Entry 607: On Health, Private and Public

I started doing a new diet in which I only eat within an 8-hour period of each day; I don't eat anything the remaining 16 hours. It's commonly referred to as the 16/8 diet and is a form of intermittent fasting. I don't love that term, because to me you have to refrain from eating for at least, like, a day before you can say you're "fasting," but that's what people call it, so that's what it's called. I'm doing a specific type of 16/8 diet in that I only eat two meals a day roughly 7.5 hours apart -- so, like, I'll eat something at 12:30 pm and then I'll eat something at 8:00 pm, and I won't eat anything at any other time. It's technically closer to a 16/0.5/7/0.5 diet.

Why am I doing this? I just want to do something. I ate like shit on the cruise, and even before that I had relapsed into some bad eating habits -- too much snacking, too much salt and sugar. Working from home, I'd frequently swing by the cupboard and shove a fistful of Goldfish crackers into my mouth or house a sleeve of Ritz. And my nightly bowl of granola had morphed into bowls of granola to where I was polishing off half a bag of Michele's Cherry Chocolate in a sitting. That was not good for my waistline (too much fat and sugar) nor my wallet (close to $7.00 per bag). So, I felt the need to do something, and a few people (including my sister) swear by intermittent fasting, so I decided to give it a go. 

The truth is I don't think which diet you pick really matters that much. I mean, I read some stuff that says eating only two meals a day is a good way to go because it gives your body a chance to metabolize food into energy, and it trains you to function while being a little bit hungry, and that all makes sense to me, but it could just be BS. It seems that so much of what you read about nutrition is either based on one study that gets overly hyped only to be refuted a few years later (eggs are bad, eggs are good, milk is good, milk is bad, milk is good again), or it's just a new way to sell us what we already know. Because there are really only three principles you need to know for eating healthy:

1. Eat primarily protein and vegetables
2. Stay away from added sugars and salts
3. Don't pig out

That's it; everything else is noise. It's so simple in theory, but so difficult in practice -- and that's why people need regimented diets. It's not the mix of food that matters; it's the bookkeeping. For me, 16/8 is appealing because I like eating big meals, I drink a lot of coffee in the morning so I don't get that hungry anyway, it stops my snacking, I can still eat "what I want" for the most part, and it doesn't require much thought to implement. That last one is why I've never been interested in "points" diets. I have enough stressful decisions in my life, I don't need to fret over whether or not I can eat a 15-point bag of soy snacks with lunch.

Anyway, it's going pretty well so far, but it's only been a week, and I have no idea if it's "working." I'll report back in a month or so and let you how I'm feeling and how my waistline is looking.

In other news, as you probably heard, a judge overruled the federal mask mandate on public transportation. This doesn't bode well for future court rulings by Trump appointed judges, and according to experts I trust, it's judicial overreach, but I'm fine with the mandate being gone. Bad process, okay results. I don't feel personally aggrieved being compelled to wear a mask -- I'm mostly fine with it -- but I don't think mandates are good policy, politically or public health-wise. Politically, it's just not smart for liberals to tie their identities to a rule that annoys so much of the country (including many other liberals). As for public health, it's not clear to me that masks do all that much to prevent spread in the first place. They are probably efficacious in certain controlled settings, like, say, hospitals, but in airports or metro centers where half the people are wearing translucently thin pieces of fabric around their chins, I don't think they do all that much. For what it's worth, my kids' school has been mask optional for over a month, and I haven't received notice of a single Covid case among the students since then.

Also, the pro-mask-mandate folks only have one measure of public health: disease transmission. If that's the only criterion, then of course we should all wear masks all the time. But there are other aspects of public well-being, and these are often given short shrift by the pro mask crowd. For one thing, masks make people irritable and resentful, which leads to an increase in hostility and confrontations, and masks make it harder to resolve such things because you can't always hear what people are saying and you can't read their facial expressions (you can't defuse situations with a smile). For another thing, masks are a major part of a fear-based response to Covid that now outweighs the severity of the disease itself. Yes, getting Covid is bad, but so is living our lives in fear of getting Covid (and training our kids to be scared). It's not good for our mental health. Covid anxiety is now worse than Covid.

At least this is the case for most of us, given current strains of Covid are unlikely to make vaxxed and boosted people any sicker than a common cold. There are of course folks who chose not to get vaccinated (that's on them) or who can't get vaccinated or who have comorbidities that make it dangerous to get Covid even if they are vaccinated. But a lot of these people probably aren't traveling even with a mask mandate, and if they are, they are still free to protect themselves. They can still wear a mask -- even though masks are better at protecting others, wearing a good surgical-grade mask does provide you some protection -- and they can wear a face shield. This to me seems like a more reasonable, sane way to go about things rather than making everybody else do something they hate.

The sad part is that even though I suspect this point of view is shared by a lot of liberals, it's super hard to find it represented in mainstream, left-of-center media. You are more likely to find tripe like this article -- on the main page of my WaPo feed, under News, not even Opinion -- "Whoops of selfish delight" by Robin Givhan. This is a shockingly bad article. For starters, the very premise that wanting the mask mandate to be lifted is selfish is flawed, because, by allowing others to remove their masks, you are accepting the same risk of exposure for yourself (and your family) as everybody else. Cheering for a rule in which only you could remove your mask would be very selfish, but that's not the case. So, what we have here is not selfishness; it's a different collective risk calculus and a different prioritization of public health objectives.

And the article not only doesn't mention any other public health objectives, it doesn't even acknowledge that some might exist. Instead it links to another article about the racial and class disparities of pandemic life, even though this doesn't in any way strengthen the author's argument concerning the mask mandate. It's completely inapt. I mean, does she think it's only rich whiteys who loathe the mask mandates?* If so, she should patronize a few establishments in a diverse neighbor. I do that on the regular, and I see people of all colors and income levels wearing or not wearing or kinda wearing masks. There doesn't seem to be any correlation with race or wealth at all.

*I doubt she thinks that. I think she just wants to inject an element of racial justice into this story, because there's a certain type of person -- overly represented among WaPo readers and writers -- who thinks the only credible way to address a societal issue is through a lens of power differentials. This is a big part of the book I'm currently reading Woke Racism by John McWhorter. It's a bit over the top in certain parts, but still an interesting read.  

Another thing that undercuts the author's premise is the video in it. Those are some pretty weak "whoops" (of selfish delight or otherwise). It opens with a flight attendant singing in celebration about the ruling (and if anybody has standing to speak on a mask mandate, it's somebody whose living is potentially effected by it, no?), and then it shows a few clips of scattered applause and cheers among passengers. The vast majority of the people onboard are clearly just sitting there unmoved, because they either didn't hear what was announced or they don't give a shit. It's not like the entire plane rose to their feet to give a standing ovation.

Then the article ends with legal stuff, which is the best part, but still, not really here nor there. I guarantee you the vast majority of the people cheering on planes were not well versed on the jurisprudential ramifications of the announcement. They are just annoyed with their masks and responding to somebody who said they can take them off. I don't think it's any deeper or more sinister than that.

Until next time...

Entry 606: Cruisin'

The big family cruise for my father-in-law's 80th birthday came and went. It was... fine. I enjoyed it, and it was good to spend time with everybody as a family like that, but I'm not super eager to hop back on another cruise ship anytime soon. It's kinda a weird concept: Hey, let's all hang out on this floating resort. It's not as nice as a regular resort, and there's a pretty good chance you'll get motion sickness at some point to boot!

The motion sickness is a really thing too. Don't let anybody tell you otherwise. Those ships are so big you don't even notice it! Nah... I always noticed it. It didn't always bother me, but I always noticed it. And weirdly, I handled it much better than S. I'm the one who gets nauseous at Hollywood Studios, and she's the one who lived at sea for a semester in college. But somehow she was really starting to feel it toward the end of the trip, and I was pretty much good to go. The first night was brutal (the choppiest night of the trip by far), and then after that I acclimated to it. Lil' S2 got it the worst. He would have to lie down from time to time because he felt seasick.

He still had fun though. We all did. They had a water park, a pool, a gym, a spa, a mini golf course, and a bunch of lounges and bars. The nightlife looked pretty cool -- so much live music. You could just pop in on somebody playing the piano Billy Joel style, or an '80s cover band, or a salsa club, or a variety show, or what have you. I didn't really partake because I went to bed very early by my standards, usually around 10:30. Everybody in S's family is fast asleep an hour and a half before that, including S and the boys, with whom I was sharing a very small cabin, so when they woke up (very early) I pretty much had to wake up too. Once I got up in time to watch the sunset, so I did, but it was cloudy and not very beautiful at all.

Actually the final night we were there, we did do something at night. S, her sister, and I went to see a comedy show -- some woman named Thea Vidale. It was terrible. We literally walked out after 10 minutes it was so bad. I looked her up online afterward, and I think she was pretty funny once, but she mailed it in big time when we saw her. (To be fair, she did like ten shows total the four nights we were on the ship.) She was doing what's known in the NBA as "keep getting dem checks." She just rambled with little point and no punchlines. Her whole shtick was being an overbearing vulgar loudmouth, which gets old super quickly if there's nothing clever undergirding it. I knew we were in trouble when she came on stage and sat down in a chair. It's never a good sign when you get the standup who doesn't actually stand up.

The best thing I did on the ship was get a deep tissue massage. It hurt so good. I don't know how a 97-pound woman can make her arm feel like a rolling pin flattening your muscles, but this massage therapist did it. This wasn't one of those relaxing "aah that feels good" massages -- those aren't my type. I like the massages that dig deep into your soul, confound your sensors of pleasure and pain, and leave you feeling sore the next day. The only problem with it was that she made me feel guilty for having knotty muscles -- like, she'd feel tightness in my back and tsk-tsk and say something like "can tell you don't soak in tub enough." It reminded me of that Seinfeld episode in which Brad Garrett plays an auto mechanic who chastises Jerry for not taking care of his car.

The worst part about the trip was the cost -- not of the cruise itself, but of everything else. It's "all inclusive," with the exception of espresso drinks, seltzer water, alcoholic beverages, soda, arcade games, casino games, bottled water, sushi, surf & turf, internet service, spa treatments, photos, souvenirs, shore excursions, and service gratuity. If you want any of those things, you have to pay separately, and they are not cheap nor are they high quality. I dropped $65 on internet for the trip, and I could barely check my email it was so slow. I gave the kids $10 each to spend in the arcade and it didn't even last them 15 minutes. That's how they get you.

The second worst part of the trip was the shitty country music they played nonstop in the main dining area. God, I loathe that pop country garbage: My whiskey's brown, my truck's a Ford, got some country girls to come on board, them country girls all flock to me, cuz my gee-tar's hot and my land is free... It's my least favorite musical genre by far. Here are my top-5 in order from most to least tolerable. 

5. Weird experimental avant-garde shit
4. Punk/metal in which the leader singer screams all the lyrics, especially insufferable if the members of the band are straight-edge and/or vegan
3. Easy listening, Kenny G stuff -- I heard an interview with Kenny G and really like him, so I listened to some of his music on YouTube; it's not good
2. Gospel -- once I took a Lyft to the airport at five in the morning and my driver listened to a radio show called "Praise Jesus" at 100 decibels the entire way; it was absolutely brutal
1. Pop country

Mainly I dislike pop country music because it's an aural atrocity, but, I will admit, another reason is that I associate it with people I would probably not want to hang out with. People who defend Deshaun Watson but hated on Colin Kaepernick, who think "Let's Go Brandon" is the cleverest slogan ever created, and whose attire consists primarily of cargo shorts and tee shirts with stylized American flag iconography. I actually was a bit worried that this type of person was going to be overly represented on the cruise, but they weren't really. They were definitely there, but almost every type of person was there. It was a pretty diverse group. Lots of old people of course, but also lots of families and seemingly lots of single people. It wasn't just a bunch of straight, cis whiteys either. There were a good number of Black and brown people onboard and seemingly a strong LBGT contingent as well. I guess people from all walks of life want to party on a floating skyscraper.

Plenty of kids around too. The hot tubs were filled with teenagers by 9:00 pm. Lil' S1 made a few friends, because of course he did -- some little boy named Magnus or something like that who is apparently a YouTuber. They met at the water park and then hung out at the "Kids Club." That's actually the best part of the cruise: They have a place you can dump your kids. It would have been really nice if I had a wife who could stay up past 8:30 in the evening.

One funny moment happened when both my boys were in the hot tub with a few other kids, and I got in it with them and Lil' S1 gave me a strange look and said, "Uh, daddy, I think the adult hot tub is on the other end," and pointed to the other hot tub which happened to only have adults in it. Then he put it to a vote, and I got booted from the "kid" hot tub by unanimous decision. One of the kids in there was, like, 13 too. He seemed too old to be hanging out with a 9-year-old, but he was by himself, which really matters. Kids are so much nicer to other kids when there is nobody around they are trying to impress.

The best thing about a cruise, in theory, is that you get to vacation during your travel time to destinations. In practice, this didn't work out so well for us because our destinations, Honduras and Mexico, didn't really feel like destinations because we got such little time there. We didn't even make it to mainland Honduras. We spent a few hours on the island of Roatán. Our guides (a couple dudes with a van) were cool, and they took us to a zoo of sorts, where the kids got to pet a sloth and hold a macaw and stuff like that -- things that surely would have been illegal in the states. Then we went to a chocolate factory (very different from Willy Wonka's), and then went to a lookout point and snapped a few nice pics.

The next day we went to Mexico. We docked in Cozumel, and then took a ferry over to the mainland (Playa del Carmen). We went to a nature park called Xcaret and swam/floated down this "river." It was cool, but it was super rushed and really expensive, and S's parents are too old to do anything too active anyway, so they basically just sat on a bench the entire time. Also, the ferry ride was kinda long (45 minutes each way) and super choppy, which is exactly what we didn't need at that moment. Thankfully, Lil' S2 slept both there and back or he would have been really suffering, I think.

Oh, and I lost S's water bottle. That might not sound like that big a deal, but it was this expensive, hard-to-find water bottle that "purifies" the water after you put it in. I mean, it's probably total BS -- what does it even mean to "purify" tap water? -- but somehow pointing that out to S only made things worse. She couldn't get too mad at me though, because after we finished the river at Xcaret, she wanted to go to lunch, and I insisted that we look for her parents because the guide told us to meet them afterward (the whole scene was very hectic). She was hangry and already walking with the kids toward the restaurant, but I made her stop and wait while I looked. Lo and behold I found the guide who took me to her parents, who were in fact waiting for us. If we had listened to S, we would have totally dissed them. So, you know, you win some, you lose some.

Alright a few pics and then I'm out.

 

Until next time...

Entry 605: Math Problem

Short entry today, which is unfortunate, considering I didn't post anything at all this past weekend. I'm not abandoning this blog (I can't let down my double digit readership); I've just been really busy of late, with very specific things, not just, like, life or kids or whatnot. I served as a judge at the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament last weekend (I wrote nearly 2,000 words about it here, if you are so inclined to read about it), and then we are leaving early tomorrow to visit S's parents in Tampa and then take a cruise to Honduras and Mexico. It's a big family to-do for my father-in-law's 80th birthday.

I'll admit I was quite apprehensive about the idea of a cruise a first. Floating in the ocean, in the middle of nowhere, hundreds of miles from civilization, just doesn't strike me as very relaxing. I'm not a grandeur-of-the-open-sea type of guy. But after having some time to warm up to the idea and looking online at the amenities on the ship and the excursions you can book when you dock, I'm excited for it -- or at least I'm not totally anxious about it, which is probably the best I can hope for at the moment. I'm sure once it's actually in progress I'll really enjoy it -- that's how these things seem to go.

It's pretty late and I have to wake up super early tomorrow (like 4:00 am early), but before I go I want to share the latest math exploits of Lil' S2. The other morning before school we had the following conversation. 

Him: Daddy, how many 60s are in 400?

Me: Well, let's see, 6 times 60 is 360, so it's 6 with a remainder of 40.

Him: Oh, okay, then there are 16 hours and 40 mins in 1,000 minutes!

Me: Is that... [Can't do arithmetic in head quickly enough, pull out calculator on my phone and punch in 1,000 / 60 and get the answer 16.666667] You're right! How'd you figure that out!

Him: Well, you helped me with last part. I know that there are 10 100s in 1,000, but if you only take 60 instead of 100 then you have 40 left over and 40 10s is 400. So when you told me there are 6 hours and 40 minutes in 400, then I knew it had to be 16 hours and 40 minutes in 1,000 minutes.

Me: Woah! Good job!

That is some advanced reasoning for a six-year-old, and I'm not just saying that because he's my son. I'd be willing to bet a substantial portion of the adult American population could not figure that out, even if I gave them 400 / 60. S and I have been trying to figure out a good way to nurture this math talent. We want to send him to Mathnasium (Lil' S1 has been doing it for a while), but his reading skills aren't strong enough to handle the word problems yet. I think this hurts him in the classroom as well. I don't think his teachers recognize his natural aptitude in math because he can't always follow the written instructions, so he gets things wrong. I guess we need to teach him to read better to improve his math skills.

Alright, now I'm done.

Until next time...

Entry 604: Unstructured Play

Busy weekend, this one, despite not really doing anything. It's all the kids' activities. They are always doing something, and this is after we made a conscious effort to cutback on signing them up for things. It's funny because I feel like I did way less formal activities when I was a kid, and yet I feel like I was exposed to more things. I've been trying to reconcile those two seemingly contradictory things. One obvious answer is that I'm misremembering in some way, and that is definitely a possibility. But I have a different theory, and that is that the way children interact these days limits their exposure to different types of things. Parents are so much more helicoptery today than they were when I was a kid (myself included), and so play time is more formal and focused. There isn't as much unstructured play where kids just do shit on their own.

Let's take sports, for instance, because that's what I was into as a kid. Just about every memory I have about playing as a child involves sports in some way, and yet I played very few sports formally pre-high school. It was pretty much just soccer and baseball, and then I took swim lessons during the summer. I played so much football and basketball and did a ton of bike-riding and wrestling, but I just did this stuff with the kids in my neighborhood -- my parents didn't sign me up for it. They didn't need to sign me up for it because I was already doing enough of it on my own.

It seems like that pick-up game culture just doesn't exist to the same extent anymore. My kids and their friends certainly don't partake in it, and I don't see kids out on the street or in the park playing sports very often either, unless it's as part of a formal league. This might not be such a great thing. Rec leagues are cool and all, but they come with a lot of overhead and restrictions. You need to have time, transportation, money for dues, uniforms, etc., and then they are overly structured, in my opinion. There's too much of a focus on pedantry and not enough on fun. You have to teach the children "the fundamentals," when all they really want to do is run around. It's a lot of drills, taking turns, and standing around, not enough scrimmaging and playing.

As an example of the logistical problems, Lil' S2 asked me if he could play flag football. His friends happen to be playing in a league, so I went to sign him up, but it's at the same time as his soccer. So, then I looked at a different league, and it's at the same time as his karate. (It's especially annoying because they only overlap by a few weeks, but that's like a quarter of the season.) There's another league but it would be a 45-minute drive each way, and we've already devoted enough weekend time to our kids' activities. So, I passed on it.

That's the other thing: Scheduling too much burns out everybody, parents and kids alike. But, as a parent, you feel compelled to sign your kid up for so much stuff, because it's now seemingly the only way to expose them to a lot of different types of things. Like, if Lil' S2 played football in the street everyday like I did at his age, then I wouldn't feel bad about him not getting to play in the league. But he doesn't do that, because that's just not how things are done anymore.

It could be that sports are just less popular now, and kids are doing other things, and I don't doubt that that's part of it, but even non-sport play seems to be much more structured now than it was in the past. Lil' S1 doesn't really like team sports, but we still set up a lot of his "play dates" for him. He's almost 10, and at that age, I rarely had my parents set things up for me (though I needed their sign off, of course). I would just knock on people's doors, or I would call people and see if they could play. And maybe that's a big part of the explanation -- there's no such thing as a family phone anymore. Kids don't have phone numbers, so they have no choice but to have their parents facilitate.

Anyway, not to sound like "back in my day" guy --the kids will probably be alright -- but I do wonder if we're setting our children up for an increased likelihood of isolation and loneliness by structuring so many of their social interactions for them. Are they going to have the social skills needed to make and keep friends once their parents aren't around? Throw in a few formative years spent in the midst of a global pandemic and the rise of social media, e-commerce, and telecommuting, and it's definitely a recipe for a new social order that doesn't sound very appealing to me.

Well, there are a few heartening things. Lil' S2 actually does have some neighborhood friends whom he plays with just about every weekend. He can just go over there and see if they're home and they can do the same. (Although we often do text with the mom, just to save a trip.) This really has been a saving grace for us. It gives him something to do, and it gives us a break. He can only entertain himself for so long.

As for Lil' S1, he doesn't really have anybody like that in the neighborhood (sometimes he'll ride his bike to his friend E's house but not very often), but he does seem to have a lot of friends, or at least he's friendly with a lot of kids. He's pretty bold when it comes to interacting with others, and he seems to have no airs to him. He says "hi" to everybody. I sometimes worry that he's too naive -- I mean, not everybody is going to like him and be nice to him -- but he'll figure it out. It's tough to get through middle school without a reality check of how mean your peers can be.

Until next time...

Entry 603: A Six Pack of Quick Hitters

I'm low on time and blogging energy this weekend, so I'm just going to do a few quick hitters and call it a post.

-Our Tesla came in, so we've been driving it. It's pretty fuckin' sweet. Aside from it being electric (the biggest draw), it's just fun to drive. I've never really owned a "nice" car before, and I gotta say, you get spoiled by it really quickly. Now when I get into our other car, I'm like What, I gotta put a key in and adjust the seats on my own? And how am I supposed to back out without cameras? You mean I gotta turn my head?

-There are downsides, of course -- the payments, most notably, but also the stress of trying to keep it in pristine condition. If you drive and park in the city a lot, which we do, your car is going to get dinged up a little bit. I used to watch cars parallel park from my apartment window, and drivers act like they're playing bumper cars if they don't think anybody is looking. Plus, we've got two kids, so the inside is going to get trashed pretty much no matter what we do.

-As an example of stressing about the car, we are going to a Holi celebration tomorrow, at which we will get caked in a bright-colored corn starch substance. Our other car just started making a weird grinding noise (speaking of stress), so we don't want to drive it until we can get it looked at. I'm already nervous about getting this color stuff all over our Tesla. S and I are diligently planning it all out -- We'll bring a change of clothes and towels and lay down blankets in the backseat... But you know that's not going to totally work. It's like going to the beach and expecting not to track sand everywhere.

-I hate being a guy who stresses over material things, but sometimes I can't help it. I had another ordeal with that damn treadmill. A few weeks ago it just stopped working. So, I had to spend another umpteen hours on hold to do a virtual diagnostic session. Then I had to wait a week for some replacements parts to come. Then I had to make a bunch of phone calls and spend more time on hold to get a technician to come out. It got fixed and everything is under warranty, but it was such a hassle, and I'm nervous it's going to crap out again. I would be more pissed about it all, but it might have been my fault. I didn't read the manual carefully, so I didn't know I was supposed to use a surge protect. I plugged it directly into the wall, which apparently is a no-no.

-My anxiety levels were especially high at the beginning of the week, but they've come down a bit since then. I don't really know what causes the ebbs and flows. Sometimes I do -- there will be a big life event that will really get the butterflies going -- but most of the time it's just kinda normal events. I mean, there's never a time in your life in which you have all your problems solved and can totally relax. It's one shitty thing after another until you grow old and expire. Life's a bitch and then you die. This sounds dour but I actually find it comforting, because it makes me think -- you might as well just enjoy life now because there's no better time. Go ahead and grab (and give) joy whenever you can do so; don't wait for the perfect moment because there's no such thing.

-To that end, I've been watching a lot of basketball -- March Madness mainly, but also this new HBO show called Winning Time about the 1980s LA Lakers. It's so good. John C. Reilly as Jerry Buss is fantastic, and this guy Quincy Isaish they got to play Magic Johnson is excellent too -- totally believable. They've only released two episodes so far, but I'm eagerly awaiting the rest. Apparently Adrian Brody joins the fray later as Pat Reilly, which sounds like another bang-up casting job. It's even got a bit part for my girl Molly Gordon of Booksmart and Good Boys fame.

Well, it's late; that's all. Until next time...

Entry 602: Travels and Travails

I went to Palm Springs for a work conference this past week. As far as conference locales go, you could do worse than Palm Springs this time of year. The conference was pretty good. The talks were on the dry side, but the overall experience was enjoyable. The hotel was nice, the weather was mostly pleasant, and it was fun to hang out with my colleagues. Also, I set the high score at pop-a-shot at the end-of-conference reception (they had a bunch of arcade games there), so that was cool. I'm not being facetious. It was legit cool. A crowd of 20 people or so were watching me play and rooting for me as I annihilated the previous best score (it was 48; I got 106). Then a random guy who was playing it a bunch proclaimed in a German accent: You are the champion, tonight. It was like something out of an '80s movie. Badass.

[This is what I left]

[This is what I came home to; pretty good snowman though by Lil' S1]

The travel was pretty brutal though. There is no direct flight from DC to Palm Springs, so I had to book a layover, which I hate. I find the airport experience super stressful (doesn't everybody?), and layovers double this stress because they double the number of airports. I was scheduled to leave on Monday, but my flight got delayed, which would have caused me to miss my connection, and there was nothing else available, so I had to rebook for the next morning. Of course, it didn't get delayed until after I had already arrived at the airport and went through security. To make matters worse, I (stupidly, in retrospect) checked a bag, so I had to go to baggage claim and have them put in a request to pull my bag, which they did, but not until my scheduled flight actually boarded, which was almost two hours later. I left for the airport around 1:30 pm and returned back home at 5:30 pm -- four hours for a trip I didn't even take.

And I had to wake up at 4:30am the next morning to catch my rescheduled flight. But that, thankfully, went smoothly. Although I hate getting up that early, it does make the traveling process so much more tolerable. There are so many fewer people on the road and in the airport, and you're much less likely to get delayed because there aren't as many flights before yours to mess things up. I also learned from my previous mistake and didn't check a bag. I downsized from a hard-case roller-board to a medium-size duffel bag, and that's the way to go if you can swing it. You can always find room for it in the overhead bins -- pliability, see.

It's the dilemma of the short trip: Is it more inconvenient to check a bag and have to wait for it at baggage claim (and run the risk of getting separated from it somehow), or to not check it and lug it around with you and possibly fight with other travelers for overhead space?

Now my answer to that question is that it is much better to not check it if you have a layover, and it's about the same if you don't have a layover. But this, of course, is also contingent on your cargo. I typically don't have anything that can't be a little smushed or that isn't allowed through security. I always just bring all my normal toiletries -- normal-size toothpaste, deodorant, etc. -- and then if they tell me it's prohibited I just throw it away and buy a new one. But that almost never happens. On this trip, I even brought a razor blade through security, both on the way there and back. I didn't even need to shave. I just forgot it was in there.

I don't really like doing anything on a flight other than sleeping (half-sleeping really; I can never get comfortable enough to totally conk out) and watching, so I always load up the iPad with movies before I go. I watched four of them combined on my flights there and back.

Free Solo: Alex Honnold climbs an insanely treacherous rock, thousands of feet, without any security ropes. It's truly nuts, but, I gotta say, kinda awesome. I've been meaning to watch this for years, in part because a guy I played lacrosse with in high school is in it. He's a mountain climber/cameraman, and he's part of the film crew, who are part of the movie, because part of the movie is about the ethics of filming somebody doing something that could easily result in them falling to their death.

Minding the Gap: I guess I was in the mood for documentaries about extreme sports. Although, this one is really more about boys coming of age in less than ideal circumstances than it is about skateboarding. Very good, but maybe a tad -- just a tad -- overrated. I mean, 100% on Rotten Tomatoes from the critics -- really? The audience's 91% is a more accurate reflection, IMO.

Lady Bird: Really enjoyed it. I'm a sucker for this type of character-driven teenage dramedy. Such a great cast too -- Saoirse Ronan, Beanie Feldstein, Timothée Chalamet, Laurie Metcalf, etc. Metcalf was especially impressive to me, because she pulled the Bryan Cranston. She made me forget that she's the sister on Roseanne. That's why I said Cranston should have won every TV acting award every year he did Breaking Bad. His entire case was just Remember, this is the same guy who was the dad on Malcolm in the Middle. I know it's true, but I still never believe it.

The Ballard of Buster Scruggs: Fantastic. A delight from beginning to end. Those Coen brothers don't make a bad movie now do they? Well, actually, yes, they do -- I found Intolerable Cruelties irksomely convoluted and Inside Llewyn Davis is flat-out boring -- but this one was excellent. It's a series of six western vignettes, and there wasn't a dud in the bunch.

Well, I was going to also write about a weird dream I had, but I ran out of time. It's just as well, to quote Built to Spill:

No one wants to hear
What you dreamt about
Unless you dreamt about
Them

Until next time.

Entry 601: Daily Stream of Depressing Ukraine News

The title of this post speaks for itself. Everyday I wake up and check the headlines in the Washington Post, the first half-dozen of which are always about Ukraine. It's progressively worse news. There were some relatively heartening stories in the beginning about the Ukrainians surprising the Russian military with their willingness to fight back, and there is still an element of that going on, but it might be just delaying the inevitable, a total occupation and take over of Ukraine by Putin's force. It might not be, but it might be. I'm far from an expert on the subject, and even the experts aren't clairvoyants. It just seems to me that Putin is pot committed at this point, and he isn't going to stop unless he's compelled to by force, and the Ukrainian military and the makeshift militias are probably not strong enough to do this.

This raises the obvious question: Should NATO countries send in troops to help the Ukrainians repel Russia? NATO hasn't directly intervened militarily (though they've sanctioned Russia heavily and provided weaponry and other supplies to Ukraine), and I think that's the correct call. As difficult as it is to watch a sovereign nation get senselessly steamrolled by a regional bully, it's still preferable to WW III and/or nuclear warfare, both of which would be distinct possibilities if a NATO country, particularly the US, were to get involved directly on the battlefield in Ukraine. There's a bit of a trolley problem element to this. No decision the US and our allies make now can prevent massive death and destruction. It's all a series of very sobering least-bad tradeoffs.

But what's in it for Russia? That's what I've been trying to figure out. I said in my last post that it's about Putin's ego and inferiority complex, and I still think that's it. I've read other analyses, even a few that put a lot of the blame of the US for expanding NATO so rapidly and making Russian feel boxed in and existentially fearful. Invading a neighbor like Ukraine to prevent it from becoming too pro-US and possibly joining NATO is, under this philosophy, an understandable defensive move by Russia.

But this idea of defense just doesn't hold up upon examination. For one thing, Russia's hostilities toward Ukraine over the past decade are, in large part, what have made it more pro-US. If Putin would have respected Ukrainian sovereignty, the people of the country probably would not be so keen on joining NATO and the EU (polls results back this up). For another thing, the US and western Europe have major incentives to maintain friendly (or at least neutral) relations with Russia. We import a ton of their energy (especially Germany), and we are tired of fighting and western imperialism, in general, after the mostly failed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Warring with Russia would not have been a consideration. They weren't even really on our radar. (Mitt Romney was an outlier when he called Russia our biggest geopolitical threat back in 2012. But dude was prescient, I guess.) So what if Russia lived next to a "western" country? What were we going to do, set up bases there to attack Moscow? That would have been the last thing we would have wanted to do. I mean, the Republican party was an unabashedly pro-Russia party until like two weeks ago.

That's the thing about the defensive self-interest argument: Invading Ukraine has done the exact opposite of advancing those goals for Russia in almost every regard. Russia could have just kept their head down, stayed off their neighbors' land, sold their energy, maintained amicably trading and diplomatic relations with the US and the EU, and lived their best lives in peace. The only way this war makes any sense to me is to view it through the lens of a dictator with an inferiority complex who is obsessed with projecting power. I think he thought the Ukrainians would be a pushover (or even welcoming to Russia), and now that they aren't, he's going to double-down on the brutishness rather than admit he's not as strong or as smart as he pretends to be.

And what's the endgame? That's the part I've heard nobody been able to even answer with any confidence. The stated goal of Russia is to "denazify" Ukraine, which isn't really a thing, considering it wasn't overrun with Nazis before. Russian can probably take control of the entire country militarily, but then what? They are then going to govern a war-decimated country in which the only people who haven't fled or been killed hate their guts? And they are going to do this with their economy at home severely weakened because of sanctions? That doesn't seem very realistic to me.

I dunno... and I also don't have my endgame worked out with this post, so I'm just going to stop here.

Until next time...