Entry 794: Winter Is Coming

The big news here in the DC area, and along much of the Eastern Seaboard, is the winter storm forecasted to strike very early tomorrow morning and wreak havoc on all of us who call the region home. It's really hard to get an accurate assessment of the situation. In large part that's because it hasn't happened yet, and nobody knows with certainty what's going to happen, until it actually happens. In large part, it's because the short-term incentives of pretty much everybody involved are to act as if we are on the verge of a snowy apocalypse. The weather services don't want to be accused of insufficiently alerting the public to the possibility, or understating the potential damage, of a major storm; the media knows sensationalizing the weather is a great way to get cheap clicks; and for the general public, it's something exciting to talk about and something you feel compelled to prepare for. You don't want to be the family who's eating creamed eels and wadded beef because you didn't get to the grocery store in time.*

*I went to our local supermarket yesterday, and parts of it looked like photos of Soviet-era groceries, just huge swaths of empty shelving. But, here's the thing, there was still a ton of food for sale. Like, maybe you couldn't get exactly what you wanted--they were all out of strawberries and grapes and only had the super expensive artisanal yogurt left--but if you needed sustenance, it was available for purchase. Capitalism, baby!

But there is probably a long-term downside to treating every kinds rough weather event as if it's a biblical torrent. Collectively, we become a boy-who-cried-wolf society, where we are ill-prepared for the true disasters. So, that's why I'm going to make a very boring prediction: This storm is going to be no big deal. We are going to get half a foot* of snow tomorrow morning/afternoon, and it will be over by the evening. Things will be closed on Monday (DCPS already has a pre-planned staff day, so kids have it off anyway), but the snow plows will get out, the roads will be cleared, and the city will be moving again by Tuesday. Schools might not reopen, because they are annoyingly cautious about, well, pretty much everything, but they will be Wednesday, and then that'll be that. There are not going to be widespread power outages; old people won't be freezing in their homes; and diabetics won't be deprived of insulin because medical supply trucks can't get into the city. It's just going to be a couple of normal snow days, where parents bundle their kids in whatever snow-appropriate attire they can rummage up (always with mismatched gloves), and everybody goes outside and plays and sleds and frolics for 45 minutes, before returning inside to get warm and drink hot chocolate. The worst part is going to be looking at the banks of dirty snow on the side of the road for the next few weeks. That's my prediction.

*The Weather Channel, which is advertising an "Historic Winter Storm," is saying 5" to 8" of snow anticipated. I assure that is not historic. I was in DC in winter of 2003-2004, when we got, like, two feet of snow, and the city almost completely shut down for over a week. I actually did run out of food and had to trudge several miles to the closest open corner store for some hugely marked up canned goods. Now to be fair, the storm is supposed to be worse in surround areas than in DC proper. But, to be fair in the other direction, there's nothing stopping media from noting this in their coverage.

Of course, I could be wrong about all of this--maybe the storm really will wreak destruction and mayhem--but that's true about everything everybody says. It could always be wrong. That's baked into the cake of all human analysis.

In other news, a weird thing happened the other day, where Lil' S2 and a bunch of his friends walked to Target after school, as they sometimes do, and some random guy told them to "stay safe" and paid for all their snacks for them. Details are very murky because they are being retold by nine- and ten-year-olds--the description of the man is that he had kinda blond curly hair and was maybe Black, maybe white, and maybe mixed--but here's my best guess as to what happened. While walking to Target, Lil' S2 got too close to the road, and some guy honked at him from his car. He happened to be going to Target also, and when he saw the same kids he just honked at in line, he paid for all their snacks on a whim and told them to stay safe -- kinda a life-lesson, imparted wisdom, gesture-y type of thing. If that's the case, it's a little strange, but completely harmless. In fact, I'm a thousand times more frightened by the fact that Lil' S2 was close to the street than I am by some rando paying for their snacks -- and I let him know as much. One thing I am not chill about at all is pedestrian safety with respect to my children. Every time I drive down the major street that bounds our neighborhood, and I see how fast people drive and how distracted they are and how distracted walkers often are,* it sends a shiver up my spine.

*There is one crosswalk in particular that is kinda at a weird angle whereby the pedestrian has to really look backwards over their left shoulder to see if a car is turning right into their area, and they almost never do. In theory, they shouldn't have to--it's their right-of-way--but that's putting way more faith in other people's driving abilities than I have or that I want my loved ones to have. 

As soon as a parent got wind of this incident (one of the moms asked how her son still had money after getting snacks), it spread on the text chains like Crying Jordan. I found that I was somewhat in the minority, in that most parents were super creeped out by the fact that an adult thought it was appropriate to buy things for children he didn't know, regardless of his intention. To be clear, I was a little creeped, but not super creeped out. It went so far as to consider asking the store to view their security footage, but I don't think anybody actually did that. Instead, it was determined that all of our children would be indefinitely forbidden from going to Target after school, which I think is the correct decision.

To be honest, I was never really comfortable with them going to Target. It's right on the border of a part of the city where things get a little shady -- not like City of God shady, but inappropriate for unsupervised fifth graders shady. But they always went in the middle of the day and in a large group and other parents seemed okay with it, so S and I reluctantly agreed to it. Well, now I realize that all the parents thought like me. They were also just going along with it because everybody else was going along with it. So, now it's done, and who knows, maybe this small incident forestalled a much more serious incident that would have occurred if we continued to let them go to Target.

It's a tricky thing, determining how much freedom to give your kids, especially in a big city. I feel pretty safe in our little nook, but there are definitely pockets of DC for which this is not the case, and you can't live your life and avoid all the bad stuff 100% of the time. Part of growing up is learning how to be aware of your surroundings and how to successfully navigate out of potentially dangerous situations. The challenge is that, as a parent, it's not at all obvious how to let your children learn these lessons in an age-appropriate manner. It's a balance, and I think we added a bit too much weight to the "free-range" side of the scale, and now we have to self-correct. If nothing else, it gives me greater piece of mind that they can't go to Target any longer, and that's not something to discount. An anxious worrying parent isn't good for anybody.

Alright, time to go get ready for a birthday party -- our second one in as many weeks. Look at us, social butterflies.

Until next time... 

Entry 793: Well, At Least The Seahawks Won

The Seahawks not only won, they destroyed their arch-rival San Francisco 49ers, 41-6. It was very reminiscent of Super Bowl XLVIII, where they scored within the first 15 seconds and didn't relent until they were up by 35. It was the type of game where if it was between two teams neither of which were "my" team, I probably would have turned it off at halftime due to a lack of drama. But since it was the Seahawks, I watched until the very end (even when it was Drew Lock handing off to Velus Jones) and didn't let my nervous fan guard down until Kenneth Walker scored his second touchdown to make it 34-6.

I'm very glad the 'Hawks won. I needed something to bring my spirits up a bit. The news the past few weeks has gotten me down a bit, and it doesn't look like it's getting better anytime soon. You know what I'm talking about. You've heard all the stories--no need to go into the details here. I don't have much to add, anyway. Instead, I'll talk about other, more fun, things like music.

To that end, I briefly became obsessed with this song "Hail to the King" by the band Avenged Sevenfold. I don't particularly like or dislike the song--it's fine; metal isn't really my thing--but I've been trying to figure out the name of it and who sings it for like six months, and I finally did. I definitely heard it a few times when it first came out like ten years ago, but recently it's been added to my Krav Maga instructor's playlist, so I hear it every time I go to the gym. Not knowing it would bother me so much--Who IS this?--but I would be in the middle of doing a drill, so I couldn't exactly stop and check. Plus, I doubt my instructor would appreciate me trying to look at his phone, anyway. So, then I would make it a point to pick out a few lyrics, so that I could Google them later, but I had a lot of trouble discerning the vocals, and it's really hard to pay attention to a song, when, say, you are doing inside defenses and somebody is throwing punches at your head that you need to deflect. A few times I thought I had something, but I would forget it by the time class was over, or it wouldn't be the actual words, so my searches wouldn't turn up anything useful.

But then, during Wednesday's class, I definitely heard the word "henchmen." It was either "the henchmen come" or "the henchmen call," so I repeated those phrases in my head like a mantra while doing a set of front kicks to a vertical target, and then during a water break I made a note of them in my phone. After class, I Googled it up, and "boom!" I got the result I needed. Finally! I now know the name and artist of a song I don't really care about. I can sleep at night.

Actually, I can't really sleep at night, or at least I couldn't last night, not well. I woke up four or five times throughout the night, including once at 3:30a, and I didn't fall back asleep until about 5:30a. My system was all askew. I ran six miles earlier in the day, which felt great, but also kinda messed me up, and then I had two tall beers later in the evening, and drinking feels more and more like poisoning myself, the older I get, and then I stayed up late and forgot to eat dinner, because I was watching the Seahawks game, so then I polished off, like, three bowls of Honey Nut Cheerios right before I went to bed around 12:30a. So, it's really no wonder I didn't sleep great last night. I brought it on myself.

I had the beers at a friend's 50th birthday party. I probably should have just had one, but I was having fun, and I don't like to think of myself as somebody who can't drink more than one beer anymore, even though that's probably the reality. It was a karaoke party, which was really cool, but it was with a live band, so the set list wasn't huge, and there was no bouncing ball on the lyrics. You just had to figure out where to come in on your own. That made it really tricky. It's also tricky because I have a terrible singing voice, so I have to do songs that are kinda goofy or intentional off-key. My plan was to do the Violent Femmes' "American Music," but they didn't have it, so then I thought about Harvey Danger's "Flagpole Sitta," but they didn't have that either, so I settled on "Ice, Ice Baby." It went fine. I still know all the words and the tempo, but not knowing exactly when to come in made it kinda hard. Also, the vocals were super quiet compared to the instruments, which is not ideal for karaoke... or is it? Maybe that was the plan. Have people come up and have fun singing without embarrassing themselves too much or subjecting other people to their terrible voices, since nobody care really hear them anyway.

We know the guy whose birthday it was because our kids go (or went, rather) to school together, and it was very much a parent party. The stated time was 6:00p-8:00p, and around 7:50p a bunch of people were like, "Time to go relieve the sitter." The birthday boy said to me, "I feel like I should organize an after party, but also... I'm officially old now!" There was no way we staying out any later. S usually goes to sleep around 9:00p, and I had a football game to watch. Also, although our kids are old enough to not need a sitter anymore, we don't like to leave them home alone too long.

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

Entry 792: Chaos

The chaos was threefold this week: in the world, the country, and on the homefront. In the latter it was not even on the same scale as the other two, in terms of importance, but it was especially relevant to me because it was mine, and I'm heavily biased toward things that affect me. I'm (not at all) weird that way.

S went away for work -- just a mini-trip, a few days -- but it happens to be on a weekend in which a bunch of things are coming together at once. It also doesn't help that work is quite busy right now. I've been putting in long hours since I got back from vacation. Today, the moment I woke up, at 7:09, I started doing shit -- getting the kids ready and off to school as work items piled up. By 11:00 I was sufficiently agitated, so I stopped, closed my computer,* threw on some workout clothes, and hit the exercise bike for an hour. It was a great stress relief. What I really wanted to do was run on the treadmill. I started doing that again, once in while, and I love it. I go for an hour and crank out six miles -- not a super fast pace, but running for an hour is still running for an hour. It's the best cardio workout around, as far as I'm concerned. But, alas, the only treadmill available to me is in my sister-in-law's apartment building, and although, it's only about a mile away, I didn't have time to go there (or anywhere), so the basement stationary bike it was.

*Actually, I opened a blank PowerPoint presentation and put it into full-screen mode. If I close my computer, or it goes into sleep mode, it disconnects me from the VPN, which can be bad, depending on what I'm doing. So, I've gotten in the habit of not letting it go into sleep mode, which it will do automatically after 15 minutes of inactivity, and I can't change it, because I don't have administrative permissions for the privacy/security settings. I used to to jiggle the mouse every 14 minutes and 55 seconds, like a chump, and then one of my colleagues told me that if you're in a full-screen PowerPoint presentation, your machine will never go to sleep. Totally changed my work life.

After that, I was able to refocus and get a bunch of work done before I had to pick up Lil' S1 from swim practice on the other side of the city. That actually went okay, but I was annoyed because he usually doesn't have practice on Friday, and then last night I got an email saying that he did have it for some reason. So, I had to get him, and I got some pizzas for dinner also, which you think would be easy, but getting takeout is an ordeal with my kids. They never want the same thing -- Lil' S1 wants Chipotle, Lil' S2 wants Chick-fil-A; Lil' S1 doesn't want Domino's, Lil' S2 only wants Domino's; Lil' S1 doesn't like Thai food, Lil' S2 loves Thai food -- and it drives me crazy. I'm like you're getting takeout! Stop complaining! Then they get mad at me because I won't order from two different places. That's totally on S. She'll get them each their own thing, and now they have this bratty sense of entitlement because of it.

Oh, and after I picked up Lil' S1, I had to take him to the comic book store (in rush-hour traffic) to buy a gift for his friend's birthday party tomorrow. To be fair, he did offer to take the Metro home from swim practice and walk to the comic book store and then walk home, but it would've been a 45-minute train ride, and then over a mile walk in the rain, in the dark, with all his school stuff and swim gear and whatever he bought for his friend, at 6:30 at night. I wasn't going to do that to him or to me -- I would be feeling guilty and worrying the entire time.

Anyway... I'm home and chilling now, decompressing, watching a terrible football game (Indiana absolutely running roughshod over Oregon). This is when I wished I drank. I mean, I do drink but only socially, not by myself. We have plenty of alcohol in the house, but I know that if I actually had a drink, I would be regretting it later. I mean, I just ingested about 25 ounces of pizza. I'm probably already pounding the Pepto tonight, anyway. I'll just crack open a seltzer and pretend it's a beer. That's actually more effective than you might think. Just the ritual of opening a can of something and taking swigs off of it can be very relaxing.

In other news, S and I finished Stranger Things, and I absolutely loved the last few episodes. I stand by everything I said in my previous entry. The show's flaws are myriad, and if anything, it got worse toward the end of the season. Instead of everything everybody says being complicated plot explanations or mediocre one-liners, they introduced a new type of trite dialog: The lengthy, cloying relationship-defining talk or heartfelt soliloquy, always delivered in the most dire of circumstances, when there is not time to spare, except for the perfectly timed five-minute lull in the action.

But I'll be damned if it didn't all come together in the end. The story mostly made sense, and was pretty clever, provided you ignore some pretty major plot holes (spoiler alert*). Those kids in Hawkins pulled it off. They saved the world and it was a joy to watch.

*At the end, right before the upside down gets destroyed or collapses or what have you, when all our heroes are in custody of the military, what happened to them after that? How did they get free? Did Dr. Kay and her vengeful minions just let them go after all they did? I mean, Hopper killed, what, 50 soldiers by himself. Once Eleven was out of the picture, the military was like So, you destroyed a bunch of our equipment, stole our vehicles, and annihilated dozens of our colleagues, but, hey, no harm, no foul?  

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