Entry 825: Fall Olio

It's been a kinda dud of a morning so far. I woke up and almost instantly engaged in virtual battle against Tesla. They charged us $100, directly deducted from our checking account, for a self-driving subscription that a) we never signed up for, b) is for a car that we don't own and probably doesn't even exist anymore. We were able to get our bank to cancel the payment, so all good there, but still, it made me realized that we need to disentangle ourselves from the Tesla web completely. This is part of the brave new world in which we now live. We all need to add "Remove Vehicle and Delete Profile" to our list of things to do after we sell or total a car. This never even crossed my mind. Once our car was gone, I deleted the Tesla app from my phone (good riddance!) and got on with life, not thinking that of course all the background data was still being stored and was active and could still be used against us.

So, after we got this bogus charge nullified, I set out to delete our accounts and depart the Tesla world* once and for all. Easy written than done, of course. Since I deleted the app already, I started on the website and followed the instructions to delete my account. It wouldn't let me because it said I had to remove our vehicle from our profile first. But I couldn't do that because the vehicle isn't controllable from my profile, only from S's. So, I logged in using S's credentials and went to remove the vehicle, but there is no option to do that on the website (at least that I could find), and all the instructions online say to do it from the app, so I reluctantly downloaded the app again, and logged in as S.

*It's a shitty world. The car itself is actually really good, but everything that comes with owning it kinda sucks. Repairs take a long time and are super expensive; everything that can possibly be run by AI is run by AI, so getting support is dystopian and dehumanizing; and apparently you get charged for shit you never asked for. One thing this ordeal reinforced is that it's nice to not have a Tesla anymore.

The prompts for removing a vehicle through the app are straightforward, if you sold it—not so much if you totaled it. I called Tesla support (even more reluctantly than with downloading the app) and talked to a robot who told me to follow the same prompts as if we sold the car to a third party. I guess technically we did that with our insurance company, but that's not what people think when they get in an accident. When my neighbor asked what happened to our Tesla, I didn't tell him we sold it to a third party. What would be nice is if the prompt on the app says "Sold to Third Party or Totaled in an Accident," then it would be crystal clear as to what button to tap. To any event, I submitted a request to remove the vehicle that probably doesn't exist anymore from our account, and it told me it takes a few hours to do this, so I'll check back later today. If it actually removed the vehicle, then I'll try to delete our accounts. If it didn't, then I'll probably have to call that robot back. I removed all forms of payment from both of our accounts (we don't even remember linking our checking account, which is a bit disconcerting), so they don't (or at least they shouldn't) have a way to extract money from us in the meantime.

Then, after I was done with all this (for the time being), I had to clean up a mess of undercooked chocolate chip cookies. Lil' S1 was baking them for some event he's going to later today. He frequently uses the same recipe, and the cookies are delicious, but the stated cook time is never long enough, so they are too doughy if you follow the instructions to a tee. Instead of remembering this and leaving them in the oven a few minutes longer, Lil' S1 always takes them out before they are done and then insists that they are fine. I would be wise to bite my tongue and just let him deal with his mushy cookies, but for some reason I can't do that, which today led to the following conversation.

Me: You need to cook these longer they aren't done.
Him: Yes they are. They'll harden. Look this one is brown on the edges [points to the most cooked one].
Me: They aren't going to harden that much. Look at this one and that one and that one [points to a bunch that are still super doughy]. These aren't done.
Him: Fine. I'll put this tray back in. But the other ones are done.

[As he's clumsily putting the cookies back in, he drops the tray, it flips over, and everything falls onto the backside of the open oven door in a messy pile.]

Him: This is your fault!
Me: How is it my fault? You dropped the tray because you weren't holding it properly.
Him: You're the one who told me to put them back in the oven! If you didn't say that, this never would have happened.
Me: So if I ask you to go to the store, and you trip on your way out the door, that's my fault?
Him: Yes!

[About a half-hour later, he's taking the cookies from the other trays and putting them into a Tupperware container.]

Him: Actually, you were right—a lot of these cookies are too soft. 

In other news, we have a doubleheader flag football game tomorrow. We had to reschedule a game a few weeks ago because we didn't have enough kids (half our team went to Michigan to watch the Wolverines lose to Iowa on a last second touchdown), and this was the only way the league could do it. It's a holiday on Monday and parent-teacher conferences on Tuesday, so the kids have four days of no school, so I had to make sure enough people would be in town this weekend before I signed off on the doubleheader. It would be very embarrassing to reschedule only to have to cancel again for the same reason. Well, we have enough kids, but now storms are in the forecast, so there is a decent chance everything gets called off because of inclement weather. Wouldn't that be ironic? It's like ra-a-a-ain on your football games...

We are scheduled to play probably the best team in the league tomorrow, and, honestly, I wouldn't be completely bummed if we have to miss them. We've actually had their number the past two years, beating them three of four times, and our only loss came by a single point under dubious circumstances (the referees told me the score and then changed it later when the opposing coach argued about it). But we aren't as good this year. We lost three really good players and replaced them with one not that good player. So, if we have to miss the best team, I won't be heartbroken. We will probably play them in the playoffs anyway.

Despite our personnel hit, we are off to a very good start. We're 3-0 and the games have been really fun. Everybody is getting more playing time, and kids are stepping up and making the most of it. Lil' S2 didn't play much defense in past games, because he plays quarterback, sometimes the entire game, so it's hard to justify also playing him a lot on defense over other kids who don't see the field as much. But at most we have two subs each game this year, so Lil' S2 gets to play a lot more D, and he balled out last game. He had two interceptions, including a game-clincher. (He also threw three or four touchdowns and caught one on offense.)

Part of that was my brilliant coaching, and I'm only being half facetious. Our opponent had this big kid on their team, tall and thick, and although he wasn't very fast, he was killing us early on because our defenders were too small to D him up properly when we were in zone, and he was catching everything on them. So, I made a switch to man-to-man, and put Lil' S2 on him, because he's decent-size (though not as big as the other kid), and he's physical so I knew he wouldn't get outmuscled at the point of the catch.* Sure enough, they try the big kid again, after I make the switch, and Lil' S2 wins the jump ball for the INT, and then he got another one later in the game too. 

*You can't make overt contact, in this league, but it's kinda like basketball, where the more aggressive kids get the rebounds because they get to the right spot and box out.

That's the thing. I've had to do more coaching this year, because the players aren't quite as skilled, and one of the players we lost (who is excellent) is the son of my former co-coach, so now it's just me, and my responsibilities have doubled. It's forced me to get more creative, which doesn't always work. (I called a play for a kid who doesn't get the ball much last game, and he was wide open, but not even looking for the ball (doh!), so our QB had to throw it to somebody else.) But it is really satisfying when it does. We have this kid on our team who can't catch very well, but he's pretty fast, so I called a wide receiver reverse for him on first down, hoping we'd get five or six yards and have second and medium, and he took it to the house for a touchdown. It was awesome.

We still do a lot of silly things—like throw an interception in the end zone when all we need to do is burn clock—and if we really need a big play, sometimes I'll tell our quarterback "just throw it to Z" (our best receiver, by far). But that's 11-year-old football. Heck, that's any football. Every week I watch NFL games, and think to myself Why did they do that? There is usually not a satisfying answer. Actually, there is: football is played by humans, and humans make mistakes. With the AI takeover seemingly imminent, this is something to celebrate, not lament, in my opinion.

Until next time... 

Entry 824: Anticipation

I was thinking about anticipation today, and I decided that there are four ways in which I anticipate something. There is negative anticipation, neutral anticipation, positive anticipation, and experiential anticipation. The first one on my list, negative anticipation, is also known as dread. It's when I just don't want to do something, because it's going to be horrible, but I know I have to for whatever reason. I just got some very expensive, very painful periodontal work done on Monday, and I was absolutely dreading it (but that's a whole other post). There are many other examples. They differ greatly in severity—some things fill me with extreme anxiety; some just slightly annoy me—and in type—dreading periodontal work is very dissimilar to dreading a difficult conversation with my spouse—but they all share the property of negative anticipation.

The flip side of this is positive anticipation or eagerness. This is the feeling of looking forward to something. Again, these things can be very different in scale and type, and they are highly personal to me (I couldn't care less about the new season of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, but it seems to Lil' S1's favorite thing in the world at the moment), but they are all things I am very eager to do. 

Neutral anticipation is in between dread and eagerness. It's basically normal life—going to my job, running errands, shuttling the boys around. Most the time, these things are not negatively or positively anticipated by me. They just are.

The last type of anticipation, which I call experiential anticipation, is the most interesting, I think. This is when I want the experience of something, but I don't really want to do it. And note, wanting the experience of something is not the same thing as wanting the outcome of something. It's a journey-versus-destination thing. I didn't go to college don't just to get a degree or even just to get the knowledge that college afforded me; I wanted to actually go to college.

I think exercise is a good illustration of these four types of anticipation. Sometimes I dread exercise and don't do it or only do it because I feel compelled to do it some reason (usually health benefits or aesthetics).* Sometimes I just do it because it's part of my routine, and I don't really think much of it. Other times I really like it and look forward to it. Then there are yet other times, and these probably constitute a majority of the time, when I don't look forward to exercise as an activity, but I look forward to it as an experience. It's enriching and rewarding, and not just because of the results, but because of the act itself. So I want to do it, even though at that moment I might not "like" it.

*I rarely have negative anticipation for exercise, but I have had it before. I used to dread wrestling tournaments that required me to wake up early in the morning, but that's probably more due to the waking up early in the morning part than the exercise part. It's why I've never done the Army Ten-Miler here in DC. I was going to sign up for it once when S and a bunch of our friends did it, but then I realized I would have to wake up at 6:30 am, and I was like nope. I foresaw myself lying in bed the night before staring at the clock at 1:30 am, conversing with myself Okay, if I fall asleep right now, I can still get five hours. But you can't fall asleep right now, you fool! That's the entire problem! and didn't want any part of that.

I realized that as I've gotten older I anticipate more and more things experientially. I want to do them, but I don't want to do them. This dawned on me the other day when I was walking out of a networking event. I serve on an advisory board for my graduate school alma mater, and we had our annual in-person conference yesterday. As I was walking out of the building when it was over, I felt this strong sense of relief that it was over, but it wasn't relief like that was painful. It was a satisfying sense of relief like I've done my duty. I did a thing that is enriching and rewarding, and that I like doing—I genuinely enjoy interacting with all these interesting people I would never interact with otherwise—but for some reason I'm never particularly eager to do. Like, if Thursday evening I got an email saying the conference had been postponed a month, I would not have been bummed in the slightest. I would have thought Okay, cool, I have other things to do, anyway.

Travel is another great example of something I often have experiential anticipation for. Going to India this summer was wonderful. It was super fun, and I had a great time, and I would do it again, but I'm saying that in retrospect. In the lead-up to it, I was not super stoked about it, even though I knew that I was going to like it. It's kinda weird. And I don't know if it's a good thing or a bad thing. Maybe it's neither; maybe it's just a thing. On the one hand, things I used to have positive anticipation for have been shifted into the experiential anticipation category. I've outgrown a lot of my this is going to be the coolest thing in the world exuberance. As a child and young adult, there would be events—games, parties, concerts, etc.—that my insides would be churning over, in the best way possible, in anticipation. And I just don't feel that so much anymore.

On the other hand, why is that a bad thing? I have other things in my life to replace this feeling. I mean, a big reason I used to anticipate things so positively was the glimmer of hope Maybe the girl I like will be there, and this was true even if I didn't like a particular girl at the time. But that hasn't been a relevant thought in nearly 20 years. I think my shift in how I anticipate things might just be part of a natural progression away from a desire for excitement to one of satisfaction. And the answer to my question is that it's not actually a bad thing.

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

Entry 823: Another One Bites The Dust

Another appliance went on the fritz Friday night. Our TV went down. It wouldn't turn on, and then it would, but it was only the bottom half of the screen, and it was flickering and unresponsive to any controls on the remote, and then it wouldn't turn off. To put it in technical terms, the thing was tweaking out. Sometimes you can fix "broken" devices just by restarting them, so I unplugged the TV and waited ten minutes and plugged it back in, but it didn't do any good. Then, I turned to the internet to see if I could find any troubleshooting tips, but the only thing it said to do was to check all the connections, which I already did (duh) and hold down the factory reset button, but that didn't do anything either. So, I gave up and decided to just buy a new TV. We bought the broken one at the very beginning of the Covid shutdown, which seems like last week but was actually almost seven years ago. Is that a good lifespan for a TV? I'm not sure, but I don't feel completely cheated by it, at least.

Whenever something breaks in our house, I always face the impossible task of determining whether or not I should try to fix it myself or call a professional or replace it altogether, and if I do the latter, then I have to decide whether I should try to replace it myself or call a professional. I used to be very much in the just-book-a-professional camp, but I've changed my tune on that because of the prevalence of information on the internet, specifically very detailed YouTube videos. It's also just a mindset change, for the better, to think, Maybe I can fix this myself. It doesn't hurt to look at least. When I taught math, I would see so many students psych themselves out from even trying to solve the problem, but that's what I used to do with DIY. So, now, I at least give it an initial go, and sometimes, like when my laptop wouldn't charge, and I had to physically disconnect and reconnect a wire in the battery (which required me ordering a special type of screwdriver to open the back), it works, and I'm very happy. Other times, like with this broken TV, I can't figure it out, and I'm not happy. I'm not sad either. I'm just normal. Yeah, I have to buy a new TV, but that's a solution too and one that doesn't require much labor from me. And I can buy it with a clear conscience, knowing that at least I tried to fix it first.

Decent TVs are relatively inexpensive too. That's another thing. We got the new one yesterday, and it was $250 for a nice normal 50" flat screen smart TV. That's how much you pay, at a minimum, for service when you call a repairman to fix a broken appliance. It's also super easy go get a new TV. I bought it online at Best Buy, picked it up, brought it home and set it up, and the whole thing took maybe an hour total. The most onerous part is getting rid of the old TV. I have to search up on the DC website when and where is the next e-waste drop. As I recall, they have them a couple times a month at various points around city, never anywhere near where we live. Last one I went to was in the concrete ruins of old RFK Stadium. It was ridiculously crowded and took me a long time to get rid an old laptop and printer. They also had a paper shredded and a grease disposal service, but they didn't have the lines separated properly so everything was bleeding together, and it was pure chaos.

So, I'm not eager to do that again. Not only is it a huge hassle, but it's one that also bums you out. You go there and look out at this vast wasteland of broken electronics and have a Crying Indian moment. Putatively, it's a recycling center, but I doubt even half of that waste is getting reused. Surely, much of it is just piling up in a landfill somewhere. It's terrible, but it also probably doesn't make the cut of things I would fix right now with this country, if I somehow got a dozen One Wish Willows.

I read about this family who wanted to create as little new e-waste as possible, so whenever something broke, they would try to find somebody who could repair it, no matter how big or small it was. Like, their toaster broke, and instead of tossing it and getting a new toaster (what 99% of the population would do), they got it repaired. What they said is that you can basically get anything repaired if you're diligent enough about it, and often, it's a super easy fix. I completely believe that because I'm looking at our old TV, and the majority of it is fine—the casing and screen and all the ports and chords are all still good. There's just something inside that malfunctioned, and if I had the time and patience to figure out what it was or to take it to somebody who did, that piece could surely be replaced, and the whole TV could be used again. But therein lies the rub. I don't have the time nor patience to do that. For the family, this is their thing, but it's not my thing, and I don't want to make it my thing. My thing is riding the exercise bike while I watch football, and I need a working TV ASAP to be able to do that.

Also, it's worth pointing out that the companies who build our electronics are highly incentivized to make it very inconvenient to fix their products, since replacing them is more money in their pockets. Making new software and accessories incompatible with old hardware is a common means to this end. And I will admit, it works on me. If my iPad broke tomorrow, I wouldn't even attempt to get it repaired. I would just buy a new one, with the justification that "it was old anyway." That's how they get ya.

In other news, we watched Disclosure Day last night. It was good not great. Actually, I would say it was fine. It didn't quite get up to the good level. Like, if somebody asked me how it was, I'd say it was "worth a watch." I wouldn't say it was "good." There are some huge flaws with it that I can't explain without spoiling the entire movie (so I won't). I anticipated it wasn't going to be great because it's Spielberg, so if it was great, it would have been a way bigger deal than it was. There was almost no buzz surrounding this film and its release, and if you contrast that to another alien movie from this year, Project Hail Mary, you get an idea of what the public thought of it. The public isn't always right, but it often is—wisdom of the crowds and whatnot.

I probably wouldn't have even watched this film, but S wanted to have a family night, so she made us all watch it together. It was cool. I certainly didn't mind watching it. I love Spielberg, especially since hearing him go on the Rewatchables podcast to talk about 2001: A Space Odyssey. He was so unpretentious and enjoyable to listen to that I want to like his newer movies. Unfortunately, however, they aren't spectacular. Dude lost his fastball. It happens. He can still put out watchable movies (I thought Ready Player One was pretty good), but he's not the maestro he used to be. He hasn't been that in decades, honestly. His last real masterpiece, in my opinion, was Saving Private Ryan, and that came out in 1998. He hasn't had a true tour de force in the 21st century. But that's just life. As Sick Boy beautifully illustrates in Trainspotting: You get old and you can't hack it.

So it goes.

Until next time... 

   

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... 

Entry 819: Ten Movies I Watched While Traveling

One thing about going from DC to Frankfurt to Paris back to Frankfurt to Bangalore to Shimoga back to Bangalore back to Frankfurt to Philadelphia back to DC is that you have a lot of transit time in which you can watch movies. I saw ten movies total, and that's not including the first half of the The Dink, which I was watching with Lil' S2 and S until our internet connection unexpectedly dropped, and we never got around to finishing it. (Nobody was all that broken up about it.) These were all movies I had not seen before, and below is my review of each of them in reverse order of how good I thought they were.

10. Don't Say Good Luck 

That this movie is last on my list tells you that it's a very strong list, as this wasn't a terrible film. The main reason I didn't particularly enjoy it, isn't its fault; it's Netflix's. It came up on my profile as a comedy, but it's not a comedy. It's also not a "musical teen drama" as Wikipedia says. It's a drama about a teenage girl in a musical. There are very few laughs in it, which was a problem for me, as when I put it on I wanted to laugh. I was in the mood for something not-so-serious, and so when I saw a comedy starring Adam Sandler's daughter, I had something like Booksmart in mind and thought to myself, Ooh, this could be perfect. Then, in the opening scene, you learn the main character's mom is dying of cancer, and it was like, Wait... what?! This isn't what I wanted at all!

9. Spider-Man: Brand New Day

We watched this in India on the big screen. We couldn't have carried on with our vacation in peace if we didn't. No matter what we were doing on a given day, Lil' S2 bothered us about going to see the new Spider-Man. Stuck at the airport in Frankfurt: "If we don't go to India, can we at least see the new Spider-Man?" On the train to Paris: "Oh, when we get there, can we see the new Spider-Man?" On top of the Arc de Triomphe: "When we get down, can we see the new Spider-Man?" We put him off by saying we wanted to take his 13-year-old cousin in India with us, which was true, so then once we got there we had to follow through on that.

As for the movie itself, it was a slight step-up from the usual formulaic, forgettable superhero film. I mean, I saw it several weeks ago, and I still remember the major plot points, which is something. Every other time I saw one of the Spider-Man movies--and I think I've somehow seen them all now--I forgot major portions of the story the second I left the theater. So, Brand New Day at least clears the very low bar of "I can tell you what happens."

8. Obsession

Like Don't Say Good Luck, this one suffers from a genre problem for me. Unlike Don't Say Good Luck, it's on me, as this one is clearly categorized as a horror movie, and I just didn't realize that when I rented it. (I just heard it was a good movie.) Then after I rented it, I had to watch it, lest I pay $4.99 for nothing. This is not a bad movie--it's quite good actually--it's just that I don't really appreciate horror films, unless I'm in the right setting, and that setting is not in an airplane seat watching by myself on a small screen. I need to be with people to get the most out of a horror movie. That's probably why I don't watch them very much anymore. S doesn't like them, and Lil' S1 thinks the live action Grinch is too scary, so he's out. That leaves Lil' S2, and although I'm very lenient on the movies my kids consume, making my 11-year-old child my horror movie watching partner is a bridge too far. I mean, who am I Mark Borchardt?

So, sorry Obsession, you're a fine film, I just didn't consume you correctly.

7. Yesterday

I found this movie delightful because I love the Beatles, and I find pretty much anything associated with the Beatles delightful, but it has a plot flaw that I couldn't get past. The premise of the film is that a struggling singer-songwriter* wakes up one day in world where the Beatles don't exist, but he still remembers them and all their songs. He then starts playing their songs as if they are his own and gets famous, and then the movie is basically about his internal conflict of living this lie (with a cute girl in the mix, of course).

*Played by Himesh Patel in his much less buff, pre-Odyssey body. 

But here's the thing: If these songs only exist in a world in which they are in your head, aren't they rightfully your songs? I mean, whose else are they? And I just kept thinking, Why doesn't he tell the truth? Just say, "Something weird happened, and I have all these amazing songs in my head from a band nobody else seems to remember but me." That's what I would do, and then I could ethically take credit (and money) for the Beatles' music. Nobody would believe me, and they would probably think it was a ridiculously pretentious act, but it would clear my conscience. Plus, I would still be performing, and inevitably changing, the songs (no cover sounds exactly like its original), so they would still very much be my songs. Plus, plus, maybe I would start to think that the Beatles never existed, even in my world, and I was some sort of touched musical genius. I mean, this is less crazy than the alternative, if you think about it.

So, overall, fun movie with a very flawed plot.

6. Bridesmaids

Now this is the silly female-led comedy I was looking for--very solid. One problem is that the funniest part (to me) came within the first five minutes of the movie, so it didn't quite live up to the high bar it set for itself early on, but still, it made me laugh, and it made two-hours of a nine-hour flight go by relatively quickly. So, well done there.

5. The Power of the Dog

A good movie that is not a great movie. The performances are really strong--Benedict Cumberbatch and the kid Kodi Smit-McPhee are both great; Kirsten Dunst is great; and Jesse Plemons is great, as always--but there was something about the character development of Smit-McPhee's Peter that I found lacking. The film is apparently based on a novel, so they probably had to cut out some of the backstory, and maybe they cut out a bit too much.

An interesting fact about this movie is that it is one of three movies for which a woman won the Best Director Oscar. Once, I was in a trivia competition, and my team was leading, and the final question was to name these three women directors. We knew Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker) and Chloé Zhao (Nomadland), but we did not know Jane Campion (The Power of the Dog). Thankfully, nobody else did either, except for my sometimes trivia teammate/sometimes trivia rival N, but nobody on his team trusted him, so we still won.

4. Scarface

A classic I had never seen. Really good movie. I kept waiting for the line "Say hello to my little friend!" and I waited a long time, as it doesn't happen until the very end. I didn't watch a lot of the famous gangster movies--Scarface, Goodfellas, Casino, etc.--the first time around (I think I was a little too young), so now that I've been catching up on them, I'm struck by how many of the actors were later on either The Sopranos or Breaking Bad. In Scarface, we've got a young Don Eladio and a younger Héctor Salamanca and "Feech". We've also got Michelle Pfeiffer at her apex. Once I was at Sherry's with my high school girlfriend, and an old woman came up to our booth and said to her, "You are a dead-ringer for a young Michelle Pfeiffer." I was like, Yeah, right, if only... 

3. Marty Supreme

This one has been available to stream for free for some time, but I was really resistant to it for some reason (possibly the 150 minute run-time). I shouldn't have been. It's tremendous--an absolute tour de force by Timothée Chalamet. I heard that he campaigned hard for himself to win the Best Actor Oscar, and I can see why. He should have won, and I say that having no idea who actually did win. (Fact check: It was Michael B. Jordan for Sinners, which I haven't seen yet; see my spiel on horror movies above.) The Shark Tank guy was also good, as was Gwyneth Paltrow. She's easy to make fun of, because her Goop company is so ridiculous and she says things like "conscious uncoupling," seemingly in earnest,* but as an actress, I don't think I've ever seen a bad performance from her.

*It's possible she's just an Andy Kaufman-esque comedian, and the joke is actually on all of us. Her line "I'd rather smoke crack than eat cheese from a can" is genuinely funny, as is her doubling down on it. The problem is that I've read articles and blog posts from real medical professionals who aver that a lot of her Goop stuff is not just harmless campy fun, but rather junk science that can do people harm. 

2. Wild at Heart

Now, this is precisely the type of film I want to see on a long flight. I'm strapped into a small chair, in a metal tube, with 199 other people, hurtling across the planet at 600 mph, 35,000 feet in the air. Let's get weird. And who does weird better than David Lynch? I've seen a lot of his stuff, and it ranges from quite bizarre but coherent (Twin Peaks) to completely unintelligible (Inland Empire). Wild at Heart is in the former camp, which I appreciate. I like the surreality of Lynch's work, but I need there to actually be some semblance of a storyline, or I start getting bored. It's like staring at a piece of abstract art. It's fine to do for two minutes, but not for two hours (and even within two minutes my mind would start to wander).

And speaking of actors who get made fun of a lot, but who can be legitimately brilliant: Nic Cage. Say what you will about the man, but he's got range. I saw him in a movie called Dream Scenario recently, and he is really good playing a character who couldn't be more opposite than Sailor Ripley in Wild at Heart. And he's excellent in this film too. (So is Laura Dern. So is Willem Dafoe.) David Lynch isn't for everybody, so I'm always hesitant to recommend him, but if you like his style and somehow haven't seen this one yet, you should see it... on an airplane. However, I suggest positioning your device in such a way that the other passengers can't see it. That was the one problem with watching this movie in a public setting--it's basically one long continuous sex scene with some breaks for dialogue and action.

1. The Odyssey

One of the days we were in Bangalore, S went shopping with her cousin and mom and took the kids with her. Her cousin's husband was at work, so it was just me on my own. As it just so happens there is an IMAX* theater in the same building as our hotel, so I went to see The Odyssey. I loved it. As a movie, it's pretty good; as a spectacle, it's tremendous. The cyclops scene on the big screen is amazing; the Trojan horse scene on the big screen is amazing; every scene with Charlize Theron on the big screen is amazing. I was enrapted the entire film. It was two hours and 52 minutes, and I could have watched more. One of my steadfast beliefs is that everything is too long, but this was an exception. It could have been four hours, and I would have been into it still. Of course, it helps that in India they take a ten minute intermission during long movies. I love that, and I hope it comes to the States sometimes soon. I don't have to be in the position of choosing between a bursting bladder and missing a possibly an awesome scene. 

*I think it was an actual IMAX theater too, although I'm not 100% sure. I did a deep dive the other day on the difference between IMAX and "LieMax," but it's all dependent on aspect ratio and film gauge and technical stuff like that. My main takeaway: If you see a movie on a giant screen, with huge speakers, and it looks and sounds cool, what difference does it make?  

Alright, that's enough for today. Until next time...