and every artist whose work it references to make the song gets half a cent or something. Humans can freely borrow ideas from other humans (we can't help it, anyway); machines should have to pay. 

Alright that's all I got for today. Until next time...

Entry 764: A Few Unrelated Items

Not much time to blog today. I've got maybe 50 minutes, which isn't a lot for me. As S likes to point out to me quite often, I'm slow. I'll usually do a good job with things but almost never quickly. But today time is of the essence, so I'm just going fire off the first things that come to mind.

------------------------------ 

Lil' S1 went to "Indianapolis" for a night on Friday with a friend. I use quotes because he actually went to Annapolis, but when he asked us about it, he said "Indianapolis." We were really confused -- for several days, not just like a few minutes -- as to why his friends' family were going to Indianapolis for a single night. It's at least a nine-hour drive from DC. Were they flying there? And isn't that the type of thing the parents should contact us about? That's a big trip to have kids work out on their own, no? So, S texted the friend's mom, and she informed us it was Annapolis, as in the city that's under a 45-minute drive from where we live. Yes, that makes a lot more sense. 

The thing is, Lil' S1's geography is so bad that there isn't a meaningful difference to him between Annapolis and Indianapolis. They're just phonemes and as phonemes they're objective easy to confuse. If you're familiar with where they are on the map, then you're highly unlikely to confuse them. But Lil' S1 isn't familiar with where they are on the map. In fact, if I asked him right now, I bet he could not tell me what states these cities are in, and one of the states is a short walk from where we live and the name of the other one is literally embedded in the city name.

It's not just him either. I don't think his friends know this stuff either. It seems like it isn't something that's taught in school anymore. Maybe it never was. I've known every state and where it is on the map and its capital and largest city since I was seven, but I memorized it all from an atlas we had at home. I don't remember if we learned that in school or not. We should have though, and kids should learn it today. I think stuff like this is sometimes considered unimportant memorization work, but I don't think it is. If you don't know where anything is in the country relative to everything else, you just kinda look like a dumbass, and it's a useful life skill to look like a dumbass as seldom as possible.

And now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go study a map of the world for no particular reason.

------------------------------

A few nights ago I was creeped out in a way I haven't been creeped out in a long time. I woke up from a really bad dream, one of those panic inducers, where the premise of the dream is really silly -- in this case I was staying with a bunch of family at a friend's vacation house, but then the friend came with his family and so we had to find a new place to stay -- but the tenor of the dream is extremely unsettling, borderline frightening for some reason. So, I woke up in a bit of a disoriented panic. My mouth was super dry and the water bottle I keep near my bed was empty, so I got up to fill it in the kitchen, still very much discombobulated. 

In the kitchen, I heard a startling scratching noise coming from outside in our backyard. It's sounded like concrete being dragged against concrete. My first thought was that somebody was breaking in so I peeked through all the windows* but didn't see anybody. Also, on second thought, it wouldn't make sense that somebody was trying to break in given where the sound was coming from. It wasn't particularly close to a door or a window, and it sounded like it was coming from under the house. I convinced myself that it must be an animal of some sort, which didn't exactly put my mind at ease but was a much less worrisome thought than it being a human trying to rob us, and so after about twenty more minutes of walking around the house making sure everything was locked the alarm was on, I felt comfortable enough to go back to sleep, still more than a little creeped out.

*We have blinds that are one solid piece of fabric, not the kind that are a bunch of individual slats plastic slats. In general, I like our kind of blinds better, but they suck for peeking. You either have to put it all the way up or peek through the side at a bad angle. The individual slats are perfect for peeking, and whenever I hear something outside, I wish we had that kind. 

The next morning, I noticed a random black box in the middle of our lawn, and I figured out what happened. A few years ago we had a mouse problem, where we could actually hear mice running around in our walls and our ceiling. It was pretty gross, so we got pest control out here, and they located the point of entry, sealed it up, and also set a bunch of traps. It worked great, and we haven't had any problems with mice since then.

One of the traps is this bait box thing. It's like a box mounted on a slab of stone with poison in it, and then there is a tiny entry where only something the size of a mouse could get in to. So, some animal, I'm guessing a raccoon, because it would be hard to move this thing without grabbing it, was dragging this box out from under our house, and that's what I heard. Presumably, it was attracted to it for the same reason a mouse would be, but it couldn't actually get at the "goods" (which is lucky for it), so it eventually got bored and left.

There we go, mystery solved, no reason to be creeped out anymore. Now I'm just annoyed because I have a bait box in the middle of my lawn, and if I put it under the house, I'm sure it'll just get dragged out again. I guess I'll just push it off to the corner and call it good. I also don't love that it's attracting other vermin, but perhaps that's unavoidable, and, like I said, we haven't had any further problems with mice, so I'll just live with it.

Alright, time's up. Until next time... 

Entry 763: Secular Meditation

I never got the chance to put up Part II of my last entry like I had hoped. Oh well. I've probably started and abandoned a dozen things on this blog. That's just how it goes. Something else came up last weekend that demanded my and S's attention, something every parent of our generation has to deal with sooner or later: inappropriate texting. Lil' S2 got a new Apple Watch recently, and he's at the age where most his friends have one also (or they have a phone), so he's on a bunch of fourth-grade group chats, and, well, let's just say he obviously did not realize that everything he said on them could be seen from S's iPad. I'm not even going to post what he actually said, because it's embarrassing, and because I don't want this blog entry to get flagged for inappropriate content, but suffice it to say, it's not stuff he learned from watching Bluey.

It's partially, maybe even largely, on S and I. We never explicitly went over texting rules and etiquette with him, and we were extremely lax in monitoring what he was consuming and parroting to all his little schoolmates. We only found about it because one of his friends ratted him out. That prompted us to deep-dive his text history, and it was... not great. Some of it was just superficially bad language, which I don't really give a shit* about. But there was some other stuff in there that was worse on a deeper level. He made fun of a kid in his class at one point and issued vague dis-track-type threats to everybody else at another point. After getting caught, he immediately melted down in tears and claimed he didn't even know what the things he was saying mean, and I believe him to a point, but only to a point. He certainly knew it was wrong.

*See what I did there? 

S and I knew we had to nip this thing in the bud, so nip we did. We laid into him pretty good. We revoked his texting privileges indefinitely. (He's now only allowed to text about logistical things.) We took away his iPad and PlayStation for a week, and we blocked YouTube permanently on his devices. So as to not just be punitive, we also tried to have a nonconfrontational heart-to-heart with him to underscore the importance of being smart about what you post online. It lives on forever and everybody can see it.* I think (pray) this message got through to him, and hopefully throwing down the gauntlet on this early will pay dividends later. It's going to be an ongoing struggle and learning this lesson now, when the stakes are low and people are forgiving, could be very valuable.

*In fact, one of his friends' mom saw the texts before us and responded to him individually, telling him to knock it off or she would contact his parents. I don't know this woman well, but I texted her to apologize, and she was extremely cool about it. She said not to worry too much, that it's just part of growing up these days (true) and that Lil' S2 is a good kid (also true) who is welcome to hang out with her son anytime. I really appreciated her response.    

And some immediate good things did come out of this as well. Without watch time, Lil' S2 spent more time doing other, I would say better, activities. (It's like that scene on The Simpsons when all the kids stop watching Itchy & Scratchy.) He's really gotten into riding bikes around the neighborhood with his little friends, which is great. The G & G boys all got bikes during the Covid lockdowns (S was already borrowing one from a friend), rode them like twice, and then they just sat in our shed for a few years. Lil' S2 is now too big for his original bike, but his brother's fits him nicely, so he took over that one, and so at least one them is getting used. In theory, I could ride mine more, but I don't really like street cycling for some reason. I can't explain it, as I like being outside, and I like riding the stationary bike. You would think I would love outdoor riding, but I don't really. I don't hate it, but I don't love it.

Lil' S2 has also taken up Rubik's Cube solving, which makes me super proud. He's gotten quite good at it. Over the course of three weeks I watched him go from struggling to solve it with instructions and with my help (I learned how to solve one a few years ago) to being able to do it by himself with instructions to being able to do it by himself without instructions to being able to do it by himself without instructions in a minute and 15 seconds. That's about a full minute faster than I've ever been able to do it, by the way. I've been trying to figure out how he's so much faster than me, and I think it's simply that he's way quicker than me at doing the moves. His fingers just move faster than mine. I'm well past my physical peak, especially when it comes to quick-twitch motion; he's not. My only hope is to learn more algorithms that are faster for different starting states. I definitely can't out-turn him, but I can probably outthink him... for now.

Seeing how Lil' S2 has thrived with less screen time has prompted S and I to make some of the limitations permanent for both he and his brother. They both need it for different reasons. Lil' S1 is almost certainly not going to text inappropriate things to his friends. On the contrary, he's a bit of a goody-two-shoes when it comes to that type of thing. The other day I overheard his friend drop his phone and say "fuck!", and Lil' S2 mildly scolded him for it. I couldn't make out exactly what he said, but the final line was something like, "In this house that's all we ask." But Lil' S1 is way more susceptible to the addiction aspect of screens than his brother. Left to his own devices,* he will spend just about all of his waking hours on his phone or iPad. Even his reading, his saving-grace hobby, has gone down significantly in favor of listening to podcasts. And, look, nobody loves podcasts more than me, but I just don't think it's healthy for anybody, especially a child in his formative years, to have earbuds constantly in his head.    

*See what I did there? 

I fear that I'm going to have to start setting a better example and not be on my devices as much when I'm hanging out at home. S is already on me a little bit to do that. I try to explain to everybody that I already put in hours and hours, nay, years and years, of brain development without screens, but it does little to convince them. Also, when I'm on my phone, I'm almost always doing something somewhat productive. I'm doing a crossword puzzle or reading an article or doing trivia with a friend I otherwise wouldn't keep in contact with. I don't do social media at all anymore, and I (almost) never zombie-out on YouTube for hours on end. But, again, it's not really very persuasive, and I understand that. If you tell your kids how bad it is to be on a device all the time, and you're on a device all the time, it's just not going to land, even if it's not an apples-to-apples comparison.

All this does make me happy, however, that I grew up before the time of device ubiquity. I mean, we had TV and video games, of course, but they weren't as good, and, most importantly, the good stuff wasn't available 24/7. When I got home from school there was nothing on TV but cartoons and soap operas. I didn't have all of TV history at my beck and call. And if I wanted to play Nintendo, I only had the same games I had already grown tired of months ago. I couldn't get online and instantly have a new experience. I had to play Cobra Triangle for the umpteenth time. It just wasn't that great. It's not like I consciously decided to better myself by going outside and touching grass. It was just more fun than the other options.

Also, I was just bored a lot of the time, and I think there's value in that. Necessity is the mother of invention, and by corollary, boredom is the mother of imagination. When you have nothing to do as a child, you get creative real quick. In fact, I have a feeling people are going to realize this and boredom is going to make a comeback -- like, it's going to become trendy for people to force themselves to be bored for a little while everyday. Maybe it already is. That's kinda what meditation is, after all. But meditation has a spiritually aspect to it that boredom lacks. Maybe that's how we sell boredom to the masses. We call it secular meditation instead. Secular meditation -- I think I'm on to something here.

Until next time...   

 

Entry 762: When Are Things The Best? Part I

I was listening to a movie podcast the other day, and the hosts were discussing the 1982 cult classic Fast Times at Ridgemont High. It's very much a movie of a time. If you are Gen-X, like me, it probably means something to you; if you aren't, it probably doesn't. One of the hosts was saying that the main reason this film resonates so much with people of my generation is because it's the perfect movie -- it has the right mix of  pathos, humor, and sex* -- to implant itself in the psyche of a young teenager, and, in general, movies are at their best when you are a young teenager. I think he's mostly right about this -- I saw Fast Times at age 13 at an older kid's house, and it kinda blew my mind -- but I have a quibble in that I don't think movies, in general, are at their best as a young teenager.

*In terms of both timeline and content, Fast Times at Ridgemont High is almost exactly between the campy, raunchy comedies of the late-70s/early-80s like Animal House and Porkies and the more "realistic", sentimental John Hughes teen movies of the mid-80s.  

When are movies at their best? Keep reading, and you will find out, as this question got me thinking not just about when movies are their best, but when all sorts of things are at their best. I break it all down in this post.

Movies: Late teens

Movies are excellent when you are a young teen, but I think they are even better when you are an older teen. At that age, you haven't yet become jaded by the realities of life -- you still have the capacity to fully ingest the magic and awe of film -- but you are old enough to appreciate more interesting concepts and themes that would go over your head (or terrify and traumatize you) as a younger person. My personal apex movie moment was seeing Pulp Fiction in the theater at age 17. I knew nothing about it or the director. I had no idea what I was sitting down for, but I was hooked from the get-go. In my memory, I watched the entire thing with my jaw on the floor and my eyes bulging out of my head like a cartoon character. I didn't blink for two and a half hours. I've never been more rapt in wonderment in my entire life.

Then I had almost the exact same experience two weeks later when I saw Trainspotting. Now, in actuality, Trainspotting did not come until 1996, so it was more like two years later, but in my mind's eye I saw these movies almost back-to-back. That's the hold they took on me -- they completely warped my sense of spacetime.

As an aside, allow me a moment to lament the current state of in-theater cinema. Going to the movies just isn't what it used to be, not only because I'm not 17 anymore, but also, and primarily, because the films that play in theaters just aren't that good now. I would say I'm superhero movied out, but that would imply I was ever in on superhero movies in the first place. I've heard Thunderbolts is really, actually -- no, seriously -- quite good, and I still have absolutely no desire to watch it. Since we moved back to DC in 2011, I can probably list the number of movies I truly enjoyed watching in the theater on one hand.*

*Off the top of my head: Once Upon a Time In Hollywood, The Shape of Water, Gravity, and I'll throw in a replay of Avatar in 3-D I-Max (but not Avatar: The Way of Water, which I didn't like that much). That's literally all I got -- three movies and a throw-in.

Music: Early teens

You could pick any age between 14 and 29, and I wouldn't argue with you. After that your tastes mostly calcify, and you find yourself mostly wanting to listen to the same thing over and over again, instead of exploring new music. But I went with early teens because that's when the nostalgia hits me the hardest. I heard Superman by REM the other day and damn near burst into tears. I don't even particularly like that song -- I mean, it's fine but nothing special -- but I did like it in junior high, and so it still really moves me thirty-five years later. This happens frequently -- if I chance upon a song I listened to between 1991 and 1994, I'm all in, regardless of how good or bad it is.   

Also, early teens is when your music most defines you. When I was that age CDs were emerging as the dominant musical medium, and they came in those long cardboard boxes, so I would collect them and decorate my school binder with them. I would rotate the band on the front -- Nirvana, Nine Inch Nails, Inxs -- depending on my mood and tastes at that particular moment, and I had Jimi Hendrix permanently on the back. My message to the world: I love alternative rock, and I am not a racist.

TV: Late twenties

This one is largely a function of when TV was at its best, in general. In my opinion, this was in the mid-twenty-aughts, and in the mid-twenty-aughts, I was in my late twenties, so TV-watching was the best for me in my late twenties. There are undoubtedly more good TV shows available now than at any other time in TV history, but the experience of watching TV is notably worse now than it was twenty years ago.

In fact, part of the problem is that there is too much on TV now. There is paralysis by analysis -- The Last of Us, The Pit, The Bear, Poker Face, Landman, Running Point, The Studio, Your Friends and Neighbors, The Rehearsal, Severance, The Agency -- these are all shows with new(ish) seasons out that I've heard are worth watching. And then even when I pick a show, there is the "online dating problem", where if it's not bad but doesn't rock my world immediately, I become overwhelmed with the feeling that there is something better out there for me, and I'm wasting my valuable time and energy with this not-as-good-as-something-else show, and that sentiment can totally ruin the viewing experience. As a result, I usually end up just watching sports or doing something else entirely.

I miss the days when when I could mostly keep up with the great TV shows just by watching an episode or two a night. Early Netflix, when they sent you DVDs in the mail, represents the peak of TV-watching for me. I only had one service, and with that and all the stuff I already had on disc (my brother-in-law used to check stuff out from the library and copy it), I was able to rip through almost all the great TV shows of the day -- The Sopranos, Sex & the City, Freaks and Geeks, The Office, Six Feet Under, The Wire, Arrested Development, Curb, etc. -- in short order.

And there was something ineffably wonderful about getting the physical discs in the mail. I would go into campus and teach all day or work on my dissertation, and then come home to a mailbox filled with the latest episodes of whatever great show I was engrossed in at the moment as my reward. With the two disc plan, the timing worked out perfectly too. I would watch one disc while the other was out, and by the time I was done, the other had arrived with the next batch of episodes. Well, the timing was almost perfect -- Sundays always threw off my rhythm. No mail that day.

Alright, I can see I have more to say on this topic than expected, so I'm taking this to a Part II. Why not? It's a holiday weekend. Let's go nuts.

Until next time...

Entry 761: Too Much

I sneezed this morning and pulled a muscle in my back and could not be more annoyed about it. It's not terrible, but it's definitely going to prevent me from doing my S & C class* on Monday, which really sucks, because I was finally ready to attend full-time again, now that my finger is on the mend. But no. I sneezed and felt a sharp pain shoot through my body, emanating from my left lat, and I knew instantly what was going on, because it's happened before. Goddammit, that's me out for at least four days.Then I had to go sit in bleachers with no back support for two hours, which certainly didn't help.

*That's strength and conditioning, to those of us who do S & C classes. 

It's just been that type of week -- one disruption after another. I just want things to get back to normal (even though there really is no such thing). For starters, work has been uncharacteristically busy, as we are trying to get a product out to market ASAP, and a lot of the bug-fixing falls on me and my team. Then I had three appointments for my finger (two therapy sessions, one follow-up with the orthopedist), and although it has gotten much better, it's still not 100%, and the doctor recommends at least another month of occupational therapy. Then I got a cold, and then I hurt my back because I sneezed because I have a cold. On the plus side, we had family plans during Lil' S2's baseball game this morning, so I didn't have to fight him on it.

The in-laws were here this week, which, let's just say, doesn't not add to the unsettledness. It used to be a big help having them come in, because they could aid in childcare. But as everybody, children and adults alike, have gotten older, that's less and less the case. The kids are faster and the grandparents are slower, and it's to the point where S doesn't like leaving her father alone with the boys, because she's worried about him. He's really getting frail. He has the physique of Montgomery Burns. We have an electronic deadbolt on our front door, and he can't press the buttons on the keypad hard enough to enter the code. He'll tap it in, but the lock will only register like two of the four numbers, and then it'll time out, and he'll get frustrated and start cursing it in Kannada. Toward the end of the trip, he wouldn't even bother with it. He would just wait on the porch until somebody let him in.

And I say all this with love. Dude is getting old. That's just how it goes. It's going to happen to all of us (probably). So, we might as well have fun with it while we can. If my kids aren't poking fun at me when I'm that age, I'll be disappointed... or dead already.

They left this morning. My sister-in-law gave them a ride to the airport, while the four of us (me, S, and the boys) went to S's graduation. She's been taking night classes for the past few years and just earned a master's in legal studies. It's pretty impressive, and she wanted to do the whole cap-and-gown thing, so we all went. It was cool, but the fateful sneeze occurred immediately before entering the auditorium, and we got there just as the last of the good seats were being taken, so we had to sit in the backless bleachers. We picked a spot at the very top, so that I could lean against the back railing, but it wasn't at all comfortable. And of course Lil' S2's iPad died within five minutes of being there, because he's terrible about charging it, so he was bored out of his gourd pretty much from the get-go.

But we made it through. There was a lot of pomp -- pomp and circumstance, as it were -- but we got that sweet payoff of hearing somebody you don't know say a loved one's name and then watching them walk across the stage, while you squint and say, "I think that's them right there... no, no, the one next to that one." Afterward, Lil' S1 said, "We waited for two hours for something that was over in a minute. That was worse than a track meet!" And Lil' S2 said, "It wasn't even a minute. It was, like, five seconds." He's right too. If you started the clock from the moment S came onto the stage and stopped it the moment she left, it would have been very close to five seconds.

After this past week, I would love a nice, chill normal night at home, but that's not happening. S wanted to celebrate (she also had a birthday recently), so she invited our friends over for pizza and cake, and then their kids are staying the night. It's a great idea… for a different weekend. I so don't feel like hosting anything, and I feel like chaperoning a slumber party even less. And that always falls on me, as S is zonked out by like 8:30. But I'll keep my opinion to myself on this one (other than putting it on this blog -- don't say anything). Unless I'm going to cancel everything, which I'm definitely not going to do, there's not much to be gained by saying something. It will only irritate S, and then I'll have a salty wife on top of everything else. That would just be cutting off my nose to spite my face -- at least I think that's what it would be. I have to admit, I've never really understood that idiom.

Until next time...

Entry 760: Kids Sports II

The woes with kids sports continue this weekend. This time it's Lil' S2. He's signed up for baseball, and every time he has a game, it's a death-battle of the wills to get him to go. Weirdly, he'll go to the practices (somewhat) willingly, but he hates the games. Actually, he hates going to the games. Once he gets there, I see him interacting with the other kids and having fun, and sometimes, if we catch him in the right mood, he will admit after the fact that he had a good time. But I've come to dread game-day morning because I know it's going to be a knock-down drag-out fight to get him to participate.

I so regret signing him up for baseball in the first place. He never asked to play, but I wanted him to try a sport other than football, and a bunch of his friends play, so I asked him if he'd be willing to try it, and he said yes, even though he now says he never said that (more on that below). And the problems began when he didn't get a spot on the team with most his friends. He got put on a different team with one of his friends and one other kid from school he's friendly with. Then he got moved off that team onto a different team with nobody he knows.

I knew that that wouldn't do, so I contacted the commissioner of the league and requested that Lil' S2 be moved to a team where he at least has a few friends on it. The commissioner kinda dragged his feet on the whole thing, so I asked for a refund for league dues. The commissioner was cool about it and said I could have a refund, but that he would move Lil' S2 back to the team with his one friend if we wanted to stay in the league. I think part of the reason he did this is because I mentioned everything to the dad I coach flag football with, and this dad, who is a bigwig in this baseball league, probably said something to the commissioner on my and Lil' S2's behalf. I immediately wished I hadn't said anything to the dad, as I think he felt compelled to say something to the commissioner, even though that was never my intent -- I only reached out to him to get the commissioner's contact info. I even told him straight-up that I didn't want to put him in the middle of it, and that he didn't need to do anything about it, but I'm pretty sure he did anyway.

Regardless, at this point, a refund was still on the table. So, I went to Lil' S2, explained the situation, and asked him again if he wanted to try baseball, and again he said yes. I signed him up, and then, of course, when the season starts, he says he doesn't want to play and that he never agreed to it in the first place. This is an ongoing issue with him. He does this with many things, big and small -- baseball, guitar lessons, Mathnasium, getting a hair cut, taking a shower, etc. It drives S and I crazy. It's gotten to the point where S will record him agreeing to something, so that we can prove to him that he actually said yes. Not that it matters. He's a nine-year-old without a fully formed prefrontal cortex, not a Superior Court justice.

It has gotten to be a huge problem, though, because it makes it so hard to sign him up for anything, and it frequently puts us at odds with him, which also sucks. (Although the flip side of being nine is that you snap out of bad moods just as easily as you snap into them.) I'm definitely not going to sign him up for baseball again, but we still have this season to get through, and letting him quit would a) set a bad precedent; b) put us out the league dues (yes, I know, this is the sunk cost fallacy, but still); c) make me look kinda silly, given all the finagling I did to get him on this team. So, I'm trying to tough it out -- we've got, like, two games and four practices to go. I got him to agree to go to the game today through a combination of bribery and guilt-tripping, but we still have three hours until game time, so... who knows?

The ironic thing is that he recently started playing pick-up baseball after school everyday with his buddies. I asked him why he like playing baseball then, when he hates being on a team. He said it's because after school you get to pitch and hit and play a lot, whereas on the team you mainly just stand around the whole time. And I gotta say, this is a totally fair point. I love baseball, as much as I love any activity, but I concede, it can be very boring at times, especially if you're a Little League participant who doesn't play one of the few premium Little League positions (pitcher, first base, shortstop). I completely understand why a kid wouldn't want to spend two hours standing in right field or sitting on the bench just to get two at bats and maybe field a ball or two. The people who say baseball is ill-suited for today's youth are probably right.

To be honest, I don't think I loved playing organized baseball either. I mean, I must have liked it, because I willingly did it for many years, but when I think about the reasons I like baseball so much today, very few of them involve structured league games in which I played. The things I like most about baseball are the history, the bond with other fans, the numbers, the trivia. When it comes to playing, I had way more fun playing Wiffle Ball or pickup beer-league softball than I did playing anything official. So, it doesn't bother me in the least that Lil' S2 doesn't like playing organized baseball -- or rather it won't bother me a month from now when this godforsaken season is finally over.

Until next time...