Entry 526: Post-Vacation Wrap-Up

Back from our trip to OBX.  It was a nice vacation -- a day too long, but still nice.  (One of my life axiom: Everything is too long.)  I was burnt out and literal burnt by Wednesday morning, but we had the cottage until Thursday.  (I wasn't that burnt, by the way -- I go heavy on the sunscreen -- but sometimes you miss a few spots.)  The thing is, I would have been fine staying at the beach one more day without kids, I would have preferred it, actually.  With kids though...  It's fun, but exhausting.  I have to be on high alert anytime one of my boys steps foot near the water, and then they always want me to take them in and play in the waves with them.  And the waves where we were can get brutal.  There were a few times they literally flipped me head-over-heels.  Imagine what they would do to two kids under 60 pounds.  We put Lil' S2 in a life vest, but not Lil' S1.  He can swim, but he's only 8 (and as I've mentioned before, he's the least confidence-inspiring swimmer I've ever seen; he's actually pretty good at staying afloat, but you'd be forgiven for thinking like he's struggling to reach the side).  I made him hold my hand or stay very close to me anytime we got further than ankle deep waters.

Thankfully, they will also get distracted for long stretches and play in the sand, and then I can just zone out and bask in the sun.  It felt good.  We were right on the beach, so you didn't need to bring anything other than the essentials.  I wore nothing other than trunks, shades, and a hat.  Then we set up a canopy and some chairs and that was it.  No phone, no headphones, nothing to read.  Just sitting on the beach watching the waves.  It was as relaxing as anything could be in 2020.  The bad stuff was still there in my brain -- Covid, police brutality, our idiot president -- but I could at least compartmentalize it and enjoy the moment.

Speaking of Covid, I think we did a good job being safe.  We only went inside a public place two or three times and literally everybody was wearing masks.  (A quick aside: Mask mandates work.  The "there's no real way to enforce them" argument might be technically true, but it's a total cop out.  If you put things into law and get businesses and most people onboard, then the vast majority of other people follow suit, if begrudgingly, because they don't want to get hassled.)  Then outside, on the beach or about town, it's extremely easy to stay distanced.  I don't think anybody came within ten feet of us the entire time we were there.

Unfortunately, the disease is going to persist, however, because of people like the ones who rented the house down the street from our cottage.  They were having a family reunion (as evidenced by a giant sign that read "Family Reunion 2020"), and they had at least fifty people all packed together, with cars in the drive way from all over the East Coast.  And they certainly did not strike me as the type to test and quarantine before they came.  They had a massive "Don't Tread On Me" flag hanging behind their bar.  (They had a bar and a pool in their backyard, which was right on the beach below this little bridge across the dunes, so you could see everything they had going on.)  They sounded like Long Islanders -- like, if you hear interviews with New Yorkers who love Trump, that's how they came off to me.  They were so obnoxious -- ridiculously loud and inconsiderate.  They has massive, wedding-DJ-size speakers that they bumped them so loudly you could hear them from our cottage which was at least 100 yards away and in the opposite direction they were facing.  They were playing such trite, repetitive music too.  I think they had "In Da Club" on repeat at one point, and then they would all sing along to "Bohemian Rhapsody," like, five times a day.  I was so annoyed one night, I went for a walk down the beach by myself, just to get away from the noise.  It turned out to be a good walk, though, because I got to see hundreds of these cool crabs scurry away as I got close to them (we took Lil' S1 to see them the next night), and even better, when I was walking back across the bridge, I heard one of my "friends" in that house announce that they just got shut down by the police and everybody there was all pissed.  ("I guess nobawdy is allowed to have fun in dis place.")  It was a magnificent moment of schadenfreude, and then they kept it down the rest of the trip.

Here are some other highlights.

• We celebrated Lil' S1's eighth birthday, by taking him kite flying, and then having pizza and sundaes at the cottage. 
• We visited Kitty Hawk, which is pretty cool, even though the indoor portion of the museum is closed due to coronavirus.  
• S locked herself and the kids out of the cottage, and her phone in the cottage, within our first hour of being there, while I was at the grocery store.  It was 9:30 at night, so she had to ask the bros across the way to borrow a phone to check her email to get the code again.  (Said bros were extremely friendly and obliging.)
• She tried to blame the above incident on me, because she said I'm so anal about keeping the doors closed to keep bugs out that I got in her head about it.  It's true that I am anal about this -- for good reason, I say, what's more annoying than flies and mosquitoes in your house? -- but I accept no responsibility.  You cannot blame locking yourself out on somebody who was not there.  You just can't, sorry.
• We drank nearly two cases of Lacroix water in the six days we were there, and I was the only one really drinking it.  I would say I averaged six a day.  By contrast, I had two beers, total.  This pretty much sums up my drinking habits these days.
• S's sister Sw joined us the last few days at the cottage and now she's staying with us here in DC for a bit.  I think she was going a bit stir crazy by herself in her condo in Atlanta.  It should be fun to have her here.
  

Okay, a few pics, and then that's a wrap.

[Three from Kitty Hawk]

[Two from the beach near Nags Head, North Carolina]

Entry 525: Pre-Vacation Shortie

I had another "What I'm Watching on YouTube" entry lined up for this week -- for last week, actually -- but I never got the chance to finish it up.  Life, you know?  I think it's just going to get skipped, because I'm short on time tonight, as well.  We're going to the Outer Banks on Friday, and I'm always busy right before a trip -- packing, cleaning out the fridge, tying up loose ends at work, etc.

It should be a good trip.  I'm hoping we get some sun -- a lot of rain cloud icons on the forecast website -- but if we stay inside the entire time I guess it will limit our potential exposure to Covid.  It should be pretty easy to stay safe anyway, though.  Contrary to what news reports might lead you to believe, I think beaches are some of the safest places to go.  They're huge and they are outside.  Bring a mask, just in case, and you should be good to go.

We're meeting S's sister there, so that should be fun.  We haven't seen any family in long time, obviously.  As a precondition, we all got tested.  We're all negative, which as Lil' S1 made sure to tell me, is actually positive.  He's gotten really into the Pearls Before Swine comic strip, and apparently there was a joke in one of his books with the negative/positive test result as a premise.  It might just be comics, but I'm glad he's reading something on his own.  Who knows how well online learning is going to take?

Alright, three paragraphs is already more than I intended to write.

Until next time...

Entry 524: What I've Been Watching On YouTube: Part I

It's creepy, but admittedly convenient (which is a big part of why it's creepy) how good our content providers are at interacting with one another to suggest things we might want to consume.  Every time I go to YouTube there is a seemingly endless scrawl of clips I did not ask for, but which all look legitimately interesting nevertheless, and it's often related to something I was consuming on a different platform.

For example, I recently listened to an episode of The Weeds podcast -- a one-on-one with host Matthew Yglesias and the linguist John McWhorter ("The Great Awokening") -- and then next thing I know, YouTube is suggesting I check out a clip of a discussion between Ta-Nehisi Coates and John McWhorter.  I think what happened is I Googled McWhorter, because I wasn't super familiar with him, and then since Google owns YouTube it thought I might be interested in more material on him.

Indeed I was.  Well played, Big Brother.  I found his discussion with Coates very thought-provoking.  It's actually quite old -- I think it occurred in the lead-up to the 2008 election -- and it's probably a good thing I didn't know that going into it or I probably would not have watched it.  It's mostly about hip-hop music, a subject on which I don't have particularly strong feelings, but I enjoy listening to McWhorter's arguments.  In a lot of ways he thinks how I like to think I think.  He's very logical, empirical, and solution-oriented -- sometimes to a fault.

For the most part, it was a very amicable debate, but there was one exchange that got slightly contentious, and it reminded me of the type of pointless argument I have all too frequently with my wife.  McWhorter was defending a quote by Geraldine Ferraro, a Clinton supporter (the 2008 Democratic Primary, remember): "If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position," the position being one of a legitimate contender for the nomination.  Coates was having none of it and seemed to find the quote demeaning to Obama and to black men, in general.  But McWhorter pushed back, not really on what the quote conveyed, but it's technical accuracy.  He felt the fact that Obama (whom he very much likes and supported) is black did help raise his profile from single-term senator to presidential front-runner.  Coates argued, basically, that it was offensive to single out race, when there are so many other factors to it.  And it really reminded me of S getting frustrated with me for taking issue with a single detail of something she says when she's trying to make a broader point.  It was kinda funny.

(For the record, I mostly agree with McWhorter, but the retort is "yeah, so."  People are helped all the time in life by things outside their control.  Innate attributes and situations into which we are born largely determine who we are.  Meritocracies don't actually exist.  I mean, you could say LeBron James wouldn't be the best basketball player of this generation if he wasn't abnormally tall (6' 9").  It's probably true, but it's a meaningless point.  That's how I feel about the Ferraro quote.)

More recently, McWhorter has been in the news, so to speak, because of his contention that 21st-century, "woke" antiracism is in effect a religion.  Although I don't agree with everything he writes in the article, I think the general framework he lays out is accurate and very clever.  It's one of those "I wish I had thought of that" things.  It provides a unifying model for a lot of disparate thoughts I've had on wokeness over the past decade or so.  McWhorter has led me, ironically, to an awaking about wokeness.  You can read his article or read this one (a critique of Robin DiAngelo's best-seller White Fragility) or listen to him on the podcast mentioned above or talking with Jane Coaston here, if you like.  If you don't like, I'll give my own thoughts below, and you can just read those.

One thing I've found frustrating about certain voices on the Left is the belief that there is some sort of greater moral purpose to the advancement of their preferred ideas and policies beyond just helping the people they want to help.  It really is analogous to religious enlightenment or redemption or salvation.  The reason I don't like this is, well, for one, I think it's annoyingly sanctimonious, but for another, it is often used to justify dishonesty and deny objective reality.  We can see this in AOC's famous quote about criticism she received for possibly misrepresenting some budgetary numbers: "I think that there's a lot of people more concerned about being precisely, factually, and semantically correct than about being morally right."  That's religious talk right there.  She also recently said an uptick in crime in New York City could be explained by unemployed people shoplifting bread to feed their families.  Again, she's saying something that is clearly not true literally to convey a greater moral message about the plight of poor people in our society.  You could almost argue she was being metaphorical, but I don't think she was.

The thing is, I understand and mostly share AOC's moral beliefs (just as I mostly share the moral beliefs of, say, Christianity), but I can't get behind her wokeness, because I simply don't believe in it, and also because I think it can be counterproductive.  In the case of budgets numbers, they are important because they provide the basis for the actual, real-life resources that will or will not be allocated to people.  If things don't add up and people in need don't get the services they rely on because of it, AOC's moral rectitude isn't going to mean shit.

In the case of rising crime, by attributing it solely to righteous behavior by desperate people, you are destroying your credibility on the issue, infantilizing your audience, and nullifying a very real trade-off we need to consider between a potential increase in crime and a reduction of heavy-handed policing.  If the message of people who want to defund or radically change policing is "we can do it in a way that will not lead to any increase in crime whatsoever, even a small one, even temporarily" then we are setting ourselves up for failure from the get-go.  The correct message about an uptick in crime, in my opinion, is something to the effect of, "We are in a time of social and political upheaval.  Many people are unemployed; many people are anxious because of the coronavirus; many people are rethinking the role of the police in society.  When you put all that together, you are probably going to get an uptick in crime -- some of it is political in nature; some of it is a result of stressed-out people making irrationally bad decisions; some of it is total desperation; some of it is amoral, opportunistic looting; some of it is the police sitting back because they feel underappreciated and are trying to make a misguided point.  Once we start to solve these things, crime will start to drop again."  That, I think, is the correct message, but it's not the woke one, because one of the tenets of wokeness, in the aftermath of George Floyd's murder and the protests, is that you can't attribute any of the peripheral crimes to the people actually committing them, even in a heavily qualified manner.

Another way in which wokeness is like religion is because it requires its adherents to believe two contradictory things simultaneously.  It's like the joke on The Simpsons:

To wit:

You must not generalize groups of people -- no single person is a representative of their racial, gender, sexual orientation, etc. group; saying you see people as individuals is a cop-out, because it denies them their culture and shared experience, and it serves as cover for your own biases ("I don't see color").

As a white person, you must take an active role in standing up and speaking out against racism; as a white person, you have to let black people be the prominent faces in the fight against racism -- don't coopt the movement -- it's not about you.

In the wake of recent tragedies, you should reach out to black friends and coworkers and make sure they are okay; you should give black people space and not overwhelm them to assuage your own burdens.

You should have frank conversations about race with black people to understand their perspective; it's not black people's job to education you about racism.

It is self-evident that sexism was a huge factor in Hillary Clinton losing the 2016 presidential election; Bernie Sanders was way out of line when he (allegedly) stated that Elizabeth Warren's gender would work against her if she was the 2020 candidate.

And so on...

I'm sure that to many people who might read this (hypothetically speaking; in reality I don't have "many" readers), it's going to sound like I'm being a whiny white guy or hating on antiracism or wokeness, but that's not my intent.  In fact, one of the ways I disagree a bit with McWhorter is the degree to which woke antiracism is a pernicious phenomenon.  I've pointed out some ways in which it is bad, but it has a good side, as well (like most religions).  I don't hate it; I just don't want to be a part of it, and I don't want to be considered a pariah for not being a part of it (as I feel with most religions).  I'm extremely tolerant of wokeness (as I am with most religions), and I hope it is reciprocated.  I'm not a big-tent liberal; I'm a huge-tent liberal.  I want (almost) everybody -- woke, non-woke, and in between -- invited to the party. 

Because the truth is, the AOCs and John McWhorters of the world share many common goals, and we all should come together to try to achieve them.

Until next time...

Entry 523: The Danger Zone

You know how when you go to the woods, you will sometimes see a sign telling you the fire danger rating?  I feel like we all need one of those for our anxiety level during "Coronavirus Season" (as my kids call it).  Mine was "very high" earlier this week, in the yellow, approaching orange, but I've dropped off to the blue: just normal "high."  I don't know what causes the fluctuations.  Nothing has happened in either direction that should have affected my anxieties levels.  But, for whatever reason, I felt much more uneasy at the beginning of the week than I do now.  Maybe it's just a learned behavior to relax on the weekend and stress out at the start of the week (an extension of the Sunday Blues).  Who knows?

Our mayor announced DC public schools will go entirely virtually until at least November.  It sucks (obviously), but probably for the best.  I was steadfastly in favor of school returning as normal in the fall, but after hearing a lot of the teachers didn't want to be forced to return in-person, I changed my tune considerably.  They are already overworked and underpaid, and now we are going to ask them to risk their health so that the rest of us can have some relief?  That doesn't seem right.

Although, that's not an entirely accurate way to frame it.  For many parents and students, school isn't just a source of relief, it's a necessity.  If you don't have the resources -- time, money, moral support -- to keep kids home, you really need school.  Not having it is not just an inconvenience (albeit a fucking massive one) like it is for us.  That's why I mentioned in a previous post that I'd be in favor of a school-only-for-those-who-really-need-it model.  Sadly, it probably wouldn't work politically/socially.  We are way too selfish.

Speaking of which, Paul Krugman has a good article up this week titled "The Cult of Selfishness is Killing America", which is about how the reluctance (and in many cases outright refusal) of Trump and his acolytes to take basic precautions against Covid, such as mask wearing, fits into a broader warped world view.  I recommend the entire article, but the final passage is particularly on-point.

Just to be clear, I’m not saying that Republicans are selfish. We’d be doing much better if that were all there were to it. The point, instead, is that they’ve sacralized selfishness, hurting their own political prospects by insisting on the right to act selfishly even when it hurts others. 

What the coronavirus has revealed is the power of America’s cult of selfishness. And this cult is killing us.  

I agree with Paul that this selfishness is mainly perpetrated by those on the right end of the political spectrum, but there is an element of this on the left too -- just not to the same extent and not with the same vindictiveness (and this matters; degree matters, a lot; I'm definitely not trying to "both sides" this).  We have such a look-out-for-number-one, gotta-get-mine mindset in this country.  We are terrible at working toward a greater good, just for the sake of the great good.  Often a greater good happens to be a byproduct of our individual, selfish pursuits (the good side of capitalism), but when this isn't the case, as with this pandemic, we flounder.  It's sad and disheartening.

But, hey, at least we can still have the music of Kenny Loggins.



Alright, I hear the movie I put on for the kids coming to an end.  I better go.  I don't want them to bother S.  She's been really stressed out this weekend.  We are trying to line up some sort of part-time nanny/tutor to help us out when school starts again, and she's not going to be able to relax until that's finalized.  I'm sure it doesn't help that I'm pretty blasé about the whole thing.  (We will find somebody, and if we don't, we will still get by.)  Also, I slept in today, so I think S feels I owe her some emotional capital.  I understand that, but it's not really my fault -- I just didn't wake up and nobody woke me up.  What am I supposed to do, set an alarm for Saturday morning?  Time: 8:00 am.  Label: Make sure spouse isn't annoyed.

Until next time... 

Entry 522: This Bird Has Flown

I once had a girl

Or should I say she once had me

She showed me her room

Isn't it good Norwegian wood?

She asked me to stay

And she told me to sit anywhere

So I looked around

And I noticed there wasn't a chair

I sat on a rug biding my time

Drinking her wine

We talked until two and then she said

"It's time for bed"

She told me she worked

In the morning and started to laugh

I told her I didn't

And crawled off to sleep in the bath

And when I awoke I was alone

This bird had flown

So I lit a fire

Isn't it good Norwegian wood?

I was listening to Pandora Radio the other night, as I do sometimes when my podcasts run dry, and the The Beatles song "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)" came on.  I'm very familiar with the song, as I am with most Beatles hits, and I probably could have regurgitated the lyrics on command since age 16 or so, but I never really gave them much thought.  For some reason, though, I started thinking about them this time, and I realized they are pretty awful.  It's a really trite, possibly misogynistic tale.



It's all set to this mystical, Eastern-inspired sitar music, and you're imagining this untouchable, exotic woman who mesmerizes John Lennon with her mysterious ways, before frustratingly vanishing forever.  But if you actually lay out what happens, it's just a dude getting denied in most mundane way possible -- like, it could have been based on any one of hundreds of nights I and my friends had in high school and college.  A guy goes back to a woman's room and sits on the floor (which happens often when you're young, because you're typically hanging out in small, inexpensive residences, without much furniture); he drinks with her for a little while, probably hoping something will happen, but nothing does (she doesn't seem to be into him in that way), and then she gets tired and makes an excuse to go bed; he wakes up in the morning, and she's already left for work.  That's the story.  There's nothing deep or profound about it. 

There are also some parts that don't make much sense.  Why he does he "sleep in bath"?  I would have just gone home.  (I was the type of guy who would walk many miles drunk at two in the morning to get to my own bed.)  If that wasn't an option (he does say he had to "crawl off," so he might have been in exceptionally bad shape), then I would have taken the floor over the bathtub.  I mean, he mentions that she has a rug, at least.  That seems much more comfortable to me than porcelain or whatever bathtubs were made of in 1965.

Also, the lyrics say, "this bird has flown," as if this woman is gone forever, but he's at her place.  Presumably she is going to return at some point later that day.  If he wants to see her again, he could just leave a note, or even stop by to say hi at another time.  She hasn't really "flown"; she just went to work.

After having these thoughts, I did a deep-dive into the song, and I learned that it's supposedly about one of Lennon's extramarital affairs, which makes even less sense.  A key takeaway from the lyrics is that he and this woman don't have sex.  He just drinks her wine and bides his time until it's time for bed.  When does the affair part of the affair happen?  Or is it something else -- like, the woman is actually John's wife at the time, Cynthia?  Or maybe Cynthia is the narrator, and John is the woman.  Her leaving to sleep in the bath is a symbol of them growing apart, and he's the "bird" who "flies" away (to be a rock star), leaving her hurt and alone in her own house.  That, somehow, actually makes the most sense.  And it kinda fits with what Paul McCartney once said about the song:

In our world the guy had to have some sort of revenge. It could have meant I lit a fire to keep myself warm, and wasn't the decor of her house wonderful? But it didn't, it meant I burned the fucking place down as an act of revenge, and then we left it there and went into the instrumental.

Norwegian wood is apparently a slang term for a type of cheap residential siding, and the reference is to watching it easily burn.  But, why would this man have to get revenge?  For what?  If anything, he should be grateful to this woman for sharing her wine.  Is he committing arson because she didn't sleep with him?  That's, uh, disturbing*, and it doesn't tie into the theme of infidelity at all.  The only way it makes any sense is if the "bird" is the one having the affair, and it gets its house burned down because of it.  Aggrieved significant others have started fires for lesser reasons, after all.

*Although, let's not forget John Lennon also famously sang, "I used to be cruel to my woman, I beat her, and kept her apart from the things that she loves."  And apparently this wasn't just poetic license.

So, I think that it's it.  I think I've cracked the code.  In a role reversal, Cynthia is the boy narrating the song and John is the girl who flies.  Either that or it's just a bunch of pablum by a mediocre poet trying to do a Bob Dylan impersonation.  That's also a possibility.

Alright, I think I've spilled enough virtually ink on a 55-year-old recording that's maybe, like, my 103rd favorite Beatles song ever.  So, I think I'll leave it there.  The last thing I'll say is that I first started listening to the Beatles on my own in the early '90s, and they seemed like such a distant band from a such a distant era, but it would be like a kid today listening to Nirvana.  Maybe that's not as weird as The Wonder Years of today being set in 2003, but it's still messes with my head a bit.  The passage of time never does not confound me.

Until next time...

Entry 521: Bad News Day

Not a lot to be cheerful about in the headlines today.  I went to the Washington Post homepage this morning.  The first two stories I saw:

1. 15 women accuse then-Redskin employees of sexual harassment
2. Officials criticized as protesters tell of being detained by agents in unmarked vans

Then, as I was reading these, a breaking news banner ran across the top of my screen: "Justice Ginsberg Being Treated For Cancer Recurrence."

Fantastic.

Oh, and also, plenty of sidebar information about how Covid-19 is still terrorizing the population.  We are actually worse off now than we were before shutdown in many places, which is an awful indictment of our current president and his anti-science worshipers.  A lot of places are even shutting down again, which is the appropriate response.  It's one that was sadly predictable.  Here's what I wrote on this blog about two months ago:

In general, my hunch is that everywhere is going to open up too early, from a public health standpoint, and then places are going to shut back down piecemeal if they are hotspots of resurgence.  This won’t really work, because the damage will already be done by the time one area decides to shut down again, and the virus will already be passed on to the next place.  We are going to carry on in this way -- flare-ups and shutdowns -- until we develop a treatment/vaccine or we build up herd immunity, neither of which is likely to happen anytime soon.  The result is going to be a lot of unnecessary death and sickness.

Lo and behold...

And now we have the Sword of Damocles hanging over us with school set to reopen in the fall.  If we do open schools, it's going to be disaster; if we don't, it's also going to be a disaster.  There is no way to win.  There is only a way to lose the least.  I mean, maybe we could win if we (a) shut down everything again; (b) send people money so that they can scrape by once we shut down everything again; (c) social distance and/or wear masks everywhere, especially indoors.  But even then, it's still too late to safely open up schools as scheduled in many places.  And we are not going to do those three things anyway.

Here in DC, we've actually been managing things reasonably well (or getting lucky).  We only had 39 new cases today and only have 89 people currently hospitalize with coronavirus, which isn't terrible, relatively speaking, for a city of about 600K.  Our trend line is well below its peak and not moving much in either direction.  It seems, at the very least, we've flattened the curve.

For this reason, I was pretty staunchly in favor of sending kids back to school full-time, as scheduled, a few weeks ago when I took a survey on the matter.  I thought the risks of infection were outweighed by the risks of shuttering schools (of which there are many).  However, I've changed my tune quite a bit since then.  Mainly, it's because the virus is still completely out-of-control in other parts of the country.  I mean, we can't wall off our city.  We are one of the most transient regions in the country.  It would be so easy to let our guard down and get slammed again because of it.  It might happen even with our guard up.  That's the thing about exponential growth.  It doesn't take long to completely blow up.  If you take a piece of paper and you fold it over itself repeatedly, so that you double its thickness each time, you know how many times you have to fold it until it stretches from Earth to the Moon?  40.  That's it: 40.

So, I'm no longer in favor of sending kids back to school full-time in the fall.  The most likely scenario is a hybrid, two-days-in-class, three-days-remote schedule, which I guess is fine.  At this point, I'd almost rather just go full-time remote for at the least the first few months, but that might be an unbearable burden for some families.  S and I are very fortunate in that we both have decent paying jobs that allow us a lot of flexibility.  We have time and resources to home-school our children (as much as it sucks, we can do it), and after this is all over, we can hire independent tutors to catch our kids up if they fall behind.  Many parents don't have this luxury and would be devastated if schools shut down.  Not to mention, some children don't have parents or any other accountable adults in the their lives and need school for some semblance stability.

Here's an idea that just popped into my head.  What if we just had in-class instruction for the families who really need it and everybody else did it remotely?  Would that work?  Would it be possible to create workable criteria for "really need it"?  Would teachers go for it?  Would other parents go for it?  I would, but I'm pretty selfless in that way.  I'm perfectly fine paying for public services I don't need.  I'm not saying that to brag or anything like that.  It's just how I am.  I'm plenty selfish in other ways: Don't fuck with my leisure time.

And speaking of leisure time, this session has come to an end.  I need to wrap it up, and help S put the kids to bed.  Then, hopefully we will have a chance to watch an episode or two of our new favorite show: Indian Matchmaking.  It's not exactly world-class TV, but it's fun enough, and it's something we can watch together.  At the very least, it's a distraction from morbid and unsettling news, which is what I want at night.  When it comes to media consumption, the way I stay informed and sane, in times like these, is with my "mullet strategy": news in the morning, entertainment in the evening.

Until next time...

Entry 520: Star Wars, Monopoly, Polls, and Social Media

A bit short on time this weekend, so I'll try to crank out this entry as efficiently as possible.  Too many leisure activities are cutting into my blogging time.  I played trivia last night over Zoom (we had our worst showing -- 10th place out of 26 teams; we usually finish top-5), and then we watched the last Star Wars movie, number nine.  I can't remember the subtitle.  I think it's Star Wars: Same Shit, Different Movie.  We watched all nine movies as a family, so this was the final one.  S and I hadn't even seen it yet.  It's not great.  The entire sequel trilogy is pretty lousy, to be honest.  I mean, not as bad as the prequel trilogy, but still not good, at all.  Derivative, inconsistent, schmaltzy, and too damned long.  (Whatever happened to the 1:55 movie?  Why is everything 2:20 or longer now?)  I wonder if Lucas/Disney would have been better off just spinning it off completely and never doing anything with the original trilogy.  Certainly, they wouldn't have been better off financially -- you could build a real planet-destroying Death Star with the amount of money those movies have made -- but artistically I think they would have been.  I enjoyed both Rogue One and The Mandalorian quite a bit.  Anyway, there's already been more than enough virtual ink spilled on Star Wars over years, so I'll just leave it at that.

I've been playing a lot of Monopoly lately too.  Lil' S1 had gotten into it.  It's a good way to kill an hour as a family.  S will play too sometimes.  Lil' S2 is too little, but we can usually occupy him by letting him roll for us and handle the deeds and houses and stuff.  I used to play Monopoly a lot in high school (seriously), and I got pretty good at it, so usually I'll try to control the game and make it as even/fun as possible.  Like, I'll try to make deals so that everybody has a fair chance, and then it's just whoever gets the lucky rolls will win.  Lil' S1's strategy is to get Boardwalk and Park Place at all cost, which isn't a terrible way to go.  What usually happens is we will play for a while, and then once somebody starts falling behind they'll just quit, which is good, as in Monopoly, you can hopelessly drag things out for hours if you want to.  We implemented the whoever-loses-has-to-clean-up-the-game rule, which has worked out very well.  It helps abate any hurt feelings, and it gives people incentive to concede gracefully.

Man, what a weird time, huh?  We all have to stay home, while the world burns down around us.  I've started sneaking peeks at the presidential election poll numbers, which I told myself I wouldn't do.  I was so into it in 2016, and it was so painful; I vowed not to let that happen this time around.  But I can't help it.  Things just look so good for Biden right now.  It's hard not to check out FiveThirtyEight when I need a little pick-me-up.  I mean, Biden is currently leading the polls in Texas -- Texas! ...  Okay, let's move on to a new topic before I jinx this.  I don't believe in jinxes, but I'm not taking any chances.  I'm Pascal's Wager-ing this one.

I actually pulled the trigger and deleted my Facebook account.  It should be gone from view now, and in a few more weeks it will deleted permanently -- or so Facebook says.  It wouldn't surprise me if it's alive forever on some server farm in The Dalles, Oregon, or something like that, but whatever.  As far as I'm concerned, I'm out.  I recommend it, if you're considering it.  It's nice to not have to feel compelled to check anything and to not have to feel conflicted every time you hear Mark Zuckerberg give his junior-high-libertarian views on free speech and why the massive spread of misinformation is actually good a thing.  Gaming social media algorithms to spread old, out-of-context stories as if they're news is paramount to any free society!

I'm still on Twitter, and my use has gone up quite a bit since I quit Facebook, but on net, my social media usage has dropped.  In fact, my overall screen time was down 20% this week from my average, which is a positive thing.  I've been making a concerted effort to look at screens less.  I got a paper subscription to The New Yorker, and I've been trying to read it during down time instead of staring at my phone.  I'll print out a crossword puzzle and solve it on my clipboard more often now.  And when I want to stream something, I'll cast it to the TV, and it watch it there instead of on my phone.

Part of this is that I don't want to have my face in my phone while I'm with my kids (which is pretty much all the time now).  It feels so disconnecting and isolating.  I feel much more "present" reading an actual magazine than scrolling Twitter on my phone with my kids around.  Also, there's a mental/physical health component to it.  It can't be good for your mental state to be on your phone all the time, and it definitely isn't good for your body.  (I can tell my eyes are getting worse, and I don't think it's just because of age.)  In general, I want to be healthier.  It's one of the few things I can control in this out-of-control time.  Cutting back on screen time is a part of this, as is exercising regularly (back on track after a mild back injury), abstaining for alcohol (I'm down to a drink or two a month now), and eating right.  That last one is the hardest, without question.  I can go a week or so eating healthily, and then I have a night like last night, where it's 12:15 am, and I'm like, Fuck it, I'm hungry; I'm making nachos.  Oh well, nobody's perfect.  If I'm forever doomed to be "Out of Shape In Shape Guy" so be it.

Until next time...