Entry 652: Stomach Bug Break

Some sort of stomach bug going around these days. I and both the boys got it. It hit me Tuesday night. Driving back to S's parents' house from Disney World I started to feel some, um, unnatural movement in my bowels, and then I spent most of Wednesday sitting on the toilet. There's never a good place to get a stomach bug, but S's parents' is among the least worst places. It's a one-story bungalow with three bathrooms, so there is always a toilet nearby, and, most importantly, said toilets are equipped with bidets. That's huge. You don't have to use rolls and rolls of toilet paper nor do you have to rub yourself raw to keep clean.

In general, the bidet is a way underutilized contraption here in America. I don't understand why they aren't more popular. You can get near shower-level cleanliness after each dump, and it saves toilet paper. What's the issue? The only reason I can figure that they aren't a societal standard is because people think they're weird. But everything is weird until it's not. Why is spraying water on your bootie hole any weirder than wiping it with tissue? (In fact, if I didn't know any better, I would definitely think the latter was weirder than the former, as it requires you to interact much more intimately with your poop.) I think I'm going to get a bidet attachment for the toilet in our master-bedroom bathroom. The kind my in-laws have looks easy enough to attach and works great. If that turns out to be the case here, then I'll get one for every other toilet in the house, and then I'll proselytize about it to everybody I know. It'll be the American bidet revolution!

Despite the sicknesses, we were miraculously able to get in a relatively healthy day at Magic Kingdom. Lil' S1 felt a bit under the weather when we first arrived, but he really perked up as the day went along. Space Mountain was one of the first rides we went on, and I was really nervous going into it that he was going to get really sick and throw up. (I made sure not to sit behind him.) But instead it gave him the adrenaline dose his body needed or something like that because he was totally fine after that.

The day was pretty much as expected. Theme parks like this are fine but don't do much for me. I don't really like the rides, and I resent the lines and costs. S's parents gave the kids some money to spend (I'm embarrassed to say how much), so that defrayed expenses a little bit, but just a little bit. We still had to pay for the tickets and the parking and the gas to get there, etc., and that's a lot of money.

We went cheap(ish) on the food too. S's mom made, like, ten PBJs and packed them with a bunch of snacks in a little cooler that could fit in a backpack. I don't think any of the kids ate them (we met another family there, so there were five kids total), but I had at least three myself. It's better than the food you can get there, honestly. I mean, there's probably some decent grub there if you want to look for it, but all I saw was ballpark fare -- subpar chicken fingers, greasy fries, and plastic-container salads consisting of little else than lettuce and croutons. I got this pineapple float made with "soft serve whip" as my sweet treat for the day and was supremely disappointed with it. To make matters worse, we got the kids ice cream later (real, delicious ice cream), and it looked so good, but I felt compelled to abstain.

Just being at Disney World made me want to go on a diet. I spent a good portion of the day dodging obese people on those Rascal scooters. Distressingly, many of them didn't look that much older than me, and there's no way they all got that big from thyroid issues. That's mostly shit eating and lack of exercise. I get the idea behind the "healthy at any size" movement, and I'm not into body shaming (it doesn't help), but everything has its limits. At some point we have to face the fact that, much like we were with cigarettes a generation ago, we are losing a lot of quality years by eating so much junk food. It really is the public health catastrophe we know about but kinda pretend we don't. We've all read articles like the one I've linked to above, and we acknowledge them, and then we all kinda nod our heads and shrug our shoulders and go right back to eating (and feeding our children) the same ultra-processed food and drinking the same sugary drinks as we did before. How can we not when they are at our fingertips 24/7?

Alright a lightning round and then I'm out.

• My digestive system seems to have overcompensated and now things aren't moving fast enough down there. I've been hitting the psyllium husk pretty hard the past few days.
  
  
• We watched the movie Everything Everywhere All at Once recently. I don't get it and didn't really enjoy it. I pulled a bait-and-switch on myself. I only looked at the cast, not the plot summary, and thought I was settling in to watch a tale about immigration and intergenerational differences, and that's what I got at first, and then it turned into David Lynch directing The Matrix. (Michelle Yeoh's presence should have tipped me off that some martial arts would be involved.) I was into it for about a half-hour and then it became borderline unwatchable. (In fact, S literally stopped watching. I stubbornly finished it.) I haven't been this disappointed in a mid-movie genre transformation since From Dusk Till Dawn, which switches from super compelling to crime story to super stupid vampire movie halfway through.
  
  
• If you love movies (like me), but don't watch many (like me), sitting through a bad movie is especially painful because it's a wasted opportunity. We were trying to decide between Everything Everywhere All at Once and The Banshees of Inisherin, and clearly we made the wrong choice. To make matters worse, I downloaded Banshees on my iPad to watch on the flight back, but the app glitched, and it wouldn't play. So annoying.
  
  
• I was able to watch the three-part documentary Stolen Youth: Inside the Cult of Sarah Lawrence this past week. It's so fucked up and would probably be too bleak to watch if not for the fact that the leader will almost certainly die in prison, and all but one (maybe) of the abused subjects has denounced their abuser and now recognizes the cult for what it was (and has seemingly started the healing process). I really recommend the doc if you can stomach scenes of psychological, and in some cases physical, abuse. It's very interesting, and there is so much real-time footage, because the cult leader is a paranoid nutjob who filmed his misdeeds thinking they somehow illustrated a conspiracy against him. (In a nice bit of irony, they instead provided crucial evidence in the case against him.)
  
  
• I've been kinda following the controversy over Roald Dahl's publisher making some changes to his books. Like many children of the '80s, Dahl was my favorite author back in the day, and I read (or had read to me) most his books. I have no issue whatsoever letting my kids consume his work. (We started James and the Giant Peach last summer, but lost the copy and never resumed.) He was openly anti-Semitic, but he's also dead. For me, a lot of the conflict of "separating an artist from their art" goes away once they die and can no longer personally profit from my consumption of their work.
  
  As for this censorship stuff, I see both sides. On one hand, counterintuitively, sometimes you have to change something to be true to its roots. I'm thinking of baseball (stay with me), in which the reluctance of the powers-that-be to change the rules of the game, has allowed it to morph into something different (and less interesting) than it was when I first found it 40 years ago. (Starting pitchers no longer matter as much; guys don't steal that many bases; fewer balls are put in play; etc.) Things exist within their context, so if context changes and the things don't change, then they do change within their context. Some words mean different things today than they did in 1970, so if you want to convey the same feeling as back then, you might have to use different words. It's not necessarily censorship; it's updating it for a new audience.
  
  On the other hand, I think we do our children a disservice trying to sanitize everything for them. They need to hear words like "fat" and "stupid" in a low-stake setting because they're going to hear them at some point in an adversarial context and need to be able to handle it without crawling into the fetal position. That's one reason I hate all this booking banning bullshit that's going on in schools in Florida (and other places). I think it's a net positive if kids have access to literature, even stuff that is problematic or explicit and arguably not age appropriate. It's like, they are going to be exposed to this stuff at some point. Would you rather it be from a book in a school library or some other, much less safe, situation? 
  
  
• Perhaps worse than being sick for a few days, I developed a canker on the roof of my mouth. It has been driving me crazy. As soon as it starts to feel better, I eat something (because, you know, I have to eat to live), and it gets inflamed and bothers me again. It's in a spot where there is no way I can chew and avoid it. I also can't help but subconsciously rub my tongue against it compulsively, which certainly doesn't help. I think it's finally, maybe almost gone, but I've thought that everyday this past week, and it's still frickin' there. So... *resign shrug*.

Until next time...

Entry 651: More Disney!

Not too much time to blog this weekend. We are headed out early tomorrow to visit S's parents in Florida. We are going to Disney World again -- this time Magic Kingdom. I hope that this isn't going to become an annual tradition. Even without getting a hotel room (S's parents live close enough that we can do a long day trip) it's expensive. And it's too crowded and not that fun besides. I mean, it is fun, but not that fun. It's fun if you don't have to do it again for a really long time. It's not the type of thing I want to make a habit of doing every time we visit S's parents... not that there is much else to do there.

We might not have gone to Disney this time, but we learned another family from the kids' school independently planning a trip there for mid-winter break, and somehow the idea of us joining them was broached, and so we figured, why not? We need something big to do to break up the week, anyway. It'll be fine, but it's definitely one of those events I'm more looking forward to being over with than I am actually doing. You know what I mean? It's like, I want to do it because I want to spend time and have precious moments with my family, but I'm not that keen on the actual experience. Basically, I just want the memories.

But that's not how life works... or is it? Maybe all life is is memories. Like, each moment in time you are somehow popping into existence in a different form totally defined by its memories. The you you are right now isn't the you you will be in one millisecond, but you will think it is because the you you will be in a millisecond will have the memories of always being that you. The you you are now will be totally forgotten, just as the you you are now has forgotten the you you were one millisecond ago. Maybe that's how it works.

Okay, that's enough stoner talk. I gotta get some sleep.

Until next time...

Entry 650: Super Bowl LVII

Super Bowls are demarcated using Roman numerals, with one exception. Super Bowl 50 is called Super Bowl 50 because the powers-that-be thought that Super Bowl L looks weird. I guess it does, but, in my opinion, it looks less weird than seeing one obvious outlier in the list of Super Bowls.* In a way, it is fitting that Super Bowl 50 is an outlier in how it is enumerated, as the game itself was an outlier. It was among the worst Super Bowls ever -- a terrible, yawn-inducing game. It was a punt-and-turnover-fest (21 total), featuring a decrepit Peyton Manning quarterbacking one team and a total outmatched Cam Newton quarterbacking the other. I remember watching it at some friends' house on their massive TV (like 100 inches) and thinking to myself, So much screen wasted on this awful game. At least the company was good.

*I wonder what they will do at the 100th Super Bowl. Will it be Super Bowl 50 or Super Bowl C?  Will there ever be a 100th Super Bowl? Will I be alive to see it? I would be 88 and I love football, so hopefully on both accounts.

Although, now that I look at it, maybe it wasn't such an outlier game. The boring Super Bowl is unfortunately making a bit of a comeback. When I became a cognizant football fan, around age 7 (1984), the Super Bowl was entering into a strange period in which almost every game was noncompetitive and boring. For a nearly 20-year stretch, there were exactly three exciting Super Bowls (Giants-Bills, Broncos-Packers, Rams-Titans), everything else was a blowout or a slog. Then, something changed, and for about 15 years the Super Bowl was reasonably close almost every year, and we got a bunch of all-time classics like Patriots-Panthers, Steelers-Cardinals, Ravens-49ers, and (so help me) Patriots-Seahawks. But since 2014 it's been a mixed bag. The Patriots comeback win against the Falcons and their loss the next year to the Eagles were both really fun games, but their victory over the Rams was arguably worse to watch than Super Bowl 50 (it's the lowest-scoring Super Bowl ever -- 16 total points), and the Bucs-Chiefs game was also an awful spectator experience. So, we shall see how it goes tonight.

The Super Bowl is mostly for the tourists, anyway. Unless your team is in it (which has happened three glorious times for me), the "real" NFL fans prefer the early rounds of the playoffs or even important regular-season weeks. Back when I used to spend every Sunday in a sports bar, the first week of the season was my favorite one. But it's kinda good that I'm not that invested in tonight's game. We're going to some friends' house (not the ones with the humongous TV), and it will be easier to socialize (and eat) this way. Also, we will have to leave at halftime (no Ri-ri for us) and miss much of the third quarter. The game starts too damn late on the East Coast. If we actually stayed for the entire thing, the kids wouldn't be in bed until 11:00. They really should move up kickoff to 4:00. That would be 1:00 on the West Coast, which seems fine to me. It might even be better than 3:30 (the current West Coast kickoff time) because it would line up nicely with lunch.

Anyway... let's lightning round the rest of this entry.

• S is back, which is nice. The single-dadding this week was a bit more challenging because Lil' S1 got sick and stayed home most of Thursday and all of Friday. It's some sort of throat issue that is not Covid. It could be what I got a few weeks ago, but it's a milder strain, as he's been able to function pretty normally, other than only being able to eat really soft foods for a few days. He says he feels better now, so hopefully we're past it.
  
  
• We are having some work done on our house (screening in our back deck) and one of the construction workers got his wallet stolen from his car in front of our house. Our neighbor caught the entire thing on his security camera. Somebody drove past our house, put their car in reverse and rolled back to it, and then started trying to unlock every door of every car parked in the area, until they found one that was unlocked. Unfortunately, the footage wasn't clear enough to make out a license plate or anything like that. I feel so bad for the guy who got his wallet stolen -- I mean, don't leave you wallet in your car on a DC street, even if it is locked -- but still it really sucks for him. He said he didn't have much money in it, and he canceled his credit cards immediately, so basically all the thief did was ruin some random dude's day -- so unnecessary.
  
  
• Speaking of crime, the DC city council rewrote the crime code here, and it's caused some controversy. Most everybody agrees with 95% of it, but the other 5% seems to be following the trend of downplaying certain types of crimes (in this case carjacking) in the name social justice. The mayor vetoed it, but the city council overrode her veto, but then the Republican-led House voted to kill it (because Congress has the ultimate say over DC law), and now I'm not sure where it stands. I haven't been able to figure out if the House can kill it on it's own or if it has to go to the Senate and the president like a normal bill.
  
  
• It puts the mayor in an awkward position of potentially being helped out by a party of which she is not a member and a system (Congressional rule of DC) she hates. I'm with the mayor on this one. Crime in DC (as in many other cities) is currently at an unacceptable level, and the effects of this are disproportionately felt by people of color (like the guy who got his wallet jacked). Reducing crime, not the penalties for committing crimes, seems to me the move we should make in the name of social justice.

Well, that's all I got for today. Until next time...

Entry 649: Hey Bulldog

I got a Spotify account and it has kinda changed my life -- or at least the exercise portion of my life. Back in the day, I had this little iPod that I would listen to whenever I went running. I curated my exercise list over many years, but then I lost the iPod in the transition from Australia to India to the US back in 2011. I never backed up my music library, and I didn't want to pay for yet another streaming service, so after that I switched to listening to podcasts while I ran. Podcasts are okay, but I missed music. I realized that during exercise was pretty much the only time I listened to music regularly, so by moving to podcasts, I almost eliminated music listening from my life all together. I then tried free Pandora for a bit, but I hated the ads, and I hated not being able to pick the actual songs myself. I also tried listening to the few songs in my iPhone library, but it got old quick. So, I just stuck with podcasts.

But then, a few weeks ago, S realized we were paying for an unused Spotify account because she bought a family plan so that she could have music and the kids could listen to all their podcasts. I took it over, and now I have music again while I run. It's so awesome. There's an art to building an exercise playlist. The mistake people make is only getting hype music. You need that for sure, but if you're, say, running for 45 minutes, as I usually do, you simply can't keep up that mental "go! go! go!" pace the entire time. You need softer stuff in there too, so that when the harder music comes on it actually has an effect on you. If it's all Rammstein all the time, you become inured to it.

What you really want are songs you get lost in, so that you don't notice the pain. I also like to go really eclectic -- lots of songs from lots of different genres. I want to have no inkling as to what's coming next and then when I hear it be like fuck, yeah, this song rocks!

Here are a few of my staples: 

• "Big Pimpin", Jay-Z
• "Only in Dreams", Weezer
• "Du Hast", Rammstein
• "Cake By the Ocean", DNCE
• "I Wanna Be a Girl", King Khan and the Shrines
• "Coming Home Baby", Skeewiff
• "Murderers", John Frusciante
• "Bag Full of Thoughts", The Flaming Lips
• "You Keep Me Hangin' On", The Supremes
• "Hey Bulldog", The Beatles

To that last one, I realized that I might actually be a John guy. About a year ago, after I watched all eight hours of the documentary Get Back, I broke down my Beatles fandom and determined I was a Paul guy. But I actually misattributed "Hey Bulldog" to Paul. In researching it, it's seems to be more of a John song. (They both sing on it which, makes it hard to tell by ear.) That might push John over the edge for me. I dunno, though. They're both so good. As I heard somebody say once, "It's like the Beatles had Michael Jordan in his prime, and then another Michael Jordan."

Anyway...

S flew out of the country again today. I got the kids to myself for another week. It's never too bad, but there's always something. Lately, it's been eating. It's so, so difficult to get them to eat anything even remotely healthy. (It's a universal problem with kids, I know. I went out with some dad friends last night, and we were all commiserating over our kids garbage eating habits.) They're both bad, but Lil' S1 is worse, and he's way less active than his brother. With Lil' S2, he'll eat chicken nuggets (the meaty "adult" kind) and baby carrots and drink a cup of milk and then go run around for a half-hour. I can live with that in good conscience. But little Lil' S1 only wants nachos or pasta with cheese (no sauce) or a bagel with cream cheese or pizza. Basically, he just wants cheese on top of empty carbs, and he doesn't do much to burn them off. He does kinda like mushrooms and apples, and he'll begrudgingly eat sweet peppers, but you have to monitor him or else he'll "forget" to eat them.

He made me so mad tonight. I made him this chicken with mushroom soup and rice dish that he will usually eat, and he took two bites and then said he was full. I was like, "Okay, but that's your dinner. Don't ask me for junk food later." Smash cut to five minutes before bedtime, "Dad, can I have I some chips? I'm so hungry." He did not get any chips. I have no problem sending my kids to bed hungry once in a while (plus, he got an apple, so he wasn't totally famished). That's where S and I differ. I think her biggest fear in life is that one of her kids his hungry for longer than 30 seconds.

The most frustrating part is that even if you're a total hard-ass, your kid is still going to eat junk if they want. They could just get it at school. (Last time I saw them serving breakfast it was a box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch, a Go-gurt, and a chocolate milk.) Or he could get it at a friend's house. And even if you clamp down on those avenues, you have to worry about turning snack food into the forbidden fruit (snacks). The kids who had the worst diets freshman year of college were those whose parents forbade them from having any junk food. Once they had open access to snacks and desserts without their parents around, it was like Rumspringa. What you want is for you kid to develop sensible, long-term eating habits, but that seems like a near impossibility given how crap-centric our society is when it comes to food. 

I wouldn't worry about Lil' S1's diet so much if he was more active. But he has a very sedentary lifestyle. He does swimming every Monday and walks home from school a few times a week, but it's not enough to overcome his physical torpor the rest of the week. During the weekend he sits on the sofa almost the entire time. Like, even when Lil' S2 isn't really doing anything, he's moving. He's kicking a ball or trying to punch me or just running around for no reason. Lil' S1 isn't like that. He's pretty much just reading, listening to a podcast, or looking at a screen the entire day. Today I had to bribe him with extra video game time to do calisthenics with me for ten minutes. And he barely he even tried. Although it did lead to a funny exchange.

Me: Come on, man, you're not even trying. Do you want to be somebody who can't even do a single pushup your whole life?

Him: Why not? Plenty of successful people can't do a pushup.

Me: Really? Name one.

Him: Bill Gates.

Me: Actually, you might be right about that.

And I think I'll leave it there, as it's late and I'm tired.

Until next time...

Entry 648: Honey, I Blew Up The Baby

Was single-dadding this week. It's over now, but I start anew in another week. (S has a lot of work trips on the docket over the next few months.) This iteration went pretty well. Only one mistake -- I missed an online therapy session for Lil' S1.* I'm still annoyed by it because I checked the calendar around 2:00 pm (it starts at 5:00 pm), and said to myself, "Set an alarm so you don't forget." And then I said, "Nah, I'll remember," which is the dumbest thing I do on a regular basis. My success rate is like 10% when I tell myself "I'll remember" to do something, and yet I still tell myself this frequently.

*We recently stopped sessions for Lil' S2 and started them for Lil' S1. Apparently we always need to have one kid in therapy. I don't think he really needs it. But S wants him to do it, and he seems to actually enjoy it, and he participates willingly and immediately (unlike his brother who would take 20 minutes of a half-hour session just to warm up). So, whatever, it can't hurt.

I probably would have actually remembered this time, but I got caught up in something somewhat time-sensitive at work. Usually what I do is not time-sensitive at all, so when I get a task that even kinda is, I feel compelled to get it done ASAP. Like, I probably could've finished this particular bit of work the next morning and nobody would have cared, but I really wanted to do it before the end of the business day. And I did (that's how you get those raises!), but when I finished, I immediately left to pick up Lil' S2 from school, and when I returned it was 5:25 pm, and that's when I remembered Lil' S1's session, but it was too late.

I was kind of annoyed at Lil' S1, to be honest. He was just sitting on the sofa reading the entire time. He could've given me a head's up. But he's not at that stage yet, where he can manage his schedule in that way. He should be, but he's not. I've been trying to get him to be better about it, but he's a very reluctant learner when it comes to certain things. There are still many mornings, in which we will need to leave for school in five minutes, and he hasn't even gotten dressed yet.

Lil' S2, despite being three years younger, is actually more advanced in this area. He gets up and gets dressed immediately and is almost always ready to go on time without being nagged. He usually watches the clock carefully. It's his analytically mind. He's got a lot of his pops in him, I can tell. He has a chance to be really good at math if he wants to be. And memorizing spelling words is almost effortless for him. He gets 100% almost every test, and he only looks at the word list once or twice before taking it. Contrast that with his brother who would have to spend literally hours every week to have a fighting chance. It's so weird -- same genetics, same upbringing, totally different strengths and weaknesses. Although maybe it's just as simple as Lil' S1 takes after S and Lil' S2 takes after me.

In other news, since S was gone, I decided to get Madden for the PS5 a few days ago. It's been fun to play it, but it's been even more fun to watch the boys play it. They were on the same team, and despite never showing any interest in football whatsoever, nor even knowing the rules, Lil' S1 picked it up super fast. (Lil' S2 not so much, but he's not terrible.) He was the quarterback,* and he was totally running the offense and dominating the computer. He was picking the right plays and correctly reading the defense pre-snap. He doesn't know any of the players, so he would just call them by their corresponding shape on the controller: "I'm gonna throw it to box; they aren't really covering him." Lil' S2 was the running back and his brother gave him the ball enough to keep him interested, but whenever they needed a big play he would throw it to a computer player. I totally got a kick out of it. This is my gateway drug to getting them to be real-life football fans.

*Dak Prescott -- for some reason, Lil' S2 loves the Cowboys and picked the team. Actually, I know why he likes them. It's because his friend up the street likes them because his dad is a fan. I would prefer he like the Seahawks, of course, but he's got a bit of contrarian in him, so I don't want to push it. The funny thing is that both he and his friend live in DC and don't even entertain the possibility of being Commandeers fans. I cannot explain to you how much the local fan base for the Washington football team has eroded since I first moved out here nearly 20 years ago. Daniel Snyder must be on the short list for worst franchise owner in sports history -- and there have been some bad owners.   

Since S came back, we had family movie night and watched Honey, I Shrunk the Kids tonight. It's not bad, and more importantly it's not very long. It was about as good as I remember it. It has a sequel called Honey, I Blew Up the Kid, which I've never seen but remember. Only I recall it being called Honey, I Blew Up the Baby. After some initial googling, I thought I was going crazy, or having one of those "Berenstein Bears" false memories, but then I found this on IMDB:

Was originally going to be titled "Honey, I Blew Up the Baby", but was changed due to fear of negative feedback for the title.

So, maybe I saw a trailer or something before the name change. I'm not sure why "Baby" is any more (or less) negative than "Kid," but whatever.

A few other HISTK fun facts:

• One of the kids in it is the best friend from Big. I don't remember knowing that back when I originally saw it, but I pegged him instantly tonight.
  
  
• The neighbor guy in the movie is played by Matt Frewer, who also played the titular character on the old MTV show Max Headroom. S said that he reminded her of Jim Carrey, which I came to find is not an uncommon sentiment. You can see, for instance, this Reddit thread, which was among several webpages I found discussing Frewer's similarity to (and possible influence on) Carrey.
  
  
• Apparently there is going to be another movie in the franchise coming out soon called Shrunk. Rick Moranis is going to come out of a two-decade retirement to reprise his role of Wayne Szalinski in the film. Why this movie would prompt him out of such a hiatus, I have no idea. Maybe retirement has been a bit more costly than he expected.
  

Until next time...

Entry 647: There Are Sicknesses Other Than Covid?

It was a wasted day today -- but maybe that's too harsh an assessment. It was a recovery day is a better way to put it. It was a recover day, so it's understandable that basically all I did was watch YouTube videos on my phone. In my last entry, I mentioned that I had started feeling some Covid-like symptoms, and said symptoms intensified a hundredfold immediately after I posted. I woke up Tuesday morning and went on auto-pilot -- I got out of bed, got dressed, and started making the boys breakfast, moving via pure muscle memory, and then about five minutes into the process I realized I was going to pass out if I didn't lay down soon, so I called up S, who was working downstairs, told her I was sick and asked if she could do morning and get the kids to school. She told me she could, so I got back into bed and basically didn't get out until noon the next day.

It was brutal. Even when I was sleeping I somehow still felt sick. I kept having this weird fever dream where I had to solve this numerical code but couldn't do so. There was this big screen of numbers, and I had to arrange them, but no matter how I did so it was wrong. (There was a very Severance vibe to the whole thing.) I had specific symptoms -- sore throat, headache, chills, etc. -- but the main issue was that I physically just could not function. It was a chore to go to the bathroom, and taking a Covid test -- opening the packaging, doing the swabbing, mixing the solution, etc. -- was a monumental task, seemingly on par with administering a shot of adrenaline to the heart of a woman od'ing on heroin. I didn't have Covid, but I probably would have felt better if I did.

By Thursday, I thought I was on the mend -- and I was, I could do basic tasks, at least -- but then on Friday, I woke up with a sore throat to end all sore throats. It was like a woodworker's file had been dragged through my esophagus. My lymph nodes were swollen and throbbing with pain and just taking a sip of water felt like swallowing a burning ember. It was so brutal. I tried sucking on lozenges but all that did was leave me with a sore throat and a worn away roof of my mouth. There's really nothing you can do but wait it out. On the plus side, I dropped like seven pounds.  Apparently, eating nothing but a few cans of soup and a handful of Ritz crackers over the course of three days really makes the weight melt away.

Anyway, it still hurts today -- quite a bit, actually, like if I felt this way a week ago, I'd be like oh man, I got a sore throat! -- but it feels so much better than it did yesterday that it doesn't really bother me. I think tomorrow, Monday at the latest, I'll basically be back to normal. Although, I feel like I kinda always have a sore throat, at least in the morning. I often wake up with a very dry mouth and throat. I guess I'm a mouth-breather when I sleep. Speaking of which, I've recently become a snorer, which S "loves". It's apparently only when I sleep on my back, which I've started doing a lot lately because the arthritis in my shoulder prevents me from lying on my side for too long. It starts to ache even when I'm lying on my opposite side, somehow. The joys of aging.

In other news, we had a little episode happen a few days ago that would have been funny, had it not cost us some money. There's been a car parked in front of our neighbor's house for the last two-weeks, and nobody knows whose it is. So, our neighbor calls the District Department of Transportation (DDOT), and they tell her it hasn't been reported as stolen, and they can't just tow it for no reason, so they will come out and ticket it, and then if still nobody moves it after n days, or whatever, they can tow it. Our streets are technically zoned, so you need a parking permit to stay for longer than two hours during the day, but it's not enforced. We never bought a permit, and we once parked on the street for five straight weeks (this summer when we stayed in UP), and didn't get a ticket. But we weren't so lucky this time. The traffic cop came out, didn't ticket the car in front of our neighbor's house for some reason, but ticketed our car. So, the mystery car is still there, unticketed, and we have to pay a fine for parking in the same spot, right in front of our house, we have parked at for the last four years, without issue. Thanks, DDOT -- you guys rock!

Until next time...

Entry 646: Watching Mrs. Doubtfire

The good news is that I'm probably getting a raise. I don't want to jinx it, but I'd put it at about 90% in my favor. It's not to the amount I asked for, but it's close enough to make me happy (assuming I get it). With the way tech is going at the moment just having a job -- let alone getting a raise -- is something to feel lucky about, and I do feel lucky. But at the same time, it's not like I cashed a lottery ticket. I spent years and years cultivating skills and gaining knowledge that not a lot of people have (even in tech), and then even more years making myself valuable to my company. I feel like if I really got lucky, I'd be a multimillionaire tech bro right now -- the kind of guy whom everybody immediately thinks is really douche-y, but then can't help but like once they get to know him. That's my truly lucky path in life.

I think about that a lot: What even is luck? What do people deserve in life, and do we assess that? I don't have any answers. And my train of thought almost always leads me to free will, and the question: Are we mostly responsible for our own lives, or was all of history preordained the instant the universe began (or something in between those two extremes)? And that's when I hit a wall because not only is that question impossible to answer, it quickly becomes not that interesting to ponder. There's just nowhere to go with it. I feel the same way about the "Are we in a simulation?" question. It's cool to think about once, and then it's like Okay, let's say we are, then what?

I mentioned good news above, so you probably ascertained bad news is coming also. It's ultimately pretty minor bad news, thankfully. I started feeling kinda sick this evening with Covid-like symptoms, but I'm testing negative. Also, I'm kinda stressed out because we're supposedly building a screened-in deck in place of our non-screened-in deck, and we're having some issues with the contractor to whom we've already paid a non-trivially deposit. I think it will all get resolved, and we will get our mosquito-resistant asylum, but I'm not going to breath totally easily until it actually happens.

Anyway...

We watched Mrs. Doubtfire today with the kids. It kinda holds up. It's sorta funny, but it's actually much more reliant on schmaltz than it is on jokes -- and that's not really a criticism. It's a genuinely heartfelt take on parenthood and divorce, and Sally Field is kinda brilliant in it, to be honest. She has to be enough of a hard-ass to deny her ex-husband custody to their kids but not a villain. The movie doesn't work if she's the antagonist. There's really no bad guys in it -- even kinda snooty Pierce Bosnan is a decent enough chap. Yeah, he calls Robin Williams a loser, but he puts up with Mrs. Doubtfire's straight-up insults throughout the entire movie, and then he's surprisingly sporting at the very end when Williams very nearly kills him (literally).

There are definitely some cringe scenes, though. In fact, I bet if I google "Mrs. Doubtfire" right now, I would find at least a few links talking about how transphobic it is. I don't think the premise is transphobic, per se, but it does play transgenderism for a few cheap laughs (and the joke is always that it's weird and creepy). The thing is, at the time the movie was released, I think it was viewed as socially progressive because it features an obviously gay couple (the brother and his partner). But, you know, things often look very different in retrospect. Needless to say, we didn't have everything figured out in 1993.

I mean, we don't have everything figured out today. A lot of this stuff is still very confusing. I'm amazed at how often the new progressive, social-justice thing to do is the exact opposite of what I would expect it to be. I ran into a situation like this recently. I had to write a little mini bio for this thing I'm doing, and in the instructions it asked to include your pronouns. No problem -- it's a bio, after all, so just about every sentence is going to include my pronouns. (He lives in DC with his wife and two kids.) So, they're included. Done. Didn't think twice about it.

But then the bios are posted, and I see that everybody else -- literally everybody else -- has their pronouns explicitly stated after their names in parenthesis. John Doe (he/his) grew up in The Bay Area... So, now, it looks like I intentionally didn't do it, like, to be different, or as some sort of political statement. But that's not the case. I just thought it was implied. I didn't know pronouns were an explicit part of the bio format (and I didn't read the sample bios, which I clearly should have done). I emailed the guy who's in charge of the bios and explained this all to him and told him he could add my pronouns if he wants, but that was a few days ago, and I haven't heard back from him, and last I checked, everything was still the same on the site.

I don't love having my bio look different from everybody else's -- I do wish I had just known and followed the format -- but ultimately I guess I don't care that much one way or the other. Getting back to my point about the new progressive, social-justice thing to do being the opposite of what I would expect, I would have thought that having a bunch of obviously cisgender men list their pronouns would have been not cool. It's like we're trying to get in on oppression we've never experienced. It kinda makes me feel like a poseur, to be honest. I've never been misgendered in my entire life. I've never experienced that hurt/embarrassment, so it doesn't seem appropriate for me to even imply that that's something that could happen to me, because it hasn't and it won't.*

*For what it's worth, I've also had women in my field tell me they hate giving their pronouns, as a matter of course, because they are already self-conscious about constantly being a minority at work due to their gender, and so they don't like constantly highlighting it. 

I guess it's about allyship, but that's a fraught, confusing concept in and of itself, especially when it's something that's clearly just symbolic. It's kinda like: Hey, you absorb all the slings and arrows; I'll change my signature line. I'm not sure how I would feel about that if I was the former person in that scenario.

Ultimately, the conclusion I've come to is that you'll never get it right because what's right is different to different people, even among those who are in the affected group. No matter what you do, somebody you're supposed to "listen to" will tell you you are doing it wrong (and that's okay). With that in mind, I say we should all just live and let live and have a lot of compassion and kindness for those who don't live the exact way we do. And maybe most people feel the same, and so I shouldn't worry that my bio is different.

Until next time...