Entry 829: So Blue

I am not going to prevaricate. I was nervous on Tuesday. I tried to not get emotionally invested in the midterms. I did all the tricks one does when they are trying to not let things they don't control control them. I didn't follow the races very closely; I didn't look at a single poll or prediction model; I told myself that some of the Democrats were no great shakes either. And it kinda worked—I went through large stretches of the days preceding the election without thinking about it at all—but it kinda didn't work too. I would still hear about individual races (how could I not?). James Talarico and Jon Ossoff would randomly pop into my brain, I would see an ad for Roy Cooper, and I would reflexively get my hopes up, as one thing I did pick up on is that the Dems were favored to win and win big. And then about noon Tuesday afternoon everything came to a head, and the pit of my stomach filled with anxious energy.

I muddled through the rest of the work day. Then I went for a walk and listened to Paul Simon Graceland for the first time in decades for some reason.* Then I came home ate dinner and started following the election returns on my phone. I went to The New York Times home page for the first time in weeks and clicked on the infamous needle. It was tilted slightly into the blue for both branches of Congress, mirroring the aggregate polling data, as the actual results were still out in most places. The minutes ticked by, and the needle started moving into the darker blue. Georgia was called almost immediately for Ossoff; North Carolina for Cooper; Annie Andrews was smoking Darlene Graham in South Carolina—South Carolina?! So-called "toss-up" races for the House were being won handily by the Dems up-and-down the East Coast. We put the election coverage on the TV and watched Steve Kornacki break down the stunning results: Dems +30 in districts Harris only won by 5; Dems +5 in districts Trump won by 15; +0 races in districts Trump won by 30. The needle moved to >95% for a blue House and nearly 90% for a blue Senate. It was only 9:30. 

*It's an excellent album, which I guess is a very good reason to listen to it. "The Boy in the Bubble" might be my favorite song on it. I love how it starts out like it's a Weird Al polka party song, and then the drums kick in, and it's like, Oh shit! This actually rocks!

I stayed up and followed the returns from the middle of the country and the West Coast. Abdul El-Sayed won his high profile race in Michigan. Sherrod Brown flipped Ohio. There were going to be Democratic senators in Kansas, Iowa, and maybe even Mississippi. Mississippi?! WTF?! Not only did James Talarico win a Democratic senator seat in Texas for the first time in nearly 40 years, he won by nearly 13 points! And it wasn't just congress. Statewide races went overwhelmingly blue as well. Democrats netted five new gubernatorial seats—including Georgia where Keisha Lance Bottoms will become the first Black female govern in US History—and seven new state legislatures. When I finally crawled into bed around 12:30 in the morning, S half woke up, and we had the following exchanging.

Her: What happened?
Me: The Dems won.
Her: Which races?
Me: All of them.

Every election people use the results as vindication of whatever they believed before the election. The far left is using AES's victory as a rebuke of the idea that "Squad" types can't win in swing states, while the centrists are pointing out that their preferred candidates ran way ahead of the DSA/DSA-adjacent candidates. But I believe there is one thing on which everybody can agree: This was a complete and utter repudiation of Donald Trump. It's a decade too late—if this had happened on Election Day in 2016, as I thought (and hoped) it might, we could have saved ourselves a lot of headache and heartache—but better now than never.

I believe there are three things voters want their politicians to deliver to them—well, way more than three, but three main ones: 1) peace, 2) prosperity, 3) the feeling that they're being respected and heard. If you can get people those three things, you will win elections and be very popular, even if you fall short in other areas. But Trump completely failed on all three of these this election cycle—to a staggering degree. On 1), he started an unpopular, unnecessary war with Iran, and he wrought violence in our streets by turning ICE into Gestapo Lite, a move as Un-American as it is cruel. On 2), his war drove up prices on fuel, and his tariffs—driven almost completely by personal animus, not sound economic policy—drove up prices on almost everything else. Meanwhile, he and his family rake in millions in shady crypto deals. On 3), he hasn't responded to public concerns in anything close to an adequately manner, even to those people who voted for him. He still insists the war was the right call, and it will be over soon anyway (the same thing he said six months ago), and prices will fall then, but actually they don't need to fall, because high prices are a hoax, and hey you can't trust the lunatic left, and look at this magnificent flooring of my new ballroom.

By handpicking many of the candidates himself, Trump made it virtually impossible for them to untether themselves from his brick-like influence on this midterm. I don't know if less MAGA candidates would have won any of these races, but I have to think they would have. It would have been difficult for them to do any worse, that's for sure. It's like Trump made a list of the people most likely to repel voters and chose exclusively from it: Vivek Ramaswamy, Darlene Graham, Ken Paxton, Roger Marshall (maybe the worst), and so on. Could you find a human being more off-putting to the general public than this lot?  

Actually, yes, yes you could.

Until next time... 

Entry 828: Halloween 2026

It's Halloween, y'all! And it's coming at the right time. I've been feeling kinda glum this past week (an accumulation of small stuff), and Halloween is a fun festive occasion to raise my spirits (from the dead!). Lil' S1 is doing his own thing with friends across the city, and then S, Lil' S2, and I are going over to some friends' house in the neighborhood. The adults will all hang out and drink and eat, and the kids will go trick-or-treating. We will probably have to have at least one adult go out with them. Maybe me. I enjoy being out and about on Halloween. The neighborhood* gets popping in a way that mine never did as a kid. And it's so nice to see a community hanging out together, in person, when so many forces in society—social, economic, etc.—are pushing us away from human interaction.

*Though not our particular street which gets almost no trick-or-treaters for some reason. 

I took something tantamount to a "me morning" today. I wasn't planning on it. But I turned my weekend alarm off at 8:30 and went back to sleep and was out until 10:30. Then I got up and decided to treat myself to a Starbucks, which I normal don't do, because I'd be spending $150 on coffee each month if I bought one everyday, and now I'm just chilling, writing this blog entry. The rest of the family is mostly preoccupied with other things, which affords me this opportunity. Also, S was away for work this past week, so she's less likely to give me the side eye for zoning out in my own world. 

I also deleted the news podcasts in my feed that I usually listen to Saturday morning. The midterms are right around the corner, which is undoubtedly a cause of my malaise this past week, and I don't want to listen to stories about them. The Dems are favored to do very well, which means either they won't, which will be a huge disappointment, or they will, which isn't such a great thing either, given some of the candidates they are running. I've been trying, and mostly succeeding, to not get emotionally invested in the election this time around. It is the epitome of "no sense worrying about something out of my control." I vote in DC, so I already voted on everything important during the primary, and there isn't even much of a point for me to submit a ballot (but I will anyway). I'll vote for the prohibition of force feeding animals,* which is the only real thing on the DC slate this election.

*Humans have to kill something to produce the amount of food necessary to feed everybody on the planet—if not the animals directly, then the pests that would destroy our crops—but we don't have to torture them.

I could donate money to candidates out of the district, but I don't actually think that helps. Every cycle we get these Democratic candidates, ready to pull off the upset in some red area, and they receive outsize national attention and build up this enormous war chest, and then they lose handily. Beto O'Rourke is the first example that comes to mind, but there was also that lady who was gonna beat Mitch McConnell in Kentucky and that dude in South Carolina and probably a half dozen other examples I could come up with if I thought about it a bit longer. Now, don't get me wrong, Dems should try like hell to win in races like these. The political winds shift can shift drastically over time, even if it doesn't always seem like it. But it happens by winning the support of people who actually vote in those elections, not from outsiders. In fact, one of my semi-hot takes is that too much outside money often hurts candidates because it raises the profile of the election and makes the locals resentful of the interlopers meddling in their business.

Anyway... another thing that got me down this week is that I went into CVS. I should have known better. CVS's are among the most depressing establishments in the country, and the one in my neighborhood is particularly bad. There are only three reasons I go in there: To get a vaccine; to pick up a prescription; to buy some over the counter medicine. The first one is the best of the three, and it involves getting jabbed with a needle. The second one is typically an interminable experience, where I wait in a line that stretches all the way through one of the aisles, and there is always at least one person in front of me who argues vociferously with the cashier about things the cashier clearly has no control over. (They don't know why your doctor only prescribed one-week of medication instead of two! They're just facilitating the transaction!) I actually switched my pharmacy to the one in the supermarket next to the CVS (which is still not great, but much better), but S and the kids still use the CVS, for some reason, so I still have to go there to pick up meds every now and then.

But this week I went in for the third reason, to buy some antacid that I didn't even need. I just wanted to break a 20* and had a momentary lapse of judgement in where to do it. The first thing I notice every time I go into a CVS is that there are almost no employees there, except for in the pharmacy in the back. There's not even a cashier there because everything is self-checkout. Then I notice that almost all the products are behind theft-resistent plastic. It used to just be relatively expensive things that are easy to pocket now you have to find somebody to unlock the case (which isn't easy because of the lack of employees) to get, like, mouthwash. It's super depressing. It's like being in a prison commissary.

*Some neighborhood kids came by asking to rake our leaves. I didn't want them to for several reasons, one of which was that they had this old scraggly, busted-up rake that looked like it was going to shred our lawn rather rake it, but I didn't want to be a curmudgeon, so I told them I'd give them $6 to do a tiny portion of our yard. Then I realized I didn't have any bills lower than $20, so I gave them an IOU, and then they came over everyday the next few days to collect, but I still didn't have the money, because who uses cash anymore? But I couldn't be the guy who stiffs the neighborhood ten-year-olds, so I went to CVS to get the $6.

Antacid is actually not one of the products that is locked up, so I grabbed a box of Pepto tablets and wandered around until I found somebody who works there and told her that I needed to pay. She motioned me to the self-checkout machines, and I said that I wanted to pay in cash. She took me to the register (no line at least), rang me up, and then realized there was no money in the till. So, she put out a call over the intercom: "Will a manager please come to the front of the store?"

We waited and waited and waited, and then she made a second call: "Will a manager please come to the front of the store?"

And we waited and waited and waited some more, she made an exasperated sound under her breath and then put out a third call: "Will a manager please come to the front of the store?"

"I think the manager went home early," I said jokingly, making a weak attempt to break the awkwardness of the situation. She didn't respond to me, but said over the intercom for the fourth time, "Will a manager please come to the front of the store?"

After waiting a bit longer, I asked her to just cancel the transaction, but she said she couldn't do that because she had already rung it up. I started getting frustrated at this point, and said something to the effect of, "This is ridiculous! All I need is $11 in change, and it's taking a half-hour." The length of time was an exaggeration, but not by all that much. She seemed sympathetic, and finally said, "Okay, okay," and then she punched a code into a different till and opened it and gave me my change. Why she didn't just do that in the first place, I don't know, but at least I could pay off my debts now and not have to worry about a group of elementary schoolers breaking my kneecaps.

In happier news, our flag football team won in the first round of the playoffs, so we play in the semifinals on Sunday. This, despite the fact that one of our best players was out with an injury. It's really remarkable, considering how much talent we lost from last season, that we are one game away from playing in the championship for the third straight time. We might not make it, but still I'm proud of how the kids played. It's already been a pretty good season, and there's at least a chance it will get even better.

Okay, gotta go. Until next time... 

Entry 827: Not Impressed

I did another round of the ESPN Jeopardy! tryouts Tuesday evening. I did not do well. And I'm not just saying that to be self-effacing or to attempt some sort of reverse jinx. I objectively did poorly. It wasn't what I expected. I thought there would be a live interview/audition portion to it, but there was no interaction with anybody at all. It was just another quiz, much like the first one, but on a Zoom call. That's fine, but it wasn't fine in this particular instance because I missed a lot of questions, and the quiz wasn't even very hard.

Do you ever go to address somebody you know extremely well, say, your child, and for some reason their name won't come out of your mouth? You do that thing where you stammer and stutter and then call them their sibling's name and then your spouse's name and then maybe the family pet's name before you finally get the proper response out? That happened to me on this quiz, repeatedly, and my time ran out before I could get to that last "proper response" part.

The first four or five questions went well. I knew them all except for one about a European soccer coach—totally fine. Surely, I wouldn't need to get all 30 correct to move on. Then the clue was something like "This man won MVP of the NBA and the NBA Finals in 2025." Perfect. This will be a lay-in... haha... I could tell you every NBA champion since, like, 1957, so all I need to do is think of who won it all last year, and the answer will be obvious. Let's see, it went Knicks this year... Celtics two years ago... The Nuggets three years ago... Who won two years ago?! The Warriors? The Bucks? No, those were earlier... Shit, my time is almost up... I gotta type something: JOKIC. But I know that's wrong, dammit!

Then a few questions later, it happened again, and again it was with a basketball clue: "This star WNBA rookie is nicknamed 'The Spectacle'." Oh, it's that little point guard who wears the glasses... She's really good... Plays for the Lynx... Light-skinned Black lady... Wears her hair in a pulled-back quasi Afro puff... Jesus, why can't I think of her name?... 3-2-1... Uh, uh: VANDERSL. You idiot! It's not Courtney Vandersloot. She's like a 37-year-old veteran, not a rookie, and she's white! And you didn't even have time to type in her full name!

So it went throughout the rest of the quiz. I would say there were at least five more clues for which I "knew" the correct response but just couldn't get it typed out in the allotted eight seconds for whatever reason. Another one I have a hauntingly clear memory of: "This two-word phrase was turned into a meme featuring a picture of gymnast McKayla Maroney making a face." I confidently typed in DOESN'T CARE, and then as the clock hit zero, I had a panicked realization: Wait, no! It's "honey badger doesn't care." It's "McKayla's not impressed." I've confused my memes! I want to change my answer! NOT IMPRESSED! NOT IMPRESSED! But nobody could hear me shouting this because I was only thinking it, not saying it aloud, and also I was on mute, and also also they wouldn't have changed my answer even if they could hear me.

They don't tell you your score or give you the answers, but my best guess is that I missed 10 of the 30 clues. I legitimately did not know at least two of them, and then I botched at least six of them. Toss in two that I missed that I thought were right or don't remember getting wrong and that's 10. I have to think that's too many. Jeopardy! is notoriously opaque with their qualifying criteria—the tryout process is very black box-y—but rumor has it that you need to score at least 70% on their tests to even be considered for the next phase. Well, you can do the math: 20 / 30 < 0.7. I'll be stunned if I get selected to move on.

Of course, once the quiz was over, all the answers I couldn't come up with sauntered easily back into my brain. The Thunder—it's SGA. Miles—Olivia Miles. Red Devils—Belgium. "Team Spoon"—Teresa Weatherspoon. It's so frustrating. It's the worst way for things to go. If I did really well on the quiz (as I could have) and didn't get selected for the show, then that would have been fine. It's not in my control. If I would have just not known a bunch of the answers, then that would have been fine also. Well, maybe not fine, but it would have been less frustrating. I could have just chalked the whole thing up to not being good enough (like I did when I took the real Jeopardy! test and didn't make it past the initial stage). To not perform to the best of my abilities is the absolute worst—or at least it makes me feel the worst.

But maybe there's no meaningful distinction, as far as Jeopardy! goes, between getting things wrong because I don't know them and getting things wrong because my recall isn't consistently fast enough. My immediate reaction when the test was over was It's so unfair to only give us eight seconds on each clue! That's such a huge disadvantage to people who can't think quickly! Then I had a Pam moment and thought about what contestants on the show actually need to be good at... I guess that's fair.

So, I think that's a wrap on my ESPN Jeopardy! bid. I don't know that for sure, but I kinda do. I might try again someday; I might not. I mean, who knows if this show will even exist long enough for me to get a second chance. I've seen about a half dozen of these sports trivia shows (Stump the Schwab, The Two-Minute Drill, etc.) through the years, and they never last very long. And then there's the uncomfortable, inevitable fact that my brain is only getting slower. If my recall isn't up to snuff now, it's not like it will take a jump in my fifties.

It's all very disappointing. I was legitimately bummed and slept horribly Tuesday evening, replaying all my mistakes in my head. But I'm okay now. I've got other things going on. That's one reason why it's good to try a whole bunch of different things. When one thing doesn't work out, you've got something else coming up right behind it.

Alright, that's enough on this topic. Until next time... 

Entry 826: RIP Mr. L.

I woke up late this morning. Left to my own circadian rhythm, I would sleep in until noon and stay up until 4 am. But I can't do that due to having a family and a job, so I have a weekday alarm set for 6:45 and a weekend alarm set for 8:30. Somehow the latter got turned off, and I didn't realize it, so I just slept in, long after S had awakened (5:45; she just got back from England and went to bed at 8:05 last night), and I surely would have kept sleeping had Lil' S2 not banged on our bedroom door and shouted at me at 9:45: "Dad! It's almost ten o' clock! You need to get out of bed now!" S took Lil' S1 to a friend's house to go to a ren faire, so they were both gone, and I think Lil' S2 was just bored and wanted me to get up for company.

I heard S pull up as I was getting dressed, so I hustled and made it look like I didn't just wake up. She wouldn't really care—and I had just spent the week with the kids by myself, so surely I had accrued some marital equity—but still... She told me that we had Mr. L.'s thing in a few hours, which I had completely forgotten about. Our elderly nextdoor neighbor died a few months ago—while we were in India, I believe—and his memorial was this afternoon. We had gotten to know him and his wife quite well, so we definitely wanted to pay our respects, but we had no idea as to what type of event this was going to be. His wife only told us via text that it would be today from 12:30-3:00 at a restaurant because he didn't want a big sad funeral. Was it an open house or something we needed to be there right on time for? Should we plan on being there the entire time? Was it formal attire? We didn't know.

I decided to wear nice jeans and a button-up shirt—basically what I wear when I go to the office. I got the suit jacket out and put it on and looked at myself in the mirror, but I didn't love the vibe. Everything is just so informally nowadays. I never lived in the time when men wore suits and ties every time they left the house  but I definitely lived in the time they wore suits and ties to a memorial. The times have changed, though, and at many events in which formal attire used to be the norm, you will look out of place if you are wearing it now. On the other hand, this memorial was sure to be filled with people from that older, more formal generation, so I was slightly worried I would be underdressed.

I needn't have been. When we arrived (about 12:45), I quickly realized that this was not at all a formal event. Very few men had on ties or suit jackets and many were dressed even more casually than me. It also was not a very well-organized event (by the admission of one of the organizers). Actually, that's not exactly true—the program looked cool and they had a little jazz band there and good food was on the way—it just wasn't at a big enough venue. Apparently, many more people came than they were expecting, so there were a lot of people standing (including us), and there wasn't even much room to stand. It became clear that we weren't going to make it through the entire event. I mean, how could we eat when we could barely lift our arms up without bumping the people next to us?

We listened to everybody give their mini eulogies—it was all very touching; he was a good dude with many friends and family members who remembered him warmly—and then when there was a lull in the program, we followed an old lady through the tightly packed network of tables and chairs to his wife Mrs. L, figuring we would just pay our respects and leave. The other standers (including our neighbor across the street, who arrived shortly after us) apparently had similar ideas because a little makeshift procession line formed behind us. We went though and gave Mrs. L hugs and well-wishes, and then we met her sons and their families (one of whom is moving in with her, next to us, soon), and then we headed out. We were probably only there for about 20 minutes, but it was good.

Since we were hungry and (kinda) dressed up we decided to go out for lunch. Only Lil' S2 was with us (ren faire, remember), and for some reason S told him that we would go wherever he wanted. But he picked Chipotle, and I vetoed it. I would not have wanted to go to a nice Chipotle, and the Chipotle near us is not nice. It's fine for carryout, but the restaurant area is disgusting. There is always food on the table and napkins on the floor, and it's frequently filled with obnoxious teenagers (which probably explains the other two things). Thankfully, we were able to talk Lil' S2 into a different Mexican restaurant, one with servers and bussers who wipe down the tables, without too much of a fight. It helped that this place has a big TV in it, so he could kinda watch the Ohio St.-Indiana game while we ate. Football is a good salve for him, just like it is for me.

Speaking of which, I have a Zoom audition Tuesday evening for a spot on ESPN Jeopardy!. I didn't even know there was such a thing as ESPN Jeopardy! until a few weeks ago when my friend (who was once a champion on actual Jeopardy!) sent me an advertisement for their online any-time test. I took it last Wednesday, and I felt like I did pretty well on it (45 out of 50 or so), and apparently I did because I got an email the next day inviting me to submit an application with photos and information about me and all that. So, I filled that out and submitted it, and then the next day I got an email telling me I had advanced to the next round and needed to schedule a live audition.

It's pretty exciting, but I'm trying (and mostly succeeding, I think) to not get my hopes up. I know a ton of people who made it to the audition stage of Jeopardy!, and they didn't get chosen. It's still a long shot. On the other hand, I also know a lot of people who made it to the audition stage and did get chosen, and I have to imagine the ESPN version is less competitive, so... who knows?

Alright, gotta go. I think S wanted to do something as a family tonight, and I'm running out of time to go upstairs and say, "Hey, are we gonna do something tonight?" with any credibility.

Until next time... 

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...