Entry 822: Night In On The Town

I had a night in to myself last night. Well, not totally to myself. Lil' S1 was here, but he's a teenager with a bevy of devices and his own room, so I didn't see him much. To be fair, he did agree to watch a movie with me, but he didn't like the one I selected—The Town—so he bailed after about 15 minutes. I was okay with it. It's a much gritty movie than I expected, and the subject matter is right on the edge of age appropriateness for a 14-year-old. I mean, if he really wanted to keep watching it, I definitely would have let him, but he didn't, so I was fine with him peacing out before dudes get shot in the head at point blank range.

In retrospect, it was a bad choice by me for father-son movie night, but Lil' S1 suggested we watch a heist movie (he just watched and liked Ocean's Eleven), and The Town was the first one that came to mind. I didn't know anything about it, other than Ben Affleck is in it; it's set in Boston; and Joe Muzzulla used to watch it four times a week.* I thought it might be a kinda light and fun caper film—the type where you still feel good rooting for the criminals (like Ocean's Eleven)—but it's not. It's not that at all. 

*Muzzulla from the linked article: "When I was an assistant, and I had to turn in my postgame edits, I would go home and just work from 11 p.m. to 1 a.m. I needed something to kind of keep me up or keep me going. There was a three-movie shuffle (the other two were Whiplash and The Dark Knight) that I would turn on in order to get me through the game so that I could get to bed." Could you live a normal and happy life watching these three movies every night? I feel like I'd be simultaneously keyed up and bummed out the entire day. 

It's a pretty good movie, though. I thought about also bagging it when Lil' S1 opted out, but I decided to stick with it, and I'm glad I did, if only to see Jeremy Renner's performance. He's tremendous (deservedly earning a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nom). I don't think The Town would crack my personal list of top 100 films of all time, but it was well worth a watch, especially since I had already started it. I find it really difficult to start a movie for some reason (unless I'm on a plane), but once I'm into it, I really don't want to stop, and I almost always find the experience satisfying, even if the movie is not that good. I watch movies the same way many people go to the gym. It's fine once you get there and rewarding when it's over, but it's not always easy to motivate yourself to get there in the first place.

After I watch a movie, there are two things I like to do: 1) look up if there is a Rewatchables episode on it; 2) search up the cast on Wikipedia. With The Town, for 1), there is—I already listened to it. For 2), I was surprised to see Blake Lively was in this movie, and that made me realize I didn't know who Blake Lively actually was. I knew the name because TMZ is one of S's guilty pleasures, and she told me all about the legal fights with that Baldoni guy, but I obviously didn't know what she looked like, being that I didn't recognize her in the movie. I also didn't know what she was first famous for. I've since learned she was the lead in Gossip Girl, a TV teen drama I had heard of but never watched because I was a man in his 30s when it came out (I say having consumed and thoroughly enjoyed the entire series Never Have I Ever). Now I know all this, and there is a decent chance I will promptly forget it and then randomly think What was that show Blake Lively was on? while I'm trying to focus on something else, and I'll have to Google it, annoyed that I had to stop whatever it was I was doing to slake my curiosity. Of course, in this hypothetical, I could just not look it up, but that's unrealistic. That's like waking up in the middle of night and trying to not go to the bathroom. You'll just think about it and think about it until you get up and go anyway, so you might as well just do it immediately and get it over with.

That, unfortunately, is how my brain works a lot these days. I just don't retain trivia the way I used to, and I get irritated by it. For example, Rebecca Hall is another actor in The Town (she's the female lead), so I read her filmography on Wikipedia last night also, and I remember thinking to myself Oh, yeah, she's in THAT, and now I can't remember what THAT is. I just looked it up for the second time a few hours ago, and I still can't remember. The weird thing—or maybe this isn't weird; maybe this is how it is for everybody—is that I still have a very good memory for things I used to know. Like, if it imprinted in my mind before, I dunno, age 35 or so, it's pretty firmly in there and would be difficult to dislodge even if I wanted that. But if I learned it after that, it's very tenuously in my memory, and I need to do flashcards or something like that every now and then to keep it in there. For example, I just looked up the Rebecca Hall movie for the third time. It's Vicky, Christina, Barcelona. So, I've now forgotten that twice in the past 18 hours, but I could tell you that I watched that movie in Fall of 2009 in San Diego with my cousins. I was there for a convention, and it was the same week the Seahawks beat the Jaguars 44-0.*

*Let the record show it was actually 41-0. So, not perfect recall, but pretty good.  

S and I play this game Movie Grid every night in bed, and we are a pretty good team, because she watches—or considers watching—just about everything,* so she can probably come up with three movies starring, say, Florence Pugh, while I literally couldn't name one, despite listening to S rattle them off many times. (Wait, I think she's in Little Women. Boom! OK, got one at least.) But then older actors will come up like Jack Nicholson, and she only knows As Good as It Gets. When this happens I like to mess with her and feign amazement that she doesn't know the deep cuts from an actor's oeuvre: "What?! Come on, that's your only one for Jack Frickin' Nicholson?! You've never hear of Wolf? What about The King of Marvin Gardens, The Witches of Eastwick, Hoffa..." It's funny because she doesn't know I'm doing that.    

*If you wonder how she does this, the answer is twofold: 1) she travels a lot; 2) she's willing to watch things in 15-minute increments whenever she's able to take a quick break from work or chores. That last one is key. That's the how busy people watch a lot of movies and TV shows.

Alright, it's about time for me to wrap this up. But before I do, I have to share one more thing about a film that I learned today. Turns out pretty much everything about Frank Dux, the inspiration for the 1989 Jean-Claude Van Damme movie Bloodsport, is untrue. The dude apparently is a huge liar. This is not very surprising. Even as a 13-year-old, I found the claims in the end credits about the real-life Dux's feats in a real-life Kumite dubious. What is surprising is that, well, for one thing, he's still alive—I always just assumed he was dead for some reason—but more so that I hadn't heard about this before today when a series of movie-related Wikipedia jumps took me to his page. He got exposed as a tall tale teller decades ago. This is a perfect illustration of what makes misinformation so pernicious. People hear the original false story, but they don't always hear the corrective followup. It's like Mark Twain once said: “A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”

Until next time... 

Entry 821: Back To School 2026 And Other Things

This weekend really got away from me. S and I got into a fight early Friday evening, and it threw off my entire routine. We reconciled--it's totally good now--but I was never able to catch up schedule-wise. That's an underrated negative of fighting: the time it takes. As a result, I don't have much time for blogging. I'm going to have to rip through some bullet points and call it a post.

• Both kids now take the bus to school, and it's weird to not have to drive anybody anywhere in the morning. I don't even really have to get anybody ready anymore. Lil' S1 has to leave quite early--like around 7:10 am--so I try to get out of bed by 6:45 am, just to make sure he has everything he needs and see him off, but there's really no reason to do that (other than to not feel like--nor look like--a slacker parent). He gets up and gets ready and gets out the door completely on his own. I just stand there, coffee in hand, and say, "You good?" And he says "yeah, dad," in that eye-rolling, I'm-not-a-baby-anymore tween kind of way and leaves. 
  
  
• One thing we've been trying to do with the kids is get them into school-based activities. There are so many clubs and sports to try and neither of them really want to do anything. Actually, Suren did want to play tackle football, but it's at a different school that he would have to take the city bus to by himself, and it seemed liked too much in his first semester in middle school, so I wouldn't let him do it. (S deferred to me on this one--a rarity.) To be honest, I don't love the idea of him playing tackle football (especially not after reading Chuck Klosterman's new, really good, really weird book Football). I think I'll probably let him do it, ultimately, but I'm fine delaying it by at least a year. He doesn't need to be getting destroyed by 14-year-old 8th-graders with pube staches.
  
  
• I've become kinda obsessed with Kirkland brand lids. We shop at Costco, so we get a lot of Kirkland items, and they frequently have those "sealed for freshness" glue-on lids, and they are always terrible. The adhesive is so much stronger than the integrity of the lid that you can't actually take the lid off the way it is meant to be taken off. You have to pull super hard, and when you do almost always the lid splits wide upon in the middle with the edges still glued down tightly, or the little tab rips clean off. I'm about 30% in opening Kirkland milk correctly--I usually have to cut the seal off with a knife--and I've literally never done it with their peanut butter. The thing is, it's not just Kirkland, it's a lot of brands. I don't know how big lid keeps getting away with this. One of my plans for after retirement is to start a YouTube channel called "Grids & Lids," in which I film myself doing Immaculate Grid and trying to remove terrible lids.
  
  
• We are watching Malcolm in the Middle as a family, and I'm growing to despise this show. It's fine in limited doses, but it's terrible to watch on a nightly basis. The characters are cartoonishly mean to one another, which gets old fast, and the storyline of the oldest son is simultaneously irritating and boring. We're not even halfway through the series (there are seven seasons! with like 25 episode in each one!), and I don't think I can make it. I keep trying to get everybody to switch to a new show, but Lil' S1, and to a lesser degree Lil' S2, is adamant that it's good and we keep watching it. I want to spend time with my family--I mean, the fact that our sons hang out with us at all is something to tightly hold onto--but I just can't hang with another five months of Lois screaming and Francis scrubbing.
  
  
• I was listening to a podcast the other day on free will and the uncertainty of the future, and my big takeaway is that the "free will is an illusion" position is a very weird one to hold. I don't mean it's weird in the sense that the subject is weird (although it clearly is). I mean it's weird that smart people, some scientists even, earnestly believe this to be the case and try to convince others of it. To be clear, I've seen any good proof on free will one or the other, but if I had to pick, I would plant my flag on the "free will exists" side. The way I see it, the closest thing we have to evidence on the matter is our own experience, and our own experience clearly points to free will. I'm choosing to type this, after all.
  
  Could this choice be an illusion? Sure, the same why we could be in the Matrix or a simulation or Tommy Westphall's snow globe, but I think it's weird to believe those things as well. It's also possible that everything was predetermined at the Big Bang, and we think what we think simply because the atoms in our head are aligned in a certain way, and they couldn't be aligned any other way, just like dust in outer space couldn't be aligned any other way then how it is at this exact moment. It's just where the immutable physical laws of the cosmos put things. But my retort to that is: Why can we think then? Why aren't we moving through the universe completely unaware of our existence the same way space dust (seemingly) is. Consciousness is a very high hurdle for the free will illusionist to overcome, in my opinion, as if we have something as unexplainable as consciousness (and we do--I am very sure of that), then we can have free will too. So, I believe in free will. After all, what choice do I have?*
  
  *Not my line--I heard somebody else say it--but I love it.
  
  
• Lastly, RIP to my parents' close friend MB, who died today. It was no surprise--she had had health problems for years, and her family told her friends that this was probably happening very soon--but it's still sad. I hadn't seen her in decades, but I have fond memories of going over to her and her family's house as a kid. They lived on a decent sized plot of land surrounded by apple trees, and they would have an annual apple harvest party. Everybody would come over and pick apples to be pressed and come home with gallons of apple cider. I used to just run around there with all the other kids doing whatever it was we did after we got bored picking apples. I honestly don't remember--football? hide and seek? capture the flag? Not sure. But I am sure I had fun.

Until next time... 

Entry 820: Mo Problems No Money

There's a Notrious B.I.G. song "Mo Money Mo Problems" that you've probably heard even if you can't place it right now. It's very much an Oh, that song song. It's an okay tune, though not something I'm adding to a playlist anytime soon, and the message has never resonated with me. I suppose at some point you can reach a level of wealth at which it really does cause more problems in your life than you would have otherwise, but I certainly haven't gotten to that point yet. In my experience, life is almost the exact opposite of "Mo Money Mo Problems." Being able to spend money on problems makes you have fewer problems not more.

I mean, to be clear, money alone doesn't make you happier or more fulfilled or more satisfied with your life. And it's also true that I have many more problems now than I did when I had much less money, but that's just correlation. The equation isn't high income equals more problems; it's getting older equals more problems. It's getting married. It's having kids. It's your body slowly withering away to nothing. It's having to take care of yourself and provide for others with increasingly bad eyesight, decreasing levels of energy, and an arthritic shoulder.* That's what causes problems, not money. On the contrary, having a much higher income now than I did as a carefree young man is one of the few good things about getting older. If I had all the problems I have now on my salary from 25 years ago, I would be much worse off than I am now.

*But it's worth it, because the thing that does make you happy, more fulfilled, and more satisfied with your life, in my experience, is developing meaningful loving connections with other people. 

I've been thinking about this lately because a bunch of things have come up that we need to spend money on, and it's starting to get quite expensive. And this is coming on the heels of our unexpected budget-busting detour through Europe. It's really eating into our savings, which I hate because the instability of the job market right now makes me apprehensive, and our savings is what assuages my nerves in this regard.

Of course, the flip-side of this coin is that we have savings to tap into. A lot of families don't. I am aware of that, and I acknowledge it. I'm just not going to write much about it. The purpose of this blog, after all, is not to check my privilege--nobody actually wants to read that, and I don't want to write it. The purpose of this blog is for me to write about what I feel like writing about, and at the moment I want to grouse about all the money we're spending.   

The first expensive thing we need to do is get our trees serviced. That's the biggest and steepest thing. A storm ripped through DC the other night--it's a semi-regular occurrence, unfortunately--and it took down a couple of massive limbs from trees in our backyard. One landed on our lawn, thankfully causing no damage, and the other landed on our neighbors' roof, bending their gutter a little bit.* The size of the branch that fell in our yard makes me very uneasy--had it landed somewhere other than an empty patch of ground, it could've caused serious damage to person or property--so I called the tree people right away to schedule an appointment to have them come out and clear away all the dead branches and debris in all the trees in our backyard. And we got the estimate yesterday: $3,000. 

Ffffuuuck.

But we gotta pay it. If our roof caves in because lightning strikes a tree and splits it in two and half of it falls onto our house, that's on God. If the same thing happens because a stiff wind blows down a dead limb that's been dangling by a thread for years, that's on me.

*I've done extensive research on this--well, as extensive as somebody with no legal training can do using the internet--and from everything I've read our neighbors are responsible for any damage caused by branches that hang over into their yard, even if they come from a tree in our yard. They are also free to remove or trim these branches, if they wish. I've been in contact with them, and I think they know this (I mentioned it to them the other day in a hopefully tactful way), so presumably we are cool with them.

Also, our dryer broke. It's a cheap dryer that I never liked, so I'm not that broken up about it, but I do wish we could have milked another year out of it or so. The same thing happened at our old house, so we bought a nice new washer-dryer set, and then when we moved, we had to downgrade to the clunkers in our new house, because the company who flipped our house cut corners on a bunch of stuff, and we didn't realize it until after we moved in. Actually, I noticed the cheapy washer and dryer before we moved in, and I complained about it to our Realtor,* and he was like, "Just go get the ones from you old house and switch them." And I said, "You can do that?" And he replied, "Why not? We never agreed to anything with the washer and dryer one way or the other." But I didn't do it because I didn't have a vehicle to move them in and renting one, or hiring a mover, would have been moderately expensive, and it seemed more cost efficient to use the bad appliances until they break, and then just buy new ones then.

*I just learned, after typing "realtor" with a lower case 'r' and getting the squiggly red line, that Realtor in a proper noun for a real estate agent who is a member of the National Association of Realtors. Huh, how about that?

It was a sound plan, but now we've gotten to the part where we have to buy new ones. Well, new one, anyway. The washing machine is still working. So, we did buy a new dryer, and it is coming on Tuesday. That's another multi-$1000 hit, and a few days of old-fashioned air-drying, for the G & G household.

Then, on top of all this, we have to buy plane tickets to visit our families (S' for Thanksgiving; mine for Xmas), and I just spent a few hundred dollars to cover the deductible for a dental deep cleaning. That one I was able to pay for with money in my HSA, so it doesn't feel like a big expense, but it's basically the same as if it came from our primary checking account. It's psychologically cheaper to use the HSA, because it's money in a different pot, but it's not logically cheaper to use, because all the pots belong to me (and S) and are essentially just one big pot.

So, we have a lot of expenses at moment, but we do have one thing that has recently broken our way financially, and it's a very big thing: Lil' S1 decided to go back to public school. Unfortunately, he decided this after we had already paid the first installment at his old private school and the refund deadline had lapsed, so it doesn't help us too much this year.* In fact, it's an enormous waste of money this year. We basically gave a massive donation to a school our kid no longer attends and that I never liked that much even while he was there. We spent a large amount of money on nothing. That's absolutely one way to look at it.

*We didn't have to pay quite the full yearly amount, but we had to pay an embarrassing large percentage of it. 

Another way to look at it--and this is the way I'm looking at it--is that we will save nearly four times over what we paid this year, expenditures we already had budgeted, by Lil' S1 not going to private school for the rest of his high school years. Keeping him in private school, just because we already paid for most of a year of it, would be penny wise and pound foolish. It would also be a classic application of the sunk-cost fallacy. The money is gone either way, so we should make the best decision for Lil' S1, regardless, and the best decision is for him to go to public school. It's what I wanted all along (I just got outvoted on the matter), so I'm not even that annoyed that he changed his mind so late in the game, and cost us a bunch of money. It's like when a sports team buys out an underperforming player. Sometimes you just gotta take the L, cut your losses, and get on with this nonsense we call life.

Alright, that's enough money talk for today and probably for quite a while after today.

Until next time...