Another week of school in the books -- only, like, 95% of the year left to go! I'm guessing that it's going to be remote learning until 2021, probably Fall 2021. I've become more and more pessimistic about the prospect of in-person schooling as the virus has lingered. The vaccine picture doesn't look particularly rosy to me. Even if we can get a safe one sometime soon, the logistics of inoculating, in a timely fashion, a huge portion of the population -- especially in a country rife with anti-vaxxers and other Big Pharma/Big Government conspiracy theorists -- just doesn't strike me as very likely. If I were in charge (if only...), I would probably start shifting resources toward disposable at-home testing. If we got a semi-reliable, affordable Covid test, similar to a pregnancy test, where you could swab yourself and get a result back in ten minutes -- and my understanding is that this is well within the realm of possibility -- that would be huge. With such a test and the continuation of distancing and mask-wearing, I think we could get that infamous R-value under 1, meaning the disease would peter out. A vaccine or other treatment would accelerate the decline, and of course we should continue developement along these lines, but I think it's foolhardy to pin all our hopes on this. But we have a foolhardy president (to put it mildly), so... we'll see, I guess.
I'm trying not to stress about school. I'm mostly succeeding. The kids are actually better at sitting in front of a computer all day than I thought they would be. Whether they're actually learning effectively is another question -- but, whatever. S does enough worrying for the both of us. Actually, I shouldn't frame it that way. She's been pretty mellow, for the most part, but she has intense moments where she gets super annoyed/stressed with something. It's usually justified, but the thing is, nobody is good at doing school this way. Not the teachers, not the students, not the parents, not the administrators. It's going to suck. It's going to be confusing. People are going to send the wrong links or say the wrong thing or not show up to the right meeting. You just have to roll with it as best you can.
As an example, S started an email chain with Lil' S1's teacher about turning in homework, on which I was cc'd, and it kinda went off the rails, not in a hostile way, just in a talking-past-each-other type of way, so S was annoyed, which I get, but my thing is "why are you even worried about homework right now?" (I mean, everything is homework at the moment -- isn't it?) If the teacher sends us an email saying Lil' S1 needs to start turning in homework, then of course we need to get him to do that. But let's not go out of our way to create new things to worry about. Let's just focus on getting him to the right meeting at the right time each day. Let's get that down first.
Another thing about S that makes times like this more stressful for her is that she's a consumate comparer. You don't know how many times I've heard about what other families have or do that we don't. This family is doing special tutoring; this family is sending their kids to private school; this family bought a portable schoolroom for their backyard. And it's not just about school and it's not just during coronavirus. It's about everything, all the time, and it's often framed as if we should be doing that as well. Actually, that's not entirely fair, it's more framed as, Should we be doing this? With a question mark at the end. So-and-so has their kids in gymnastics, should we put our kids in gymnastics? Should we get a membership to a private pool? Should we put them in tennis classes? Should we have them take French? Should we get them bigger bikes? Should we rent a house on the beach for a month? Should we get an electric car? Should we get rid of a car? And so on and so on.
On one hand, this is a good quality. There's nothing wrong with being ambitious or wanting what's best for your family. On the other hand, it's, like, just stop: stop comparing what we have to what everybody else has. For one thing, you don't even know if other people are even happy with what they have. People often pretend as if things are better than they actually are, especially on social media. For another thing, if you cherry pick the best parts about everybody you know, and use those as points of comparison, then you're setting yourself up for inevitable failure. Nobody can possibly be as good as a best-of composite of all their acquaintances.
Anyway...
In other news, sad news, I found out today a guy I went to high school with died of cancer a few weeks ago. This marks, like, the twentieth person I know from high school who has died. That's abnormally high, right? It seems like it, but I don't know for sure. One factor in this might be that I knew a lot of people in high school. I wasn't the BMOC or anything like, but I had my irons in a lot of fires, so to speak. I did jocky and nerdy and arty things in high school, so if you picked a kid at random, there was a decent chance I knew them.
This guy who died recently, for example, he was two grades ahead of me, but we were on the wrestling team together, so I knew him. We weren't buddies -- I don't even know if he would have remembered me -- but I remember him. He seemed like a good dude. He was an excellent athlete. Football was his main sport, and I once saw him on TV playing in a random bowl game in college. (He played for Air Force, and I think it was this game I saw him in. So, it probably wasn't "random." It was against my boyhood team the Washington Huskies, which is likely why I was watching it.) His obituary made me sad, as obituaries often do. He had kids and a wife and did a lot to help out veterans in need. You hear clichés about how life goes fast, and how you take it for granted when you're young, and then you have kids and reach middle age and come to find it's all too true.
My dad forwarded me the obituary and included in the email was a photo of the wrestling team, in which I happen to be standing right next to this kid. It also made me lament, just a tiny bit, that I didn't try harder in wrestling or stick with it after high school. At the time the photo was taken, I was a sophomore and he was a senior, and we were pretty evenly matched, despite the fact he had two-years and thirty pounds on me. I had so much promise! I mean, I fulfilled it to some extent (district champion at 168-pounds in 1996), but with a little more dedication, I probably could have been really good, like, one of the top wrestlers in the state. The flip-side of this, however, is that it would have taken some serious sacrifice, and maybe it wouldn't have been worth it. Maybe I was better off doing other things, like hanging out with friends or learning how to code or reading books. Those things are important too. At the very least, however, I wish I would have gotten into martial arts earlier. It's cool now, but at 43 I'm just never going to do be able to do the things I could do at 23, and I almost never got sore back then. Youth! Such a shame it is wasted on the young.
Alright, I started out talking about a guy I once knew who tragically passed away and ended up having a mini-midlife crisis. I think it's time to quit.
Until next time...
No comments:
Post a Comment