Entry 234: It's Not a Tumor

The ol' trick back is acting up again.  It happens.  I think it's one of those things I'm just going to have to manage for the rest of my life.  I don't think it's ever going to be "better".  I've been to the doctor probably, I dunno, six or seven times total over the last 20 years about it and nobody can do anything for me.  Or I should say, nobody can do anything for me to fix it permanently; they give me tips and activities (and sometimes drugs) for making it bearable, but never a cure.  I started doing DDP Yoga which has helped a lot, and it's been feeling pretty good lately except for one spot.  I have a charley horse-feeling in the lower right part of my back that has been nagging me for over a month.  To make matters worse, every now and again I'll contort the right wrong way, and a sharp pain will emanate from that spot and just shoot up my spine.  It sucks.

[Sitting all day (at a desk, not a piano) is probably a big part of the problem.]

I finally broke down and went to the doctor again, even though I was pretty sure it would be the same old routine.  What made me go was this story on This American Life in which a guy mentioned that his dad had what he thought was a pinched nerve, but it turned out to be cancer.  Then I thought about that movie 50-50, and then I started thinking about what would happen to Lil' S if I died young, and then I decided to get it checked out.  Joseph Gordon-Levitt and my son persuaded me to see a doctor.

And I'm glad they did.  It's very likely not cancer, which is good.  The doctor thought I might have a kidney stone, but my pee said otherwise.  It's probably the same thing it's always been -- a bad back.  It just happens to be manifesting itself right now in a more painful and localized way than usual.  But the reason I'm glad I went is because the doctor gave me some anti-inflammatories that have been helping with the discomfort.  Also, I found this new clinic that's not too much of an inconvenience.  It's just a normal hassle instead of a super-hassle.  I can handle a normal hassle.

The doctor also gave me some muscle relaxers, but I haven't taken any yet and probably won't.  I'm not that into numbing pain meds.  Either they don't really work (I once drove all the way to South Carolina from DC after taking two muscle relaxers) or they make me nauseous.  Unless the pain is excruciating I usually just toss them.  If I ever become a drug addict, it's not going be from popping pills.*

[This is one of those scenes where my recollection of it is different than what actually goes down.  In my head he says "It's not a toomah!" once very emphatically.  In the scene, he says it twice not too emphatically and adds "at all" at the end.  Here's a kinda interesting link about misquoted movie lines.  This line isn't misquoted, but it's said differently than how I remember it.]

In other news, this article on why people with kids go M.I.A. has been making the rounds on Facebook.  Usually I'm not big on the whole "people without kids can't possibly understand" mindset that some parents get into, but I thought this particular article really hit the nail on the head.  There were two points in particular that I didn't fully appreciate until I became a parent: 1) The kid's schedule is more important than one would think, 2) "Just bring the kids" is an option. But it is one that sucks.  On the latter point, a wise man once said, "I realized the real reason parents with toddlers don't go anywhere except to specifically kid-oriented establishments.  It's not fun."  And that wise man was me, five weeks ago in this blog entry.  Maybe I should write for HuffPo.

Reading this also made me realize that you can really help yourself when it comes to having kids by being smart about when you have them.  If you value things like free time, sleep, and less stress you should, if possible, wait until you have a committed partner and a steady income before you start riding bareback.  I don't think these things make you a better parent or make your child develop in a superior manner or anything like that.  It just makes things easier on you.  For instance, S and I outsource a lot of our chores -- we pay to have our house cleaned top to bottom once a month, and twice a year we have landscapers come out to do yard maintenance.  These are huge time savers that I couldn't justify spending money on if, say, I was still a student.  Also, since S and I live in the same house and are both around at night, we can take turns going out after he goes to sleep if there is a social event (assuming we have the energy).  If it's a friend's birthday or something special like that, we usually try to arrange it so that one of us can go.  And very rarely we will get a sitter.  I can only think of two times we've had a non-family member watch him so that we could got out.

There is, however, an obvious downside to having kids late -- you're that much older than you would be otherwise.  The older you have children the fewer number of years you have to spend with them and with their potential offspring.  That's just a fact -- a slightly morbid fact, but a fact nonetheless.  And the years are less likely to be "prime" years.  If everybody has a kid at 25, you're a grandparent by 50.  If you push this back to 35, it's 70.  My energy level has dropped substantially from 25 to 35, and I imagine it will be even worse from 50 to 70.  So, you know, it's all about tradeoffs.  

OK, that's all I got ... Oh wait, I'll give you all a quick update on how things are going with me, my mother in-law, and the little guy.  Well.  They're going well.  S gets back on Monday.  I'm interested to see how Lil' S responds to seeing her in person again.  If it's anything less than total rapture followed by him running into her open arms while screaming "amma!", she's going to be disappointed ... so she's probably going to be disappointed.  I don't think he's forgotten her or anything think that, but kids this young do have out-of-sight-out-of-mind mentalities.  My guess is that he's going to need a little warm-up period before he completely embraces her like he did before she left.  But, I could be wrong.  Like I said, it will interesting.  

Until next time...

*Speaking of which, this The New Yorker article about a clinic in Kansas that essentially became an unchecked drug dispensary is interesting if you've 20 minutes to kill.

Entry 233: Privilege (And Does Newt Gingrich Read My Blog?)

You might recall in my last entry I suggested that the best model for the ownership of sports franchises is for them to be owned by the municipalities in which they play.  That way we wouldn't have this conflicting arrangement of a public good owned by a private entity that we have now.  Well, guess who agrees with me?  None other than The Salamander himself, Mr. Newt Gingrich.

It's an unexpected position from Newt, although maybe not; he was the guy who called out Mitt Romney during the Republican primary with quotes like

"Now you have to ask a question - is that really, is capitalism really about the ability of a handful of rich people to manipulate the lives of thousands of other people and walk off with the money? Or is that in fact somehow a little bit of a flawed system? And so I do draw distinction between looting a company, leaving behind broken families and broken neighborhoods and then leaving a factory that should be there."

that sound more like things Ralph Nader would say than Newt Gingrich.  I think Newt fancies himself some sort of anti-establishment free-thinker, ready to liberate us all with his sterling, unique intellect.  And so he relishes grandiose pronouncements that will grab people's attention.  That would be fine if he was actually a smart guy with good ideas.  But I've seen him debate.  He's not.

Anyway ...

So both the in-laws are in town now.  It's nice.  I still have to do the bulk of work with Lil' S, but it's easier as he gets more familiar with his Ava and Thaatha.  He lets his Ava give him baths now, which is huge.  The only thing is that I'm trying to teach him "no" and grandparents aren't the best at that.  I'm worried he's getting spoiled.  Apparently he's been having some behavioral problems at daycare -- taking toys away from other kids and throwing a fit when he doesn't get exactly what he wants.  We've definitely noticed the latter at home.  If you take away the lotion he's eating, he starts screaming; if you don't give him the cracker he wants, he starts screaming; if you don't carry him when he says "up", he starts screaming; if you try to interrupt his play to change his diaper, he starts screaming; if you zip up his jacket too high, he's start screaming.  Any little thing that doesn't go his way causes him to scream.  If it's just me I'm fine letting him scream, but the more adults around, the harder this is to do (he only needs one to give him what he wants, and he's already learning how to work it).  Also, if I'm trying to get him to daycare because I need to be at a work meeting or something like that, I'm probably going to cave and just do whatever I need to do to placate him.  Sometimes you don't have time to make a stand.

What he really needs is a little sibling to take away some of the attention.  But until that happens, when S gets back we're going to have to come up with some sort of game plan to deal with his tantrums.  I know he's still basically a baby and that's what babies do, but at least we can start planting seeds that bratty behavior is unacceptable.  I really don't want Lil' S to become one of those annoying, spoiled little kids who feels entitled to things just because.  In general, I think the "Participation Trophy Generation" thing is way overblown.  A lot of it, in my opinion, is just old people acting like things were better and harder in their day (i.e., old people acting like old people).  But that doesn't preclude me from wanting to teach my kid work ethic and gratitude.

On a similar note, I came across this article about the notion of "checking your privilege".  It ran in Time, and it's been making the rounds on social media.  If you don't want to read it, I'll give you the gist: It's a fired-up, white, male, 20-year-old Princeton student writing about how's he's fed up with people suggesting he's privileged.  He's not going to apologize for it (who asked him to do so is unclear) because his grandfather was a Jew who endured serious hardship in escaping from the Nazis.  If my recap seems incongruous, it's because so was his article.  Time must really be struggling if they are willing to run such a terribly reasoned polemic just for the sake of getting clicks (any story that stands up for white people against the slightest hints of racism is guaranteed to get passed around by satisfied conservatives and outraged liberals).  The article has no logical flow.  Here is the best takedown of it I've read.  But I have my own analogy; it fits in with my grand view on privilege and life in general.

Basically, we're all in a giant poker game.  We all start out with a different number of chips (chips aren't just money in this metaphor, but any advantage you were born into), and we are all at a different skill level, and this skill level changes -- some people work hard and get better, some people don't and get worse.  As the game progresses, on average, the good players do well, the so-so players do so-so, and the bad players do poorly.  But it's not quite that simple.  Because the chips were unevenly dispersed in the beginning, some mediocre players will always be ahead of some really good players and some bad players will be always be ahead of some mediocre players just because they started out so far ahead.  And it gets even more unfair.  There is an element of total randomness -- the luck of the draw.  You could be the world's greatest poker player and start with a huge mound of chips and lose just because the cards didn't go your way.  It's not very likely, but it's possible.  Conversely, you can succeed just through dumb luck.  But that's not very likely either.  The vast majority of us end up where one would expect, probabilistically, given our starting stack and our skill level.  But there are always outliers -- far extremes in either direction and everything in between.  And that's life.

The kid who wrote the terrible article for Time seems like a pretty good "life player" (logic isn't his strong suit, but he got into Princeton so he must have something going for him).  He also -- just by virtue of being white and male in a society that (at the very least) still has residues of racism and patriarchalism -- started with more chips than, say, a black female, all other things equal.  That's just a fact.  And now when people point this out to him, he's saying, "Yeah, well, my grandfather survived the Nazis, and he passed a bunch of chips down to me."  Great.  Irrelevant, but great. This kid still started with more chips than most people of color and women in no small part because he's white and male.  That's really all the Privilege Police is saying.  I don't really get what the issue is.

This is yet another reason why I could never be a conservative.  I just don't understand why it's so difficult for conservative white men to say "Yeah, I had and will continue to have advantages in life because of my skin color and sex."*  Conservatives always want to be the victims -- the war on Christianity, the assault on traditional marriage, redistribution, reverse racism, class warfare, the liberal media, etc., etc. -- even though, by and large, they're old, rich, white, American men -- one of the least victimized group in the history of modern civilization.**  It's a very weird pathology; one that I cannot comprehend.  Many conservative mindsets I disagree with, but I understand.  This is one I can't even understand.

Well, I'm not going to try to figure it out tonight.  It's late, and there is still a crossword puzzle I want to do.

Until next time ...

*I can think of a number of instances in which I've likely been given the benefit of the doubt because I was white.  Once I was with some people who went on a vandalism tear.  I was just a spectator, but I was there.  The cops caught us, but they let me go with little hassle.  Actually we all got off relatively easy.  If the circumstances were the exact same, but we looked like NWA circa 1987, are things so easy for us?  I seriously doubt it.

**Even Ann Romney on the campaign trail tried to claim she and Mitt were once poor because their dining table was an old door (an old door, I tell ya!), omitting the fact that Mitt's father George was an incredibly wealthy GM exec and former governor of Michigan.  There might have been a time when Mitt and Ann didn't have a ton of spending cash, but how far were they really going to fall with the Romney safety net under them?

Entry 232: Did You Know there's a Second Verse to "Jack and Jill"

Did you know "Jack and Jill" has a second verse?  I had no idea.  We got a book of nursery rhymes for Lil' S from the library, and "Jack & Jill" is one of them.  It goes:

Jack and Jill went up the hill,
To fetch a pail of water;
Jack fell down and broke his crown,
And Jill came tumbling after.

That part I knew, and I thought that was it.  But there's more.

Jack got up, and home did trot,
As fast as he could caper;
To old Dame Dob who patched his nob,
With vinegar and brown paper.

Why is this last part usually omitted?  It's terrific.  Old Dame Dob?  His nob?  Vinegar and brown paper?  Genius.

[I want it to be known that I was done with Adam Sandler in like 1999, WAY before it was cool.]

Anyway ...

The "experiment" I mentioned in my last entry in which S goes to Africa for work for three weeks and leaves Lil' S with her mom and I is not off to great start.  It's manageable, but it's hard.  He's much moodier than usual; he's constantly throwing tantrums over nothing; and he's waking up in the middle of the night inconsolably crying for his "amma".  It sucks.  I feel for him, but I'm much more a "cry it out" type of person than S's mom.  She can't really stomach that.  So what happens is she wants to get him, but he's still not completely comfortable with her, so he cries more, and then I have to get him, not only to placate him but to placate her, as well.  The flip side is that she gets him in the morning when he wakes up so I can sleep in -- by which I mean I can wake up at 7:30 instead of 6:00.  Overall, I'm very grateful that S's mom is here; she's been a HUGE help.

In other news, a bird built a nest on our hanging porch light.  It was absurd.  She (I'm assuming this bird is a female.  Do males build nests?) couldn't have picked a worse place to build -- right in front of our main door -- and she must have put that sucker up fast.  Yesterday morning the nest was just there -- seemingly appearing from thin air.  Thankfully, she hadn't laid eggs, so, according to the internet, I could destroy it legally and with a clear conscience -- which I did.  (She came back and was looking around like WTF?)  But then she built another one!  I looked out my window late last night and three-fourths of a new one was there.  So I had to destroy that as well.  And since it was night and nests skeeve me out, in general, I kept having visions of this bird flying out of the darkness and attacking me.  Luckily that didn't happen.  The internet told me to hang something shiny at the nesting site to keep the bird from coming back yet again.  So I tied an old CD to the light fixture -- so far so good!  It's a bit like the scene from the Simpson's below, but whatever.

Homer: Not a bear in sight.  The Bear Patrol must be working like a charm. 
Lisa: That's spacious reasoning, Dad.
Homer: Thank you, dear.
Lisa: By your logic I could claim that this rock keeps tigers away.
Homer: Oh, how does it work?
Lisa: It doesn't work.
Homer: Uh-huh.
Lisa: It's just a stupid rock.
Homer: Uh-huh.
Lisa: But I don't see any tigers around, do you?
[Homer thinks of this, then pulls out some money.]
Homer: Lisa, I want to buy your rock.
    

In other other news: racism!  Wow, there's been a lot of it in the news recently, hasn't there?  First was Cliven Bundy that insane "libertarian" rancher who thinks that using the federal government's resources and not paying for them is "patriotic".  (This is actually a reasonable interpretation of the word patriotic when you consider he also thinks it's patriotic to not recognize the federal government of the United States ... the very country of which he's claiming to be a patriot.  At least the first interpretation of patriotism isn't an inherent self-contradiction.)  Ol' Cliven was a rallying point for Rand Paul conservatives because they don't really believe in the federal government either (they'd prefer we be governed by the invisible hand of capitalism -- because, if the last ten years have taught us anything, it's that the free market is pretty much infallible).  But everybody has had to back away from him now because in an interview he mused that black people -- or "the Negro", as he calls them -- were perhaps better off as slaves.  He also said, “They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton."  Well, okay, then.

The best response to the this whole foofaraw was by Jonathan Chait who in this article avers that it's no surprise that Bundy turns out to be a gigantic racist because “America’s unique brand of ideological anti-statism is historically inseparable … from the legacy of slavery.”  To further Chait's point, I'm no expert on this type of history, but wasn't the Emancipation Proclamation the ultimate act of Big Government?  Anyway, the last paragraph in the article -- with the last line being a reference to an Onion article -- is brilliant.

Amazingly, Cliven Bundy was eclipsed in the racism department earlier this week; he has the Notorious B.I.G.O.T., Donald Sterling, to "thank" for that.  I'm sure you know the story (how could you not?) so I won't rehash it.  But I will direct you to this article by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar who nails it like he nailed those two foul shots in Game 6 of the 1988 NBA Finals.  I'm totally with Kareem on this one.  I'm glad Donald Sterling was banned and is being compelled to sell the Clippers.  (Seattle SuperSonics 2.0?  One can dream.)  But I find the fact that it is what he said and not what he did that ultimately ruined him to be very disconcerting.  Why is Sterling saying racist things to his girlfriend in a private (so he thought) conversation worthy of a lifetime ban, but systematically discriminating against minorities -- as he has a long documented history of doing -- isn't?  One creates hurt feelings and embarrassment, the other, prevents black people from having access to the same housing opportunities as white people (among other injustices).  Which is worse?

It's something that Ralph Nader observed many years ago: The collective outrage we exhibit over what people say compared to what they do is way, way, way out of whack.  If Politician A votes repeatedly in favor of legislation that hurts a certain group of people, but doesn't talk about it, the outcry is a murmur at best (even from that group).  If Politician B votes against this legislation, but is caught on TMZ using a slur against this group, he or she is ruined.  It's very weird to me.

Something else on the Sterling fiasco that I haven't heard anybody else broach: It's another example of why private ownership of a public good can be extremely problematic.  Sports teams are quasi-public goods.  They're public goods when it behooves the powers-that-be for them to be so, like, say, when they want the taxpayer to foot the bill for a new stadium, or when they want to market their product ("now batting for your Washington Nationals...")  But when it comes time to collect the money, they're strictly private.  So you have this asymmetrical situation where basically one person (almost always an old white dude) almost completely controls this irreplaceable thing that is meant to be enjoyed by the entire community.  It works out OK if that one person is a good steward of this public good (say, Mark Cuban, from what I can tell).  It doesn't work out so well if this one person is a racist sleaze bag who bought a basketball team because it's the closest thing he can get to a slave plantation in modern society.*

[Donald Sterling]

The way things would be if I was in charge is that the municipalities in which the teams play would own them.  That way a public good would actually be public.  But I'm not in charge.  And this will never happen for the same reason many good ideas will never happen: rich and powerful people make money off them not happening.  Joan Kroc, Ray Kroc's widow, tried to donate the Padres to the city of San Diego after her husband died, and Major League Baseball forbade it.  Rudy Giuliani once described the notion of a publicly-owned franchise as "a great idea for Communist Cuba".** (Meanwhile he's a staunch advocate of taxpayer-funded stadiums; that is, public investment for private profit.  What's that analogous to?  Some corrupt banana republic?)  So sports teams are going to stay privately run, and fans like me will continue to be conflicted about investing so much time into such an one-sided relationship.  

Being an ardent sports fan is like dating a selfish, manipulative narcissist who's dynamite between the sheets.  You get ignored and embarrassed a lot, and you constantly feel like a huge chump.  But every so often you get your world rocked like you wouldn't believe (Seahawks!  Super Bowl champs!), and you think to yourself, "Totally worth it."     

Until next time... 

*Yes, NBA players are freemen who are extremely well compensated -- hardly comparable to slaves in this regard.  But that doesn't change the fact that Donald Sterling apparently got off on imaging himself as the white overseer of a group of physically powerful young black men.  (It's as creepy as it sounds.)  His girlfriend being part black fits perfectly into this twisted fantasy.

**I can't source this quote online, and I'm not even sure it was Giuliani who said it, so I could be way off the mark.  If I am, Rudy, feel free to sue me for libel.

Entry 231: Wife, Baby, and Me Minus Wife Plus Mother In-Law Makes Three

S is going to Africa for work for three weeks.  It's the first "long" trip she's had since the little guy was born.  She did go away another time, about a year ago, but the trip was shorter.  And for that trip, we sent Lil' S to South Carolina to stay with his grandparents.  We're not doing that this time for a variety of reasons.  First, there's the purely logistical issue of getting him to South Carolina; second, I don't want to be away from him for three weeks; third, he's not a baby anymore, but he's also not yet a "little boy".  He's at that tweener age where he's physically able to get himself into precarious positions, and he lacks the necessary sense to prevent himself from doing so (I think this phase will end right around 25).  And there is absolutely no reasoning with him.  He doesn't even get little kid logic yet.  We can't threaten to take his toys away or put him timeout or anything like that.  He's still too young for all this.  

As a result, taking care of him can be physically exhausting, and as much as I love my in-laws, physical strength is not their collective strong suit.  Now, I'm sure they could make do; they probably have that weird grandparent strength that's not really strength, but rather technique and experience that comes from raising two kids for 20 years.  (They're like the crafty basketball veterans who can no longer jump and are the slowest people on the court, yet still manage a nightly double-double from pure guile -- think Charles Barkley with the Rockets.)  But still it makes me a bit nervous; I'd rather be around to keep up with him and keep a close eye on him.

So, the little man couldn't go to his Ava, but she could come here -- which is exactly what she did on Wednesday.  My mother in-law is here and going to stay with us while S is away; my father in-law will join us for the last week.  We're currently still in the "warm-up stage" that occurs anytime a toddler meets a "new" adult -- he's a little standoffish -- but I think things will be cool in a few days.  It's simultaneously funny and sad how unintentionally cruel little kids are.  All his Ava wants -- the singular most important thing in her life right now -- is to win her grandson's affection, and he does nothing but dis her at every turn.  For instance, I put him on the sofa between us and started reading him a book, slowly trying to transition to his Ava reading it to him, and as soon the book got near her lap, he would rip it away, scream, "NO!", and put it on my lap.  Or she would hold out a toy for him, and he'd run over, take it from her, and then run away -- like I said, funny and sad.

I remember one of my nephews treated my mom like this for a while.  I guess it's just part of being around kids that age.  It's (obviously) nothing personal, but I image it still hurts a bit.  It wouldn't hurt me, but as my wife is fond of saying, I'm part robot.  The thing is, Lil' S used to spend a lot of time with his Ava -- she was out here for the first six months of his life -- so I think somewhere in the recesses of his brain he remembers her.  I can already see hims starting to get comfortable.  By next week, I bet everything will be completely cool.

In other news, I've started doing yoga.  I've been at it a couple months now.  I used to make fun of people (especially men) who did yoga because it always seemed like a wuss workout -- it was for people who couldn't handle real exercise like running and weight lifting.  But I was having a lot of problems with my back (an old issue), and I was having trouble finding the time to go to the gym and the weather was terrible, so I was looking for something I could do at home, and I heard former WWE wrestler "Diamond" Dallas Page hocking his "DDP Yoga".  It supposedly helped all these old wrestlers who whose bodies had been ravaged by years of mistreatment (apparently being hit repeatedly by a folding his not good for you), and it worked Arthur.  So I bought the videos, and gave it a shot.

It's been awesome so far.  My back feels a lot better now (still not 100%), and I can actually get a legit workout in my basement, which is pretty sweet.  The thing is, it's almost false advertising to call it yoga.  It incorporates some of the "traditional" yoga positions (e.g., down dog), but a lot of it is isometrics and calisthenics.  Although, I guess it's fair to call it yoga because that word has already been so bastardized that it's fair game to call just about any exercise in which you use a mat yoga.  Real yoga is a physical and spiritual practice founded in ancient India and mostly associated with Hinduism (when I told my mother in-law I was doing yoga she perked up for a moment before I told her it was fake yoga).  Devotees are called yogis, and they ply their discipline to try to achieve some sort of divine freedom called moksha.  It's a far cry from getting decked out in Lululemon gear and going to a studio to do a bunch of stretches led by a white woman from Takoma Park.  

Not that there's anything wrong with this.  But we should call it something different, otherwise it's misleading (and perhaps a bit insulting).  From now on, I'm not going to call what I do yoga -- I'm going to call it "fake yoga". Or how about just "exercise"?  Saying "I do yoga" is like saying "I take communion" because I sometimes eat bread and drink wine. 

Alright, that's all I got today. 

Until next time ...

Entry 230: Just the Facts, Ma'am

It's Good Friday.  This doesn't mean much to me, other than my Facebook feed gets inundated with prayers and Bible quotes that I don't fully understand.  I was thinking that being a non-believer and trying to follow religious mumbo jumbo must be similar to not liking sports and being in the company of a bunch of sports fans talking about sports.  You understand the basics and get bits of the terminology here and there, but overall you're not really sure what's going, and you'd just as soon change the subject.

For example, I don't really understand the story of Easter.  I think Jesus died on Good Friday and was resurrected on Sunday.  But I'm not sure exactly why Jesus died.  I've always heard that he "died for our sins".  But what does that mean?  How (Why?) does somebody die for somebody else's sins?  And who exactly killed him?  Were they in on the "die for our sins" deal?  And if Jesus didn't die, what would have happened to us and our sins?  I don't get it.  I'm sure I could find a website that would happily provide me all the answers to these questions.  But the truth it is, I don't really care.  Just like how a non-football fan couldn't less what a cover-3 defense is -- that's how I am with the story of Jesus.



Don't get me wrong, Jesus is just alright with me.  He had some pretty cool messages: take care of the sick and poor, love thy neighbor, and whatnot.  I just don't believe there was ever a man who was also the son of God who physically walked among us on this Earth.  Frankly, I don't know how any grown person can believe it.  I can kinda sorta get on board with religion if it's completely in the abstract.  But once literal interpretation of fantastical scripture is involved, I'm out.  And by the way, isn't it such a shame that Jesus lived 2,000 years ago, before the advent of things like movie cameras and tape recorders?  I mean that whole resurrection thing must have been quite a sight.  If only he had lived in today's age, somebody could have captured it on their cell phone and put it on YouTube.  Then everybody would've been a believer.  Like I said, it's a shame.

Anyway ... I think I need to take a break from Facebook.  I've found myself getting really annoyed with people's posts lately.  For one thing those fad "What ___ are you?" quizzes just need to die.  The thing about a fad is that eventually it goes out of fashion, but that "eventually" somehow hasn't arrived yet with these stupid quizzes.   For another, I have friends who are continually putting up posts that are just getting on my nerves -- some are political, some are medical, some are just completely vapid.  (I won't say anything more than that on the off chance one of them actually reads this blog.)  The thing is, I like all these people, and it's Facebook -- they can say whatever they want.  It's my problem that I'm annoyed.  So I think the solution is to just not look at it for a while.  It's a shame too because I like a lot of the posts I read on Facebook.  I suppose I could fiddle with the settings, but that just seems like more trouble than it's worth.  What I need is a single setting that says "Baby pictures, broad strokes of people's lives, and legitimately funny or interesting comments or links", and then anything that doesn't fit into one of those three categories gets filtered out.

In other news, Lil' S is doing just fine -- getting bigger as kids will do.  He's also been waking up really early recently, which is an unfortunate trend.  Today he woke up a 5:50, about an hour and a half earlier than I'd prefer.  Being that he woke up last night and started wailing right as I began to doze off around 12:30, and it took about twenty minutes to give him milk and calm him down, and then it took me about a half hour to get back to sleep, I'd reckon I got about 4.5 hours in.  Eh ... I'm used to it.  That's the thing about parenting: You get used to it, just like anything else.  When I wasn't a parent I used to be very suspicious of people who acted as if parenting was the most difficult undertaking in human history (so difficult only a billion people can do it!), but I didn't really have any grounds to stand on.  Now that I am a parent I can say -- it's not that hard.  It's not easy, but it's not the most difficult undertaking in human history.  I'm not a stay at home dad, but I'd rather be one than be, say, a lackey on a construction site like I was one summer in college.

Along these lines, I came across this video (on Facebook of course) and shook my head in annoyance.  For one thing, I saw the reveal coming three seconds in.  For another, I would be pissed if I sat down to do a job interview and got a righteous "lesson" on the difficulties of motherhood instead.  In general, it's pretty mean to interview (presumably) unemployed people for a job that doesn't exist.  If you're going to do it, the payoff had better be much better than this drivel.

So ... I noticed my trash bin somehow got swapped with my neighbors'.  All the bins have numbers, and I wrote down ours when we first got it.  Now I see the one with our number is in my neighbors' yard, and we have one with a different number.  I don't really care -- they're all the same.  But I wonder if we took theirs or they took ours, and if they notice/care.  I'm debating whether or not I should talk to them about it or just let it ride.  I think I'm going with the latter.  No harm, no foul.  (Know harm, know foul.)

Before I go, a few bits of good news to share.  The first is that I got another crossword puzzle accepted by the NY Times -- that's two on the docket.  The second is that I got fully reimbursed for all that work I had done on my hand (all to find out I possibly have arthritis that I will need to manage the rest of my life).  Apparently my work contributes to something called an HSA (health savings account), which is basically a cash account you can use on medical expenses.  I had roughly $2,000 in it, and I racked up a total bill of about $1,400 in copays and deductibles, so I scheduled a reimbursement check, and it came -- just like that.  I couldn't believe how easy it was.  It's kinda sad that I get so excited when things actually work as they should ... but here we are.

I felt stupid at first for not knowing how my HSA works earlier, as I could have used it on medication and a dental copay (relatively small amounts).  But then I thought, how should I have know about it?  It's not like managing HSAs is an innate human skill or I took a class on HSAs in college or anything.  Yes, at some point I'm sure I received paperwork on it.  But I don't always read that stuff, and when I do, it usually doesn't stick.  The truth of the matter is that we're so inundated with contracts and legalities in modern society that it is basically impossible to keep up with it all without a law degree (and I suspect even if you have one).  Just to buy a house alone S and I had to sign close to thirty documents.  There is no way for the average person to retain what it all means.  Toss is credit cards, car payments, health insurance, college saving accounts, etc., and there is no way for the average person to keep up with all of it.  Hell, you need to "sign" a several hundred word agreement just to buy a $1.99 song from iTunes.  It's ridiculous, and it's why I'm not going to feel stupid or beat myself for not knowing about something like an HSA right away.  And, damn it, you shouldn't either!

Alright, that'll do 'er.  Until next time...

Entry 229: House Cleaning

Alright, it's time for a little house cleaning.  I'm referring of course to my "Blog Topics List".  As I've mentioned before, I keep a list on my phone of topics that I might want to discuss on this site.  Inevitably, when the time comes to actually crank out an entry, I just talk about whatever happens to be on my mind at that particular moment and don't even get to anything on the list.  So it just grows and grows.  Well, no more.  I'm going through my list lightning-round style and hitting some of the topics.  Let's do it.

***
I "love" when movies, especially vapid comedies, use hackneyed plot devices that only ever happen in movies.  One I've noticed recently that is especially "nice" is the "impossible to explain" plot device, where a conflict is created due to a misunderstanding that in reality would have been cleared up in thirty seconds.  For instance, S and I (mainly S, I was just a bystander) were watching the end of some movie with Steve Carell, and in it some guy thinks that Carell's character is having an affair with his underage daughter because he finds a revealing letter written to her from him.  But it wasn't actually written by him, she has a crush on him and wrote it to herself from him without his knowing.  So the dad storms out of the house, drives across town, and starts a fight with Carell's character. His daughter tries to stop him, but of course the situation is just "impossible to explain".  And thus a "hilarious" fight ensues.  Now, in actuality somebody could blurt out "He didn't write it!  I wrote it to myself!" in approximately one second.  Maybe two, but certainly in the amount of time it would take somebody to find their keys, put on their shoes, and get out of the house.

Another example is the entire premise of Maid In Manhattan (again, S had it on).  If it was real life here's how the big reveal would go:

Snooty Woman: She's not classy!  She's the maid!    
Ralph Fiennes: What? You're the maid?
J-Lo: Yeah
Ralph Fiennes: All right ... We can still have sex, right?

OK, maybe he wouldn't say that last part, but he'd be thinking it.

[What? You're a maid?  Ewwww ... Get away from me.]

***
A lot of people complain about chatspeak -- "I mean, the kids today with all their LOL and OMG and BFF, I'd like to see it all DOA, amiright?"  But if you think about it, it's just initials and acronyms, which everybody of all ages use all the time.  Next time I hear somebody complain about chatspeak, I'm going to say, "Yeah, you know what else drives me crazy?  When people say DNA.  What, you don't have time to say deoxyribonucleic acid?  Laser, too.  It's light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation, people.  So lazy."    

***
I know somebody who looks a bit like Lena Dunham.  I was going to tell her this, but then I thought better of it -- what if she doesn't think Lena Dunham is attractive?  Then I thought telling somebody they look like somebody else is a weird thing.  Because if you tell them, and they get offended, you're not really dissing them, they're dissing the person you just compared them to.  Maybe this will be my new thing.  I'm going to go around and tell people they look like unattractive celebrities (I'll tell guys they look like Clint Howard and women they look like Elena Kagan), and then when they get offended, I'll say, "Geez, don't be so such a superficial ass".

   
***
We took Lil' S out to brunch with us the other day, and I realized the real reason parents with toddlers don't go anywhere except to specifically kid-oriented establishments.  It's not fun.

***
I came across this Onion article with the headline, "Find The Thing You're Most Passionate About, Then Do It On Nights And Weekends For The Rest Of Your Life".  It's (obviously) satire, but the thing is, I completely agree with it (maybe that's part of the joke).  There's this idea that the way to true fulfillment is to love your job, and then you can do what you want everyday.  But that's a fool's errand for all but the most fortunate people in this world.  The better strategy for the vast majority of us is to work a job that pays the bills, and then do what we want the rest of the time.  You can work and have hobbies.  As a prolific mathematician whose name I can't remember (Ron Graham?) once said when asked how he was able to get so much done, "What do you mean 'how'? You do know the average person is awake for 16 hours a day, right?"
   
***
Queen's "Another One Bites the Dust" came on my Pandora station the other night.  I tried to skip it, but I was out of skips from skipping so many other songs, so I listened to it.  And I realized something: It's a fucking great song.  Like really, truly great.  The bass is awesome, and Freddie Mercury just shreds it on vocals.  I never really got a chance to appreciate it because it had already been played into the ground by the time I became aware of it as something other than a song they play at sporting events.  The greatness had been overexposed right out of it.  Here are a few other legitimately excellent songs that society has ruined for me:

• "Seven Nation Army", The White Stripes
• "Losing My Religion", REM
• "Smells Like Teen Spirit", Nirvana
• "Bad Romance", Lady Gaga
• Anything off Dave Mathews' Under the Table and Dreaming

Until next time ...

Entry 228: Mr. Mom and the Rest of the 1980s

There are certain aspects of society in the '80s -- when I did most my growing -- that seem so out of date by today's standards that it's as if they happened, not a mere three decades ago, but in a different century.*  I'm not talking about profound things like how we have a black president now (unimaginable back then) or gay rights or the explosion of computing power and the rise of the Internet and cell phones and all that.  I'm talking about small simple things.  Here are a few.

1.  Cars used to break down all the time.  It seems like throughout my childhood there was always some discussion among my parents over which car could actually be used and for what.  We once had a broken-down car sit in our driveway for, I dunno, five years?  Ten years?  It was a long time -- so long, the car literally grew vegetation.  I remember driving up to a Mariners game once and having my car (i.e., the car my parents let me drive) die in the Kingdome parking lot.  And my friends and I had to find a payphone in a not-so-great area of Seattle and call somebody to pick us up.  That sort of thing just doesn't really happen today.  Cars have somewhat quietly become super reliable.  There's almost no such thing as shitty car anymore.  It's kinda weird.

[My first car.  Not the actual car, but the same make and model.]

2.  Normal people could be shown smoking in movies and on TV.  I caught 30 seconds of Ghostbusters the other night and was reminded that they smoked cigarettes throughout the entire movie.  That would never happen today.  For some reason, smoking has ascended beyond the realm of bad habit and into something only Voldemort would do.*  The heroes of a Hollywood blockbuster would not smoke today.  TV is the same way.  You can have shows on prime-time network TV depicting murder and rape, but you won't see any protagonists with cigarettes in their mouths.

3.  Thai food wasn't a thing.  I don't think I had heard of Thai food until I was about 16.  Asking somebody if they wanted Thai food back then, would've been like asking somebody if they wanted Liechtensteinian food today.  If just wouldn't have made sense.  Among Asian cuisines, there was Chinese and sushi (if you were really fancy) that was it.

4.  The notion of men trying to care for children was hysterical.  This phenomenon was captured in at least two popular films: Mr. Mom and Three Men and a Lady.  The absurdity isn't so much that men are obviously bad at child-rearing (although that is absurd), it's that the mere act of being left alone with children turned men into complete retreads.  Tasks requiring nothing more than an IQ above the first percentile and basic motor skills were suddenly too much for otherwise capable men.  In actuality, diapers are pretty easy to put on, even if you've never done it before.  Likewise turning on a vacuum cleaning isn't something you need training in.  But for moviegoers in the '80s, it was enjoyable to watch everymen like Michael Keaton and Steve Guettenberg bungle these simple chores.  Or maybe it wasn't and people just didn't have anything better to do back then but watch bad movies.

The latter item is especially relevant to me right now because S is out of town for the second night in a row, so I've been on my own with the little guy.  I'm happy to report that I was able to give him a bath tonight without him escaping from the house and running around the yard naked.  He did me pretty wet though.  His baths used to consist of us dumping water on him from a bucket.  But now he's able to dump it on himself, and he's started wanting you to do whatever he's doing (like he'll try to feed me his food when he eats), so he dumped a cup of water on my knee.  Like a filled-to-the-brim cup of water.  But the joke's on him.  I wanted to put those pants in the wash anyway.

S is coming back tomorrow, thankfully.  (Just because I can take care of him all by myself, doesn't mean I want to do it.)  She had to make a quick trip to South Carolina to return her parents car; we borrowed it for the winter.  The DMV started getting up our ass about having it parked on the street for an extended period of time without DC plates, and they will tow it or put a boot on it, so we had to get it out of here ASAP.  We wanted to store it at a friend's place with a driveway, but we realized that we don't actually have any friend with a driveway in the area.  (It's times like this I miss the suburbs.)  So S had to make the drive down south.

Actually, it's good practice, as in a month S is going to be leaving for three weeks to Africa for work.  That's when my childcare skills are really going to get tested.  Although, S's mom is going to come up to help me out, so that will be nice.  She's excellent help.  She always wants to watch him; she's a terrific cook; and she doesn't talk too much.  It's perfect.

Anyway ...

In other news -- sporting news -- I won my office March Madness pool for the second year in a row.  It's kind of a big deal.  They've been doing it for like 15 years, and people get really into it.  Each year the winner gets a little trophy with his or her name on it, and it's put on display above the copy machine so everybody can see it.  I'm the first person to win two years in a row.  That's mad respect, bro.

[U. Conn. was the team that helped my bracket the most.]

I don't even follow college basketball until the tournament.  But I've developed a simple ranking algorithm using Nate Silver's win probabilities, and I just use that every year.  My goal is to break the game by always winning.  I like the money (about $150), but really it's about the pride.  The pride of being the best at a game based on a game played by 19-year olds I don't know and have no connection to whatsoever.  It's awesome.

And with that.  Until next time ...

*Yes, I'm aware the 1980s were in a different century.  Don't get smart with me.  You know what I'm saying.

**I hope this reference makes sense.  I quit reading Harry Potter after the first book.  My thoughts on it can be summed up thus, "Yep, it's a story about a kid wizard alright."