Entry 469: Trivial Matters on Father's Day

I’ve been on a serious trivia kick the last few weeks.  I've been watching Jeopardy! daily.  I've been playing weekly at a bar, and I started playing this game called LearnedLeague, where you get six questions every weekday, and you compete head-to-head against some random people.  It’s all on the honor system, and you assign defensive points based on which questions you think will be the most difficult for your opponent.  For me, pretty much every question is difficult.  I average around two correct answers per day.  (Friday I only got one right.  I have yet to be completely shut out; my record for correct answer is five – and I lost!)  But that isn’t abjectly terrible, as my record is 5-8-4, and the only people who would ever want to do this are hard-core trivia nerds, so I’m kinda-sorta holding my own.

My biggest flaw in trivia is near total ignorance in several key areas: art, classical music, opera, Greek mythology (most of the ancient world actually), religion, Shakespeare, and very recent pop music.  That still leaves a decent number of categories in which I’m either excellent (sports, math, Gen-X pop culture, word play/vocabulary), pretty good (movies, TV, science, current events), or mediocre (literature, history, geography).  So, as reflected in my record, it all adds up to below-average-but-not-completely-awful.

Retention, sadly, is also becoming an increasingly worse problem for me.  I just don’t have that iron-trap memory that I once had.  I actually got a math problem wrong the other day.  I knew exactly what this thing was and how it was used, but I couldn’t for the life of me come up with the term in question.  It was so frustrating.  I had some sort of mental block that wouldn’t let me remember it.  That’s totally an age thing.  That type of thing just didn’t happen to me in my twenties.  I mean, it’s not like I’m a decrepit old man, but I’m a little slower and little less sharp than I used to be.  That’s just how aging goes.

[I would have won a LearnedLeague match had I remembered Louie Anderson once hosted "Family Feud".  I used to watch that show all the time.  I just couldn't come up with it.  Super frustrating.]

[Dimebag Darrell of Pantera.  I would have won a LearnedLeague match had I known what band he was in.  Pantera was my second guess, but I went with Insane Clown Posse.  It was a bad guess, not just because it was wrong, but because I know the two many people from ICP are named Jay and Violent Bob or something like that.]

My Sunday night bar trivia is a good palate cleanser, however.  We just dominate the competition.  We've not taken first place only three or four times over the past three years.  Last week, our best player wasn’t there, and we still won by like 100 points.  I was coming through with a lot of correct answers, and it was nice to remember, oh yeah, against “normal” competition I’m not half bad.  My father-in-law wants me to go on Jeopardy!, because I get most the answers (er... questions) right when we watch it together, but I’m not sure he realizes two key things about the show: a) They don’t just let you go on it because you want to; there’s a very competitive tryout/audition process; b) all the contestants on it know almost all the clues all the time.  Everybody is so knowledgeable it effectively becomes a game of buzzer speed, betting strategy, and luck.

Speaking of Jeopardy! contestants, the aforementioned best player on my trivia team has an audition in a few weeks.  He’s been trying for like 15 years, and this is the first time he’s gotten this far, so he’s pretty excited.  If he gets on, he will be the eighth person I know personally to be on the show.  That's crazy.  Almost all of them come from the crossword puzzle community.  There’s a huge overlap between Crossworld and Trivialand.  (I also know a guy who won almost $3 million on a trivia game show.)  Personally, I don’t really have much desire to try out for Jeopardy!.  I don’t feel like I’m good enough, and I don’t really want to put in the work to try to get good enough.  Sports Jeopardy!, on the other hand, I’d love to go on that show -- if it still existed.  I did try to sign up once for it, but the website was temporarily down, and I never went back and tried again.  So, I guess I didn't want to be on it that badly.

In other news, today is Father's Day.  (Why isn't it Fathers' Day?  Doesn't the day belong to all fathers?  If it's singular, I'd prefer it be Father Day or Fathers Day with an attributive noun instead of a possessive.  Anyway...)  It's kinda a made-up holiday, but I guess it's nice to have my family be extra nice to me for an hour or so (that's usually how long it lasts).

Alright gotta run -- literally I'm going for a jog.

Until next time...

Okay, that’s all I got for today.  Until next time…

Entry 468: Scooter

I rode a motorized scooter today in DC for the first time.  They seem to be catching on.  You might have seen them in your city -- Lyft, Lime, and Bird are the big names.  Their presence on the streets has been somewhat contentious here in DC, in large part because everything new in DC is somewhat contentious, but overall I think they're a big net positive.  They provide a much more energy-efficient alternative to a car, and that alone basically outweighs their downside, in my opinion.

[Once I was at the dog park with a friend and his dog, and there was a guy there in really nice clothes standing a bench, because he didn't want to get his shoes dirty, tossing a ball for his dog.  He was the first person I've ever seen with a bluetooth device for his cell phone (this was almost 20 years ago).  We struck up a conversation somehow, and he told me he just got his dog from a prior owner and was trying to teach it a new name.  "It was named Scooter," he told me, "but, I'm like, that's fine for a kids' dog, not for an adult."  I asked him what its new name was, and he said, "Lucky."  And then I spent the next few minutes trying to figure out why somebody would think Lucky was a less childish name for a dog than Scooter.]

Plus, they can be very convenient.  Last night I had to meet S and the boys at a graduation party for a friends' daughter (well, a friend of friends' daughter, if you want to be technical).  It was about three miles away, too long to walk in a timely fashion, and not near a major bus line or metro stop.  It was a beautiful day, so I downloaded an app and scooted my way there.  It cost about a fifth as much as a Lyft ride and took about a third as long as public transportation -- very nice.

The big downside, however, is safety.  You're not supposed to ride them on the sidewalk, and cars aren't very respectful to you when you're causing a traffic hold-up by puttering along at 12 mph.  Also, I don't wear a helmet, which... I dunno... I guess I should.  It's probably comparable safety-wise to riding a bike, and I prefer to wear a helmet when I bike.  But, I took it easy and tried to avoid the major streets, unless they had a bike lane.  If things started to feel hairy, I used the sidewalk and just pushed it with my feet.  It worked out pretty well.

I think the main thing people don't like about these scooters doesn't have to do with the scooters themselves but rather what they represent: A gentrifying city.  Marion Barry once said if you give white people bike lanes and dog parks then they'll be happy.  So, a bunch of shared bikes and scooters in a neighborhood is a symbol of gentrification to many people.  Along these lines, the party I went to last night is in a predominantly black neighborhood, one that isn't really gentrified (yet), and so I felt a bit self-conscious riding a scooter through it.  I mean, I roll up to the party and an old(ish) black man is sitting on the porch sipping something strong-smelling from a plastic cup, chewing on an unlit cigar, and I'm a Dockers-looking white guy parking a neon green scooter in front of the house.  But the guy couldn't have been nicer, which is typical.  One of the least true stereotypes is that of the angry black person.  In my experience, it's the exact opposite -- African-Americans are an incredibly welcoming and accepting people.  And that's saying something because if there is one group who has a legit claim to being upset, it's the one who was literally treated as chattel for the first century-plus of our nation.

Coincidentally, when I sat down at the party, I happened to sit on the periphery of a conversation about gentrification.  It is something I've thought about a lot, but I didn't feel comfortable butting in giving my two cents.  Plus, I don't have much interesting to say on the matter, because, although I've thought about gentrification a lot, I don't know what we do about it.  It seems to me an almost impossible problem given our current economic system.  We're talking about a Bernie-Bro's-wet-dream style revolution to change things.  Laws like rent control and rights of first refusal are half-measures at best and counterproductive at worst.

The conclusion I've come to is that the best we can do is pay the people who are most likely to be displaced.  Buy them out.  Make sure they at least get a decent chunk of change before their inexpensive building is purchased and renovated and converted into luxury homes for people who probably don't look like them.  That's the least-worst realistic short term solution, in my view.  Then, in the long term, we need more affordable housing.  That might mean "unsightly" skyscrapers or mega-complexes of inexpensive apartment units in neighborhoods that don't really want it.  That's just something people like me will have to deal with.  The value of our houses might tick down; crime might tick up; but I think it can be done in a way that's not too disruptive.  No more NIMBY liberalism.

On the flip side, people need to realize that neighborhoods change drastically even without gentrification.  If you stay in a place long enough, the businesses you like get replaced with ones you don't like.  The types of people you've gotten to know leave or die and new types people you don't know move in have kids.  A lot of people who complain about cultural gentrification sound a lot like old people pining for the good old days that weren't all that "good," just familiar.  Not everybody riding a Lime scooter is a new-to-the-neighborhood, well-off white person who calls the cops on their nonwhite neighbors every time they turn up their music.

On the flip flip side, if you are a new-to-the-neighborhood, well-off white person don't call the cops on your nonwhite neighbors for petty stuff.  When Science Vs looked into gentrification that was the most tangibly deleterious problem.  If you can afford to live in luxury housing, you can afford a sound machine and a set earplugs.  Although, I must confess, I'm very glad I don't live in that area, because that go-go shit would drive me bonkers.  Shades of gray and nuance... such is life.

Until next time...

Entry 467: Mo' House Mo' Problems

Our latest “adventure” with our new house: a flooded basement.  That’s a bit of an overstatement -- it wasn't flooded flooded, but water definitely was getting in from outside and getting our carpet wet.  I noticed it about 11:30 pm Thursday evening, and there is no worse time to discover something like that than right before bed.  I was up for another hour and a half trying to figure out what was wrong and how to fix it, before I finally decided to cut my losses and try to sleep, which of course I couldn’t do, because the carpet in my basement was all wet and I didn’t know why.  I maybe got three hours of shut-eye in.

Then the next morning, all I wanted to do was resolve things, but I had to get the kids fed and clothed and drive them to school, which now takes well over an hour, because we have to drive across town in heavy traffic.  Then I had to deal with some stuff for work, so it was nearly noon by the time I got back to our soggy floor.  In the light of day, I quickly diagnosed the issue and made a video to send to S.  She probably didn’t really want a video, but it was the best way to convey my message of “I’ve been working on it and I figure it out.”  If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video must be worth millions of words.

Given that we had a problem, a clogged storm drain was probably the best-case scenario.  I was worried that it was a broken pipe or some other internal leak or, even worse, something under the carpet.  Since it was outside we didn’t have to pull up the floor or break any walls or anything like that.  We just had to pay a plumber $400 to snake our storm drain.  I thought about trying to do it myself.  I’ve gotten pretty good at unclogging drains using a plunger and a baking soda and vinegar mixture, but I figured it best to go with the professionals for this one.  I’d hate to realize during our next heavy rainfall that I didn’t do the job right and be outside with a bucket running up and down the stairwell trying bail things out.

So, it's fixed now, but our carpet is still kinda wet.  I've been running two space heaters pointed at the damp area for nearly two days straight (our electricity bill is probably gonna be through the roof).  It's definitely helping but carpet just takes forever to dry because there's no air flow from the bottom.  We might have to invest in a dehumidifier.  Also, we're gonna need some sort of air freshener in there, because it's getting that nasty mildewy smell.  I actually hate the smell of most air fresheners.  That ersatz Glade odor gives me a headache; I'd almost always rather smell the smell of whatever it's covering up than smell the smell of an air freshener.  But something is going to have to be done.  Maybe I'll burn some incense or a scented candle or something like that.

Anyway... aside from all these things popping up seemingly daily, settling in to the new house is going pretty well.  S likes to take the lead on most things, and I don't, so that has been working out pretty well.  Every now and then I have to argue for something she doesn't want though.  Usually that's because she will want to get rid of something that I use regularly.  For example, she hates the DVD player.  Now, it's true that DVD players are mostly outmoded, but I have a stack of workout/yoga DVDs that I use a couple times a month, so why get rid of it?  She said that it's because it looks bad and takes up space.  But our "entertainment system" is currently a TV on a pair of boxes and a single folding chair in an otherwise empty room, and it's going to stay that way for a while, because it's all we can afford, so that's not a very persuasive argument.

It's the same way with this bookcase we have.  It's a fine-looking, sturdy bookcase that does an admirable job holding books, which is good, because we have a fair number of books.  But S doesn't like it for some reason, and so she's always purposing we get rid of it.  And then we I ask her where we would put our books, she says we should get rid of them too.  But I like having books (although I did actually give away a bunch before we moved -- textbooks mainly), and so I like having a bookcase to store my books.  So, the bookcase is staying.  I usually get my way when I put my foot down on something, likely because I don't do it too often.  Pick your battles, see.

In other news, they finally made Trainspotting 2 available for rental (for like two years, I couldn't find it on any streaming service), so I watched it.  Feckin' loo'd it, ah did.  I mean, it doesn't even compare to the first one, but it was really good as far as sequels go.  It's a quintessential "enjoy it for what it is" movies.  It was based on the novel Porno, Irvine Welsh's follow-up novel to Trainspotting, and it continues the story arc with the same characters 20 years later.  Since I'm only a few years younger than the characters in the story (though not the actors themselves -- Robert Carlyle is in his late 50s), it hits home.  Well, the part about aging and growing apart/reconnecting with friends from your 20s hits home anyway.  I definitely don't identify with the part about substance abuse and addiction.  That has never been my bag, thankfully. 

I made a couple of notable actor connections watching it.  I don't watch a ton of movies, some I'm not the guy who knows everybody who's been in everything.  But I love trivia, and I pay attention to the cast of the movies I do see, so I really enjoy filling in the gaps in my mental movie network: Oh, that's Actress X who was in Movie Y with Actor Z... that's who that is!  In Trainspotting 2, I realized the actress who played Diane, Renton's (underage) love interest, is Kelly Macdonald from Boardwalk Empire and No Country for Old Men.  But the one that really blew my mind is that Tommy, a character who dies of AIDS in the first movie, is played by Kevin McKidd!  The Grey's Anatomy actor who a friendly bloke at an Australia gym said I look "exactly like."  His appearance is starkly different in Trainspotting and Grey's Anatomy, so it's not that weird I never made the connection before.  I guess it's fitting, because of all the Trainspotting characters, the one I most identified with was Tommy.  He kinda had his shit together and frowned on his mates for using hard drugs.  But then in a moment of pain, Renton gives him a shot of heroin and he gets hooked and contracts HIV from a dirty needle.

And on that note, I should probably go.  I'd like to do the dishes before S gets home.  She went to a Bell Biv Devoe/Bobby Brown concert (seriously), and I can't imagine a bunch of middle-aged women are going to be raging on a workday.  But who knows?

Until next time...

Entry 466: Raising Kids With Range

My week without S is nearly over, and it can’t end fast enough.  The boys are at ages where everything is difficult.  If one of them is easy in an area, the other one is difficult in it.  They perfectly complement each other to make things hard on me.  Lil’ S2 is more difficult overall.  He hasn't outgrown the random tantrum stage, and the smallest, weirdest things set him off.  Appeals to reason or logic are futile.  The other day, for example, he had a total meltdown because his ice cream wasn’t “in a stripe” in his bowl.  Most kids are happy just to get ice cream no matter what the form.  Eddie Murphy once joked a kid could drop an ice cream cone in dog shit and still eat it (“it’s just sprinkles”).  But apparently not Lil’ S2.  He’s the most fastidious kid I’ve even known.  Everything has to do be just so or he gets really upset.  He’s seems well-adjusted enough at school, but if we find out he’s on the spectrum or has OCD or something like that, it wouldn’t surprise me.

Lil’ S1 is different.  The days of the random tantrums are pretty much gone (and he was never as bad as Lil’ S2 anyway), and you can reason with him and make deals with him, but he’s still trying, in that everything you tell him is in one ear and out the other. “Time to turn off the iPad.”  He just sits there.  “Don’t touch my glasses.”  He puts his grubby fingers all over the lenses.  “Put down my phone.”  He puts in a bad password locks it.  “Don’t tell your brother you got the last jelly bean.”  He immediately gloats to his brother that he got the last jelly bean.  That last one is part of a bigger problem: He constantly has to be holding one over on Lil’ S2.  He makes everything they do a competition whose rules are always tilted in his favor (and that immediately change in the rare instances he loses).  Of course, it gets under Lil’ S2’s skin, and then it’s a fight over a piece of dental of floss or something like that.  They do have moments when they play nicely together, but those never last longer than 15 minutes, before it's tears and punches.  Well, maybe this is my comeuppance for picking on my little brother when I was younger.

The other thing about Lil’ S2 that wears on me is that his sleep schedule is still erratic.  Sometimes I have to wake him up so that we won't be late for school; other times, like today, he comes into my bed at 6:00 am and won't go back to sleep.  The most annoying thing about this is that S’s mom is awake at that time and would love nothing more than to spend time with him, but he refuses to go.  So irritating.  He does say some pretty funny things, though.  He's a stream of one-liners.  This morning he said, “look at that, a fan-man,” and I looked up and the ceiling fan kinda looked like a face with two light bulbs as the eyes and blades as the hair, and then he said, “and look at his hair, it's all twirly.”  It made me smile, but it wasn't worth my last hour of sleep.

In other kids’ news, Lil’ S1’s first day of baseball went pretty well.  He seemed into it – much more so than soccer.  I don’t know if it’s the sport or just that he’s older now.  I intentionally planned it so that we arrived 15 minutes late, which I think helped.  In general, I hate being late – it’s a bad habit and usually a very self-centered thing to do.  But in this case, it seemed like the lesser of two evils, as I doubt Lil' S1 would’ve lasted until the finish had we come on time.  He was starting to fade toward the end.

His coach is alright, in that he’s a dad who volunteered to do it, but he’s a bit too pedantic for my taste.  Then again, almost everybody is too pedantic for my taste when it comes to youth sports, as I think kids shouldn’t really be taught anything at this age.  I mean, they should learn the basics, the rules, how to play the game – stand here, run there, throw the ball to that kid.  But trying to teach technique is a waste of time, in my opinion, and it might do more bad than good.  I think it’s better for them to develop on their own and figure it out for themselves, especially in baseball, which is full of silly old wives’ tales, even today.  Here are a few things you always here growing up playing baseball that are mostly BS.

Keep your eye on the ball
Hitters at high levels don’t hit by keeping their eye on the ball.  It’s literally impossible for anything beyond slow-pitch softball.  Your eyes can’t follow a ball moving throw air with any amount of speed.  Hitters see the ball early and then use pattern-recognition to infer where it is going to be when they swing.  If kids are missing the ball a lot when they swing, they don't need to keep their eye on it.  They need more reps to build their pattern database and develop muscle memory.

Swing levelly
Playing T-ball as a youngster, my teammates and I always wanted to swing under the ball, in an upper-cut fashion, because we intuited that the ball would go further that way.  But our coach (who also was my dad), always instructed us to swing levelly.  He was following conventional wisdom of the day – the baseball world believed the best way to hit was to go for the line-drive, not the big fly-ball.  But it turns out that’s wrong, and today we are seeing the “launch-angle revolution” in professional baseball.  The best hitters try to hit the ball in the air because home runs are good, and fly-balls are better than ground-balls, and ground-balls happen frequently if you don't try to elevate the ball.

Use two hands when tagging a runner
Lil’ S1’s coach was teaching this, and I had to bite my tongue to avoid putting him on the spot.  The idea is that when you tag a runner you should put the ball in your hand and then put your hand in the glove and then tag the runner with your glove.  The rationale is if you tag the runner with the ball in just your hand or just your mitt, it could pop out.  But this particularly silly, as unless the baserunner is body-slamming you (which is illegal), the ball almost never falls out of a one-handed tag.  What’s more, it’s awkward to chase a baserunner holding the ball with two hands, and you can’t stretch as far.  This is a case where teaching the kids the fundamentals is actually teaching them a less natural, less effective way to do things.  It’s the same thing with catching a fly-ball two-handed, which is another one you hear all the time.  There’s no reason to bring your throwing hand near your mitt unless you are going to have to make a quick throw. 

Curveballs are bad for your arm
This one is for older kids.  There’s long been this idea that curveballs wreck kids’ arms when they’re little.  And that’s actually true... but only because pitching in general wrecks people’s arms at any age.  Throwing curveballs doesn’t seem to be any worse than throwing fastballs, and it might actually be less stressful.  Revving up and throwing as fast as you can 50 times in a row turns out to be not that great for you.

Hustle is good
We love hustlers in baseball especially, but in life in general.  We love the idea of going all out, all the time, even for small things.  But it's an unrealistic ideal.  Hustle would be great if we had unlimited resources, but we don’t, and part of being a human is determining how best to utilize the resources we do have.  Hustling is often inefficient.  In baseball, for example, health is a valuable resource, and hustling is a great way to lose this resource for minimal gain.  Sometimes it’s best to concede the battle to stay alive for the war.  I think I’m especially attuned to this, because once I blew out my hamstring in a beer-league softball game trying get to second base on a play I was probably going to be out on anyway.  We were losing by, like, 10 runs at the time too.  One dumb play, and I was out the entire summer.  Actually, I haven’t played softball since.  It was a career-ending injury that probably would have been avoid if I didn't hustle.

[Pete Rose aka "Charlie Hustle" during his short stint with the Montreal Expos.  What a haircut!]

Incidentally, there is a new book I want to read called Range by David Epstein about childhood development, especially in sports.  I’ve heard him talk on like five podcasts, so I know a bit about the book already.  The basic premise is that kids should do as many activities as possible when they are younger and not specialize in anything until they are in their late teens, at least.  There are a few areas in which super young specialization is advantageous (like golf and chess), but for the most part kids with broad range often surpass hyper-specialized kids later in life.  It’s somewhat counterintuitive, but it makes sense, in that having a broader skillset makes you more adaptable and more creative.  It also, I’m sure, helps prevent burnout and resentment.

I’ve certainly never been good enough at a sport to have this apply, but there is something of a parallel in math.  In junior high and high school, I was a good math student, but not a prodigy or anything like that.  One of my shortcomings was that I didn’t carefully read the text and didn’t learn the techniques exactly.  I would just get the gist and then come up with my own ways to solve the problems.  I always figured this was going to come back to bite me in the end – eventually, I thought, I was going to have to learn to do things “the right way.”  But then I got to college, where the instruction is better and not so by-the-book, and I learned that there is no “the right way.”  In fact, I had inadvertently trained myself to think in a way that helped me become a very good math student.

Anyway, like I said, I want to read this book, but it will have to wait a while.  I already downloaded a different book (The Queen by Josh Levin), and these days it takes me a while to get through an entire book.  Maybe if I had more hustle, I would be faster.

Until next time…

Entry 465: On Several Topics

Man, not a great week if you are a proponent of a woman’s right to choose.  Alabama has outlawed abortion altogether and several other states have severely limited it.  These laws are not in effect yet, and once they are, they will be challenged in court immediately.  That seems to be the entire point of them.  The anti-choice right (i.e., the right) is attempting to shoot the moon and use these cases as a catalyst to overturn Roe v. Wade.  It’s relentless; it’s audacious; it might work.  With Bart O’Kavanaugh seated, conservatives hold a 5-4 advantage on the Supreme Court.  If there is a vote along ideological lines, the anti-choicers will win.

This definitely not a slam dunk though.  O’Kavanaugh strongly implied during his confirmation hearings that he would not vote to overturn Roe v. Wade.  Normally I would find this reassuring, but the dude also repeatedly and brazenly lied about his high school yearbook during these hearings – so who knows?  It’s also possible one of the other conservative judges (Roberts?) votes with established precedent.  It’s also possible it never gets to the Supreme Court.  That’s the easiest out for the conservative justices who want to retain their conservative bona fides, but are also loath to overturn established law.  It's an endless loop we seem to be stuck in: The lower courts strike down unconstitutional anti-abortion laws; the Supreme Court decides to let them stand without further appeal; and the anti-choicers start hatching their next plan.  Lather, rinse, repeat.

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In other news, we are probably not going to go to war with Iran.  So, that's good.  This is the one area -- literally the only one I can thing of -- in which Donald Trump is better than a run-of-mill Republican president.  He doesn’t want to get drawn into yet another soul-crushing, resource-draining war with a Mideastern country.  I heard an interview with about this, and he actually strung together a few sentences that made him sound, fleetingly, like a rationale, intelligent leader.  It was very surprising.  He doesn’t deserve much credit for this -- not starting an unwinnable war is a very low bar and him pulling out of the Iran deal is a big reason for this saber-rattling in the first place – but it does actually sound like he’s the reason the hawks in the administration (e.g., John Bolton) haven’t been able to take it further.  Of course, he could change his mind at any time -- we could be invading Tehran by the time I post this entry.  That’s a possibility too.

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On a less worrisome note, Lil’ S1 starts baseball tomorrow.  I’m curious to see how it goes.  He doesn’t know the rules, and he hasn’t played much before.  He had a Wiffle ball pitching machine, but he was more interested in using it like a cannon than he was in hitting off it.  We also played catch a few times, but he got bored pretty quickly.  That’s my guess as to how this is going to go.  I think he’ll be into it for the first 15 minutes or so, and then he will quickly fade.

This could be a problem too, as it’s two hours long.  I know, that’s insane for a six-year-old.  There's an hour-long practice followed by an hour-long game.  The idea is to have practice once a week and then a game on Saturday, but our coach wants everything to be on Saturday for logistical purposes, which I totally understand (one-stop shopping), but it’s just too much at one time for the kids.  If it was up to me, I would go half-hour practice, short break, half-hour game.  Round-trip, the whole thing shouldn’t last more than an hour and a half.  It was the same thing for soccer, and the majority of the kids were ready to go home before we even started the game.

But, the thing is, it’s not up to me because I specifically didn’t sign up to be a coach.  I want to make sure my kid is into it before I go that route.  If he likes it and is willing to do it without a bunch of coercion, then I have no problem being a coach.  If he’s “meh” and drags his feet on the whole ordeal, then I don’t want to do it.  In soccer I kinda got roped into being a coach anyway – or rather I roped myself – because I would be there watching, and I would get annoyed at how the other parents (who probably didn’t want to do it either) were doing things, so I would volunteer to do them instead.

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S’s parents are in town for a visit.  It’s been nice to see them.  S actually just left for Africa for work for a week, so they will help out while she’s gone.  I still have to do all the heavy lifting, childcare-wise, but they can at least pick the kids up from school, which is a huge help, because it means I don’t have to hurry home from the office, and I can take my workout classes.

Speaking of which, I've had a nice run in which I've been able to take four or five classes every week consistently.  I might be in the best shape I've been in since high school wrestling.  I'm constantly sore and a little nicked up, but it feels pretty good overall.

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Before S left, we celebrated her birthday at this excellent Cuban restaurant up the street.  There are actually a ton of cool (or at least cool-looking) restaurants and bars within walking distance of our new house.  Downtown Silver Spring is basically an outdoor strip mall.  It’s a good place for kids, but the food options are mostly boring chain establishments (Red Lobster, Macaroni Grill, Nando’s, etc.).  However, walking through the side streets, I was noticing some more interesting options.  I probably won’t go to any of them until S’s birthday next year, but I like to know they’re around, just in case.

Well, that does it for today.  Until next time…

Entry 464: House Rich and Cash Poor... Is that the Saying?

We have a nice new house, so it's tough to complain about things, but let me try.  If there is one thing I'm good at it's complaining.  It's an art, really, being a good complainer.  Because it's not enough to just complain, there has to be substance to the complaint.  You have to make people say, "he's kinda got a point," even if they wish you would shut up and stop complaining.

In this case, my complaint is a relatively easy one, because it's about money -- not wealth or assets or anything like that -- but actual money: straight cast homie.  We're low on it.  Everything with our move is costing more than we anticipated and that’s after factoring in that it would cost more than we anticipated.  We covered our down payment (paid back S’s parents in-full) and closing costs, which are the main things, but the ancillary expenses are piling up.  We are managing, but it’s paycheck-to-paycheck, and it’s going to be a while before we get back to normal.  Some of it is stuff we didn’t budget for, but should have.  Take pest control, for example.  Our yard is overrun with bugs (mainly ants and stink bugs), and it's only a matter of time before they get inside.  Some of the ants are carpenter ants, and they need to be quashed ASAP, because they can damage wood.  We also want to get preemptive termite service and get our crawlspace attic cleaned and insulated for bugs.  If we are going to do it, we want to do it right, but in order to do it right, we have to pay the price -- and in this case, the price is a couple grand.  Again, we probably should've thought of this, but didn't.  (In our defense it's super hard and stressful to think of everything when buying/selling a house.)

Then we also had some bad luck.  A tire blew on one or our cars, and of course we had to get four new tires, because you always have to get four new tires, and so that was another grand gone.  Then we had to get our lawn serviced, and we had to buy a bunch of shit at Home Depot for little (but vital) maintenance jobs, and I already mentioned how we had to pay for plumbing in our old house.  Like I said, it’s piling up.  I mean, as long as S and I stay employed, which seems like a safe bet, things will be fine in the long-run, but it’s not the long-run yet, so currently things are kinda tight.

We have been cutting back in some areas, namely entertainment.  We haven't been going out much at all, and we've been relying on free services (or ones we already pay for) for our entertainment.  I did my part by watching both seasons of Cobra Kai in a few weeks, so we wouldn't have to pay for YouTube Premium past the free one-month trial period.  I enjoyed it -- the first season much more than the second season.  I didn't like the way the second season ended.  But for the most part the series is entertaining.  It does a great job of mixing nostalgia for the original movie with a modern story line (lots of Easter eggs for the Gen-Xers.).  It's also got a fun and cheesy veneer, while getting at some deeper issues at its core.  One of these is the notion of "toxic masculinity."  This has actually been a recurring theme in a lot of the content I've been consuming recently for some reason.  I've started listening to a new podcast called Man Up, which is all about masculinity, and then I came across this article in the New York Times, and I also recently listened to an episode of The Weeds podcast about "incels" (if you don't know, do yourself a favor and don't ask).

Personally, I've spent chunks of my life being toxic-masculinity-adjacent, but I've always rejected it for as along as I can remember.  Even as an insecure teenager I knew it was bullshit.  I've always wanted to embody stereotypically "manly" attributes -- I've always wanted to be physically strong, I've always wanted to be able to kick-ass if need be (need has never been), I've always wanted to hook-up with hot babes (less so now than before I was married with kids).  I've always wanted all that stuff, but I never wanted the noxious mindset and behavior that often comes with it -- the fronting, the bullying, the misogyny.  In fact, I think that was kinda my lane growing up.  More than one person I've reconnected with after high school described me as some variant of a "good jock" or a "nerdy jock."  I never thought of myself as a jock at all, because "the jocks" were a different group of kids on the football team (I only briefly played football), but I was district champ in wrestling my senior year* and one of the top scorers on the lacrosse team, so I guess that's sufficiently jock-ish.

*By the way, they started offering wrestling classes at my Krav Maga gym, and I went for the first time the other night, and I was straight-up dominating fools.  I didn't get taken down once the entire class, and a lot the dudes in it are 15 to 20 years younger than me.  Still got it!

One thing I've never been very good at, however, is calling out other guys on their bullshit behavior.  It's just not in my personality.  I'm more the type who would stay silent and then make fun of that guy later with my non-troglodyte friends.  I've had some people tell me some fucked-up shit too.  I think because I've always had a kinda outwardly bro-y appearance, people assume I'm more bro-y than I actually am.  Anyway, I'm trying to get better about calling out fellow dudes -- I know it's important -- but it's not easy for me.  On the whole, I figure as long as I can lead my boys down the right path with all this stuff, I'll consider my "work" on this issue a net positive to society.  It's something I worry about sometimes.  My new joke is that if a omnipotent being told me I had two choices -- A) My sons would one day become prominent leaders in the MRA movement; B) The universe as we know it would be destroyed at the end of the year -- I'd tell everybody I know to start working their way down their bucket lists.

Speaking of gender issues, I came across this article, titled "What 'Good' Dads Get Away With" in the New York Times, and I'd be lying if I said parts of it didn't ring true.  For example,

Like him, I worked outside the home. And yet I was the one who found myself in charge of managing the details of our children’s lives.
Too often I’d spend frantic days looking for spring break child care only to hear him ask, “Oh, there’s no school tomorrow?”

I read this to S, and we both cracked up because this could have been taken from a screenplay of our lives word-for-word.  S manages the details of our children's schedule almost completely by herself and then fills me in on it later.  In fact, I would say she does most of the traditionally female work around our house -- she does most the cooking, most the cleaning, and pretty much everything dealing with child and household management.  I don't think I've ever done any of the following: signed our kids up for daycare or camp, bought an article of clothing for the kids, bought an article of future for the house.

But I don't think I'm getting away with anything, because I do a bunch of other stuff.  I do some of the traditionally female tasks (laundry, dishes, driving kids to school), and I do almost all of the traditionally male tasks.  That's a major shortcoming of the article, in my opinion -- it doesn't get into who's doing things like changing light bulbs, servicing the cars, mowing the lawn, unclogging drains, etc.  Just as I made a list of things I've seldom done, I could make one equally as long of things S has seldom done.

Overall, I think we have a pretty good division of labor.  In general, our days are shifted so that I do morning and she does night.  She's usually out of the house before we wake up, and I'll get the kids fed, dressed, and to school in the morning.  Then she picks them up and gets them dinner and does most of bedtime (although that almost always ends up a two-person job).  This used to be a very even division, because the kids would wake up hours before school/daycare started and go to bed early, but now that they stay up a little later and sleep a little later, night is definitely more work.  The scale slides toward S.  But then she also will leave for days at a time for work, and then I have to do everything, and that, I think, slides the scale back to close to even.  And even if it doesn't -- even if it's off in one direction or another -- it doesn't really matter, so long as we are both happy with the arrangement.  There is no such thing as a perfectly equitable relationship, and that shouldn't be the goal, in my opinion, outside of facilitating contentment and satisfaction.  The way I see it, as long as my wife doesn't resent me and I don't resent her -- and that was the case last time we talked about such things -- then it's all good.

With that... until next time...

Entry 463: Done and done

We did it.  We bought a new house and sold an old house.  All papers have been signed; all keys have been relinquished; all money has been duly remitted.  The process sucked, but the end result was worth it.  Moving is always stressful, but this move was especially stressful, due to a seemingly endless stream of over-promises, under-deliveries, and straight-up gaffes made by various parties throughout the process.  They say if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself, and, boy, did we just go through a month of living that adage.

To wit…

I already mentioned in my last post how the settlement company instructed S’s dad to wire an enormous (for us) sum of money to the wrong account.  That was the ur-fuckup.  Surprisingly, however, that settlement company ended up being one of the more competent parties we dealt with throughout our move.  The manager took responsibility, repeatedly apologized to us, said that were she in our shoes she would've been “appalled,” and did her best to make things right by personally ensuring the money was ultimately wired to the proper account and paying all fees associated with the multiple transfers.  She also gave us a dozen eggs from her personal chicken coop, which might sound silly, but we actually go through eggs extremely quickly, so it was a very useful gift, and more importantly it demonstrated that she understood our anger.  That’s a key, often-omitted component of atonement: acknowledging the aggrieved party has a right to be aggrieved.

******
The woman at the moving company could have learned something from her.  Here’s the story with that.  We had a box spring upstairs in our old house that couldn’t fit down the stairs.  We brought it inside by hoisting it through a big window in a sun room that no longer exists (it's now an extension of the kids’ room).  We knew that there was no way to get it downstairs without breaking it into pieces.  We explained this to our coordinator at the moving company, and she said it was an unusual request, but they could accommodate us for an additional $150 fee.  Okay, fine.

When the moving crew actually arrives, however, and I point out the box spring, they have no idea what I’m talking about.  A series of phone calls ensues, and the upshot is that the box spring doesn’t get moved that night (Friday).  Instead, we are told somebody can come out Monday morning to do it, free of charge.  That’s cutting it really close, as we are closing Monday afternoon, but we agree to it.

I’m not feeling confident about the arrangement, so I decide that night to get it down the stairs myself.  I won’t be able to dispose of it, but if I can at least get it downstairs I will feel a lot better about things.  That way if the moving company flakes again, I can call GotJunk or somebody and they can easily come get it. 

So, around 8:00 pm Friday night, armed with a hammer, a box cutter, a roll of duct tape, and pint of Baskin-Robbins chocolate and peanut butter ice cream, I go back to our nearly-empty house alone and get to work.  Within a few hours of back-breaking (and bed-breaking) labor, I have created a precarious, but beautiful, bundle of wire, nailed slats, and duct tape.  I’m able to get my worthless work of art downstairs and out to the front porch.

The next day, I consider calling GotJunk to have them pick it up and be done with it.  But I decide to stick with the plan and have the moving company pick it up – it was their mistake in the first place, and obviously I don’t want to pay to have it removed if I don't have to.  So, it sits on the porch for the weekend, and then late-afternoon Monday, I go back to the house to wrap up a few things (we’ve closed, but the buyers don’t close until the next day) and it’s still there.  I’m beyond irritated.  We were told it would be gone in the morning, and it’s now 4:30 pm.  I leave a curt (but respectful) message on the coordinator’s voicemail, she calls me back, and after a series of texts ensuring me somebody is coming in fifteen minutes, somebody does eventually come – at 6:30.  Whatever.  It’s done.  I’m satisfied...

Until we get the bill and I see she’s added $100 for removal of the box spring, with a note saying, “We discounted by $50, since we didn’t do the break-down.”  I’m beyond livid at this point.  I write a sternly worded email, and I then I call her, and she’s like, “Oh, hey, how’s going?  How's the rest of your move?” as if nothing happened.  She does eventually drop the box spring fee (per our original agreement), but it’s like she doesn’t even get why I’m pissed, which is the most annoying part (acknowledgement, remember).  But the thing is, I think this woman is just a space cadet.  She doesn’t mean any ill-will.  She’s just out there -- super disorganized and flighty.  She also didn’t tell us that our bunk bed wouldn’t be reassembled until a day after it was delivered (which was actually a big inconvenience for us), and she forgot to include a charge in the original estimate, so we ended up owing more than we initially thought.  We might have been able to dispute it, but I was too worn down to try, and S was preoccupied with much bigger financial matters (see below).  At least we know who not to use if (god-forbid) we move again.

[We have top men working on it right now.

Who?!

Top... men.]

Amazingly, this wasn’t the most annoying or costly hitch in our moving plans.  That would be a leaky shower head.  We redid the entire master bathroom of our old house before we moved into it eight years ago.  We went with a handyman S knew previously, and that turned out to not be a great move.  He’s a good guy, trustworthy, but he does some shoddy work, truth be told.  In the case of our shower head, it started leaking relatively soon after installation, so we had a plumber come out to fix it, but it wasn’t a real fix, because S's handyman didn’t build in an access panel to the pipes (like I said: shoddy), so the best the plumber could do without removing a large section of tile was a low-rent jimmy-rig that resulted in the the cold handle being able to be twisted completely off and the hot handle being able to spin around and around forever.  To shut off the hot water you had to move the knob to this perfect spot, and then don’t touch it, lest you bump it off the spot a tiny bit and it start dripping.  It wasn’t ideal, but it did work…

Until the day before we were supposed to close, of course.  Our agent came to look at the house Monday before the buyers were to do their final walk-through the next day, and he told us that the shower was dripping.  I came out to try to stop it, but the magic spot was gone.  So, I called a plumber and was given a time-window of 2:00 pm – 5:00 pm.  He finally came at 6:45.  (It was a race between the moving company and the plumber.  The moving company won.  I lost, because I had to wait for them in an empty house.  On the plus side, I got some push-ups in.)  The plumber looked at it for about ten seconds, and then said he needed to more or less replace the entire thing, and that he needed to cut out the tile to do it, and it would be $1,100, and he wouldn’t replace the tile.

I called our agent, and he basically told me, “Sucks… but you gotta fix it or give the buyers some money to fix it.”  I called S and we went with the latter option.  We ended up agreeing to credit the buyers $2,000 off the sales price – the extra $900 to replace the tile.  It was way more expensive than it should have been, in my opinion, but it got us past the finish line.  S and I were leveraged to the hilt, so it would have been pretty foolhardy of us to quibble over a small (relatively speaking) amount of money.

I’m more annoyed at myself than at anybody else for this one -- I should have just given the plumber the go-ahead to do the proper fix, when he came out years ago.  (Actually, we should have had somebody else do the original remodel, but I didn’t know better at the time.)  That’s one thing I’ve learned about home repair: The cheap way is often the much more expensive way down the road.  Oh, as an extra little knife-twist, the plumber told me he would email me the estimate, but he never did, so I had to call his company and get somebody in the office to send it to me.  It’s a small thing, but it’s yet another example of somebody not doing what they said they would do.

Speaking of which... our proceeds from the sale were supposed to hit our account first thing Wednesday morning, and they didn’t come until 4:30 pm.  Our agent and S each contacted the buyers’ settlement company several times throughout the day and kept getting blown off.  S stuck with it though and finally talked to somebody of import at the company, and the transfer went through shortly thereafter.  It's unclear to me when we would've gotten paid if she didn't make a stink.  The thing is, it was the settlement company who told us the transfer would come through first thing in the morning.  Had they not told us that we wouldn't have expected it, and we wouldn't have been upset when it didn't happen.  It's like they got the adage wrong: Over promise and under deliver.  Well, they weren't alone.

That was our move.

Until next time...