Entry 656: Soccer Season

It's soccer season for Lil' S2, and I'm the coach of the team. Technically, I'm one of two coaches, but I think I've just assumed the role of de facto head coach. What happened is, I signed Lil' S2 up to play, but couldn't get any of his friends to play with him (or, rather, couldn't get any of his friends' parents to add yet another commitment to their schedules), so he just got assigned to a random team. I figured they might already have a coach in place, and I hate the coordinating aspect of coaching, so I didn't sign up for the job. But then we got an email telling us our team had no coach, and we would have to fold if no parent volunteered.

So, I said I'd do it, as did another dad, and then there was a bunch of confusion because the league commissioner was traveling for work and not giving us any follow-up information or responding to emails. And then we got like 20 emails earlier this week, in preparation for the first game of the season, that I had to sort through for relevant information to relay to the parents. That's like my nightmare right there. I so hate making plans and coordinating things. It causes me too much anxiety, and I always feel like I'm going to mess it up. I'm OCD about it, and I check things over and over, even though I just checked them. It takes me, like, an hour to do something simple, like choose a plane ticket, because I'm nervous to actually commit (whereas S can book an entire vacation in ten minutes), and that's when I'm the only one affected by it. If I'm responsible for, say, picking the best practice field and time and day for everybody, it's instant anxiety.

It's totally irrational, of course. It's rec soccer. The parents don't really care. They're just happy somebody else is doing it so that they don't have to care. I spent way too long crafting an email,* making sure I got every detail correct, and the whole time I'm thinking to myself Why am you being so meticulous? Nobody will even read it carefully, if at all. Think about how little attention you give notices from school. And that's education. This is little kids running around on field for 40 minutes. And then it rained and the schedule got changed three times, anyway.

*There's a chat feature on the app we use for the league, and I'm going to start using it exclusively for team communiques. The good thing about chat messages is that they aren't expect to be meticulously crafted, and it's not weird to send a few chats in a row if you forget something or say something wrong.

The actual coaching part is pretty fun. Our first game was today, and we beat our opponent something like 16-1. You aren't supposed to keep score, but the kids always do. Once we got a lead in the double digits, I had to tell them to not announced the score after every goal. We have one kid who's awesome, and he scored about nine times. Lil' S2 is probably the third best player on the team, and he was better than everybody on the other team. Luck of the draw. It's a good thing too because even thought it's little kids, it's a lot less fun when your team is terrible.

We do have one "lost soul" on the team. You know the type -- the kid who doesn't even really know what's going on and is just as happy to stand on the sidelines and daydream as they are to play. We didn't have any subs today, so she had to play the entire game. The first half she was goalie, and she legit made a good save (or "save"). Granted, it was kicked directly at her, but still, she caught it. Everybody on the sideline was going crazy cheering for her, but it really should have been a score, because she caught the ball so deep in the goal -- her back was touching the net -- that it was well past the line.

The coaches are the ones who make the calls (there are no refs), and the opposing coach didn't say anything, so I was in an awkward position where I either had to take away this girl's shining achievement, or I had to not call a goal for a bunch of kids that were getting crushed and could surely use a morale boost. I decide not to say anything. It was more inertia than it was a calculated ethical decision.

Alright, it's super late.

Until next time...

Entry 655: On Politics And Culture, I Guess

A lot going on in the world these day, as always. We had a good old-fashioned bank run a few weeks ago causing a bunch of chaos and market instability (hopefully the damage has been contained). It was a good opportunity for people to promulgate one of my "favorite" social media tropes: "The reason this bad thing occurred is because of the thing I hate." On the right, this meant, of course, that the problem was wokeness because, you know, nothing says DEI like overly investing in government bonds. Don't you just hate those annoying SJWs who never shut up about having to sell at a loss because of abnormally high interest rates?

This goes to show one of my truisms of our current political dynamic: Everything I hate about the left is actually worse on the right. To see what I mean, just look at Ron DeSantis. His whole deal -- his entire shtick -- is that he's anti-woke, and yet his manifestation of being anti-woke amounts to a recreation of all the bad parts of wokeness (e.g., the intolerance and censorship of dissent) but on the opposite side of the ideological spectrum. I would still take him in a heartbeat as the Republican presidential candidate in 2024 (anybody, and I mean this 100% literally, would be better than Trump), but it's worthwhile to recognize that he would be a truly terrible president. It would be every culture war, everywhere, all at once.

I hate the culture wars so much. It's not the issues themselves, which I often find important and interesting and think should be debated in good faith; it's that the people who actually want to debate this way get drowned out by the extremists on both sides. I'm tired of it. Not being on Twitter much does help, though. Every so often, I'll hop back on to see what's going on, and whenever I do, I'm immediately regretful.

A somewhat recent example of this is a letter to The New York Times signed by a bunch of contributors who have "serious concerns about editorial bias in the newspaper’s reporting on transgender, non⁠-⁠binary, and gender nonconforming people." I don't agree with the letter, and had I not gone on Twitter, I probably would not have noticed that a bunch of the signatories are crossword puzzle constructors whom I know and like and respect. I would have been blissfully unaware of this when I see them at the next puzzle tournament. Oh well, people should be able to knowingly have different views from others and still be able to enjoy their company. That's my whole thing, so I should practice what I preach.

As to why I don't agree with the letter, I think it misunderstands the role of journalism (it's not supposed to be activism), and I think one of its main premises -- that articles in The New York Times contribute to the spate of awful anti-trans legislation, pushed by far-right politicians -- is unfounded and unfair.  A) No person or publication is responsible for others citing their work, and savvy politicians frequently use the "other side" to bolster their claims and stoke division. B) Just because somebody pushes for terrible, oppressive policies, it doesn't automatically make everything they say wrong and everybody they favorably reference invalid or problematic. I've heard Tucker Carlson use speeches of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders to propagate his xenophobic brand of nationalism. Is that their fault? Should they be accountable for this? Would anybody take it seriously if a bunch of liberal billionaires signed a letter questioning the policies of Warren and Sanders because Carlson sometimes cites them positively?

Also, I've read some of the pieces cited in the letter, and I don't think they are anti-trans. I mentioned the Emily Bazelon article before (I like her work in general), and this is what I said about it:

It's just such an unhealthy discourse when somebody as diligent and sensitive as Emily Bazelon gets called out as anti-trans by somewhat prominent social commenters for writing a very good piece for NYT magazine on gender therapy. I really think this works against the cause of trans rights because it demonizes reasonable, well-intentioned could-be allies. If you define as an enemy everybody who is not 100% in lockstep with you, you will inevitably have a lot of enemies.

I stand by this.

That last thing I'll say about this is that it's important to note that not all trans and nonbinary people see things the same way as the signatories of the letter. Although activists on the left often give the impression that they are the voice of a marginalized group, they aren't. Nobody is, because any group of more than, like, three people will have a wide array of opinions and view points. For a different (and in my opinion more convincing) take on "the battle over trans rights," I suggest this The New Yorker Radio Hour interview with Masha Gessen. I don't agree with everything they say (of course), but I found myself nodding along with a lot of it (they praise Bazelon's piece), and I found it a very interesting interview besides.

Alright, enough about that. Enough about everything. It's late and time to sign off. I didn't intend to write an entire post on politics and culture, but I guess I did. Don't worry, I'll be back again soon with personal bullshit and everyday tedium. I've been getting ghosted by the commissioner of Lil' S2's soccer league, and it's really annoying me.

Until next time...

 

Entry 654: Palm Springs 2023

I have one conference I go to for work every year. It's in Palm Springs, and it certainly could be in a worse place. It's so beautiful there and the weather is always wonderful.* The only problem is that it's a pain to get to Palm Springs from DC. There are no direct flights, and seemingly all the layovers are either 35 minutes or three and a half hours. I went for the narrow option, and it got a little hairy on the way there. My flight out of DC (layover in Denver) wasn't officially late, but we sat on the runway for ten extra minutes for whatever reason, and then the in-air time was five minutes longer than expected because of strong headwinds, so we ended up landing as my connecting flight was boarding. It was a huge plane, and I was near the back, so I did the jerk move and pushed ahead as much as possible, and then booked it to the gate. I was almost the last person on the plane, and the only reason I wasn't the very last is because a few other people from my previous flight were also on this flight, and I apparently could run faster than them. 

*This year it was "cold", i.e., highs in the mid-70s. It does get legitimately nippy once the sun goes down, but it still doesn't require anything more than a light jacket. 

As I've mentioned before, plane rides are my prime movie-watching occasions, and I picked a winner this time: RRR. It's so badass. It might be the best action movie I've ever seen as an adult. On the flight home, I watched The Banshees of Inisherin, which is also quite good, if very different from RRR. In fact, I don't know that you could find two less similar movies. Actually, come to think of it, they both are largely about straight male companionship, so there's that. The main problem I had with Banshees is that I kept distracting myself: That's Colin Farrell, right? I mean, that's gotta be him. He looks so much older than I remember, and he's in costume as a 1920s Irish peasant, a large departure from his usual rakish playboy persona. It was really throwing me off, and I didn't have an internet connection, so I had to wait until the end credits to find out for sure.

Anyway, the conference was cool. I got to eat dinner with some friends who live in the area, and some colleagues and I wandered into a street fair one night that turned out to be pretty fun. I much prefer traveling west, as then the time change works in my favor. I'm just naturally on the correct schedule for a conference like this one. I go to sleep around 9:30 pm and wake up around 6:30 am. That's perfect for an event that starts at 8:30 am. One morning I even got up a bit earlier and went to the hotel gym for some weightlifting. I actually wanted to run, but I didn't want to get my shoes all sweaty and nasty, as I only brought one pair. (Plus, I averaged about 12,000 steps-per-day, just walking through the long corridors of the hotel/convention center.)

That's one good thing about workplaces and work events becoming less and less formal. It's easy to pack. I wore sneakers and jeans the entire time (nice sneakers and jeans) with a button-up shirt or a half-zip pullover. I could fit my entire wardrobe into a small duffle bag, which is the perfect carry-on because it can always be squeezed into an overhead bin. Some people take the informality a little too far, in my opinion -- I saw a guy there in a sleeveless tee, shorts, and flip-flops -- but that's better than being overly formal. I did wear a ball cap sometimes, but only outside at lunch because I would have burned my bald, pale head to crisp without it. I got a little red up top as it was.

The worst part about it all was coming back to DC, as I think I came down with some sort of bug along the way (not Covid). I woke up yesterday morning feeling hungover, even though I last drank a single beer Thursday evening. I was hoping I was just tired, but I kinda suspected I was getting sick. Indeed, by bedtime last night, I was full-on stuffed up with a sore throat and brutal sinus headache. I couldn't sleep because I couldn't get comfortable (a lot of tossing and turning), and then when I finally did, I slept until 10:30 am. I was annoyed at myself for sleeping so late, but then later in the afternoon I realized it was "spring ahead" today, so it actually wasn't that late.

Thankfully, S coincidentally already had a full day planned with the kids, so I didn't have to do much parenting today. We were all supposed to go to a baby-naming party, but I bagged out because of the whole not feeling well thing. I wouldn't say S was mad about it, but I could sense some annoyance. I think it's just spill-over from having the kids alone for a week. But whatever, I'm gone for maybe (maybe) 10 days a year; she's gone for like 50, so... yeah.

Alright a few pics and then that's a post.

 

Until next time...

Entry 653: Fitbits A Hit

We got the kids Fitbits recently, and they seem to really like them. Lil' S2 especially has become obsessed with measuring his daily step total. (It combines two things he likes -- movement and counting.) He regularly goes over 20,000 steps a day, sometimes breaking 25,000. That sounds crazy high to my adult ears. The average for an adult is around 2,500 steps per day, and 10,000 is the standard "trying to be healthy" goal. And he frequently doubles it. That's pure little boy energy. He gets in 2,000 -- 3,000 steps before we even leave the house for school in the morning. After breakfast, he'll usually just walk in a circle around our kitchen and living room until it's time to go.

Lil' S1 is not as hardcore (he usually gets 6,000 -- 7,000 a day), but I do think a Fitbit has helped him become a little more active. It's almost like a video game and your total steps is your score. Also, I started a new thing where if he wants screen time, he has to walk for 20 minutes. He willingly accepts the deal (and often proposes it himself), which is good, as there are few things that make you feel more like an overbearing parent than forcing your child to do physical activity. It's like you're Marv Marinovich, except your kid isn't going to make the NFL.

It's funny how two kids with basically the same upbringing can diverge so much in their interests and development. In our case, the simplistic breakdown is: Lil' S1 takes after S and Lil' S2 takes after me. It's not a perfect mapping, but it is a pretty good heuristic. An illustration of this is their weekly spelling tests. When Lil' S1 was his brother's age, he struggled mightily with these tests. Eventually he would learn the weekly list, but it would take an intense study session every night to do so. Lil' S1 memorizes the entire list perfectly in about ten minutes. We have a stack of tests on our fridge right now and all but one of them is a 100%.*

*I think it would be cool if Lil' S2 became a spelling champion. Indian-Americans dominate the ranks of the top spellers, and so it would be funny if people were like Oh, right, he's half-Indian. That makes sense. And then I'd be like No, that's his white side! I'm a much better speller than his mother!

On the flip-side, Lil' S1 is light-years ahead of his brother when it comes to navigating the world -- and it's not just because he's older. He's never been scared to talk to people, even adults, or try things on his own. An example of this occurred when we went to the library. Lil' S2 wanted a football book (like a little me), but he didn't know where to look, and he didn't want to ask the librarian (like a little -- and big -- me), so Lil' S1 is like I'll find it for you. And he just goes up to the front desk and asks.

That's totally an S characteristic -- getting what you want by having the gumption to ask for it. It seems like a simple skill, but it's not. I've never really had it. My strategy has been to get good at something and do it over and over until people eventually take notice. It's served me decently, but I think I could've done a lot more if I were a little more bold. It's why S makes more money than me.

And... as I'm writing this, Lil' S2 just came back home from his friend's birthday party. He was supposed to stay for two hours, but he only stayed for 30 minutes, and he didn't participate in the festivities (a video game truck). It's his neighborhood friend, and he spends almost every weekend day at his house, but because this kid is a grade below him, they don't hang out much at school. This birthday had a lot of the boy's school friends at it, and so since it was a different social dynamic, Lil' S2 felt uncomfortable and didn't want to stay. This is not a reaction Lil' S1 would be likely to have. (In fact, once he found out there was a video game truck there, he wanted to go to the party even though he wasn't invited. Ple-e-e-e-ase! I can just take my brother's place!)

Anyway...

In other news, "lab leak" is back in the public consciousness. Apparently, Covid did come from a lab after all -- according to some government agencies with "low confidence" at least. The correct answer here, in my opinion, is "maybe," followed by "we will likely never know for sure." But this news, along with a study suggesting that mask mandates don't work, provided yet more examples of how badly the powers-that-be got the Covid response so, so wrong. And this applies to both sides of the political aisle. The left foolishly insisted on super invasive, very unpopular and unhelpful (or in some cases downright harmful) measures such as mask mandates and school closures, while the right spread misinformation about Bill Gates controlling you with vaccines or whatever.

On the lab leak, I think far too many people fell victim to the "bad people have bad ideas" fallacy. Because this theory was pushed so heavily on the right by dipshits like Donald Trump and Steve Bannon and liberal foils like Tom Cotton, people on the left reflexively pushed back against it and called it xenophobic and racist. I don't think I need to point out why this is a fallacious way to form opinions. But I will. Not only is it a great way to consistently look stupid, it gives people you don't like way too much power over you. It's like a reverse form of mind control. It reminds me of a Robert Smith (lead singer of The Cure) quote about Morrisey (lead singer of The Smiths): “If Morrissey says not to eat meat, then I'm going to eat meat; that's how much I hate Morrissey." It's funny as a barb, but not so funny as a real-life practice.

On mask mandates, I think it very quickly became very obvious that they don't work. (I wrote about this a year ago.) I still believe masking done properly can reduce the spread of Covid, but not mask mandates. The reason for this is simple: people, even when mandated to do so, don't wear masks properly. Theoretically they could, but they don't.* And short of some sort of Chinese-style police-state enforcement, what can anybody do about it?

*It's not just selfishness or spite or what have you either. It's difficult even for well-intentioned people to follow mask mandates. You become complacent; you can't help it. Also, you have to take it off to eat or drink, which is a huge flaw with entire endeavor.

I think as a society we focused way too much on communal masking and not enough on personal masking. We would have been much better off instructing people on the best way to mask to keep themselves safe regardless of what others around them are doing. I know that masks are better at keeping others safe from the mask-wearer than they are at keeping the mask-wearer safe from others, but having to rely on others to keep you safe has the obvious downside of having to rely on others to keep you safe. A good mask worn properly at all times can still help protect you.

But we chose not to promote the "save yourself" narrative on masking, and I think I know why. It's a personal-responsibility messages, and the people who supported and implemented mask mandates (mainly liberals) mostly hate personal-responsibility messages. (They don't jibe well with the all-problems-in-life-are-caused-by-priviledged-people-oppressing-marginalized-communities mindset.) Paul Krugman used to talk about the "cult of selfishness" on the right, but I think now there is a "cult of the collective" on the left. Neither one coheres nicely with my normcore sensibilities.

Until next time...

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...