Entry 714: Do You Even Murph, Bro?

Have you done your Murph yet this weekend? If you're unfamiliar, the Murph is a workout traditionally done on Memorial Day weekend. It's named after Navy SEAL Michael Murphy who was killed in combat in Afghanistan in 2005. The workout consists of a one-mile run, 100 pull-ups, 200 pushups, and 300 squats, followed by another one-mile run, all while wearing a 20-lb. weighted vest. If you haven't gotten yours in yet, you still have time. But you better start running.

My gym holds a Murph event every year the Sunday before Memorial Day. I've never gone. It would require me to wake up early, which is not appealing, even though I'd very likely be up at that time, anyway. (As I've mentioned before, I often have trouble sleeping when I know I have to get up early for an event. So, what I need to do is not plan on doing the Murph at my gym, and then just decide to go the morning of. Although, now that I announced that, could I actually pull it off, or would I know the night before that I might go, thus defeating the entire purpose?) Plus, we often have plans that Sunday. Yesterday, for example, Lil' S2 and I went to the Mariners-Nationals game* with another dad and a few of Lil' S2's friends. I wanted to go as a family, but baseball is a hard sell on S and an even harder sell on Lil' S1. Overall, I'm glad that half my family isn't into sports -- it would be sports overload for me otherwise -- but I wouldn't mind if they were a little more sports tolerant. Like, would it be the worst thing in the world to go to a baseball game once every decade?

*The Mariners are in the midst of a bizarre season. They are in first place but incredibly unfun to follow as a fan, because they go through long spells in which they cannot score runs. Before yesterday's game, they had only scored two runs (and struck out 34 times) in their previous three games. I also went to the game on Friday, and they lost 6-1, with their only run coming on a home run on the first pitch of the game, which we didn't even see because we weren't in our seats yet. Yesterday's was a great game to attend, though. The M's won; they scored a bunch of runs (nine); the weather was gorgeous; and Julio hit a homer for the cherry on the top.  

Anyway, I have done the Murph on my own the past two years. I need to modify it a little bit. For one thing, I don't own a 20-lb. weighted vest, so I just do it without one (most people do it without one, although I have been meaning to get one). For another thing, the arthritis in my right shoulder prevents me from merely hanging from a bar, let alone doing a single pull-up, let alone alone doing 100 pull-ups. So, I do 100 seated shoulder presses instead (and even on those I can't extend my right arm completely overhead). But the pushups and the squats I can handle with little trouble. I've gotten to the point where I can do unbroken sets of 30, 40, even sometimes 50 pushups, and I can knock out 50 to 75 squats at a time, no problem. This year I also ran two miles first instead of one mile at the beginning and one mile at the end, because we took the kids to the optometrist, and it was almost exactly two miles away, so I just ran home, and then did the rest of the workout.

Of course, I'm feeling the effects now. My latest most troubling malady is a sore knee. So many dudes my age have knee issues, and it was the one part of my body that was holding up well, so this is especially disappointing. But so it goes, and it's only going to get worse. I really need to reform my diet to counteract the fact that I just can't work out as much as I could 15 years ago. I'm back doing the 16/8 intermittent fasting thing, but I don't know that it's doing much. I'm pretty sure it's much more about what you eat than when you eat, and our society is designed to ensure we eat as much shit as possible.

Maybe I should just not worry about it and join the "healthy at every size" movement. I'm joking, but I do actually think they make a lot of valid points. For example, being fat is not a character flaw, and everybody should be able to look how they look without society harshly judging them for it. Also, obsessing over your weight and dieting constantly can absolutely be detrimental to your mental well-being. It's completely understandable for somebody to decide they would rather be fat than constantly be trying to not be fat -- to come to the conclusion that their life is better that way. As a friend of mine who has put on a lot of weight over the past few years put it, "Instead of dieting, I'm just going to work on my personality now." She was joking but also kinda serious, which is why it's funny. 

With that said, I don't think you really can be healthy at every size. Obesity is strongly linked to deleterious health outcomes such as diabetes and heart disease. I mean, just from a common sense standpoint, speaking of sore knees, the stress on your joints alone from excess weight cannot be good for you. When I go to Disney World and see people not much older than me, who are really fat, drinking giant bottles of soda, driving Rascal Scooters, because walking more than 20 yards is an exhausting chore, it really strikes a blow to the HAES ideology for me. And to be clear, I am not saying that these Disney World people are bad or lazy or unworthy of compassion or that it's "their own fault." The struggle is real, and the more we learn about compulsive behavior, the more we learn about how little control people have over their own actions (as illustrated in the linked article by Johan Hari above). I am, however, saying that I don't think being like these people is healthy, and they probably do not feel like they are living their best lives.

Actually, the problems I have with HAES are a good example of the problems I have with so many progressively-coded movements these days. I'm usually totally with them on the positives of their movements, but I'm not with them on the negatives, and that's because they don't acknowledge that there any negatives, or they significantly underplay them. In fact, it's worse than that, because now the fashionable thing to do is to label anybody who even acknowledges that there are negatives of your movement as a morally suspect individual. With respect to HAES, you cannot criticize it without being called fat-phobic or ableist or accused of body-shaming. This article, for example, mentions a plus-size influencer who lost weight because "Two years ago, I couldn’t wipe my own ass!" The very next sentence after that quote: "Critics called her ableist and self-hating."

It's not just HAES either. It's pretty much every "progressive" movement these days (pro-Palestinian activism comes to mind right now). You rarely hear such movements argued in terms of tradeoffs, which is what they are, because that's what pretty much everything is. Instead, it's almost always: This is our self-evidently virtuous cause, and anybody who dissents -- or even so much as acknowledges that there is such a thing as legitimate dissent -- is a bigot. And unfortunately, this type of call-out is very effective on the surface. It really does silence a lot of potential opposition. But it's a terrible tactic.

For one thing, it often hurts the very people the movements are claiming to support. In the case of HAES, telling people they can be obese without any health risks is terrible for obese people, unless it is actually true, which it almost certainly isn't. (Your blood pressure doesn't care about your views on social justice.) I don't see a huge difference between this and telling heavy drinkers that their excessively drunkenness isn't that bad, that the real problem is society shaming them, and they should just work on accepting themselves as they are.

For another thing, it's a bad move politically. Scaring people into silence doesn't actually change their minds, but it can make them resentful and make the backlash against your movement worse. Also, doing this shrinks the tent. As I've said before, defining everybody who doesn't agree with you 100% as your adversary, means you will have a lot of adversaries, and having a lot of adversaries is contrary to the goal of affecting change. It's how you lose elections, and right now I typically prefer progressives win elections, because for as much as I'm dismayed by the illiberalism on the left, I know the other side is somehow almost always worse.

And with that, I shall bid you, reader, adieu. I just made myself think about Biden's chances in the November election, and I don't want to indulge that train of thought any further. It's not one that leads to a good place.

Until next time...

  

Entry 713: One Night In Vegas

I wouldn't say I'm a particularly anxious traveler. Being married to S, I'm pretty used to travel by now. However, there are some aspects of travel that can cause me great anxiety. One is waking up early. This applies to my life in general, not just to travel. If I know I need to sleep, I often cannot sleep, and I get caught in the dreaded insomnia Catch-22 -- you're anxious because you can't sleep and you can't sleep because you're anxious. Another thing that can cause me consternation is if I'm traveling, especially by plane, for one specific event, and a long delay would really screw things up. Like, if I'm going to visit my family for a couple weeks, and my flight is supposed to arrive at 9:00 am, and it gets delayed until 9:00 pm -- the type of thing that does sometimes happen -- it's not a huge deal. But if I'm, say, going to see a 7:30 pm show in Vegas, and I'm supposed to arrive at 9:00 am, and my flight gets delayed until 9:00 pm, then that is a big deal.

All this is to say that I was pretty anxious when I set out at 5:00 am Thursday morning to meet my friend JY in Vegas to see Deep Sea Diver and Pearl Jam later that evening. It also matters that it wasn't just me and my flight that could muck things up. I also had to worry about everything going smoothly on JY's end, and we have bad connection juju. This is the same friend I was supposed to see in Maui, after all, before the entire township of Lahaina caught on fire. I think I still had some residual anxiety in me from that trip that I was projecting onto this Vegas trip.

But everything was normal for me at the airport, and I took off to Vegas on time. One thing I did was go into airplane mode on my phone and specifically not connect to the inflight Wi-Fi. I was already in the air, and if something went wrong with JY's flight, I didn't want to know about it until I landed. There isn't much I can do in a metal tube somewhere over Kansas, anyway, so if things go awry, I figured, I might as well save myself a few hours of consternation in blissful ignorance.

That turned out, unfortunately, to be a good move. Upon touching down at Harry Reid, I was hit with the following string of texts from JY.

Have you boarded?
I fucked up bad
My flight is out of Everett and I am at Sea Tac
Trying to get a different flight now
Not sure that will happen
[A half-hour goes by]
K rebooked going to be getting in later
Shit
I have a layover in Sacramento
Arrival is 5:30 :(
But I will be there :)
Sorry dude fucked this up but I will be there

What the actual fuck? The wrong airport?! It's 8:30 am Vegas time. My friend, who was supposed to arrive at 11:30 am, now isn't getting in until 5:30 pm. I was worried about killing three hours by myself. Now I gotta kill nine.

Going to the wrong airport seems like a colossal gaffe -- and it is -- but it's somewhat understandable in this case. I've never heard of anybody flying out of Everett. I don't even think I knew there was a commercial airport in Everett. In DC, there are three major airports in the area, so it is always top of the mind, when purchasing tickets, which airport you will be using. Every trip I take, I double-check the airport before I leave home because it's often different from the previous trip. In Seattle, this is not the case. (At least I didn't think it was!) I've flown into and out of the area dozens of times, and I've never even considered it a possibility that one could use any airport other than Sea-Tac. If you ask somebody in the Seattle area to pick you up at the airport, they won't even ask "Which one?" There is only one. But apparently not, and JY (and by consequence I) learned it the hard way.

It was an honest mistake, but that doesn't change the fact that it really sucked. I texted P -- the guy we know in Deep Sea Diver, who got us the tickets -- to see if he could hang out, but he was busy with band things. However, he did say he would separate my ticket from JY's at will call, so that, if worst came to worst, I could still get in to the show. That actually made me feel a lot better about things. It would really suck to fly all the way to Vegas and not even get to see JY. It would really, really, really suck to fly all the way to Vegas and not get to see JY nor the show. P also said he was trying to get us credentialed to go backstage after the show to hang out. Of course, my first thought that I had the tact not to ask was, Will Pearl Jam be there? (Spoiler: they weren't.)

So, I started wandering around Vegas, and I came to the conclusion that it's a shit city. I had only been there once before almost 20 years ago, and it's changed, and I've changed. It's gotten way more expensive, which is really saying something, because it was expensive before. But it's worse now, and it's worse in a worse way. The graft has ratcheted up to 11. For example, last time I went, I passed the time playing low-stakes poker and actually made about $100 dollars (over many hours), because I was slightly better than the other patzers who came to the table. But I didn't see any low-stakes poker this time, and my friend told me they don't exist anymore. It's all tournament-style no-limit, and I don't play poker enough to hang in that type of game. Also, most blackjack tables have changed their odds and their minimum bet, so that you can't even lose your money slowly anymore. Last time I went to Vegas, I could bring $50 in chips to the blackjack table, bet $5 a hand, and walk away an hour later with anywhere between, like, $30 and $60 in chips, depending on how lucky I had been. This time I didn't see a single open table for less than $25 a hand with a 6:5 blackjack payout. Some drunk redneck-looking guy in the elevator said to me, "Seems like every time you cough in this city, you get a $50 charge on your credit card." Spot on.

It's not just the gambling either -- food is outrageously expensive. I went to Johnny Rockets -- a fast food restaurant, mind you -- and got a mediocre chicken sandwich, fries, and a side salad, and my total was $42 (and I didn't even add chicken to my salad like I wanted to). Part of that is because I tipped, which I didn't have to do, but withholding a tip mainly hurts the low-level workers who are probably just trying to eke by. So, I pretty much always tip. It's not like it's the fault of the chick behind the counter with the "All Eyez On Me" tattoo on her chest that prices are so high. She's probably making minimum wage regardless.

The other thing about Vegas is that the massive drunkenness is so unappealing to me at this stage in my life. There seem to be only a few (if any) restrictions on open containers, so people just wander the streets and the casinos sipping Coors Light tallboys at all hours of the day. I probably appreciated this type of vacationing more when I was 25, but those days are long behind me. I mean, I did have a beer with breakfast, but it was just one, and I ate breakfast at like 2 pm DC time.

I sure loaded up on the caffeine though. I think I went to three different Starbucks throughout the day. I also went to the Museum of Illusions, which was kinda cool, but, unsurprisingly, ridiculously overpriced. Once I was able to check into the hotel, I just chilled in the room and watched Baby Reindeer.* JY finally made it to the hotel at around 6:30, and since the show didn't start until 7:30, I guess he technically made it on time.

*I finished the series on the flight home. I thought it was really good, but it's pretty dark, so I don't recommend it, unless you like that type of thing, which I usually do.

It was great to see JY. I hadn't seem him in almost two years. We pretty much went straight to the venue (it was in the hotel we were staying at), but that hour gave us a chance to catch up a little bit. The show was rad. We had floor tickets in "the pit," so we were right up front, standing maybe ten yards from the stage. Deep Sea Diver was terrific. I've seen them a couple times before, and they put on a great live show. Here are two songs they played that I really like.

And then Pearl Jam was amazing. They put on a show. Sometimes you see these established artists, and they rest on their reputation and mail-in their live performances (ahem, Bob Dylan), but Pearl Jam makes you feel like you're seeing something special and exclusive, even though it's probably the same basic show they've done hundreds of times and will do dozens of more. Actually, I heard an interview will Eddie Vedder and Jeff Ament, and they said that they give it their all every performance, because they know there is somebody in the audience, who spent a lot of time and money to come see them and might not ever see them again, and they don't want that person to feel cheated. That person was me at this show. They didn't play my favorite Pearl Jam song, but they played so many other greats, it hardly matters.

After the show, we did get to go backstage and see P and hang out for a little while. So, that was cool. Then JY and I grabbed a couple slices of za and went back to the hotel to crash. JY was snoring, and I didn't want to wear earplugs because my ears were ringing from the show and earplugs made it worse (the show was super loud where we were, even though I put in earplugs for the loudest parts), so I cranked up the white noise on my phone and eventually dozed off.

We both woke up pretty early and got some coffee, and then he flew off to Berkeley to watch his son play baseball (he's a pitcher on UW*), and I got a breakfast burrito that was, hands down, the best thing non-show-related about my trip. I flew out a few hours later and was back home by 9:30 pm. The trip was awesome -- I'm really glad I went -- but as I've said before, the best part of any trip, no matter how great, is arriving back home.

*It was kinda funny. We were in the arena, watching the UW game on JY's phone, and right as his son came in to pitch -- like almost to the second -- Pearl Jam came onstage and started playing. So, JY spent the first few songs half-watching the show, half-watching his phone, giving me updates -- runner on third, two outs, popup, yes! He got out of it! Kid had a great outing: 3.1 IP, 1 H, 0 R, 0 BB, 3 SO.

A few pics and then that's the post.

Until next time...

Entry 712: Mother's Day 2024

Happy Mother's Day to those who celebrate!

I added that last part to stave off any potential push-back from people who don't like Mother's Day. I've heard tell of this holiday destroying text chains before. In perhaps the most heated example, somebody I know who lost both her parents at a relatively young age and has been unable to conceive children herself, responded to a "Happy Mother's Day!" text by asking the group to please refrain from such niceties, as they aren't so nice to those among us who aren't and/or don't have mothers. Then somebody else -- another childless woman, for what it's worth -- responded to that text with a longish rebuttal, saying that she (the first woman) could simply ignore such texts and that on a group chat you can't be expected to forego standard well-wishing due to one member's personal issues. The first woman then wrote back: "Remove me then and fuck off." And that was the end of that.

By the way, I just now noticed that it's Mother's Day and not Mothers' Day, even though it's a celebration for many mothers. That's weird, no? Other holidays, such as Presidents' Day, aren't like that. I guess it's a reference to the royal mother, like how some people just say "mother" instead of "my mother." Mother came to visit last weekend... I've never liked that. I'm not your brother.* I especially dislike it when dudes do it. It comes off as some combination of pretentious and serial-killer-y. I don't know if Hannibal Lecter ever references his mother in any of the Silence of the Lambs movies, but if he does, he surely says "mother" and not "my mother." So, if you're somebody who does this, I urge you to go ahead and start adding that extra syllable in there. It's a third of a second well spent.

*Unless you are my brother or sister reading this right now. But then I'd think it was weird you were calling our mom "mother," considering we've pretty much only ever called her mom.

As I've surely mentioned before on this blog, I'm not big on gift-giving, especially socially mandate gift-giving*, but I usually do give S something on Mother's Day nevertheless. This year I made her a little slideshow video of pictures of the boys through the years -- the type of thing Facebook would do (back when people were on Facebook) and randomly put in your feed, only instead of cheesy music playing behind it, it was cheesy narration, provided by me. I think she liked it. Actually, she inadvertently gave me the idea. I was making a video of my Immaculate Grid, this baseball thing I do on Twitter (the only thing I do on Twitter), and she overheard me and was like, "What are you doing? Are you doing something for Mother's Day?" I reflexively responded, "No!" which was the truth, but then that made me think that I should do something, so I did, which now makes my response sound like a lie. But it wasn't.

*I'm not big on gift-receiving either, so this isn't a totally selfish trait.

The main thing S wants on Mother's Day is to not have to deal with all the usual stressors of day-to-day parenting, so I did my best to alleviate those as much as possible. I did the laundry, changed the sheets on the bed, and made a few day's worth of lunch for her. I even did a touch-up paint job in our living to cover up some old water damage. Then, I let her "zone out" and do whatever she wanted, which was actually mostly more household chores, but I get that. Sometimes as a parent what you legitimately want is to be left alone to do tasks in peace. On the rare occasions that I'm home alone for a few days, one of my simple joys is to get ready to go into the office in the morning. It's so different and pleasant without two preteen children around.

The other thing about Mother's Day is that it is always very close to S's birthday. This year I actually will be out of town for her b-day. I'll be seeing Pearl Jam in Vegas. (Vegas, baby!) This came about quite suddenly. What happened is, a friend* of my good friend is in a band who's opening for Pearl Jam at one of their Vegas shows, and he got him a couple of floor tickets for the show, kinda last minute. So my friend texted me to see if I wanted to go, and of course I said yes, granted S was cool with it, which she was, even though it's her birthday, because she's awesome.

*He's kinda my friend too. I've long contended that we need a word in English for somebody who is between a friend and an acquaintance. I have so many people in my life who I get along with and have hung out with and exchanged texts with, but I wouldn't really call them "friends", because we've never been super tight, and we could have major life events without the other one knowing. "Friendly acquaintance" is the best term I have for somebody like this, but it feels clumsy to me. We need something better.

It's gonna be a whirlwind trip. Neither my friend or I can take much time off right now, so I'm flying out of DC at 7:00 am the morning of the show, and then flying back the next day. I'm sure Pearl Jam won't even go on until the wee hours of the morning DC time, so I'm basically just not gonna sleep for a day or so. I mean, I'll try to sleep on the plane, but that never works. Whatever. I'm still young enough to do this... I hope.

Tired or not, it will be great to see my friend. We were supposed to rendezvous in Maui, but then the west side of the island caught on fire, so I haven't seen him in a few years. So Vegas it is. I mean, YOLO, right?

Until next time...

Entry 711: The Right To Ignore

I've been thinking about the protests of the war in Gaza a bit lately (how could I not, given the inescapable media coverage?), but I haven't written anything about them. In part, that's because of what I said in my last post -- I lose my desire to write about serious things once the weekend rolls around -- but also it's because I don't have much to add.* Anything that could be said about the protests has already been said. They are a topic the media seems obsessed with, even if the general public is not. As Nate Silver lays out in a recent (and very good, in my opinion) Substack post, the Israel/Palestine conflict ranks among the least salient issues to Americans today, even young Americans.

*Although, I'm about to write a post on them anyway.

It's not near the top of my list either. Although, of course, I find the entire thing tremendously sad. The brutality and disregard for human life... there are no words for it. To me, it's a true moral conundrum -- there is no totally right side, no morally satisfying position, no just outcome. It's just so much hate and violence. And I worry that we are importing the hate and violence to our country. We are supposed to the country where Arabs and Jews can live together in peace. We're the place people go to flee the violence and hate. And we should be thanking our lucky stars everyday that this is the case. We should be eternally grateful that we happen to living at a time and a place that isn't beset by senseless death and destruction. We should not be recreating here the conditions of the places people want to escape.

But maybe that's not what's going on. It's not clear to me what exactly the protestors want, or, more to the point, what they realistically hope to accomplish, how camping on college campus in the US will change anything in Gaza. So, it could be a lot of the participants just want to protest more than they want to achieve an actionable end. I wonder if I was in college right now if I would be part of the protests. I don't think I would because I kinda hate sleeping in a tent. I certainly would not have understood anything about the conflict, so it would have come down to my love of a bed.

Regardless of why students are protesting, however, I support their right to do so. This type of speech should absolutely be permitted and tolerated on college campuses. It's been funny to watch each side completely invert their positions on free speech since the start of the protests. Suddenly, a whole bunch of the "fuck your feelings" people, the ones who decry things like safe spaces and trigger warnings, are calling on college administrations to do more to make Jewish kids feel comfortable. And the ones who think it's harmful to ask somebody where they're from are cool with accusing people displaying Star of David iconography of supporting genocide.

The universities really have egg on their faces here. They've been so protective of every other minority community -- allowing students to shut down invited speakers who don't have the exact "correct" views on race or transgenderism or policing or what have you, and doing so in the name of student safety -- that it does look a wee bit antisemitic when that same standard isn't applied to Jews who support Israel. It's such an egregious self-own. I've been saying it for a long time -- if you limit speech you don't like when the tide is on your side, you are going to look extremely foolish when the tide turns, which it will, because it always does.

So, I almost always favor more speech. I say "almost," because, in speech, as in every other facet of life, there are exceptions. And I think I've come up with a good way to encapsulate these exceptions: The right to ignore. Just as we have a right to speak; we also have a right to ignore. If you speak in such a way that it denies others their right to ignore, then it becomes harassment. So, for example, you have a right to say what you want on TV because people could always turn the channel; you have a right to speak in an auditorium because nobody is forced to attend; but you don't have the right to stand in front of somebody's house at 3:00 am with a bullhorn and scream insults at them. This violates my right to ignore principle.

In the case of the protestors, they should have the right to peacefully assemble and say basically whatever they want, short of direct threats. But if they are, say, preventing others from moving through campus (as I've seen in several videos) or disrupting lecture or graduation ceremonies or otherwise stopping students from accessing aspects of their campus and their education, then they are not within their rights, in my view. And, in this case, it is not wrong, and it is not anti-free speech, for campus administration to shut them down, even if that means calling in the police (although I wouldn't recommend that except as a last resort).

Let people speak, but let people ignore. More empathy, not less.

Until next time...