Entry 806: Baseball Parenting And The Kentucky Derby

I have a few minutes alone on a weekend in the middle of the day, which is a total rarity. Lil' S1 is walking to a friend's house to play some D&D (he's not the dungeon master in this campaign, which is nice, as if he was, he would have to bring a bunch of heavy manuals and would probably hit me up for a ride), and S took Lil' S2 to his baseball game. Typically sports are my milieu, but S volunteered to do it, and I let her because Lil' S2's baseball games can be kinda brutal. His team is terrible--they haven't won a game all season--and he's not very good himself. He can't hit, because he never practices (and hitting a baseball is something you need to practice to be able to do at all competently), and he shows little interest in pitching, even though he could probably be decent at it with a little focus. He just doesn't seem to actually like playing baseball, and he's only on the team to goof off with friends, which is fine, I suppose, at his age, but baseball is a rough sport for parents if your child isn't really into it. You sit around for hours, usually on uncomfortable bleachers, watching your kid stand in the field, hoping the ball doesn't get hit to them (although Lil' S2 isn't a terrible fielder; I wouldn't say he's good, but he's not terrible), and then when they come up to bat, you steel yourself for what is almost guaranteed to be a strikeout. It's not at all enjoyable, so I took S up on her offer to handle baseball duties this morning.

S is leaving next week on a work trip, a longer one than usual, which is why she volunteered (if you were wondering). She feels guilty about leaving and tries to take on more of the parenting responsibility before she goes. I appreciate it, but in theory much more so than in practice. For one thing, it's completely unnecessary, as far as I'm concerned. She already does more than enough, while she's in town, and she's leaving for work, for money, which everybody in the family benefits from, including me. For another thing, it doesn't really work. I don't actually get much of break. I mean, I do, around the edges, like maybe I get out of the things I dislike the most, but they just get replaced with other responsibilities. For example, this morning I had to take Lil' S1 to get his haircut during his brother's game (a more laborious task than it might sound), and that's something that S would normally do, because I would be at baseball. 

Also, there is an element of want-to or feel-obligated-to with your kids that you can't turn off just because your spouse is willing to do more. Sometimes I want to take the kids places, or I would rather help out than sit there and do nothing, even if S says it's okay if I sit there and do nothing, because it makes me feel like a deadbeat dad if I sit there and do nothing, and I don't want to feel like a deadbeat dad. The only way you can really get away from parenting is to literally get away from it, to go somewhere away from home. And even then you're likely to get bombarded with text messages saying somebody wants permission for more Netflix time.

In other news, time just jumped, and it is now late evening as I write this. Lil' S2's baseball game is long over. His team lost 18-4, but he told me he got a "hit," which means he made an out, but not a strikeout. He made contact and put the ball in the play. It was a ground out to first, apparently, but still, that's progress. I think that's the first time he hit a fair ball all season. 

We went to a Kentucky Derby party at a friend's house today. It was fun, but I got a bit of a stomachache from it. I guess eating fried chicken and drinking mint juleps can do that to you. I had two mint juleps, and I probably should've quit after one, not because of the alcohol, but because of the syrup. Well, it was both, really. Somebody else made me the first one, and it was very good and proportional. But then I made the second one, and I suck at making drinks, so I put in too much syrup, and then I tried to even it out by putting in more bourbon, which meant I now just had a giant sugary (but still strong) drink, and I felt compelled to finish it because I always feel compelled to finish my drinks.  

In general, derby parties are pretty fun. You can get there before the race, hang out and eat and drink for a bit, and then watch the race, which is only two minutes, and everybody gets super into it, and has this intense experience together, and then you go home. Our friend does a big betting pool every year also, which makes it even better. I very much loathe the pervasiveness of gambling into all facets of sport, but some betting is fun. Like, if everybody is throwing $5 into a pot once a year on a big race at the center of a social event, then that's good. If you're compulsively tapping away on an app, alone in your apartment, betting your rent money, unmotivated to do anything else, then that's bad. Context matters.

I didn't win big tonight, sadly. Horses were drawn randomly and mine was a 75-1 shot going into the race. That means the oddsmakers thought it had about a 1.3% chance of winning, and it showed, as early on it was in the back of the pack. But then it made a furious push and was in the lead down the final stretch, before getting passed by two horses that were even further back and coming in third. Pretty good for a horse with such low odds, but not good enough to claim a winner-take-all pot. My horse's name was Ocelli, which is the plural of ocellus, the eyespot of a peacock. I told this to the woman sitting next to me at the party, and her reply was, "How do you know that?" which was exactly the response I was going for.

Until next time... 

Entry 805: School Daze

I thought the title for this entry was an homage to a 2001 stoner movie starring Method Man and Redman, but it turns out that movie is called How High. School Daze is a Spike Lee joint from the late '80s starring Laurence Fishburne. I've never seen either film. The latter apparently is a musical comedy-drama based in part on Lee's own college experiences at Morehouse. As for the former, well, I'll just quote Wikipedia directly:

The film follows two cannabis users who gain admission to Harvard University with the supernatural help of a deceased friend whose ashes were used to fertilize a marijuana plant. 

I now want to see this film. It has strong funny-in-a-campy-sort-of-way vibe to it. I don't know why, but for some reason, the first thing that popped into my head for comparison is Weird Science, and as I recall I thought that movie was entertaining even when I rewatched it as an adult.

Anyway...

The end of the school year isn't quite nigh, but it's in sight. It's a bigger deal this year than usual, as each of my kids will be graduating to a new phase of life. Lil' S1 will be done with middle school and moving on to high school in the fall. Lil' S2 will be starting middle school and leaving elementary school. For S and I, this means we are just about done, officially, with the little-kid stage of parenting. The annual elementary school gala is tonight--it would be the final one for us--but we aren't even going. S's friend came into town from Boston to visit, so she doesn't want to go, and I would maybe go stag, but I got invited to dinner with some puzzle people, so I'm going to go to that instead. I'm not really that bummed about missing our last gala. It's a fun event, but we typically just talk to the same people we see all the time anyway.

The big topic of discussion in our household at the moment is where Lil' S1 is going to go to high school: his current private school or the in-zone public school. I want the public school, but I think I'm going to lose this one. Although Lil' S1 showed a willingness, a desire even, to switch to the public school earlier this year, he has become pretty resolute recently in his wish to stay at his current school. S is mostly with me, in that she wants him to go to the public school, but if he really doesn't want to go--and it seems he doesn't--then it changes things. As she put it to me, "I want him to want to go there."

So, I think the fear of the unknown will be too great, and she will ultimately push to keep him where he is, and then I'll have to fold or face two people mad at me in my family. I'll probably fold. Also, it's honestly not a huge capitulation on my part. I think he will be fine at either school. I hate paying tuition to an institution that I don't think it is that great, but if I don't look at our bank statements, it's not that bad. The thing is, I just don't know what we get from this private school that is worth the money. I guess from my perspective I have to tell myself that's it's for family harmony, marital bliss, peace of mind, and those things are worth whatever you can afford to pay for them.

Speaking of Lil' S1's school, there was an "incident" this past week that caused quite the hullabaloo among this little community. What happened is some teachers were trying to come up with groups for a grade-wide project, and they wanted to match kids with other kids with whom they would work well. To do this, they created a spreadsheet with the kids' names and some information about them--their race, their interests, their friend groups, etc.--and in so doing, they used informal, somewhat disparaging language about the students. Then they accidentally saved this document to a drive to which students have access (doh!). A few kids saw it, took screenshots, and showed it to their parents, and then all hell broke loose.

There were really only two demeaning descriptions in the doc--the teachers characterized somebody as a "mean girl" and said another kid was "small and very ADHD" (and even that is more infelicitous than pejorative)--but that was enough to set off an email chain of seemingly infinite length, prompt an open letter to the school, and lead to not one, but two Zoom meetings--one with the school administration and a parents-only prep before that.

What exactly got resolved? I'm not sure. I don't think anybody got fired or disciplined, but maybe that's coming. Hopefully nobody loses their job over this. It doesn't rise anywhere close to that level, in my opinion. This is more like an-apologize-and-move-on type of thing. My big takeaway is that everybody should be under the assumption that anything they write to anybody online could be made public at some point, and so they should act accordingly. I don't really care that the teachers sometimes categorize their students in less than flattering ways (they're humans and that's how humans communicate), but it shows terrible judgement to put this down in writing. That should be the lesson for the kids: Every time you send a text or an email or share a document or otherwise communicate in a way that leaves a record, you have to think, "What would happen if this gets out?" If the answer is, "It would lead to public humiliation for me and possibly be cause for discipline from my employers," then maybe don't send it. 

On that note, until next time... 

 

Entry 804: What Does The Fox Say?

No entry last weekend, you might have noticed, because I went to a crossword puzzle tournament and had no time for blogging. It went well, and I had a great time. I don't compete but rather help administer the competition. I also hang out with a bunch of people I quite like but only see once a year: my ami-puzzlers. I'm trying this new thing where I use the prefix "ami" to indicate a friendliness--actually beyond a friendliness, an adoration or bond, perhaps, there's no good word for it, which is the problem--for people I like a lot, but I'm not quite friends with. I've come to realize that the English language is completely bereft of words or succinct phrases to indicate a relationship between an acquaintance and a friend.

It's weird too, because we probably have way more people in our lives that fall into the "ami-" category than we have actual friends. I have a decent number of actual friends, people to whom I am not related (neither through blood nor marriage), whom I hang out with semi-regularly, whose phone numbers I have and could text anytime for trivial reasons without it seeming weird, whose children and spouses I know, whose careers and interests I'm familiar with, etc. But I have at least twice as many ami-folks in my life, people who don't fit the friend criteria I just laid out, but whom I still very much like and enjoying spending time with and wish nothing but the best for, people with whom I might very well be friends in the future or would have been friend with under slightly different circumstances. A lot of coworkers fall into this category, also a lot of neighbors and parents of my sons' friends. I've been going to the same gym for over seven years now, and I've gotten to know a lot of the instructors and other patrons, and it would be nice to have a way to convey this more elegantly than "this guy I'm friendly with who goes to the same gym as me."*

*Sometimes you can convey this by putting how you know the person before the word "friend," my "gym friend," my "work friend," etc. Weirdly, doing this indicates that you aren't actually friends. 

That's where "ami-" comes in. You can just attach it to the beginning of any relationship, and it instantly conveys a friendliness that goes beyond mere acquaintance. Oh, hey, there's my ami-barber... I was getting lunch with my ami-colleague... An ami-dad and I were talking at our kids' baseball game... It's beautiful, and I recommend you all start using it too, especially since there is a decent chance I will never mention this topic again. I'm very good at ideas; I'm not so great with the follow-through.

In other news, before I left, I had to retrieve a baby fox that had trapped itself in our window well. In our backyard deck, we have this little pit, about five feet deep, that leads to a basement window. It's usually covered with a iron grate and deck furniture, and we don't even think about it. But late one night, about a week and a half ago, I heard this weird noise--a sort of high pitched sound, somewhere between a screech and a yelp--and I couldn't figure out where it was coming from. I finally decided it was a weird bird call and went to sleep.

Then the next night I heard it again, but more intensely, and it was super clear right when I walked by that basement window. Thinking maybe it was an animal merely occupying the well, not stuck in it, I banged on the window to chase it away. It was silent for a bit, and then started making the noise again. So, I shined a flashlight through the window (which took a tiny bit of courage--shining a light into a dark area not knowing what you're going to see is a bit nerve-wracking) and saw a frightened little fox. It clearly was wandering around under our deck, had fallen into the pit, and now couldn't get back out. My first thought was Shit, now I'm gonna have to go get this thing, followed by so, that's what the fox says, it's not actually "hakki-hakki-hakki-ho".

Weirdly, S was still awake even though it was about 11:00pm, so I told her what was going on, and she got out of bed, and we went out to the deck together. It's an effort just to lift off the grate, but we (mostly I) managed to do so, and then I tried unsuccessfully to scoop up the kit (that's what you call a baby fox) with a snow shovel. It had the instincts to call for help, but also the instincts to evade that help at all costs. I was going to have to go in. It was visibly terrified and trying to run away from me, but it had nowhere to run. I was worried that it would try to bite me, so I kinda trapped it against the wall with a bucket and slid it up until it could reach the ledge, at which point it vanished under our house. We put the grate back and that was that.

Well, almost... The whole time I was doing all this, I was trying to remember who actually sings "The Fox (What Does the Fox Say?)," and I kept thinking it was The Elvi's, but I knew that wasn't right, because that was a local band I used to see flyers for in college. So, I had to look it up before I could sleep in peace. (Ylvis, that's right, so close.) I told this to S, but she couldn't have cared less and just wanted to be back in bed as quickly as possible. That's the difference between her and me.

Until next time...

Update: I came home tonight after meeting up with some friends and saw this guy hanging out in my neighbor's yard. Too big to be the one I saved, but maybe a relative?

 

Entry 803: Death and Taxes

There's a cliché that the only constants in life are death and taxes. I had my fill of both this week. Well, the death part might not have happened yet, but it seems imminent. My elderly neighbor collapsed twice in the past three days and is now in the hospital for some sort of emergency procedure. I'm no medical expert, but I feel confident stating that the recovery rate for a man in his mid-90s from whatever it is that ails him is not super high. And he was almost bedridden before this. He seemed to be chair-ridden. He would get up in the morning, make his way to a chair, and basically sit there the entire day. S and I are just waiting for the grim, inescapable word from his wife. He might be able to make it back home, but if he survives to see autumn, I'd be surprised.

And when he goes, there's a good chance his wife will join him shortly thereafter. She has already had a stroke, about a year ago, and I saw this with my own grandparents, where my grandma, who was hanging on decently, deteriorated extremely quickly after the death of my grandpa and died just a few months later. It's like she just didn't want her husband to be alone, and once that was no longer a possibility, she surrendered to the inevitable.   

I would say that all this is sad, but I think that's the wrong word. It's more hard. I don't feel melancholy; I feel a sort of helplessness. As the Flaming Lips put it, "Do you realize that everyone you know someday will die?" (Great song, by the way.) Since moving into this neighborhood, inhabited by a lot of elderly people, I've definitely realized this. Two people in the house to one side of me have already died in the past five years (and a third one is close), and now, it seems, two more on the other side are well on their way. I lived the first 45 years of my life without ever once being asked to lift an old person who had fallen and couldn't get up, and now it seems to be a semi-regular occurrence.

It also doesn't help my general mindset on this matter that my parents just came out to visit last week, and my mom spent most the trip in her PJs lying in bed or on the sofa. She got hit with a bug, and although she recovered, it really laid her up, and it had me slightly concerned. My parents aren't yet at the same stage as my neighbors, but they probably aren't that far behind. I mean, in the grand scheme of things, I'm not that far behind, as I don't think we are going to crack immortality in the next 40 years, despite what you might find from "life maxxers" on YouTube.

Maybe that's a silver-lining of being focused on the nonexistence of others. It distracts me from thinking about from my own departure from this mortal coil. It is so much worse to think about your own death, not just because it's your death (though of course that's part of it), but because you lose your frame of reference. There's still something when somebody else dies. When you die there's a good chance there's just nothing, and contemplating nothing will mess your head, even if it's not in the context of your own demise. An existential freakout is a double-whammy: You are going to die, and you will never understand why you (or anything else) ever even existed in the first place. It's no wonder religion is still pretty popular these days.

Well, at least I'm gainfully employed while I still exist, as I was reminded when I did our taxes a few days ago. As I've said before, I get so resentful every tax season, not because of the amount we pay, but because of how ridiculously confusing and time-consuming it is to figure out how much you owe. I used TurboTax, and the estimated time was one hour and 45 minutes. It's been over twice that, and I'm not even completely finished yet. Maybe we need to go back to having somebody do our taxes for us, like we did last year. But the thing there is that you still have to spend the time gathering all the necessary documents, which is a large part of the overall workload. I imagine the CPA is basically just entering all the stuff into a computer program the same way we are. That's not nothing, but it's also probably not worth the relatively hefty fee, especially considering we paid almost the exact amount last year as we did the year prior when we did our taxes ourselves. Also, if I do our taxes it gains me some emotional capital with S. That's also not nothing.

Well, that about does it for this morbid entry. Until next time... 

Entry 802: King Of Pain

I learned something about myself recently, something that has been true for a long time, but I just never realized it: I'm a Sting fan. Like a legit, sing-along-with-all-his-songs admirer.* I've long had what I thought was a casual fondness for Sting. Somewhere in my basement I have a CD box set of The Police and his solo album Ten Summoner's Tales, but both of those were given to me as gifts. I never would have thought myself a full-fledged fan of Sting's music, and I found his affect--the falsetto, the tantric woo, the constant feuding with his ex-bandmates--more than a little pretentious. But recently I've had my mind opened--opened like that book by Nabokov--and I've come to the conclusion that when it comes to the toe-headed Brit né Gordon Sumner, just about everything he does is magic.

*Well, not all his songs, but most of them. Well, most them before, like, 1995. I must admit, I'm not at all familiar with his later catalog. I mean, he did an album with Shaggy?

It was an episode of the podcast Hit Parade that really elicited my Sting love. I've been catching up on past episodes, and I also listened to one about David Bowie recently, and if you asked me beforehand whose music I like more, I would have said Bowie's without question. But after listening to these episodes, I realized that it's actually Sting I like more and by a nontrivial margin. Bowie has some amazing songs, but actually not all that many, in my opinion. By contrast, listening to Sting's episode, I was like, Oh, yeah, that song is a banger, and that one, and that one... I mean check out this list:

The Police 

• "Next to You"
• "So Lonely"
• "Can't Stand Losing You"
• "The Bed's Too Big Without You"
• "Message in a Bottle"
• "Walking on the Moon"
• "On Any Other Day" (Great deep cut)
• "Don't Stand So Close to Me"
• "Driven to Tears"
• "De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da"
• "Spirits in the Material World"
• "Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic"
• "Invisible Sun"
• "Re-Humanise Yourself"
• "Secret Journey" 
• "Synchronicity I"
• "Walking in Your Footsteps" 
• "Synchronicity II"
• "King of Pain" (bonus points for inspiring "Weird Al"'s "King of Suede")
• "Wrapped Around Your Finger" 

Solo 

• "If You Love Somebody Set Them Free"
• "Englishman In New York" (sneaky good) 
• "It's Probably Me"
• "Desert Rose"

That's like 25 bops right there, most of them with The Police, but a few solo tracks as well. He also provides back up vocals on "Money For Nothing" (total guilty pleasure song for me), and his song "Shape of My Heart," which I don't love (it's fine), is the backbone for Juice WRLD's "Lucid Dreams," which Lil' S2 and his friend used to ask me to play in the car all the time.

You might have noticed that I did not include either "Roxanne" or "Every Breath You Take" in the list above. I've never really liked the former, and the latter is a tremendous song, an absolute tour de force, that has been almost completely ruined for me because it's been so overplayed. It is, perhaps literally, the most played song in radio history. Like, if I had never heard "Every Breath You Take," and I listened to it for the first time, I would probably be thinking, Wow, this is absolutely amazing! (The Puffy remix is awesome too, if you can separate the artist from the art.) But I've now heard it so many times, it's hard for me to enjoy it. A few other songs that reached this level for me: "Stairway to Heaven," "Losing My Religion," "Longview," "Gangnam Style," "Old Town Road."

In the Hit Parade episode about Sting, one thing that host Chris Molanphy mentions is that Sting was a musical chameleon, who always seemed to find the right style to chart a hit--punk when punk was the thing in the early '70s, reggae when that was hot in the late '70s, synth-heavy in the '80s, ballad-y in the early '90s, and he even dipped his toe into hip-hop and country in the late '90s. This was often used as a knock against him, like he's phony or something, but really what's wrong with it? What's wrong with wanting to make the type of music that's popular at the time?

Maybe I'm just sensitive to this charge because I always felt like I was a chameleon coming of age at a time when authenticity was of the utmost importance and being a poseur was an insult of the highest degree.

Anyway, gotta run. Until next time... Zenyatta Mondatta.       

Entry 801: Fine Con

Almost no time to blog this weekend. The past three days have been action packed. Friday immediately after work I had to take Lil' S2 to baseball practice, and then I kinda crashed out from a long work week. Then Lil' S2 had a baseball game Saturday afternoon and then we had drinks with friends after that and then we had a St. Patrick's Day party after that. Today, Sunday, we spent almost the entire day at Awesome Con, which I would characterize more as Fine Con. Truth be told, I didn't find it awesome, but it's not really for people like me. It's a lot of anime/comic book/fantasy stuff, and that's not the type of nerd I am. If it was about, say, sports or crossword puzzles, then its status would have been elevated to awesome for sure. Actually, the vibe reminded me a lot of going to Cooperstown for Ken Griffey Jr.'s Hall of Fame Induction, even though the focuses of the two events were very different.

The main thing for the day was getting Lil' S2 a selfie with Nathan Fillion. I stood in line mostly by myself for two hours to do this, even though I didn't know who this guy was until like a week ago. Actually, I did, but I just didn't know that I knew him. Upon looking him up, I recognized him as the guy who played Green Lantern in the new Superman movie. He apparently was on a show called Firefly, which I've never seen, but I know is very popular in nerd culture, and so he and many of his costars from the show were signing autographs and taking selfies at this event. Lil' S2 knows him from this show The Rookie that he randomly watched the entire series of, so once he found out he was going to be at Awesome Con, he wanted a selfie.

Of course, Mr. Fillion so happened to be the most popular celebrity there (at least today), so his line was super long, and I, being the one who cared the least about actually seeing the exhibits, volunteered to wait in it. I got there at 12:45p, and we finally got the selfie at 2:45p. It was a legit two hours. I did most of it alone, and another dad took Lil' S2 and a few friends around to spend whatever money they had on swords and figurines and Monkey D. Luffy hats. (S had the big kids, Lil' S1 and his buddies, who just insisted they didn't need a chaperone, until she final relented and got a coffee and sat in the food court.) The wait would have been much longer too, at least another hour, probably even longer still, but this guy randomly came up to the other dad I was with and gave him a VIP pass that let us all skip the line. He said somebody did it for him once and he vowed to pay it forward one day, and we just happened to be in the right place at the right time.

The selfie, or selfies rather, we got a few, came out pretty good too. I'm not in any of them, by choice. There's something weird to me about paying somebody to be in a picture with them. It's fine for children, but it just doesn't seem like something becoming of a grown man. Like, if you know a celebrity personally, or you do something with them and get a picture with them, then that's cool. But it's much less cool to pay somebody to pose with you like they're your friend--to me, anyway. If that's your thing, like it is for the very chatty woman standing in line behind me, who was showing everybody around her all the photos she had with various celebrities, then more power to you. It's just not for me is all. Although, I say that, but the chick from Homeland was there also, and I did briefly think that it would be very cool to get a selfie with her, so maybe I have a double-standard about the whole thing. Well, I'm not alone. I overheard a conversation in which a woman somebody said to the effect of "The only selfie I've ever gotten was with Thomas Jane, because he's just really good looking."

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

Entry 800: I Don't Want To Talk About It

We are still bombing Iran, and it still doesn't make sense to me. I don't understand how destabilizing an entire region of the world makes us safer in the long run. Violence begets violence begets violence. At some point somebody has to break the loop. I know two Iranian-Americans pretty well. One of them I haven't talked to in a few months. I asked the other one the other day how she was doing, and she said, "It's horrifying. I don't want to talk about it." Maybe that's the best approach for now. I don't want to talk about it.

I spent a large portion of this weekend doing dishes and cleaning the kitchen and there is more awaiting me right now. Lil' S1 loves to bake and cook, but it's like a cyclone comes through our kitchen every time he does. He uses seemingly every utensil in the drawer, every bowl in the cabinet, and every ingredient in the pantry. And I'm somehow always on the hook for cleanup. Actually, I kinda volunteer for it. I would rather do it than have somebody else do it. For one thing, I'm the only one in this house who can do an adequate job. S loads the dishwasher so inefficiently it drives me mad (and it often takes multiple runs or a post-scrub to actually get the dishes clean), and when the kids "clean up," I find dough all over the cabinet handles, a trail of flour on the floor, oil spatterings everywhere, etc. For another thing, this is one of the few things Lil' S1 likes to do that doesn't involve a screen, so I want to encourage it, and forcing him to clean up--really clean up--would be doing the exact opposite.

It's so funny how different my sons are with their friends. Lil' S1 had his D&D buddies come over yesterday, and it turned into an impromptu sleepover, and Lil' S1 made a pecan pie for the occasion (which was delicious, by the way; it wasn't cloyingly sweet, like most pecan pies I've had) with homemade whipped cream. Then this morning, he made everybody eggs and chocolate chip waffles with fresh cut strawberries and blueberries, and he fixed them all sandwiches for a hike they are on right now. Lil' S2 would never do anything like any of this. It wouldn't even occur to him. When he has sleepovers, fixing breakfast for him and his friends consists asking S or I to make them something, or getting bowls of Honey Nut Cheerios from a bag that has been mutilated open, so when you pour from it Cheerios scatter every which way. So, I guess the mess is one thing they have in common.

I doubt Lil' S2 and his friends would ever go on a hike together either, unless their parents were going and dragged them along. They are all actually skiing right now. It's one of his pal's birthday, so this kid's parents took a little crew to the mountain. They all went a few weeks ago for a class trip. It was Lil' S2's first time, and he said he really liked it. So, it's good that he gets to go again, as it's unlikely that S or I will take him much (at all) in the future. Neither of us know how to ski, and I'm not particularly inclined to learn pushing 50, and I don't think S is either. She did say, however, that she would go up and sit in the lodge if he wants to go sometime.

It's kinda strange that I never learned to ski being that I grew up near the Cascade Mountains and some pretty good recreational ski resorts (from what I hear). I just was never really into the outdoorsy sports--skiing, kayaking, rock climbing, etc. My parents weren't into this stuff,* so I didn't do it when I was little, and then when I got old enough to go on my own or with just my friends, I was too preoccupied with other activities. Wrestling was the big one. It was the same season as ski season, and my weekends were frequently spent at tournaments. You couldn't really do both. In fact, I remember one of my teammates lamenting the fact that his parents sold his skis, because he wasn't using them frequently enough to justify keeping them because of wrestling.

*My dad did cross-country skiing a bit later in life, and he took me once when I was in my early twenties. I liked it, but I didn't like it any more than trail running or hiking, both of which require so much less time and gear. 

Another, very petty reason I didn't get into outdoorsy sports as an older teenager is because I didn't like the culture. There was this group of kids who always wore Gor-tex and caps with bands around them and used carabiners on their school backpacks, and even though I was friends with a lot of them, I found the whole thing over the top and pretentious in a way. In retrospect, it was just young people finding their niche and expressing themselves, the same thing I, and everybody else my age, was doing, but at the time I found it to be something mockable.

There was also surely some sour grapes mixed into the batter, as the type of girl I went to college with was much more likely to be into the outdoorsy guy than she was to me. I remember once hanging out with some folks, and we were talking about our best New Year's Eves, and one of my North Face-clad buddies said, "When I was rock climbing [some surely awesome rock face somewhere in Colorado or Utah]. I rang in the New Year all by myself, hundreds of feet in the air, hanging in a tent, looking at the stars light up the desert landscape." I couldn't have rolled my eyes any harder, and yet this dude consistently dated the hottest girls on our campus. 

Alright, the pile of dishes in the sink beckons. I can't put it off any longer.

Until next time...