Entry 742: FLA Christmas 2024

It was an FLA Christmas for the G & G family this year and a bit of a strange one at that. A random old woman came to stay with us for three days starting on the 23rd, and I never got the full story as to exactly why. I didn't mind except that S's mom was so worried about her that she rarely left her side, which means that she didn't spend as much time with us or the boys as she usually does. Typically when we visit, she'll play cards with us, or take the boys to the pool, or tag along when we go to the arcade or the movies or what have you, but this time she wasn't available for much of that. Also, the old woman, despite living in the same complex as S's parents, slept in their unit with us. There was enough room only because S's sister who was supposed to come as well (with her dog) had to cancel at the last minute. I'm not sure what we would have done, sleeping-wise, if she had come as planned.

As best I can tell, here's what happened. The old woman is the mother of some friends of my in-laws. She's 86, and supposedly cannot take care of herself and basically needs 24-hour supervision. She lives in the complex with her daughter (my in-law's friend and the mother of childhood friends of S's). This daughter, however, went to India for some reason, so she took her mother to Fort Lauderdale to stay with her brother (the old woman's son). But then the brother also had to go to India for some reason and due to a miscommunication he booked his departure for the 23rd, even though his sister wasn't returning until the 26th, leaving a three-day gap in coverage vis-à-vis their enfeebled mother. So, rather than postponing his plans a few days, which to me is the obvious move, he enlisted his twentysomething neighbors (who, I came to learn, don't even know him very well) to drive his mother home from Fort Lauderdale (over 500 miles round-trip!) to stay with us since nobody will be at her home to stay with her.

There are so many things I don't get about this and asking S about them didn't make things any clearer because she didn't know much either. Our conversation went something this.

Me: What is so important in India that this old woman's son couldn't delay his trip a few days?
S: I don't know.
Me: And why does your mom need to watch her 24-7? Couldn't this woman stay at home, and somebody could stop by and check in on her later? I mean, she lives five minutes away, and she's with it mentally. She could call for help if she needs it. I heard your mom having a conversation with her on her cellphone earlier.
S: She needs to use some sort of inhaler in the morning, and she can't make herself meals.
Me: But she looks well put-together, and she moves okay. How does she get dressed and take a shower?
S: I guess she can do those things herself.
Me: So, she can do those things, but she couldn't fix herself some toast or microwave a meal?
S: I don't know. That part doesn't make sense to me either.
Me: None of this makes sense. If she really does need around-the-clock care, then you can't just dump her on your friends, especially when your friends are old themselves. I mean, your dad is basically the same age as her.
S: I know. I just have to let it go or I'll start to get really upset. And that poor couple who drove up from Fort Lauderdale. They don't even really know this woman, and they don't know my parents at all. They just got roped into this out of the blue somehow.
Me: Yeah, I just can't imagine having the audacity to ask random neighbors to drive my mother somewhere five hours away, and then to ask my friends to basically be a hospice nurse for three days over Christmas, while their daughter and grandchildren are in town visiting. And couldn't your parents just have said no?
S: My dad wanted to, but my mom is too nice when it comes to things like this.

And therein lies the rub: too nice, indeed. But that's the thing about too nice -- it often doesn't produce more net niceness, it's just redistributes nicenss in a new way. In this case, the niceness extended to my in-laws' friend was niceness that would have been passed around to others (in the form of attention) but no long could be.

Anyway, I don't want to make it sound like this old woman ruined the entire trip, because that's not the case. She was only there half the time, and she's perfectly pleasant. But having to care for her really stressed out my mother-in-law, which wasn't cool.

Some other trip highlights...

• A lot of S's childhood friends were around, so we had a few group activities, including a sunset cruise around Sarasota Bay. I typically don't love being out on the water like that, because if you get bored or restless, you're just stuck, but this one was pretty fun, and we got some great views. The only problem is that I was quite cold at the end of it because I thought I forgot my sweatshirt. I actually didn't forget it -- it was in the car all along -- but I thought I forgot it, so I didn't bring it on the boat. That might sound weird, but it's not for me. Unfortunately, I do shit like that all the time. Perhaps the most embarrassing was when I called a maintenance man out to fix our fireplace, and the only problem is that the gas knob was turned the wrong way. I got charged $50 to basically get told I'm an idiot. (On a related note, I'm a huge fan of clearly labeled knobs and dials. I usually turn off our water when we go out of town in the winter, and there are two huge arrows printed on the valve handle saying "open" and "close". Why isn't everything like that?)

• Whenever we get together with S's old friends, there is usually this one other tall white guy there who also married into the group. I think people just expect us to get on famously, but we don't really. I mean, he's a very nice guy, but we have different interests, and I find talking to him one-on-one to be a bit of a struggle most the time. He's an older (55-ish) California tech guy, and he's really into the business side of tech (which I have little interest in), and he's always very fashionably dressed and wears a bunch of rings and bracelets and stuff. He's the type of guy who unironically wears a fedora (and pulls it off). He's really into sailing but has no interest in team sports. (He once said the last time he went to a Dodgers game he left before "halftime," and then got a little put out when I poked fun at him for thinking baseball games have halftimes.) Our pop culture interests also aren't aligned. He named his old boat after something from Firefly -- not at all my type of show.
  
  
• He did tell me something cool though. When you sail, you can go multiple times faster than the wind because you are using air pressure to your advantage the same way you do when flying a plane. I never really thought about this before. I guess I just figured it was the wind blowing the boat the same way it blows a leaf around your yard, but that's not actually what's going on. The wind blows across the sails, which (like airplane wings) are shaped in such a way to create a pressure differential, and this differential is what propels the boat. So, sailboats and airplanes (and suction cups) all leverage the same force, air pressure, to work -- like I said, that's cool.
  
  
• Another cool thing on this trip is that we went to Jacksonville to visit S's cousin and his family. He has two daughters, a freshman in college and a sophomore in high school. They took our boys out to the mall for hours, while we older folks sat around and chatted -- or rather they chatted and I watched football. S's family can't help but speak in a Kannada-English mix whenever they are together, which cuts me out of the conversation. Actually, it doesn't really -- I can follow like 90% of it through the English words and the context -- but it gives me a good excuse to zone out, which I often like to do.
  
  
• On the way back, we stopped at some outlet malls, and I got some new sneakers, which I badly needed. They were the second pair I bought in Florida because the first one didn't fit. They felt good in the store, but then when I wore them for the first time after buying them, about 20 minutes into it, they started to really hurt my feet. That's such a terrible feeling, and it was made worse by the fact that we bought them at a mall that was super crowded and wasn't at all close, so returning them would've taken me like half a day. They weren't too expensive, so I just kept them. I used them as my exercise bike shoe because they're on the narrow side (which is why they get uncomfortable), so they fit nicely in the pedal straps. That worked out okay, so maybe it's not a total waste. Plus, as S pointed out, we might not be that far away from Lil' S1 sharing my shoe size. My feet haven't grown since 9th grade.
  
  
• Saw a bunch of movies in Florida. We went to Moana 2 as a family, and it was a complete nothing of a movie. I only saw bits and pieces of the first one, but what I saw was pretty enjoyable and the songs were super catchy. Not so with 2 -- it couldn't have been more forgettable. On Christmas Eve we watched Red One, which was fun, and on Christmas Day we watched the original How the Grinch Stole Christmas! from 1966. I actually don't remember ever seeing it before, but it's good. (You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch might be the greatest diss track of all time.) On the flight over I watched Carry On, which was an adequate dumb plane movie, and then on the way back I started watching Squid Game on a whim. The second season just dropped on Netflix, and I was looking for things to download, so I grabbed the first three episodes of the series. It's so good! I wish I had watched it sooner. Although if I did that, I wouldn't get to watch it now, so I guess it all worked out.

Until next time...

Entry 741: That's A Wrapped

It's amazing how fast we get used to new technology and take it for granted. I got my Spotify end-of-the-year "Wrapped" report the other day (as did every other Spotify user), and it made me think about how much music consumption has changed in my lifetime. I became a cognizant human being during that relatively brief moment in history in which the cassette was the primary musical medium. I had a few tapes as a kid -- e.g., Beastie Boys License to Ill, "Weird Al" Even Worse -- but I didn't have a legit musical collection until the early '90s when CDs had overtaken cassettes. I had hundreds of CDs -- or rather I should say I have hundreds of CDs. They are in my closet right now. I haven't had the nerve to get rid of them.

But I should. I never play them, and they don't bring me any joy (isn't that Marie Kondo's thing?). They just sit in a box and take up storage space. I don't even have any desire to play them. It's not like I'm dreaming of buying a CD player and putting up CD towers in my living room. I just can't pull the trigger on ditching them. It's a nostalgia thing, but only for the CDs themselves -- the physically objects -- not listening to the CDs. Because the truth is, consuming music now is way better. You have everything on demand relatively cheaply, and you don't have to worry about scratches messing up your CDs and trying to buff them out with toothpaste. (Remember that one?) I heard the writer Chuck Klosterman say once that he was incredibly reluctant to move away from CDs, into the streaming world, because he so valued his CD collection, but then one day he made the change and didn't miss his CDs at all. He realized it was listening to the music that he liked, not the way in which he listened. I cosign this sentiment big time, and yet, I still have the box in my closet.

Actually, what I should do is tell S to get rid of them all at some point and just not tell me about it. Then one day I'll say, "Hey, where did all my CDs go?" And she'll tell me she got rid of them three years ago, and I'll shrug my shoulders and get on with my day.

Anyway, here's my Wrapped report.

I listened for approximately 25 minutes a day, which makes sense as I mainly listen on the exercise bike, and I do that two-to-three times a week for about 45 minutes. My top band is the Beatles, which also makes sense since they are the greatest band ever. Nirvana being second is no shocker either, as they might be the second greatest band ever (not really, but maybe to me they are). I'm kinda surprised to see the White Stripes come in third. I very much like them, but I'm not sure they would make my top ten favorite bands, if I made a list (which I might someday, if I ever finish my top-100 TV show list). Dua Lipa and Rihanna are S picks. She likes them, and I don't mind them, so when we're listening to music together it's often one of those two.

As to the top song, "Flagpole Sitta" by Harvey Danger, that's completely due to a one week period where I decided that it would be my karaoke song, so I listened to it like fifty times to get the feel for it. Then I ended up not even going to karaoke, so that was a bit of a waste. It's neither a terrible nor a great song. It's catchy as hell, campy as all get-out, and reminiscent of the early '90s, which is why I thought it would be a good choice for karaoke. Also, it's the type of song I feel I could power through with moxie and showmanship -- that's what I need when singing a song. I cannot carry a tune for the life of me, so I need something kinda silly. Paranoia, paranoia, everybody's comin' to get me, just say you never met me...

The weird one of my song list is "It's No Good" by Depeche Mode. The others make sense -- "Cold Heart (PNAU remix)" I listen to with S, "Kernkraft 400" is a workout song (it's that jock jam almost everybody has heard and almost nobody knows its name), and "Robbery" is a Juice WRLD song often requested by Lil' S2 and his friends when I'm giving them rides places. But "It's No Good," I have no idea how that got to number three. I think it was just a fluke song -- either it just came up a bunch by luck or something in the algorithm thinks I often want to hear the third best song by, like, my 81st favorite band for some reason.

Whatever the case, that's a Wrapped. Until next time...

Entry 740: Cold And Colds

It's finally cold here in DC. That's good in the sense that it's December 7th, so it should be cold. That's bad in that it sucks to go outside. The wind has just been brutal the past few days. It really sneaked up on us, too. A few weeks ago, we were still hitting highs in the low 70s, wearing t-shirts. Now, it's 37 with that little gust icon showing. Next week, it's supposed to get a little a better -- highs in the mid-50s -- but with rain, which might be worse than just the straight-up cold. Then after that I don't care because we are going to visit S's parents in Florida, and it never gets too cold there. That might not seem very Christmas-y, but it kinda is for us. If you take all the Christmases we've had since Australia, I bet we've spent more in warm weather (Australia, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, and India) than cold weather (Washington DC, Washington state). Warm-weather Christmases aren't too bad. Plus, I'm getting my fair share of cold-weather quaintness right now. We've got the tree up and the fire on, so I just need some Bing Crosby in my earbuds, and then I'm practically in a Norman Rockwell painting.

Speaking of cold, I came down with a cold earlier this week, and it's a weird one. It's bad enough to completely annoy me and mess up my sleep, but not so bad that I'm laid up in agony. Last Christmas I was quite sick in India -- it was much worse than this -- and it got me wondering what it was that made it worse, symptom-wise. I realized that it was the killer sore throat. This time I don't have that just-swallowed-a-tray-of-hot-coals sensation, and that's why it's just annoying, as opposed to completely oppressive. I do feel pretty lousy when I first wake up in the morning, though. I felt bad enough yesterday to take a sick day from work, but I perked up as the day went along, so instead of work, I assembled my exercise bike which came on Thursday. It was thankfully pretty easy to put together -- much simpler than, like, a dresser from IKEA, because there were almost no small parts. I didn't have to align a half-dozen dowels on particle board with their corresponding notches on a different piece of particle board.

S is not the most sympathetic person in the world when it comes to me being sick. She always wants me to take medicine, but it doesn't do any good. As I've said before: If we had a cure for the common cold, we would have a cure for the common cold. We wouldn't have pharmacy shelves filled with dozens of supposed remedies. When I got conjunctivitis, I didn't pick something out from the pink eye section of CVS. I got a prescription for chloramphenicol,* and it cleared right up.

*I don't actually remember if that's what I got or not. I just Googled conjunctivitis medication, and it was the first one suggested by our AI overlords.

And I've tried a bunch of stuff throughout my life. When I was young my parents used to give me Robitussin, which I thought was disgusting, and something called Triaminic, which I actually liked because it was orange and sweet. Then, as a teenager, I thought menthol rub was a panacea,* until I stopped using it and realized nothing was different. In my twenties, I went through an Airborne phase, and that stuff is total snake oil, before switching to zinc nasal swabs, which didn't work any better.** Now, I'll take things -- Sudafed, NyQuil, and whatnot -- but it's mainly just to appease S. See, I'm not actually trying to be sick just to annoy you. 

*Freshman year of college, I had a tub of the stuff on my nightstand, and my friends saw it, and it become a running joke for the entire trimester for some reason -- probably because we were all 19-year-old dumbasses who made fun of each other for everything.

**A few days before my second ever date with S, I came down with something nasty, and I remember lying in bed mainlining Zicam. I was still kinda sick on the night of our actual date, but I powered through it. I was still just some guy to her at that point, and I was worried that if we had to reschedule it might not happen at all. The next week she got sick, and I played dumb. What? It all worked out in the end.

One thing I do enjoy (for lack of a better word) while I'm sick is a good cough drop. But they go in a different category. I don't think they are actually fighting my sickness. They probably aren't even suppressing my cough. I frequently have to cough while sucking on a cough drop. They just make my throat feel a little bit better for a little while, and there's value in that. I don't believe in a cure for a cold, but I do believe in comfort for a cold. And the beauty of comfort is that you know for sure that it works. It's like this Facebook debate I once wondered into about whether or not dental floss "works." Somebody was saying that there is no evidence that flossing and brushing is any better for your oral health than just brushing alone and that flossing was probably pointless. So, I posted something to the effect of Sometimes I get food stuck in my teeth, and it's annoying, so I floss and get it out, and then it's no longer annoying, so, yeah, flossing definitely works.

Remembering that story reminded me of when social media was actually pretty fun -- like, when it was mostly just bullshitting with your friends and looking at pictures of your nephews. My semi-hot take is that early Facebook was actually pretty close to Mark Zuckerberg's stated goal of bringing people together in a positive way. I really did connect and reconnect with a lot of people -- people I like -- through Facebook, and I used to actually enjoy scrolling through my feed. It felt like a productive use of my time -- or at least it didn't feel like a small part of my soul was exiting my body with every new post I read, like it did toward the end, before I quit for good. There is no better example of enshittification than Facebook in the 2010s.

Alright, it's 10:30 pm, and I still have a mountain of dishes in the sink to attend to. That's all for tonight.

Until next time...

Entry 739: Thanksgiving 2024

Thanksgiving weekend 2024.

I like Thanksgiving quite a bit, although I feel it’s become a prime example of the so-underrated-it's-overrated phenomenon. This is a concept derived in sports in which the general public collectively recognizes the value of a previously overlooked player all at once, and everybody starts talking about how underrated they are, thus, ironically, overrating them in the process. Ben Wallace for the 2000s Pistons is the guy I always think of whenever the topic of so-underrated-it's-overrated comes up. But when it comes to holidays it's Thanksgiving. I feel like I've been hearing recently about how great Thanksgiving is, and how actually it's better than Christmas. But that's a bridge too far me. If Thanksgiving is Ben Wallace, then Christmas is Shaq. Yeah, Thanksgiving is terrific, and on any given year you might have a better Thanksgiving than Christmas, but overall Christmas is the clearly superior holiday, in my opinion.

This particular Thanksgiving was pretty good. It's nice when you have the ultimate thing to give thanks for -- a family you love. I take that for granted so often, and so it is nice to have one day of the year when I am meant to explicitly acknowledge it. It's not just my household family either; it's all my UP family and my in-laws as well. The joke is always that it's hard to get along with family during the holidays, because of the figurative "racist uncle," but he doesn't really exist in my family. We're all mostly aligned in that regard. We have our differences, of course, but they're relatively minor. They often get blown out of proportion, and we fight about them, because that's what people do, but ultimately it's petty stuff that only seems important in the moment because it involves us personally -- the narcissism of small difference, I believe is the saying.

It helps a lot that nobody in my family is hard-core MAGA. That would be tough for me to deal with. I'm not talking about somebody who reluctantly voted for Trump because they are fed up with the Democrats -- I can understand that, even though I don't at all subscribed to it -- I'm talking about people who wear the red hats and go to the rallies and use terms like "cuck" and "libtard" unironically. I can get along with just about anybody, regardless of their politics, but MAGA cultists are where that "just about" comes into play. Ideological extremists are tough hangs for me in general.

It was just five of us this year for Thanksgiving dinner -- me, S, the boys, and S's sister. Lil' S1 and I did all the cooking. I did the turkey, potatoes, and stuffing; he did homemade bread rolls, slow-cooker mac and cheese, and a pumpkin pie. S's sister brought a cranberry, walnut salad, and that rounded out a delicious Thanksgiving meal. Lil' S1 is getting quite good at cooking -- baking in particular. My dad gave him this recipe for bread rolls, and he made them completely by himself. He also did some chocolate chip cookies -- the big fancy kind, not just the little simple ones from a tube -- the next day to take to our friends house that were absolutely delectable. My items came out decently as well. The only thing is that I wish I bought more gravy. I got enough for dinner, but not enough for leftovers, and Thanksgiving leftovers just aren't Thanksgiving leftovers without gravy. I mean, I can pick some up at the grocery store easily enough, but then I actually have to go to the grocery store. Why didn't I just buy like five packets in the first place, just in case? They're only a dollar each, and they keep for a long time. I don't know what I was thinking there.

We watched Christmas Vacation Thanksgiving evening to stay in the holiday spirit. It was my choice but, I must admit, not a very good one. The kids weren't that into it, and neither was I, honestly. About 20 minutes into it, I thought to myself, Oh yeah, that's right, this move isn't actually very funny. The best part is seeing young Juliette Lewis and Johnny Galecki.

The next day we went over to our friends' place, as they do Thanksgiving dinner on Friday, and it was so chaotic it was like a scene out of Christmas Vacation. Actually, it was more like Curb Your Enthusiasm, because our friend's dad was there, and he reminds me of Larry's dad on that show. I spent most my time watching football with him, and he was regaling me with factually suspect stories about Tobin Rote and Bobby Layne, and he kept calling one of the teams we were watching the Oakland Raiders, even though they moved to Las Vegas five years ago. Then there was this little four-year-old there, who was the most hyper kid I've ever seen, and I'm not that far removed from having super hyper kids myself, so I'm definitely not overly impressionable to such a thing. Also, our friends don't have much counter space, and they cooked a huge (delicious) meal, so there was food strewn everywhere about the house -- green bean casserole on a newel post, corn souffle on a book shelf, pumpkin pie on an end table. It was madness, but it was also quite fun.

On Saturday, S's sister took the kids to Wicked, and S and I went shopping in Georgetown. That's not typically an activity I would enjoy, but I actually liked it. It was really cold and crowded, and there was something comforting about seeing everybody bundled up, bouncing around from shop to shop.  It reminded me of going to the Tacoma Mall around Christmas time as a youngster. The Borders Books, in particular, was the place to hang. My friends and I would spend hours there (only half of which was spent looking for parking) contemplating which books and CDs to ask for for Christmas. I've written about the decline of the retails store numerous times on this blog, so it's nice to see they aren't totally dead... yet.

Aright, that's about all I have time for today, so I'll leave you with a YouTube link. Seemingly every holiday season I binge watch something on YouTube. A few years ago it was Ryan George movie pitch videos. This year, it's been The Ricky Gervais Show. I've seen them all before, but it was so long ago, it's like I'm watching them fresh. Also, for a little twist, I watch them as part of a reaction video. There's really no reason for that other than it's just more fun to watch something funny with other people who laughing. The episodes are all brilliant, but this one might be the best.

Until next time...