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.

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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.

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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...

Entry 759: Kids Sports

Since Lil' S1 has been at his new school, we have been strongly encouraging (i.e., forcing) him to play a sport each semester. His outside interests -- books, video games, TV, D&D -- are all very sedentary activities, and a kid his age (a person of any age, really) needs to move. First semester he was on the swim team, which worked out quite well. Practices were at a pool very close to campus, and several of the meets were at a school a walkable distance from our house. It was usually SRO, because their pool bleacher area is so small, but that's not that annoying when it only takes two minutes to get there.

This semester he picked track and field from a rather unappealing (to him) list. As the start of the season got closer, however, he began really dreading the idea of doing the sport, to the point that S and I were wondering if we should let him off the hook and try a new exercise strategy. But we told him he only had to try it for two weeks, and then if he didn't like it, he could quit. And for the first week and a half of the season, he was counting down the hours until that two weeks was up, and then somehow, miraculously, when the time actually came, he decided to stick with it. There were two big things I think that swayed his decision: 1) He could do the throwing events (shot put and discus), which meant a lot less running; 2) I told him that as long as he does track I would let him listen to his headphones in the car when I was driving him to and from school instead of making him talk to me like I did before. That last one might sound silly, but I honestly think that it mattered.

So, he's in the midst of his season right now, and I gotta say, track and field is a rough sport for parents. The meets are in the middle of nowhere (most schools in the District don't have their own tracks); they are at least three hours long (often longer); unless your kid is a distance runner they're only actually doing their sport for like two minutes; and you have no idea in advance at what time exactly they will compete. I went to Lil' S1's meet on Monday. I arrived at 4:00 pm (driving through rush-hour traffic to get there), watched him sit around for a few hours and then throw a discus three times, and then left at 7:15 pm. Also, the stands were packed-full with the athletes, so I just stood the entire time in the blazing sun. Thankfully, I thought to bring sunscreen, and I saw this woman I used to know from Lil' S1's daycare days, so we chatted most the time (her daughter runs for a different school). Without that chance encounter it would have been so boring. I saw other parents sitting on the grass away from the action with their laptops and thought to myself, Ah, that's how you do it.

It also doesn't help that my son isn't exactly Al Oerter. If he doesn't finish dead last, I consider it a success. He probably could get decent. The throwing events are enough of a niche thing (he's the only middle-schooler at his school who does it) that I think you could be reasonably successful just through a little bit of extra practice and strength training. But I don't think he cares enough to do that. He likes throwing enough to do the bare minimum, but actually trying to get good might be a bridge too far. His favorite part of the season seems to be using an old chocolate syrup bottle as his water bottle. That's the type of kid he is. (It is pretty funny, though.)

He had another meet on Wednesday, which I missed because I had to go into the office that day, and S got it even worse than me. The event was further away, she had Lil's S2 in tow, and the throwers went first this time, so by the time she got there, he was already done. She drove an hour and a half just to give him a ride home.

Well, one silver-lining of Lil' S1 not being very good is that at least I don't have to worry about him getting on a serious travel team or anything like that. Doing this a few times every spring is barely tolerable. Doing it almost every weekend year round.... yeah, no. That's why whenever I hear those stories about the overbearing sports dad like Earl Woods or Marv Marinovich part of me is like, Well, you do kinda gotta appreciate the commitment to their kid. I'm way too selfish with my free time to force my child to do a hundred chip shots every day or wake up at 5:00 am and drive behind him in the car while he runs. Just coaching Lil' S2's rec league flag football team is more than enough for me.

Speaking of which, they lost their first game of the season today. It was a heartbreaker. We fell down 13-0 early and battled back to get it to down one, 26-25, and we had the ball on the five-yard line with six seconds left. Alas, incomplete pass and we lost. I was legitimately gutted for like an hour after the game. All the other parents and kids were getting ice cream and joking around, and I was just sitting there, despondent. It's completely because I'm the coach. I feel like I let everybody else down. It's silly. Nobody actually cares. It's fourth grade flag football, after all. And I know this, but I can't make myself feel differently. The best I can do is try not to let on about it, so that people don't think I'm a complete weirdo, and then write about it cathartically on this blog.

Alright, gotta go. Until next time...

 

Entry 758: Medicals

Finger update: My fracture has "healed" in the sense that the break is no longer detectable, but my finger is still very tender and swollen. I have really bad edema. It's not just a crossword puzzle word. This "Build up of fluid" or "Bodily swelling" is a very real thing. I can't quite make a fist, and if I bang my pinkie on something the right wrong way, it really smarts. I get that jolt of "electric" pain that courses through my entire arm for a microsecond.

It's really remarkable to me how long this thing is taking to get back to 100%. It happened over six weeks ago. By contrast, my son's little buddy fractured his heel three weeks ago and had to wear a walking boot for a bit, and he's already running around again. Kids are like little Wolverines, with their amazing regenerative powers, and they don't even realize it. That's one of the great ironies/tragedies of life. When you are at the peak of your physical powers, you aren't mentally developed enough to appreciate it. That's the problem with youth: It's wasted on the young.

I'm doing physical therapy for my finger, which is weird to me, but it seems to be helping. I haven't had a lot of success with physical therapy in the past. I've done it several times for my shoulder and on all occasions I ended up quitting because it's very time-consuming and expensive, and I wasn't seeing the results I was hoping for. It's possible I just wasn't patient enough, but it also was $50-$75 a session, and they wanted me to come at least twice a week. It's hard to justify paying that much for something that isn't doing a whole lot, and which I could do 90% of at my house for free. I still do daily stretches for my shoulder. It's been years, and it's definitely not back to normal, but it's probably better than it would be if I just did nothing. I don't know. I'm at the point now where trying to "fix" it is more burdensome to my life than working around it.

With my finger, however, I'm experiencing tangible improvement, and the sessions are only $5. I have no idea why it's so much cheaper. Maybe it's because it's just my finger; maybe it's because I'm doing it on-site at a little clinic in the doctor's office, as opposed to at a large center devoted strictly to physical therapy. I don't know. It's one of the many mysteries of our medical system. Unless you are willing and able to devote hours of your life studying the minute details of your insurance plan and the policies of the medical practice you're utilizing, you probably have no idea what you're paying for or why, and you don't know how much until your bill comes.

A great example of what I'm talking about: earlier this week I got a bill for $100. I asked the front desk what it was for, and they couldn't even tell me. They had to call the billing specialist who works remotely. Turns out it was for the splint they gave me for my finger. Now, first off, this thing only costs $26.99 on Amazon, so the fact that I got charged $100 for it is absolutely ridiculous. But even worse, in my opinion, is that nobody told me I would have to pay for it at all, let alone that it would be so much. The doctor just gave it to me and told me to use it. So, that's what I did.

It's all such a racket. And the thing is, if I complained to my insurance company and the doctor's office, if I made enough noise, I might be able to get the charge reduced. But at what cost? Likely a significant one, considering I put a high premium on my free-time. I'd rather be out the $73.01 than waste my time dealing with it. I have a colleague who fights everybody tooth and nail for every last cent if he feels he's getting a raw deal, and part of me admires that, but another part of me is like, that's way too much work. It's basically like having a shitty, low-paying part-time job, and I don't need nor want a shitty, low-paying part-time job at this moment in my life.

Alright, that's all for today. Pretty busy weekend. We have some friends in town visiting, we have a gala to attend later (oo la la, tres chic), and Lil' S2 and his friend have bothering me since before I got out of bed (literally) to take them to some place called House of Cards.

Until next time...

Entry 757: The End Of A Freeloading Era

This is the end
Beautiful friend
This is the end
My only friend, the end

My parents' long-canceled cable credentials have finally stopped working. I knew this day would come, and so it has. Yet, I rue not my loss, rather I celebrate what was mine for so long.

Some years ago, I don't remember exactly when, probably around 2016, my parents bought a cable subscription from a company called Click! Network. When we came out to visit once, my dad gave me the credentials to watch something on my tablet, and I just kept using them after we left. It was perfect because Click! was one of the few online providers that never initiated two-factor authentication. For a while, I used my friend JY's Xfinity account, but they started making me put in a text message code every time I logged in, and so I would have to text him to text me the code they texted him, and it just got to be too annoying, presumably for the both of us. But Click! didn't require that extra step. I could just put in the user name and password and start watching -- ESPN, TNT, TBS, FS1, and every now and then NFL Network would work for some reason, even though it wasn't included in the package. It was great.

Then, maybe three years ago, I was talking to my dad, and I mentioned that I still used his cable credentials, and he told me, much to my surprise, that he canceled their Click! account several years before that. So, doing the math, they probably canceled it around 2019, which means that I used cable credentials from a defunct account for about six years. That is a damn good freeloading run. The credentials just kept working. At first, I thought to myself Surely, this is the time they fail. But then they didn't, and so I started expecting them to work, and they did, right up until five days ago. I tried to log-in to TNT to watch a basketball game, and they don't even list Click! as an acceptable provider anymore. Then I tried ESPN, and Click! is still listed as a provider, but when I click the link, I just get a useless blank white box on the screen. It's possible that if I could get the Click! credentials box to pop up, like it used to, my parents' credentials would still work, but I can't figure out how to do that, and I can't exactly call tech support about it. So, I'm just accepting the L on this one, because it's not really an L. It's a glorious W that finally ended.

Nevertheless, this whole thing left me ESPN-less, and that wouldn't do, as ESPN is a must-have for live sports watchers like me. The Mother Ship might be losing its influence in the world of sport in other ways, but it is still very much a leader in live product, with Monday Night Football, the college football playoffs, the NBA playoffs, and the NHL playoffs, among other programming. It's also one of the few remaining pure cable channels, which makes it a super annoying must-have. To my knowledge -- and I just researched it fairly extensively -- there is no way to stream ESPN without buying a full-on cable package. It's not available with any other streaming service, and it's not offered as a standalone product. You might think it is, because they have something called ESPN+, but you would be wrong. ESPN+ is the most blatant case of fraudulent advertising since Lionel Hutz's case against the movie The Never Ending Story. Despite the name, ESPN+ doesn't actually contain ESPN. It's just a different network with less popular programming. It's like if Apple marketed their watch as the iPhone+.

So, I broke down and bought a subscription to something called Sling TV. It was the only service I could find that allows me to stream ESPN for under $50 a month. It's $110 for three months, but I think that's just a promotional rate, and I'll have to pay about $10 more per month after that. So, if I want to keep it, I'll have to decide whether I'm going to pay more or do the thing where you unsubscribe and subscribe anew with a different email address to get the promotional rate again. If I used all my and all S's email accounts, I could stretch it out a few years, and then maybe by that time there will be a better option. Or maybe if I just click the button to unsubscribe, they'll offer to extend the promotional rate. That's what happened with the New York Times. They sent me an email telling me my trial period was over, and I would soon be getting charged substantially more, so I turned off auto-renewal, and immediate got another email essentially saying, Psych! You can keep paying what you're paying now. We were just joking.

One thing I learned from all this is that despite all the cord-cutting and the advent of individual network streaming services, bundled TV packages are still very much a thing, and they are still very much overpriced. YouTube TV is like $85 a month; Fubo is the same; and the physical cable providers are even more expensive -- at least I think so. We get Verizon internet, so I decided to see what their TV packages are, and even after going to their website, I honestly have no idea. It's just a garbled, busy mess. One reason I went with Sling is because they have each channel explicitly listed in their various packages and the cost is clearly stated. It seems like every provider would do that, but that is not the case at all.  And Sling is still screwing me. They offer two standard packages (Orange and Blue) and one has ESPN (Orange) and the other one has FS1 and NFL Network and NFL Red Zone (Blue). So, I can't buy ESPN by itself, but I also can't buy it with the other sports channels I would want. Well, I could. I could buy their combo package (Orange and Blue), but then I'd be up near the $85 per month price point like I would with any of the other providers. It's a real racket.

What I should do is just eschew live sports altogether. It wouldn't be total unheard of -- I pretty much did this all throughout college. I just did math all the time and was pretty happy (not many dates, though). I've actually thought about doing this again -- not math necessarily but something else. Like, what if every time I got the urge to watch sports, I read instead, or watched a movie. What if I just gave up watching sports altogether? It sounds good in theory, but in practice I don't think it would work. The Seahawks would be playing the 49ers on Monday Night Football, and I would be sitting there trying to read, wondering what's happening in the game. Then I would pull out my phone and follow the play-by-play transcript, which is worse. I mean, if you're going to waste three hours of your life watching a game, at least you can watch the game, right? It's much more pathetic to waste it watching a little football icon move across a graphic of a field, while you wait for the latest text update. Play under review?! What do you mean? What's going on?   

Until next time...

Entry 756: TV

It's still difficult to type, but that's just how it's going to be until this damn finger heals. If you would have told me when it first happened that my pinky would still be purple and swollen a month later, I never would have believed you. It felt like a few-days type of thing -- a week tops. That's probably a big part of the problem. I didn't think it was that bad, so I didn't go to the doctor immediately like I should have (despite the urging of a colleague and my wife). I have a follow-up with a sports injury specialist on Tuesday, so I'll just keep it splinted and make do until then. Not much else I can do. Man, getting old sucks. 

In other news, there is a lot going on in the world right now, so naturally I'm going to write about a TV show that went off the air nearly four years ago. We recently finished watching Brooklyn Nine-Nine as a family -- all 153 episodes. I probably watched "only" about 140 of them, because when I was away they would watch without me, but somehow I was always able to hop right back into the story, hardly missing a beat (which reminds of one of my favorite The Onion headlines of all time). Overall, I found the series quite funny and enjoyed it much more than I thought I would. Captain Raymond Holt, played masterfully by Andre Braugher (RIP), is an all-time great sitcom character, and Charles Boyle (Joe Lo Truglio) was a hit with the kids.

Also, kudos to Stephanie Beatriz who plays Rosa Diaz. It's not that Rosa is such a tremendous character (although she is funny); it's that I've seen Beatriz in other things, and I can't believe she's the same person who plays this laconic, streetwise detective. I mean, she's the lead in Encanto, which just doesn't compute to me. There are really good actors, who are just kinda always versions of themselves -- like Tom Cruise is always Tom Cruise and De Niro is always De Niro -- and then there are others who cause a mental disconnect when you see them in different roles. It's why I thought Bryan Cranston should have won the Emmy every season for Breaking Bad. His sizzle real should have been clips of Walter White ("I am the one who knocks!") interspersed with reminders that he is the same guy who played the dad in Malcolm in the Middle. Beatriz is definitely in the Cranston camp, and it's super impressive.

The only major demerit on Brooklyn Nine-Nine is that the final season is straight trash. This happens to almost all great TV shows (*ahem* The Office), and Brooklyn Nine-Nine follows the same "jumping the shark" playbook -- the big names leave the show or take diminished roles; a bunch of characters start having babies or getting married or getting divorced; the small things that worked previously get brought to the forefront and played to death -- but it also had the added weirdness of unfolding in 2020 and 2021, when we were all kinda losing our minds with Covid restrictions and performative social justice expectations. It's so cringey to watch these episodes now. You can just feel the struggle of the writers trying to cater to the du jour anti-police sentiment while making a show in which cops are the explicit protagonists. Every stagy scene of self-flagellation (and there are plenty of them) made me think This is why Trump won reelection. I don't actually believe that, but I don't not believe it either. The kids were dead-set on finishing the series or else I would have applied my ABE principle of TV viewing: Always Bail Early.

In other TV news, the White Lotus Season 3 finale dropped last Sunday night, and despite being exhausted from helping to administer the ACPT again, I watched it as soon as it was available. This season has been pretty heavily criticized in the media (at least the media I consume), and having some time to reflect on it all, I must reluctantly admit: The haters are more right than they are wrong. I mean, I still enjoyed this season, but it's a B-, whereas the first two seasons are an A and A+, respectively.

One of the major knocks on the season is that it's way too boring and slow, even by Mike White standards. It could have been two episodes shorter was a common refrain. I typically don't mind a slow plot as long as the characters move and grow, but therein lies the biggest problem I had with this season. With a few exceptions (e.g., Saxon), I didn't feel like any of the major characters had fully realized story arcs. They all had isolated moments of excellence -- great one-off scenes and pull-out dialogues (Mike White is a master of this) -- but within the overall narrative context, it often felt like they were just running in place. I swear Mook and Gaitok have the same basic conversation every episode until the finale. It's like c'mon, we've already seen this, multiple times. What's next? And that was the entire series for me. I kept thinking Okay, here we go! This is when they're really gonna pull me in! But it just never happened. It almost did, in the finale, which I quite enjoyed, but there was too much to do at that point. It was all so unsatisfying. Almost every character felt undercooked or subject to a forced, unearned resolution.

Also, there's just so much throughout the series that doesn't make sense, from a basic human behavioral standpoint -- people doing things that nobody would ever do just because it's needed for the plot. I can't really say any more than that without giving major spoilers, which I don't want to do. If you've seen the season, you surely know what I mean. It comes off as lazy storytelling. I don't think it was, but that's how it comes off. I'm a big Mike White fan, but this one was a swing and a miss -- well, maybe not a miss, but it was weak contact to be sure. It happens. Nobody bats a thousand.

Until next time...

Entry 755: Fractured Finger

This will be a short entry. The finger injury (right pinky) I mentioned in a previous entry turned out to be a fracture, and so I have to wear a brace that makes it very difficult to type. This is when I wish I was a hunt-and-peck typist. But I'm not. I'm an asdfjkl; guy, and so it's really unnatural and difficult for me to have two fingers (my pinky in "buddy bound" with my ring finger in the brace) taken out of the equation. Plus, I have to cock my right wrist at a weird angle to keep my brace from inadvertently hitting random keys. I can manage, but it's tiring and annoying, and I swear I can feel myself actively developing carpal tunnel syndrome. So, for now I'll probably only type when I'm doing my actual job that somebody pays me to do.

Actually, I just had a thought: I could use my phone. That would probably be easier, but typing out an entire blog entry on a phone doesn't sound that appealing either. Maybe I'll try it next week though. Check back then.

Until next time...

Entry 754: Three-Inning Save

Long weekend, this one. I got back last night from an overnight trip to New Jersey. My good friend JY's son IY plays college baseball, and his team is playing a series in New Jersey this weekend, so I met JY and our other friend DK and his daughter EK out there to watch IY pitch. He's a reliever, so it's unclear if or when or how much he will pitch on any given night. If you want to watch him play specifically, which is what we wanted, then it's a bit of a dice roll.

Luckily, our number came up. In fact, it couldn't have worked out better. Friday night, with us all in attendance, he came into the game in the 7th inning with his team up 3-0, and he threw three innings, giving up just one run, on one hit (a solo homer), striking out six, and walking zero (although he did bean a guy). It was a dominant performance, and it was really cool to watch. Here's a kid I used to play Wiffle Ball with when he was a three foot tall toddler, running around in nothing but a pull-up, and now he's a six foot six behemoth getting the save in a D1 college baseball game. Like I said, it's really cool.

I was worried it wasn't going to happen, because the starting pitcher had a no-hitter going into the sixth inning, but then he gave up a hit and walked a guy, and it looked like he was going to come out soon. (DK and I were half-jokingly imploring the manager to pull him from our seats in the stands -- C'mon, skip, he's looking a little tired; let's get a fresh arm in there -- which cracked up JY, even though he was shushing us, because he knows all the other parents, and didn't want anyone to think we were rooting against their kid.) IY had been warming up in the bullpen, which means he would almost certainly be the next pitcher in, but then it started to rain, kinda hard, and I was worried the umpire would call the game. But he didn't, the rain gradually abated, and we all got to see what we came for.

After the game, we all went out to eat, but it was on the late side (9:30 pm), and a lot of places were closing soon, so it was slim pickings. We went to this Cuban joint, but it was not the vibe we were looking for. The menu was way fancier/pricey than what anybody wanted, and the music was so loud it was giving me a headache. It's difficult to overstate how high the volume was in this place. It was like dining on a dance floor. So, we pulled a move I think I've only pulled one other time in my entire life, we just left after we had already been seated. We had even ordered drinks already, but just soft drinks, so they didn't even charge us (although JY said they seemed offended that we were leaving).

It turned out to be the right move. We went to a place that wasn't Smash Burger, but was just like Smash Burger, and it was much more suitable to us at that moment. I got a double stack, and it was really good. I hadn't eaten a burger like that in long time, and it really hit the spot. DK's car somehow got a flat tire, and he didn't have a spare,* so throughout our dinner adventure, he was dealing with AAA. Thankfully, a tire guy came out relatively quickly and fixed it, so it wasn't that big a setback. Hat's off to EK, by the way, she was a trooper throughout everything, including sitting in the gloom and rain for hours at a baseball game (I don't think she's a fan, being that at one point I overheard DK explaining to her what a walk is) and sitting outside a parking garage with her dads' friends waiting for a tire to get changed. I don't think those are a 14-year-old girl's idea of an ideal Friday night. 

*He did have one of those spray cans that inflate your tire and seal it, but he didn't realize it until after he got it changed. It's probably better to get it changed, anyway. He had to get up at the crack of dawn the next day and drive several hundred miles, and I'm not sure I'd feel comfortable doing that on a jimmy-rigged tire.    

JY took the red-eye in from Seattle that morning, so he was quite tired, and he's always been an asleep-when-the-head-hits-the-pillow type of guy, anyway, so he zonked out as soon as we got back to the hotel and started snoring very loudly. Thankfully, I was prepared. I'm such a fussy sleeper that I always travel with earplugs, and between those and the white noise playlist on Spotify I was able to drown out the sound of logs being sawed and get a bit of shuteye. I didn't get a great night's sleep, mind you, but it was passable. It apparently wasn't as good as JY's, as he was raving about his Fitbit sleep metrics the next morning.

I decided to drive back Saturday afternoon. Originally, I was thinking of staying another night, but since I had already seen IY pitch (and there's no way he would throw two days in a row), I figured I should get back. It would have been fun to hang out with JY another night, for sure, but I knew S was struggling at home (for reasons that will be revealed in a minute), and I also didn't want to get another night of hotel sleep and then drive back in the morning and then coach Lil' S2's football game (which starts in an hour and a half) and take him to his baseball game after that. I knew I'd be anxious about it the entire night, which would make it even harder to sleep. It was the right move, as I was completely wiped by the time I got home last night. I was not in condition to do anything other than sit on the sofa.

S was even more tired than I was because she had to pick up Lil' S2 two from a field trip at 1:15 am. No, that's not a typo. He took a class trip to NYC, and they left at 6:30 am and got back at 1:15 am. S is a morning person who is usually in bed by 9:00 pm, and she was already feeling a little under-the-weather, so this was especially hard on her. She was being cool about me going to New Jersey, because she knows I don't get opportunities to see these friends that much, but I knew she could use some relief. Also, I'm already going to be out of town all of next weekend (my annual crossword puzzle tournament), and I really didn't want to stick her with all the parenting duties for two full weekends in a row. So, I made the call to bail early. There are no solutions in life, only tradeoffs.

Alright, that's all I got for today. Last thing I'll say, however, is that Lil' S1's solo trip to Florida to visit my in-laws worked out very well. I picked him up at the airport for his return flight and got a special gate pass and met him as soon as he stepped off the jetway. He had icing on his face from a doughnut he bought at the airport in Florida, and I'm sure he did nothing but stare at his screens the entire flight, but he made it there and back safely and soundly, and that's by far the most important piece of this whole endeavor.

Until next time...

Entry 753: Solo Flights

The big news this week at the G & G household is that Lil' S1 is taking his first solo flight. He is currently tens of thousands of feet in the air en route to Florida to visit his grandparents for spring break. Somewhat surprisingly, I'm not worried about it at all. I thought I might be, but now it's here, and I'm not. There are a few reasons for this. The main one is that Lil' S1 can handle it. He's good with this sort of thing. He's very much still a little kid in many ways, but when it comes to venturing out into the world on his own and not freaking out about it, he's pretty good. He's been doing errands on his own for years, and he takes the Metro to and from school several times every week. I'm sure it's safer by an order of magnitude to be in an airport and fly than to be in a DC Metro station and take the train. You don't have to pay hundreds of dollars for a ticket and go through security in the latter scenario.

Also, S and her mom are on it. S took him to the airport and escorted him all the way to the jetway, and her mom and her mom's niece and her husband will be waiting for him at the gate on the other end. Plus, he has his cell phone, so we can always track him or call him -- provided he remembers to take his phone off airplane mode, that is. That's actually one of my only worries. That is exactly the type of thing he would forget to do. We might be saved there, however, by the fact that he'll try to watch something on YouTube and will have to turn it off airplane mode to get it to work.

This is the first year the kids have different spring breaks, so it's a little different logistically. Lil' S1 is going to Florida by himself, and then in a few weeks, S and her sister will take Lil' S2 there. I don't get to go at all, which is fine. I'm going on enough trips this year, and we go down there so often, it's perfectly acceptable for me to miss a trip every now and again. It's actually a nice time right now in our kids lives. They aren't yet in brooding teenager, too cool for school mode, but they also are past the need-to-be-monitored-at-almost-all-times stage. S is a bit sad today because she caught a glimpse into what it will be like when our kids leave the house (Lil' S2 went to a friend's birthday party and will likely be gone the entire day), but I'm just enjoying the break. Plus, the way things are going in the world today, with the job market and the arrested development of our youth, our kids might not ever leave our house for good -- and I'm only half-kidding about this.

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Alright, lightning round and then let's call it a post.

 

• My injured finger is slowly getting better. It's still bruised and tender, but I have a bit more range of motion. I had to put my Krav Maga gym membership on medical freeze for a few weeks. I can't punch, grip a barbell, or do a pushup, which makes it pretty much impossible to take martial arts or fitness classes.
  
  
• I can still do the stationary bike, though, thankfully. I also might -- just might -- be able to start jogging again. I quit about a year ago due to inflammation in my right knee, but it's been feeling pretty good of late. Once the weather gets a bit nicer, I'll test it out. That would be huge if I could go running again.
  
  
• I've been hitting Queen Bee on NYT Spelling Bee a decent amount of time (about 10%, which might not sound that impressive, but keep in mind, it's not at all an easy thing to do). Here's my daily Spelling Bee routine: I play until I get to Genius level, and then I have to get one more word (it's a game within a game that only exists in my head), and then I'm allowed to look at the number of possible words and the highest possible score. I'm not allowed to look at the solution, mind you, just the highest possible totals. If I'm sufficiently close, I then try for Queen Bee. Yesterday, I finished the job when I remembered that CIVET is a word. I don't know what it is -- I'm thinking a type of bolt, but I know that's wrong, because that's a RIVET -- but I do know it's a word.
  
  
  
• As it turns out, a CIVET is "a slender nocturnal carnivorous mammal with a barred and spotted coat and well-developed anal scent glands, native to Africa and Asia." Huh, how about that? In my Scrabble days I found that words I didn't know almost always fell into one of the Four-F categories: flora, fauna, foreign letters, foreign money. Examples are the Scrabble staples QAT, AI, XI, XU -- a shrub chewed as a stimulant, a three-toed sloth, the fourteenth letter of the Greek alphabet, and a monetary unit of Vietnam, respectively.
• I found out I can watch all the non-CBS March Madness games on Max, which is huge. The March Madness app is one of the few cable streaming services my parents’ defunct cable credentials don’t work for (and it’s not that their specific credentials don’t work; the app doesn’t accept the provider at all), so I’d have no good way to watch them otherwise. And I love watching March Madness games—well, the last few minutes of them, anyway. Even I’m not enough of a sports sicko to watch a random college basketball game, in today’s watered down NCAA, from start to finish.
  
  
• Update: Lil' S1 arrived safely at his destination. See, no need to worry, at all.

 Until next time...

Entry 752: Back In Palm Springs

I didn't post anything last week because I was in Palm Springs, my home away from home, apparently. It was a mix of work and personal. I flew in a week ago, Saturday afternoon, and spent the weekend and Monday with my parents. Then I stuck around for a work conference while my parents continued a two-week tour through the Southwest. All in all it was a good time, but not without its calamities. I accidentally paid double for our lodging; I injured, perhaps broke, my right pinkie finger; and our refrigerator apparently stopped working while I was gone. Also, my parents texted that they had to change their travel plans because roads in Arizona are being closed due to... snow?!

But let's start with the positive: It was great to see my parents. The main event was a trip out to Joshua Tree National Park. The eponymous Joshua tree is an interesting bit of flora. It looks like a tree drawn by Dr. Seuss. It makes for good scenery, though, and the park is quite nice. It was a good place for us to go, because a lot of the hikes are elderly friendly, and you can drive through the park and see the pretty desert imagery.

 

We tried to do a few other nature-y things but got stymied each time. We set out to take an aerial tram up the side of the mountain -- I've done it before and it's pretty cool -- but tickets were sold out online, and there was a line of cars a quarter-mile long just to get into the parking lot to even attempt to buy walk-up tickets. When we saw that, we did a u-ey and left.  Then we went to the trailhead of a hike at Tahquitz Canyon, but it was $15-a-person to do the hike, and it looked more treacherous than my 80-year-old mother could handle. She's still pretty mobile and can walk several miles at a time, but not through rocky, uneven terrain. She is 80, after all. So, we just walked around downtown Palm Springs instead. It's pretty cool -- tons of good restaurants. We ate at a half-decent Mexican joint one night and a pretty good Tuscan place the next.

We also ate at my friends' place in La Quinta. When I said above that the trip to Joshua Tree was the highlight, I had momentarily forgotten about visiting E & M (the couple whose wedding we attended last October).  They had us over for dinner Monday night, and it was terrific. They have a bungalow with an excellent backyard for eating and entertaining outside. Everything was great -- the food, the ambience, and the conversation were all top-notch. Just a wonderful night overall.

My parents stayed one more night at the condo unit I booked us in Palm Spring, and then set out the next morning for the rest of their trip. I went to a hotel for my work conference. I accidentally double-paid for our condo unit, but thankful Expedia and the villa manager were cool about it, and I got it resolved fairly quickly. The hardest part was finding the correct phone number for Expedia. They don't advertise their number on their confirmation emails, or even at their website (at least not that I could find), so I Googled it, and ended up with a couple false leads at first.

I guess the double-booking error was my fault -- I reserved two units instead of one -- but that's because the website I went through is hella confusing. It calls a full condo unit with multiple bedrooms a "room." So, I booked two "rooms" thinking a "room" was actually a room and not a full unit. I mean, would anybody ever say "Yes, I'd like to book a room with two bedrooms, please"? Look at the confirmation notice I received below and tell me if you think it reads as one condo unit, two bedrooms total, or two condo units, four bedrooms total. It's the latter, but I don't blame anybody, including myself three months ago, for thinking it's the former.

Alright, I'm quickly running out of time writing this. So, I'll have to be brief in my description of the other calamities. I played dodgeball on a team with my colleagues at the work conference and badly messed up my finger. They always have a big corporate party thing at the end of the week that features a dodgeball tournament. Usually we don't participate, but this time we did, and it did not go well. Actually, we won our first match, but then we got destroyed in our next one. I was probably our best player, and I kinda suck, because I can't throw hard anymore due to the arthritis in my shoulder. After our second (and last) match, I noticed that my right pinkie finger really hurt and by the next morning it was purple and swollen and I could barely move it. Getting old is a bitch.

Also, our refrigerator seems to be broken. When I got home, I noticed the milk was sour and everything seemed to be warmer than it should be. I put in this little thermometer we have (great gadget, by the way) and left it overnight, and the refrigerator temperature didn't go below 55 degrees, even though it's set at 35. The freezer is okay, but not the fridge. We have another fridge downstairs, so it's not the end of the world. But moving all our food to the basement before it rots is not the activity I had planned for this morning. It did kinda force me to clean out all the old stuff, though, which was long overdo. I felt like the "aunt" from that stupid Geico commercial: expired, expired, expired...

Until next time...

Entry 751: Our Short National Nightmare

It must be said: Our country is a nightmare right now. I hope things are good for you locally, because they are a disaster at the national level. Thus far, Trump 2.0 has been worse than I was anticipating, and I was already anticipating things would be quite bad. I knew he would be terrible when it comes to things like upholding democratic norms, uniting the country, and maintaining strong international relations with our allies. (The Zelenskyy meeting was an utter embarrassment.) But he's fucking up even the things that he's supposed to be good at, like the stock market. It plummeted earlier this week and didn't rebound much. And even if you don't care about stocks,* you probably care about having a job, and Elon is gleefully, maniacally slashing government jobs and government funds that pay for a lot of NGO jobs. It's all being done in the name of efficiency, and it will be very efficient in leading us to the brink of recession. If Trump actually follows through on his plan to impose high tariffs on pretty much all imported goods, it might just push us over the edge. 

*I don't really care much about them, to be honest. Like most people with a retirement plan, I have some money in the stock market, but it's just a number on a screen until it's time to withdraw, which won't be for many years, and I'm sure conditions will be different by then. But it does matter to some people now and not necessarily just rich people. I'm sure even, like, retired teachers have investment accounts that rely somewhat on stocks.

And we're only in month two. We can't even call it "our long national nightmare" because it hasn't been very long yet. We've got another 3.8 years of this bullshit.... *Sigh*

Alright, enough about that. Let's focus on more positive things for the rest of the post.

White Lotus! I mentioned in my last post that I resubscribed to Max just to watch it, and I was lamenting the fact that I didn't wait until all the episodes were out, so that I could binge watch it and then quit my subscription after only a month. But now I'm actually very glad that I didn't do that. There's something to be said for watching only one episode a week like we used to. I like that feeling of watching something with everybody else around the country. I miss the shared TV experience. Of course, relatively few people are actually watching it with me, compared to the old days, so there's no one really to talk about it with. If I brought up the show to a colleague at lunch (assuming I'm eating lunch with a colleague and they have Max, neither of which is a guarantee) they would probably be like, Oh yeah, is that the one at the resort? Haven't seen it. Everybody is watching their own things on their own schedule.

But that's where podcasts come in. I've really gotten into the White Lotus coverage on The Ringer's The Prestige TV podcast. They point out little things I missed, give background on the actors and writers,* and toss out theories about what will happen next. It's not as good as having an actual conversation that you can participate in, but it's the next best thing. It's the technological solution to a problem technology created in the first place. It's not quite adequate, but given that it's impossible to unring the technology bell, it's better than nothing. 

*Or writer, rather, singular. I believe Mike White writes and directs every episode by himself.

Actually, it kinda reminds me of dating apps. They came along after I was already off the market (although I did very briefly do Match.com, back in the day), but from everything I hear, they're pretty much the only way people meet anymore. But the only reason we need them is because technology has so isolated us that young people, who never experienced the "before times," don't have the opportunities, nor the social skills, to pursue potential romantic partners IRL. Again, dating apps are a technological solution to a problem technology created in the first place. And also from everything I hear, they are not quite adequate. In fact, most people seem to hate the apps. I know a few married couples who met on the apps, but I know an equal number of people who have sworn them off completely. They would rather be alone than play the swipe game. I mean, dating was never easy (not for most of us, anyway). It was a top complaint among twentysomethings when I was a twentysomething, twenty-something years, but I think it's even worse now.

Anyway...

I've mentioned before that Lil' S2 is really good at math, and he's continuing to demonstrate it. Lil' S1 is pretty good too, but he's good in a more conventional way, where he will learn the methods and apply them appropriately and mostly get the problems correct. But Lil' S2 has this spark that I just don't see in many other kids. He's not necessarily a whiz at calculating things -- he's probably better than average for a kid his age, but he makes silly mistakes and messes up basic arithmetic sometimes, like most people -- but he has this uncanny knack for understanding and solving the broader problem. For example, the other day we were eating dinner and finding ways to entertain ourselves without using our phones (much to the kids' chagrin), so I started giving everybody math quizzes, and I posed the following problem: 

You are in a circle with a bunch of people and a bunch of chickens. It goes person, chicken, person, chicken, person, chicken, all the way around. When a bell rings, each chicken turns and randomly pecks the person to its left or its right. What is the probability you don't get pecked at all?

Lil' S2 immediately yelled out "25%", which is the correct answer. He got it before Lil' S1 and S. When I asked him how he got it, he couldn't explain it very well. It seemed like he just kinda intuited it. Thinking that maybe he just got lucky I asked him another question:

I roll a die over and over again. Every time it's 1 or 2, I'll pay you a dollar. Every time it's 3, 4, 5, or 6, you pay me 50 cents. Is this a game you would want to play?

He thought about it for a few seconds and then said, "I think I'd just about break even," which again is correct. I asked him to explain, and again he couldn't really do it -- he gave a 9-year-old-word-salad response (although he did correctly know that the probability of rolling a single number is about 16.7%) -- but somehow he figured it out. It was pretty cool. I hope he keeps it up. I've been trying to get him to take coding classes -- I know he could be a really good programmer -- but he doesn't want to. That's his biggest weakness. He doesn't like to come out of his comfort zone. Well, he's still just a little kid, so hopefully this is something he grows out of, because it's a mindset antithetical to success. As a wise person once said, "Half of life is just showing up."

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

Entry 750: String Delays

I made it to and from Memphis this week without incident. It was a short work trip, just two days total -- leave on Tuesday, return on Thursday. Late Tuesday evening and early Wednesday morning, it snowed in Memphis, just a few inches, but when you don't have the infrastructure in place -- snowplows, deicing vehicles, etc. -- a few inches can be a nuisance. Ultimately, it turned out to be no big deal, though. It made the ride from the hotel to the meeting venue Wednesday morning a bit slower, but that's about it. It actually kinda worked out perfectly because it snowed right in between my flights, so neither of them were delayed by the weather.

They were still delayed, though. Both times it seemed to be because the incoming flight was late. I got the dreaded "Your flight is delayed 20 minutes" text. I hate those so much. On flight days, I have a moment of panic anytime I feel my phone vibrate, even when it's nothing. Oh, whew! It's just my sister-in-law's Wordle score. The thing is, I'm not actually that bothered by a small delay. I'm a get-to-the-airport-early type of guy, so 20 minutes hardly matters. I can work/read/watch at the airport just as easily as I can at home. The problem, however, is that 20 minutes is never 20 minutes. It's always more, sometimes much more. I literally cannot think of a time in which my flight was delayed, and then departed without further delay.

I call it the string delay, and it's a staple of airlines. Often you get strung along with more texts officially declaring additional delays, but sometimes you get strung along without further announcement. Sometimes you're just standing there, looking at the display telling you boarding starts in two minutes, when there is no airplane at the gate and nobody behind the counter. Then boarding starts 30 minutes later, with no explanation as to why that delay wasn't worthy of an announcement like the previous delays. And then there are the additional sit-at-the-gate, taxi-to-the-runway, wait-in-line-for-takeoff string delays. Those can easily add another 45 minutes to your actual departure time.

My flight there got hit with a particularly bad string delay, causing me some consternation. There was a dinner I needed to attend starting at 6:30 pm. My original arrival time was 3:45 pm, which even with moderate delay, would get me there with more than enough time to get to the hotel and check-in and all that before needing to leave for the restaurant. However, the string got pulled more and more, and by the time we finally took off the arrival time was now 6:15. The airport is about 35 minutes from the hotel (which is about ten minutes from the restaurant), so I'm thinking there is no way I can get to dinner on time.

Now, I'm doing the calculation on whether or not it's best to go straight to the restaurant with all my bags or go to the hotel first and be even later to dinner. In the former scenario, I figure I'm arriving at 7:00 pm, best case scenario; in the later, it's 7:30, or more likely 7:45, so I figure I'll just go straight there. But then when we land, and I switch my phone off airplane mode, it reads 5:15. I forgot to account for the hour difference in time zones! Huzzah! I don't have any luggage*, and I check-in to the hotel online in the Lyft, so I arrive with time to spare -- not much time, only about ten minutes, but that's certainly better than being late.

*The key to quick traveling, especially if you don't have priority boarding and don't want to pay for it, is to bring a carry-on duffel bag. If you bring a rollaboard suitcase, there might not be room for it by the time you get on, or, as was the case on my flights, the overhead bins might not be big enough to accommodate them at all. Then you have to check your carry-on and either wait for it at baggage claim, which could easily add a half-hour to your trip, or at the gate, where the line still looked quite long. With a duffel bag, you can always squeeze it in somewhere in the bin.  

I watched the first episode of Season 3 of White Lotus on the flight there. It was good, but I botched how I did it. I looked on online to see if it was out yet, and I saw something about Season 3 Episode 4, so I figured there were at least four episodes out already, so I resubscribed to HBO (or Max, rather*), only to find that nothing beyond the first episode has dropped yet. Now, I have to keep the subscription for, like, three months to finish the season. Total newb move -- I should have waited until the entire season dropped and binged watched it in like two weeks and then canceled the subscription. Oh, well. Maybe there is something else worth watching on HBO right now. It's amazing that they used to have almost all the great prestige shows -- The Sopranos, Sex & the City, Six Feet Under, Curb Your Enthusiasm -- and now they have only one that I really want to watch. 

*I heard somebody on a podcast talking about how dumb it was for HBO to call their subscription service Max, when HBO spent decades establishing itself as one of the biggest names in movies and prestige TV. I couldn't agree more.

On the flight home, I watched The Menu, which I also thought was quite good. I got strong Get Out vibes from it. It's one of those movies where you know something is off from the get-go, and you can't help but be intrigued trying to make sense of it all. Also like Get Out, it takes a turn toward being a straight-up horror movie, without actually getting there, and it doesn't really know how to end. I didn't love the ending of either movie, but I also don't know what would have been better, so it's only a minor demerit. Overall, solid watch, very good for a two-hour plane trip.

Alright, speaking of not knowing how to end things... Until next time...