This weekend really got away from me. S and I got into a fight early Friday evening, and it threw off my entire routine. We reconciled--it's totally good now--but I was never able to catch up schedule-wise. That's an underrated negative of fighting: the time it takes. As a result, I don't have much time for blogging. I'm going to have to rip through some bullet points and call it a post.
- Both kids now take the bus to school, and it's weird to not have to drive anybody anywhere in the morning. I don't even really have to get anybody ready anymore. Lil' S1 has to leave quite early--like around 7:10 am--so I try to get out of bed by 6:45 am, just to make sure he has everything he needs and see him off, but there's really no reason to do that (other than to not feel like--nor look like--a slacker parent). He gets up and gets ready and gets out the door completely on his own. I just stand there, coffee in hand, and say, "You good?" And he says "yeah, dad," in that eye-rolling, I'm-not-a-baby-anymore tween kind of way and leaves.
- One thing we've been trying to do with the kids is get them into school-based activities. There are so many clubs and sports to try and neither of them really want to do anything. Actually, Suren did want to play tackle football, but it's at a different school that he would have to take the city bus to by himself, and it seemed liked too much in his first semester in middle school, so I wouldn't let him do it. (S deferred to me on this one--a rarity.) To be honest, I don't love the idea of him playing tackle football (especially not after reading Chuck Klosterman's new, really good, really weird book Football). I think I'll probably let him do it, ultimately, but I'm fine delaying it by at least a year. He doesn't need to be getting destroyed by 14-year-old 8th-graders with pube staches.
- I've become kinda obsessed with Kirkland brand lids. We shop at Costco, so we get a lot of Kirkland items, and they frequently have those "sealed for freshness" glue-on lids, and they are always terrible. The adhesive is so much stronger than the integrity of the lid that you can't actually take the lid off the way it is meant to be taken off. You have to pull super hard, and when you do almost always the lid splits wide upon in the middle with the edges still glued down tightly, or the little tab rips clean off. I'm about 30% in opening Kirkland milk correctly--I usually have to cut the seal off with a knife--and I've literally never done it with their peanut butter. The thing is, it's not just Kirkland, it's a lot of brands. I don't know how big lid keeps getting away with this. One of my plans for after retirement is to start a YouTube channel called "Grids & Lids," in which I film myself doing Immaculate Grid and trying to remove terrible lids.
- We are watching Malcolm in the Middle as a family, and I'm growing to despise this show. It's fine in limited doses, but it's terrible to watch on a nightly basis. The characters are cartoonishly mean to one another, which gets old fast, and the storyline of the oldest son is simultaneously irritating and boring. We're not even halfway through the series (there are seven seasons! with like 25 episode in each one!), and I don't think I can make it. I keep trying to get everybody to switch to a new show, but Lil' S1, and to a lesser degree Lil' S2, is adamant that it's good and we keep watching it. I want to spend time with my family--I mean, the fact that our sons hang out with us at all is something to tightly hold onto--but I just can't hang with another five months of Lois screaming and Francis scrubbing.
- I was listening to a podcast the other day on free will and the uncertainty of the future, and my big takeaway is that the "free will is an illusion" position is a very weird one to hold. I don't mean it's weird in the sense that the subject is weird (although it clearly is). I mean it's weird that smart people, some scientists even, earnestly believe this to be the case and try to convince others of it. To be clear, I've seen any good proof on free will one or the other, but if I had to pick, I would plant my flag on the "free will exists" side. The way I see it, the closest thing we have to evidence on the matter is our own experience, and our own experience clearly points to free will. I'm choosing to type this, after all.
Could this choice be an illusion? Sure, the same why we could be in the Matrix or a simulation or Tommy Westphall's snow globe, but I think it's weird to believe those things as well. It's also possible that everything was predetermined at the Big Bang, and we think what we think simply because the atoms in our head are aligned in a certain way, and they couldn't be aligned any other way, just like dust in outer space couldn't be aligned any other way then how it is at this exact moment. It's just where the immutable physical laws of the cosmos put things. But my retort to that is: Why can we think then? Why aren't we moving through the universe completely unaware of our existence the same way space dust (seemingly) is. Consciousness is a very high hurdle for the free will illusionist to overcome, in my opinion, as if we have something as unexplainable as consciousness (and we do--I am very sure of that), then we can have free will too. So, I believe in free will. After all, what choice do I have?*
*Not my line--I heard somebody else say it--but I love it. - Lastly, RIP to my parents' close friend MB, who died today. It was no surprise--she had had health problems for years, and her family told her friends that this was probably happening very soon--but it's still sad. I hadn't seen her in decades, but I have fond memories of going over to her and her family's house as a kid. They lived on a decent sized plot of land surrounded by apple trees, and they would have an annual apple harvest party. Everybody would come over and pick apples to be pressed and come home with gallons of apple cider. I used to just run around there with all the other kids doing whatever it was we did after we got bored picking apples. I honestly don't remember--football? hide and seek? capture the flag? Not sure. But I am sure I had fun.
Until next time...
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