Isolation Report, Week #5

[You could also read last week’s report, or even start at the beginning.]



This week didn’t get a whole lot better.  But primarily I blame that on the return of the rain.

You may recall me whining about the rain before.  On March 10th, which was a Tuesday (if this is week 5, that would have been week 1 ... the week that I actually made it to the office one day), it started to rain.  It was supposed to rain for 8 days; it did rain, off and on (but more on than off) straight through to the end of week 2 (so closer to 13 days, although maybe there were one or two days in there when it only drizzled or something).  Again, it may seem to some of you that I whine over trivialities: were I back in DC, for instance, it would have nothing unusual in the least to see rain for the better part of 2 weeks.  But I don’t live in DC.  I live in southern California.  You know why I moved to southern California?  To get away from the damned rain.  (Okay, there were many other reasons too, but let’s not ignore that one.)

Week 3 was dry, but still overcast and unseasonably cold.  Week 4 it started to warm up, and we actually got some decent swim time in.  I actually did some laps in the pool, which makes me feel a tiny bit better about laying around the house all week.  Then on Sunday it started raining again (as I noted last week), and it racked up another 6 days: it was still coming down pretty hard Friday night when I went to bed.  Yesterday and today have been a bit brighter, granted, but I just don’t feel inclined to trust the weather at this point.

Tendency toward depression is only compounded by dreary days when you can’t really go outside, even moreso than usual these days.  There’s a lot of sleeping odd hours in my house these days, and I’m starting to worry about people, myself not least of all.  I’m mostly staying focussed on work ... mostly.  The Mother declared it to be “spring break,” so no homeschooling this week.  This gave her time to concentrate on the fact that her baby sister was having her own baby (her first, even) in the midst of all this (life goes on, as they say), and the younger two kids have mostly spent the time digging out old videogames (and entire game systems—the PS/3 has been hooked up again, the Wii was out, and I won’t be surprised to see the Gamecube next) and rediscovering old classics.  My putative sister-in-law did deliver her girl, by the way: over 24 hours’ labor and over 9 pounds, but completely healthy and not seeming to notice that she has entered the world at a somewhat ... challenging time.

Grocery shopping is not getting any better; after a surprising uptick in week 2, it’s been constantly devolving into a queasy soup of restrictions and paranoia.  The first couple of weeks there was a bit of a feeling of camaraderie with your fellow shoppers ... a touch of “hey, we’re all in this together.”  There seemed to be precious little of that left when The Mother and I went out on Wednesday.  We specifically set out to get 2 weeks’ worth of groceries so that we can skip it altogether in week 6.  The Mother may have to do one more Costco run, and I’m sure she’s not looking forward to that, but the online delivery service reports that it’s already all booked up for the week.  So I fear we may be stuck with it.  Maybe they’ll have toilet paper.

Sorry.  Bad joke.

The one bright spot for me—not so much for The Mother, granted, but she has a new neice to long-distance-dote on—was another installment of the Family Campaign.  So far, we’ve done “flashbackstories” for everyone, and we had the initial “you all meet in a tavern” session (I put as much of a twist on that as I could, but it’s a standard trope for a reason), but this is the first actual “let’s travel together and start to get to know one another” type session.  It was a lot of fun, and I didn’t get nearly as far as I’d hoped, so we’re going to do another one next week (and then we’ll go back to doing some other campaigns to give me time to gen up some exciting bits for the next leg of their quest).  This was a nicely balanced session, I thought: some shopping, some fireside chats, some revealing character moments, some traveling-can-be-uncomfortable moments, and finally a good old-fashioned ambushed-by-bandits encounter (only this one was on a river barge, adding the extra danger of possibly falling off the boat into the strong current).  It was fun, but there’s more to be done before they get on the ship for the month-long journey that will take them to their final destination.  So I’m looking forward to next week, and hopefully the 3 of them are as well.


Enh, that’s enough for this week.  This was supposed to be the worst week of the crisis, so it’s all downhill from here, I guess?  We shall see.



[Update: It’s now Sunday night and it’s started raining again.  Shit.]

Isolation Report, Week #4

[You could also read last week’s report, or even start at the beginning.]



This week was surprisingly difficult.  You would think by week friggin’ four I would have gotten used to the whole thing, but somehow it just took this long for me to crack.  Or something.

First of all, the days are really starting to run together, as The Daily Show recently pointed out.  There’s little incentive to go to bed at a certain time, or to get up at a certain time for that matter.  I thought the return of those shows that I consider my window onto the world would be helpful—and they’re all back, at this point—but of course the world that they’re windowing is not so much one I want to hear about.  Surely there must be some other things going on in the world ... right?  Even John Krasinski’s quite welcome new YouTube Some Good News show is good news ... about the ongoing pandemic.  Better good news than bad news, I suppose, but you know what would better still?  Other news.  Non-virus-related news.  News about something ... else.

Okay, how about I make a list of all the advantages of being stuck at home?

• I only have to do laundry every other week now.
• I haven’t been to the gas station in about a month.
• I’m saving a butt-ton in lunch money.
• My house key has always been a bit flakey—I think it just wasn’t cut properly in the first place.  But now I don’t need to use it any more.  It is literally never the case that I come home when no one else is there to let me in any more.
• I’m starting to get a little sun on my shoulders from sitting out by the pool with the kids.

No, I don’t think that’s helping.  I could almost get excited about starting summer early ... but it just started raining again.  I hear it’s supposed to rain until Thursday this time.

So overall a hard week.  I had to cut my middle child’s hair for him.  I had to keep The Mother from freaking out that our eldest child had booked a flight to New Jersey—because, hey, flights are really cheap now!  (Happily, the flight was cancelled.  Unsurprisingly.)  I had to cook a little more than usual, I had to go out for food a little more than usual, I almost had to bag my own groceries, but the checkers at my local Trader Joe’s said they didn’t care if they had to touch my bags, so I lucked out there.  I had to talk to my parents for the second week in a row to make sure they hadn’t caught pneumonia and died, and I reckon I’ll have to call again next week, and if that’s not depressing, I don’t know what is.  I had to keep on working in a vacuum and hope I’m making sufficient progress.  I had to buy a new CPAP mask because my old one developed a leak.

On the other hand, I also had to play videogames with my baby girl—because she’s going just as stir-crazy as I am—and that wasn’t all that bad.  It was pretty nice, actually.  I got to play D&D again, but I’m actually locked in with my gaming group, and we all agreed that we’re going to play before dinner as well as after dinner from now on ... because, what the fuck: time has no meaning, so why not spend more of it playing games?  I had to go through 13 pages of games on Target’s web site because The Mother had the idea that we’d also start playing board games more often, and that was actually kinda fun too.  I’m trying to find some bright spots, but it isn’t always easy.  Hopefully this is a temporary dip, and next week I’ll be on the upswing again.

Till then.

Isolation Report, Week #3

[You could also read last week’s report, or even start at the beginning.]



This week was slightly better.

First of all, Trevor Noah has not in fact given up doing shows; he’s just been hiding them where I couldn’t find them—on YouTube.  They’re not full shows either ... just little snippets here and there.  But, still, quite refreshing to get some news, even if it’s 100% virus-related.  Surely there’s something else going on the world ... there was another Democratic debate, for instance.  But I’ve heard literally nothing about it other than seeing the clip where Biden and Bernie bump elbows instead of shaking hands, and that Bernie promised to fix this ebola pandemic while Biden swore he’d do something about this SARS outbreak.

That latter factoid from Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, who are also soldiering on, bless ’em.  But that’s all I’m getting: Colbert’s Internet snippets seem to have petered out, and John Oliver is in hiding, I think.  I was so desperate for news I actually watched a YouTube clip of Jimmy Fallon.  Fallon, I say!¹

It has also, finally stopped raining and warmed up at least slightly.  Which means the plumber came out to fix our gas leak, finally.  Which means we can use jacuzzi again, which we damned well did, although only once so far.  After that, I switched the heat over to the pool; it’s probably too early in the season for the water to retain the heat overnight, making it infeasible to really keep the temperature up, but I decided I was going to do my best to let my little girl swim at least once this weekend.²

Because it’s her birthday weekend this weekend, you know.  She’ll be turning eight, officially, on Tuesday, so she picked this weekend to be hers.  And what a shitty time to have a birthday weekend!  We can’t go out to sit down at any restaurants, and we can’t go out to see a movie, and she can’t have her friends over for a party.  On the plus side, The Mother was so afraid that all her presents wouldn’t get here in time (due to shipping delays caused by ... well, you know) that she went out to Target and bought some just-in-case presents.  And then the real presents did make it,³ so then she had way more presents than she really ought to have.  But obviously she did not complain about this.

So that was a minor bright spot.  And she still gets to pick the meals ... we just have drive-thru and bring them home to eat.⁴  So far we’ve had Taco Bell and Panda Express ... not sure where to next.  Jack-in-the-Box, I’ve heard.  We’ll see.

So, you know, things aren’t as bleak.  But I’m still a little concerned.  Our president⁵ is going on about we need to reopen the country and get everyone back to work.  I started to wonder if people—such as you, dear reader—might think that this is what I was advocating, given some of my previous statements.  I hope not.  Besides not wanting to be associated with any opinion that Trump is holding, I think the larger issue is that I’m concerned that we’re acting like there’s only two options here.⁶  On the one hand the U.S. administration is saying no one should be staying at home and everything should go back to normal.  On the other hand, the majority of the social influencers—including, admittedly, all the folks I praise above—are beating us over the head with the message that we all have to stay indoors or we’re all gonna die.  But I’m the balance and paradox guy, remember?  I haven’t figured out a way to do both at once yet, but surely there has to be a middle ground in there somewhere ...

Perhaps I’m just feeling a bit sad that listening to my favorite media personalities has now devolved into hearing people yell at other people—especially young people—for daring to live their lives.  It’s like The Daily Show: Grumpy Old Men Edition.  You kids today!  You and your going to beaches, and having fun ... why can’t you cower in your houses like normal people!  The mayors of Italy are going out into the streets and yelling at young people.  The mayor of New York has threatened to walk around the city removing all the basketball hoops.  I mean, seriously, people!  Again, I really do understand the necessity for action on this disease (for a particularly informative—and refreshingly less hysterial—discussion, check out Trevor Noah’s interview of Anthony Fauci), but is a society of people shaming others for having fun where we really want to end up?

In any event, I can’t go on about it too long.  I have a ruthless master to serve.  There ain’t nothing like an eight-year-old to really milk the max out of being in charge for a birthday weekend.  At this point, she’s gotten into the habit of prefacing everything she says with “birthday request.”  You know, like: “Birthday request: bring me that glass of water.”  Or, “Birthday request: stop talking so I can hear the movie.”  It’s a ... special time.  I’m not sure I can say we’ll treasure the memories, but we sure as shit won’t forget them.

__________

1 To be transparent, that was really only because Trevor Noah was his “guest.”  Such as guests are in the time of social distancing.
2 Addendum: Yes, both she and her elder brother got in the pool this afternoon and swam for over an hour.
3 Just barely.
4 For her brother, who managed to sneak in his birthday weekend just before everything went to shit, this would be fine.  It’s how he prefers to do it anyway.  But my baby girl is more of a social animal.
5 See, now I know what the fuck our president is up to, because I found Trevor Noah’s hiding spot.
6 I did allude to this issue last week, but I thought it worthy of further elaboration.

Isolation Report, Week #2

[You could also read last week’s report.]



Well, it’s week two, and I don’t think it’s getting any better.

First of all, let me say that the major development in actual virus news is the release of a study by Imperial College in London that paints a pretty grim picture about what could happen with COVID-19 if we don’t take extreme measures.  If you don’t enjoy slogging through statistical analyses, NPR did a nice summary of it, but personally I like the summation by history professor Jeremy Young: there’s a text version, and also a more graphical version illustrated by artist Danny Colee, if that works better for you.  If you’re not much for clicking on things, the takeaway is that (according to these projections) doing nothing kills 4 million Americans—about 4x the number of Americans killed in the Civil War, or 2/3 the number of people killed in the Holocaust.  If the pattern extends worldwide (and, to be fair, the study only looks at the US and UK, so there’s no reason to believe it would ... just no reason to believe it wouldn’t, either), that works out to 90 million deaths: 15x the Holocaust number, or 1.5x the total numer of deaths in all of World War II.  And the reason (at least here in the US) is that extreme cases of COVID-19 will need respirators to survive, but when everyone gets sick more-or-less at once (that is, over about 3 – 6 months), the number of respirators we would need (again, talking about the US) is 30x more than the number we actually have.  So more people die than would otherwise.  Taking moderate social distancing measures could cut those numbers in half, but only the extreme measures really bring them down to where everyone who needs a ventilator gets one and no one (or at least very few people) dies when they didn’t need to.

So, first let me say, I get that.  I understand it, and I believe it, and I in no way am attempting to argue against it.  I don’t think the study is biased, or that it’s wrong.  Please keep that in mind as you read on.

But this is supposed to be a report of our family’s experience this week.  So how’s it been going?  Not great, honestly.  In the first place, we live in southern California—you know, that place where we don’t have weather?  Where the plot of both a movie (L.A. Story) and a song (“It Never Rains in Southern California”) revolve around the fact that it “never rains” and it’s always “72 and sunny”?  Yeah, that place.  Normally, not a bad place to be stuck at home, especially when you’re fortunate enough to have a pool with a jacuzzi in the back yard.¹  But, here’s the rub:  Monday of last week (that is, two weeks from the day after this post), I went to work.  At our status meeting that day, we were told that we could stay home any time we were uncomfortable coming to work, due to the virus or whatever.  The next day, it started raining ... and I’m not talking about a little drizzle.  To call it a torrential downpour would not be exaggerating overmuch, especially considering how little it normally rains here.  The weather report said it would rain for a week.  I stayed at home that Tuesday, not wanting to fight the rain and the resulting traffic, and Wednesday was my normal work-from-home day anyhow.  On Thursday, the rain let up enough that I decided to go into work; I don’t like to wait too many days before I see my coworkers again.  But, as I was preparing to leave the house, I got the word: nobody’s coming in any more, for the foreseeable future.  So I stayed home.  And it kept raining.

The following Tuesday (i.e. 5 days ago as I write this), it was still raining, but the next day the weather cleared, as promised.  I went out to the grocery store, as I always do on Wednesdays, and let me tell you that wasn’t a barrel of fun.  And the next day it started raining again.  Even as I’m writing this, the rain is pouring down outside.  Now, while on the one hand it’s nice that by now we’re bound to be out of the drought conditions we’ve been under for the past ... months? years? I can’t even keep track any more ... but this is not a great time for stormy, overcast days and buckets of rain pouring down.  It’s difficult enough to keep one’s spirits up, but at this point it’s difficult to even get out of the house into our own yard.  It’s difficult to take the dogs out, and there’s certainly no sitting by the pool, or going out for walks in the fresh air.

Of course, getting out at all is problematic now.  Last week, when I told people I was worried about us (as a society) getting to the point where people couldn’t go outside for fear of other people freaking out and calling the cops on them, I sounded like a raving lunatic.  Now, an article in The Atlantic tells us that people going to restaurants and walking on nature trails are “more unnerving” than “empty streets and storefronts,” Stephen Colbert is yelling (his word) at young people in Florida to say at home, and Max Brooks is telling me that I’m going to kill his father Mel (and Carl Reiner and Dick Van Dyke) if I leave my house to become a “spreader.”  But, much more to the point, the governor of my state has ordered that my family (and the remainder of the residents of my state) are not allowed to leave our homes unless for “essential purposes,” under penalty of misdemeanor, and, when asked how in the world he planned to enforce this, he advised my neighbors to apply “social pressure” on me to feel bad about leaving my house.  So I’ve managed to go from raving lunatic to fucking prophet in the course of a week: not only could people conceivably be calling the cops on me if they deicde my purpose isn’t “essential,” but also they have permission from the governor to get in my face about it.

So, again remembering that I agree with and understand all the points about mitigation, and I agree with and understand that we must do something, perhaps you’ll understand that I’m worried that we’re going too far.  That same Atlantic article says:

But experts are saying that Americans can’t really over-prepare right now.  Overreaction is good!

But I don’t buy this.  That article tries to convince us that “overreacting” isn’t inherently a bad thing because the original meaning of the word wasn’t negative.  But this is a bit like saying it’s okay to use the word “faggot” because it originally meant “a bundle of sticks.”  The word means what it means, now, and there’s no point in yearning for “the good old days” when it meant something else.  And what it means, now, is “to react or respond more strongly than is necessary or appropriate.”  So, while I can’t argue that we’re reacting more strongly than is necessary, I still have to wonder if we’re reacting more strongly than is appropriate.

My kids have barely left the house in 2 weeks.  My little girl has a birthday in nine days, and, despite the fact that her presents were ordered before this lockdown started, it looks like some of her gifts won’t make it in time.  I talked last week about how many of the shows I watch regularly are going to be gone now—The Daily Show has given up, Colbert taped a few half-hearted attempts at monologues via his iPad, there’s no Last Week Tonight this evening, and even Critical Role, my go-to, forget-the-world-and-just-watch-some-folks-play-D&D show, has gone dark.  Now, I know that last one sounds like me just whining about not being able to watch my favorite shows ... and, sure, it is that.  But these are also the things that are keeping me sane, and, judging from Internet comments, I would say I’m not alone in that.

The grocery shopping situation isn’t helping either.  My usual trek to Trader Joe’s was ... interesting.  I had to wait to get in, of course, but it wasn’t too awful.  Most of the people waiting in line were friendly enough.  Once inside, there was plenty of room to roam the store, of course, and there weren’t even that many things that were totally gone: no toilet paper or even tissues, of course, but there was enough milk and eggs, and those were the main things I was worried about.  Perhaps it was because of the restrictions: “loose” items, such as bananas or tomatoes, were unlimited, but pre-packaged items were strictly limited to 2 per customer.  Also, no more than 2 “uncooked meat products” of any kind, and hot dogs count as uncooked.²  The restrictions also included sparkling water, of which I couldn’t buy more than two bottles regardless of flavor, despite the fact that my attempt to get six was in no way hoarding: that’s just how many we normally get through in a week.  But, then again, the restrictions didn’t seem to help certain things: the pasta shelf was devastated, and I got one of the last 3 containers of sour cream.  There were plenty of frozen pot pies, but no frozen burritos or microwave Indian food.  There was plenty of canned tomatoes, but no cans of tomato sauce or tomato paste.  Plenty of regular milk, but no lactose-free milk.  There were plenty of bags of potato chips ... except for the BBQ chips, which were all out.  I have no idea if this was because the store didn’t get any of those items, or they just sold out of them before I got there.

The following day The Mother braved the lines³ at Costco, where the restriction was per SKU, so you could get different flavors or different sizes of the same thing, but there the limit was only one per customer.  Still no toilet paper.  We’re trying not to hoard anything, because that’s just shitty, and, also, where the fuck are you people hoarding milk and eggs putting them?  I just don’t have that much refrigerator space even if I wanted to hoard that sort of stuff, which I don’t, because it’s a shitty thing to do.⁴  On the other hand, stocking up on things just seems prudent at this point, given how horrifically annoying it is to get to the store.  And, given the aforementioned limited refrigerator space, a lot of what we’re stocking up on is prepackaged crap.  I’ve eaten my first really-truly Pop-Tarts—as in, actually made by Kellog’s—in probably more than a decade, and there’s plenty of other stuff out of boxes and cans and, in a few cases, freezer packs, that I wouldn’t normally touch.  But we’re saving the fresher food for special occaions at this point.

You know what isn’t limited?  Alcohol.  TJ’s made it very clear that we could buy as much of that as we wanted, and they were fully stocked in that department.  I bought a couple of bottles of wine and some hard cider.  Costco also excepted alcohol, and The Mother came home with a giant bottle of Absolut.

So, basically, my state government seems to be pushing me to become an overweight paranoid agorophobic alcoholic.

Because, you see, nothing is black and white.  All our overreacting will almost assuredly save lives.  But everything has a cost.  A lot of restaurants won’t survive this pandemic, and I’m almost positive that the movie theater industry is toast.  At least one local amusement park may disappear.  Will suicide rates spike during this period?  Maybe not.  But if I find out later that they did, I shall certainly not be surprised.  Will depression increase?  What will the long-term effects be on our mental health, on our economy, on our children?

The problem with saying such things, of course, is that people will assume I therefore advocate doing nothing.  The study says we have to! they’ll cry.  You quoted the results right at the beginning!  Yes, I did.  That report studied three possible scenarios, and there really is no doubt that, among those three, the shit-storm we’re stuck with is the best option.  But there are an infinite number of scenarios—an infinite number of things we could do.  Those are not the only options.  And I personally think it’s worthwhile to explore some other options, because this one ain’t really working for me.

But, then again, if it would just stop raining here, maybe I would take my giant bottles of alcohol and go work by the pool and be perfectly content.  Honestly, I’m not much for going out under normal circumstances.  But, you know, when people tell you can’t ... after a couple of weeks, you start to realize what you’re missing.

__________

1 Okay, realistically, the pool is our back yard.  But still.
2 You guys know hot dogs are actually cooked ... right?
3 And don’t even get me started on how moronic it is to pack 50 people into a line together so that you can make sure they’re all 6 feet away from each other once they get in the store.
4 Did I mention how shitty it is?

Isolation Report, Week #1

Well, it’s week 1 of being isolated due to COVID-19.  In case you’re reading this from some far future timeline and you’ve forgotten (or never knew—lucky you) what that is, back here in 2020 a new strain of virus (specifically, a “coronavirus,” which basically means “head cold”) which is, unusually for these types of virus, occasionally fatal.  Other coronavirus disease scares in the past (notably SARS) were also scary in this way, but none of those previous diseases lived up to the hype about how fast it would spread and how many people might die from it.  This one, on the other hand, has.  Numbers are flying around right now, and you don’t always know whether you can trust them, but by some estimates as many of 70% of the entire population (worldwide) will get it, and of those who contract it maybe 20% will have severe reactions and perhaps 2% will die.

Here in the U.S., after a fairly poor showing of taking it seriously when it first appeared, we’ve now swung in entirely the other direction, with conferences, concerts, sports events, parades, and so forth being cancelled (including, ironically, at least one coronavirus conference), public institutions such as libraries and museums being closed, and huge swaths of the workforce being told to work from home.  I made it into the office one day this past week, and it looks like that was it for the foreseeable future: my office sent everyone home on Thursday (before I even managed to get in) and told us not to come back.  Trying to go grocery shopping has been ... challenging.  Happily, I went on Wednesday (my normal shopping day) before things got particularly crazy, and I just did fairly normal shopping, not really trying to hoard anything.  We went back out again on Friday for a few things just so we could cook at home, and it’s a good thing we didn’t need any eggs, or milk, or bread, or potatoes ... those were all gone.  No clue what it’ll look like next week.  But even on Monday when Christy tried to go to Costco, the toilet paper was all gone.  At this point we won’t even go out there any more: you have to wait in line to get in, apparently.  You can order online and have it delivered, but they’re not currently offering toilet paper via that method.  Amazon had to take down all the third-party sellers offering toilet paper to stop price-gouging.  I mean, judging from the state of things, you’d think it was an apocalypse.

Now, on the one hand, I find this somewhat silly.  It’s a cold, people.  Yes, it can be quite serious for some—mainly the elderly, those with compromised immune systems, etc.  I have a kid with a heart condition, so I’m not callous to that side of it.  But the chance of disease is always out there.  The flu (which is caused by a slightly different class of virus) can be fatal as well, and we have that every year.

On the other hand, I do understand what the health care people are saying.  There are basically two scenarios here:  In the first one, everyone gets the virus all at once, the number of serious cases spikes insanely, and the health care system is overwhelmed.  With insufficient resources, some people could die not because the virus killed them, but because they couldn’t get the care they needed to weather the sickness.  In the second scenario, the virus spreads more slowly; the number of total cases of serious sickness doesn’t change, but it’s way more spread out, and the health care system has adequate resources to care for everyone, and only the absolute worst cases are lost.  That makes perfect sense to me.  We’re not hiding in our homes so that we won’t get the disease—we’re probably all going to get, and there’s nothing to be done about that.  But the more we avoid large groups of people, the slower it’ll spread ... we’re hiding so we don’t get the disease too fast.  This is all very sensible, and I’m glad to see we’re taking scientific advice seriously (for a change).

Still ...

I’m struck by what Trevor Noah said on The Daily Show one night this past week: COVID-19 has killed somewhere in the ballpark of 5,000 people in the past 3 months, worldwide.  In the U.S., just one country in the world, 3,000 people die in car accidents every day.  Automobiles look at puny coronviruses and laugh at how pitiful they are at killing us.  And yet we do not cower in our homes for fear of driving to work each day.  Perspective, people ... that’s what Trevor said, and I thought it was a great point.

But I won’t be hearing any more great points from Trevor for a while, nor from Stephen Colbert, because all the New York late shows have gone dark.  They all have audiences, you see.  And audiences are large gatherings of people, and large gatherings of people could cause the virus to spread more quickly.  Colbert aired a single show with no audience (as did Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me), but that’s it (at least for Colbert; not sure if WWDTM will continue, albeit audience-less).  The Daily Show said at first they would continue to do shows sans audience, but they too gave it up late on Friday.  And here’s where I worry that we’re going too far.

You see, these are the places where I get my news.  Sure, I could sit around and watch CNN or something along those lines, but I gotta tell you: I spent a long time doing that right after 9/11, and all I got for it was way more stressed and not particularly more well-informed.  In fact, study after study has shown that “fake news” shows such as The Daily Show produce more well-informed viewers than almost any other outlet.  So right now I’m losing not only my major source of news about the world, but also the coping mechanism I was using to deal with the stress of said news: being able to laugh at it.

And, at the end of the day, that’s what’s hitting me the hardest.  Not seeing my coworkers and not being able to go out to lunch with other adults sucks.  Being cooped up with my family for essentially 24 hours a day with our only “breaks” being when one of us goes and hides in our room is not all bad, certainly, but it can be ... wearing.  Losing my opportunity to go to conferences or libraries ... well, honestly, I wasn’t taking advantage of those opportunities as much as I should have done anyhow.  But losing access to the shows that were keeping me sane: that is what I worry will send me over the edge.  And I’m sure I’m not the only one.  And I’m just wondering if this is the right choice for us to make, as a society.  Because, at the end of the day (or more likely month, in this case), it will be difficult for us to quantify how many lives our choices have saved.  But I worry that the fundamental changes to our way of life will be all too apparent.

Enh.  I’m probably overreacting.  I’m sure that being alone in my bedroom for the majority of the past 6 days isn’t impacting my stream of consciousness writing at all.  I’m probably just fine.

Hopefully next week is more ... hopeful.

A (Belated) Happy Leap Day

Yesterday was Leap Day.

Every four years, we get the Olympics,^* and we Americans get a Presidential election, and we get leap year.  I always wondered how we managed to get all these lined up like that: if they’d spread them out a bit, we could have some excitement 3 years out of 4 and it wouldn’t be so draining once every four years.  But it is what it is, I suppose.

We have an extra day, of course, because, astronomically speaking, a solar year is way closer to 365.25 days than to 365 even, so every 4 years we manage to accumulate an extra day.  For more fun details on why there are leap years, plus way more interesting oddities about dates and times, you could check out my talk on dates in Perl from a few years back.  Sure, you may not know Perl, but only the last part of the talk is really about Perl; the rest of it is perfectly comprehensible regardless of your personal level of technogeekery.

Leap Day was often celebrated by “allowing” women to propose to men.  Supposedly, this was a negotiation between Saint Bridget and Saint Patrick in Ireland, back in the olden times (by which we mean the 5th century or so).  Very gracious of St. Patty to begrudge the women of Ireland 1 day out of 1,461 to choose their own spouses.  Hopefully this type of thing is not really required any more, despite the fact that the abysmally received Leap Year is a mere 10 years old.

Other than that, Februrary 29th is also St. Oswald’s Day.  Who, you may ask, is St. Oswald?  Enh.  Some dude.  You didn’t think they were going give leap day to any of the good saints, did you?

Tune in next week for a longer post.

__________

* Yes, yes, only the Summer Olympics, since 1992.  But, then, prior to 1924, those were the only Olypmics there were.

Thankful for Thanksgiving

Well, it’s the weekend after Thanksgiving (here in the US at least), and that’s typically a time for me to blow off blog posts.  If you’re lucky, you may get one of my infamous abbreviated posts, such I did in 2014, and in 2015, and in 2016.^*  But this year, the weekend is falling squarely on a “full post week,” according to my new blog schedule, so I have less of an excuse than usual.

If you actually read any of those abbreviated posts I just threw you links to, you will have picked up some of our Thanksgiving traditions: enjoying the sides more than the turkey, watching Mystery Science Theater 3000, and coming up with 3 things (each) that we’re thankful for and sharing them with each other.  Other than that, we don’t do a whole lot on Thanksgiving.  In particular, we do not travel for it, and we very rarely have anyone over for it.  Our lovely family (for those keeping score at home, current count is: 5 humans, 2 canines, 2 felines, 1 rodent, and a tank full of piscines, arthropods, gastropods, and an amphibian who still refuses to die) is quite large enough, thank-you-very-much, and just managing to get all of us to the table, with the food, enough clothes on everyone that some pictures can be taken, while also trying not to kill each other because cooking large holiday meals is stressful enough without even considering that our kitchen is basically the size of a sardine tin ... just managing all that is challenging enough as it is.  Hell, even getting the dining room table completely cleared off (which we pretty much do exactly twice a year) is a chore.  If we had to add to that the extra work of cleaning house enough to be presentable to friends and relatives, and the extra food it would require, and so on and so forth, I don’t think we’d survive.

But, as it is, it’s pretty much exactly the right amount of work and it pays off very nicely.  The 5 of us humans share pretty much the same feelings on politics and religion, and, if any of the fuzzy children are pro-Trump or anything along those lines, they at least keep it to themselves.  None of us are huge drinkers—I think my single glass of wine was the only alcohol consumed throughout the entire meal—so there’s no drunken ranting either.  So we don’t have the stereotypical issues that you hear office mates and late-night comedians go on about.  The smallies will occasionally fight over the last buttered roll, and The Mother may yell at the eldest for sneaking food under the table to the dogs, and maybe we quibble over who took much of that and they’ll never eat it all and why didn’t you pass the so-and-so to me, I mean you had it right there in your hand and you knew I wanted some ... and that’s about as contentious as it ever gets.  Which is, you know ... nice.

This year, the lists of things we were thankful for were dominated by having a heart surgery survivor in our midst, as might be expected.  I was also bold enough to be thankful for MST3K for the second year (not in a row), since we actually got the premiere of a brand new season for our Turkey Day marathon: six movies designed to be watched in one marathon sitting.  Sure, we only made it through three of them, but it was pretty glorious nonetheless.  And we were thankful for each other, and for our friends, and for the fact that none of us or our friends had their houses burned down or suffered so much smoke damage as to be unlivable, and for my excellent job that pays me very well and yet that I still enjoy going to work every day even after five years, all of which is a long-winded way to say, we’re thankful for our life.  It’s a nice life, and we quite enjoy it, and, in general, we’re not just living it.  We’re experiencing it, and relishing it, and thriving because of it.  And it’s good to appreciate that.  And I think that’s what Thanksgiving should be about.

Thanksgiving gets a lot of shit these days.  It has a serious image problem: many people like to trot out Thanksgiving as a way to whitewash the relationship between us white Europeans and the Native Americans.  But, you know, Thanksgiving didn’t actually start with that whole Pilgrims-and-Indians feast.  Wikipedia tells us that:

Before 1536 there were 95 Church holidays, plus 52 Sundays, when people were required to attend church and forego work and sometimes pay for expensive celebrations.  The 1536 reforms reduced the number of Church holidays to 27, but some Puritans wished to completely eliminate all Church holidays, including Christmas and Easter.  The holidays were to be replaced by specially called Days of Fasting or Days of Thanksgiving, in response to events that the Puritans viewed as acts of special providence.  Unexpected disasters or threats of judgement from on high called for Days of Fasting.  Special blessings, viewed as coming from God, called for Days of Thanksgiving.

Of course, we don’t talk about that, because Thanksgiving is supposed to be a secular holiday: something we can all enjoy regardless of our religious affiliations.  But of course even in its religious roots, it has a bit of anti-establishment in its history—the whole concept of days of thanksgiving was to replace the froufrou high Church holidays.  But even so it was still a Christian celebration; who you were supposed to be giving thanks to was never really in question.  Recasting it as a coming together of disparate cultures—regardless of how accurate or how fictional—seems to me like a desperate attempt to secularize the holiday (because of course the Native Americans wouldn’t have been giving thanks to the Christian God).  But I’m not sure that’s really necessary.  If you’re religiously inclined (and I don’t really think it matters what type of religion), you know who you’re giving thanks to.  And, supposing you’re not, who would you be giving thanks to anyway?  Now, me, I’m more inclined toward the agnostic, so I’m perfectly happy to throw some thanks out into the greater universe without particularly needing to know if there’s anyone on the receiving end.  But I’m at a loss to explain how a proper atheist can celebrate Thanksgiving: if everything happens according to random chance, there certainly doesn’t seem to be any point in thanking anyone for it.  But we seem to have all agreed that we can be thankful once a year without requiring deity, destiny, or doctrine, and I think we can continue that trend without needing to drag the Native Americans into it.

So I don’t need any Pilgrims^** to celebrate Thanksgiving, and I don’t need any attempts to rewrite history to pretend that our ancestors got along better than they actually did.  I personally think Thanksgiving is more about what’s happening right now.  It’s a chance to set all the bad stuff aside—and, let’s face it, there’s always going to be some bad stuff.  But on Thanksgiving, you ignore all that—you focus on the good stuff, and you get to say, hey, maybe my life is pretty damned good after all.  I think that’s the value of listing things to be thankful for: it reminds us that there really are a lot of things to put on that list.  And some of them are little things, and some of them are big things, but they all count.  They all contribute to that feeling that life is pretty sweet after all.  And so we get together with our family, and perhaps a few friends, and we celebrate that with some good food and maybe a beer or a glass of wine or a fine single-malt whiskey, and we eat too much and we drink too much and we watch too much television, and then we fall asleep on the couch, because, hey: life is good.

And I’m happy to be reminded of that, once a year at least.  Honestly, we should probably have Thanksgiving more often.  We’d probably be happier if we did.

Although we’d probably get sick of the turkey leftovers eventually.

__________

* Last year you didn’t even get one of those.  I plead heart surgery.

** And, anyway, as a native Virginian, I’m educated to believe that those Massachusetts Johnny-come-latelies are hogging all the glory despite the fact that we did everything first.

Gone But Never Forgotten

Tomorrow we celebrate the birth of a man who was instrumental in the development of modern America.  Unlike many years, this year Martin Luther King Day is actually on King’s birthday: Januray 15th.  Most years I celebrate very simply, by just reflecting on the words and the life of Dr. King, and typically listening to “Southern” by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark.  Obviously Dr. King’s life can’t really be reduced to 3½ minutes of a song by a synthpop band, but I always found OMD’s tribute moving nonetheless.

Toward the end of 2016, I did a blog post where I shared a few quotes from Jesus, and I noted that, regardless of whether you believed in his status as Messiah and Savior, his words were still powerful.  Dr. King holds a similar position in my mind: you may not agree with everything he stood for, but even if you agree with our current president that Nazis can be good people too, or you’re a little nostalgic for the “good old days” of separate-but-equal, it’s still hard to ignore powerful statements like the following.  Here are my favorite quotes from the man:

Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.

I submit to you that if a man has not discovered something that he will die for, he isn’t fit to live.

We must either learn to live together as brothers or we are all going to perish together as fools.

One may well ask: “How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?”  The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust.  I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws.  One has not only a legal, but a moral responsibility to obey just laws.  Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.  I would agree with St. Augustine that “an unjust law is no law at all.”

It’s wrong to hate.  It always has been wrong and it always will be wrong.  It’s wrong in America, it’s wrong in Germany, it’s wrong in Russia, it’s wrong in China.  It was wrong in 2000 B.C., and it’s wrong in 1954 A.D.  It always has been wrong, and it always will be wrong.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

So, tomorrow, I’ll reflect on these words, and be happy that my three little (and not so little) children can live in a nation where they are exposed to ideas like these, where words such as these are considered important enough that we set aside a day to contemplate them.  We’re all benefitting from Dr. King’s dream.  Obviously we still have a ways to go before we get to the promised land, but I do believe we’re on the path.  And we have one man, and his relentless dream to thank for it.

So, thank you, Dr. King.

A Fresh Start

One year ago I told you to have a wonderful 2016.  However, you did not listen to me.  You had a crappy 2016: you let Prince die, and you let David Bowie die, and you let Leonard Cohen die, and you let George Michael die, and you let Carrie Fisher and her mother die, for crying out loud, and you tried to reroute an oil pipeline through sacred Native American lands, and you broke up a nearly-half-century-old agreement while simultaneously depriving the European Union of half its military, and you completely destroyed the third oldest continuously inhabited city in the world, and you let the police kill somewhere in the neighborhood of a thousand people, and, worst of all, you elected a sleazy pussy-grabber with ties to white supremacy and the Russian oligarchy to the post which is still, for just a bit longer, considered to be the most powerful in the world.  So, fuck you guys.

I will not tell you to have a wonderful 2017.  I’m not sure 2017 is capable of being wondeful at this point.  I’ll just advise you to have a better 2017 than you did a 2016, because, if it gets any worse, I may have to just sit on the sofa and consume beer and Cheetos until the end finally comes for me.  Either that or I’m gonna hafta start researching how to create the virus which will start the zombie apocalypse, ’cause the point at which The Walking Dead starts looking better than the real world ... that’s some fucked up shit.

So try to calm down a bit for this year, wouldja?  Let’s all just chill out a bit and see if 2017 can be a bit more relaxing, a bit less fatal, and feature signficantly less misogyny and racism.  I’m setting my expectations fairly low here.  Please don’t disappoint me.

Thanks.

Off to Camp

Today is an interesting day.  My eldest child, who is less than six months away from not being a child at all any more (at least according to our legal system), is going away to summer camp for the first time.  This is not because we wouldn’t let them go before now ... it’s just because this is the first time they ever wanted to go.  The Mother, of course, is as devastated as one might expect from a mother on her first child’s first day of school.  Which makes sense, if you consider that, between their initial career at a Sudbury school and later homeschooling, this really is the first time that we’ve sent them off to be with strangers in an environment which we know will be good for them but simultaneously know they will have difficulty with.  It’s a tough transition.

Now, in case you’re wondering why I’m being gender-coy with the pronouns, I can assure you it’s not because I’m having an overprotective moment where I want to keep my child’s identity so anonymous that I can’t even let you in on their gender.  No, it’s because that’s how they’ve asked me to refer to them, and I do my best to respect those wishes, even when it’s hard for me to grasp exactly where the wishes originate from.  I suspect (though I don’t know for sure until they choose to enlighten me) that it’s not a case of them being uncomfortable with the gender assigned to them at birth.  Rather, I think that the issue is they’re not that comfortable with any gender at all.  I think (and I must continue to stress that I’m speculating here) that they’ve come to realize that all gender is is a label, and no one likes to be labeled (especially not at their age).  If you think about it, we are all identified by a multitude of labels: gender, race, hair color, height, weight, social class, geographical background, sexual orientation, political leanings, occupation, technical adeptness, income level, marital status, type of car I drive, whether I rent or own my house (or neither), whether I have children or not (and, if so, how many), whether I have pets or not (and, if so, how many, and what species), which books I read, which TV shows I watch, what foods I like ... just an endless series of labels, some of which we accept and some of which we avoid, but all of which carry baggage.  Even the ones that seem innocent.  If tell you I’m a gay male, or a black woman, or a rich Jewish person, you’re going to have a picture of me, and you’ll probably even realize that you’re stereotyping.  But if I tell you that I’m a redhead, or that I’m from Minnesota, or that I live in my parent’s basement, or that I own a lizard—any of those things will also cause you to think you know me, and many of them won’t be that obvious.

Like all of us, some of those labels I own, and some I eschew.  For instance, I’ll happily tell you that I’m a liberal, and a father, and a technogeek.^*  Others I don’t talk about as much: I don’t bring up my race or my gender or my social class that often, because my race and gender and social class are pretty privileged, and I don’t wish to be defined that way.  Oh, I accept that I’ve often had an easy life because of those things (and others), but it’s often easy to imagine that people who can’t possibly have had it as hard as you have therefore never had it hard, and that’s not the same thing at all.  If you’ve suffered a lot, whereas I’ve only suffered a little, it does mean that I don’t have the right to judge you, or to talk about what you’ve been through.  But it doesn’t mean that my suffering doesn’t count.

Being stuck with one of those labels that you never particularly wanted isn’t suffering, especially when it happens to be one of the “good” ones.  But that doesn’t mean it’s totally fine either.  At this point in my life, I happen to be an old white man.  There is little separating me from those idiots you see in Congressional committees (particularly those impaneled with determining women’s reproductive rights, or settling disputes with Native Americans).  Well, apart from my long hair and scruffy beard, which, honestly, I mostly cultivate exactly because it will set me apart from those morons.  So I’m an old white man, sure, but I’m not one of those old white men, and I don’t appreciate being lumped in with them.  Do I know what it’s like to be black, or Jewish, or gay?  Nope, not in the least.  But I do have some inkling of what it’s like to have a burning need not to be judged by those labels: not to be reduced to a stereotype.

As part of the research we as parents are currently doing into gender roles and related issues, I looked at some information from a fellow named Sam Killermann.  He has a comedy show that he performs where he talks about stereotypes, and snap judgements.  Here’s a snippet that caught my ear:

It’s natural, like it’s instinctual—we just do it so fast, we jump to those conclusions, we make those decisions—you know, it snaps—and it goes into your head and you just have to let it go out ...

It’s like, there’s a stereotype, and that’s just like, an assumption about a group, and there’s prejudice, which is the next step.  That’s where you act upon it.  I don’t think it’s really possible for us to just ignore the stereotypes, for us to get rid of them all, at least not in this generation, but it’s possible for us not to act with prejudice.

I think this is key.  Stereotyping is, in my opinion, an inevitable consequence of human intelligence.  We analyze and cogitate by separating and categorizing and compartmentalizing—this ability to put things in boxes and put labels on them mostly works to our advantage.  It lets us take exceedingly complex concepts and simplify them enough to be grasped and grokked and thorougly dissescted and reassembled and twisted inside-out and turned into brand new concepts that we then put out there and let other people start the whole process all over and produce even newer concepts that then go out into the world and do it all again.  This process has enabled scientific advancements and literary achievements and depth and complexity of emotional shading and mechanical assembly and microscopic discovery that have launched us humans to the pinnacle of life as we know it.  Also, it’s launched us into countless wars, and inquisitions, and genocides, and pogroms, and bombings, and rock-throwings, and hateful words.  Because when you apply that reductive categorization and labeling to a mechanical structure, you get to understand what makes it tick, but, when you apply it to another living, breathing person, you completely fail to understand what makes them tick, because human brains have that ineffeable quality that, so far, nothing else in the known universe seems to have: it’s greater than the sum of its parts.  That is, you can understand all about neurons, and synapses, and frontal lobes and cortexes and medullae oblongatae, but still utterly fail to comprehend how another person thinks.  Because there’s simplifying, and then there’s oversimplifying.

So stereotypes are a natural, but dangerous, way of oversimplifying people, which is okay, but only as long as you know you’re oversimplifying people, and you know you better cut it out before you think you know them.  Because stereotypes may have grains of truth in them, but, unlike DNA or quantum physics, they don’t have universal truth.  And labels enable stereotypes.  And many people feel that, if we can get rid of the labels, we can get rid of the stereotypes.

I don’t necessarily agree with this.  I’m with Sam, up above, where he says it’s not really possible for us to get rid of stereotypes.  Of course, he holds out hope that future generations may be able to succeed where we will fail, and I’m not even sure I’m willing to go that far.  I’m not sure I believe it’s possible to get rid of stereotypes at all—not while remaining human.  Perhaps someday we’ll evolve into something else, and then of course all bets are off.  But, until then, I personally believe we’re stuck with them.

Which is not to say that I’m not going to respect other people’s attempts to get rid of the labels, though.  I may not agree with such attempts, but I admire them.  Striving to achieve the impossible is a victory in the journey, even when the destination is never reached.  Plus, every now and again, I’m reminded of one of my favorite uplifting quotes, from Pearl S. Buck:

The young do not know enough to be prudent, and therefore they attempt the impossible—and achieve it, generation after generation.

So let folks attempt the impossible, I say, and I will support them, even if I don’t quite believe in it.  ‘Cause I might be wrong.  Often am, in fact.  So, go for it.

But I also want to encourage people to learn to ignore the labels, even when they haven’t been expunged.  I think people have to learn to ignore the labels that people place on them, and also (probably more importantly, even) to ignore the labels that they, perhaps unconciously, place on others.  I say, don’t feel bad about labeling people.  We all do it.  Just be able to throw the label away after you print it out.  Because, ultimately, it means nothing.  If you get to know a person and it turns out your initial label was correct, that means nothing more than the proverbial infinitude of simians reproducing Shakespeare.  If you decide that you can jump off your roof and not be hurt, and you do so, and, by some miracle, you happen to land unhurt, that doesn’t mean you were right.  Ditto for people-labels that happen to turn out to be right.  More often than not, though, you’ll find that, even if you were partially right about people (and often you’re not even that), people are just so damned complex that “partly right” isn’t worth much.  Unlike horseshoes and hand grendades, “almost” is not particularly useful in psychoanalysis.

So I respect my kid’s desire to avoid the gender label as much as they can, as long as they can.  But I also hope they can learn to ignore the label ... I think that’ll be more useful in the long run.  I hope they can learn that they can be whoever they want to be, regardless of how other people look at them.  To sum up, I’ll use a quote often misattributed to Dr. Suess, but which is really a Suess-ification of a quote originally spoken by Bernard Baruch, a white, male, Jewish, upper-class father and stock broker who advised presidents, bought a former slave plantation, and endowed the United Daughters of the Confederacy.  But, like all people, he was more than the sum of his labels.  And he expressed the original sentiment that inspired this reformulation, which is another of my favorite uplifting quotes.

Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter, and those who matter don’t mind.

And that really says it all.

__________

* And, in fact, I often have, on this very blog.

A post to be: Heroscapers post #2

I’ve actually been doing quite a bit of writing this weekend, but it’s not quite ready for primetime yet.  Hopefully I’ll be posting it within the next few days; at that time, I’ll come back and post a link here.

Update: I did eventually get around to posting it, and it’s now available up on my Other Other Blog (yes, I now have 3 friggin’ blogs, despite the fact that I still think blogs suck).  It’s ostensibly about my favorite game, Heroscape, and my involvement with a fan-based group, the C3V.  However, what it’s really about is group dynamics and politics in a small, volunteer-run organization.  The lessons I learned there (and the mistakes I made) are easily transferrable, I believe, to any such organization you may be involved in: church group, school committee, scout troop, etc.  It’s over four times as long as one of my normal posts here, but I think it’s worthwhile nonetheless.  Check it out if you’re so inclined.

The between time

The lull between Christmas and New Year’s is a special time.  A time for relaxing, enjoying cheesy holiday shows with your family, playing video games with your kids, and just chillin’ out.  Not a time for writing blog posts.  Nor reading them, really.  Put that keyboard down and go do some of that other stuff I just said.  Or follow your own bliss.  Whatever makes you happy.

And, speaking of happy: have a wonderful 2016.

Ruminations of the Season

As we slip into the holiday season, it’s time to reflect on the year past, and look forward to the year approaching.  I could do that.  But my vision doesn’t quite extend that far, I’m afraid ... I’m looking forward to surviving the holidays, and that’s plenty forward enough, thank you very much.  Here’s some of the things (both good and bad) that I can look forward to as the holiday season begins to swallow us whole:

Multiplication of cardboard.  I love to recycle—really I do.  But recycling cardboard boxes is my least favorite part.  Because you have to break them down.  I mean, you don’t have to, in order to recycle them, but you have to, because otherwise they’ll never fit in the recycle bin.  And nobody in my house, other than me, breaks down the cardboard boxes.¹  Also, we do all of our Christmas shopping at Amazon.  So this time of year there are a lot of cardboard boxes.  In particular, I can count on a solid hour or two of nothing but breaking down cardboard boxes on Christmas day, or maybe the day after, if I’m lucky.  The kids get to come rushing into the room and tear everything apart and fling around the bits all willy-nilly, but who do you think has to clean that up?  Well, The Mother will do a lot of it, really.  But all the cardboard is headed my way.  Bah.  Humbug.

Tiresome repitition of the “war on Christmas” meme.  The holiday season is sure to bring out the crazy in the CCFs.²  In fact, it has already—one thing you can count on is that, if the Christmas season starts earlier and earlier every year, then so must the mythical “war.”  I refuse to link you to the idiot whining about the fact that Starbucks cups are red and green (’cause apparently that’s not “Christmasy” enough for this douchebag), but I’m sure you’ve seen it already.  I really can’t improve on my 2011 holiday rant, so just go read that.  Plus it contains my excellent Christmas music mix, Yuletidal Pools.  Bonus.

The cruelty of the advent calendar.  To a kid, an advent calendar is an excrutiatingly slow countdown to the most exciting day of the year.  Since I now have three such smaller humans—well, really two, because my eldest is now taller than I am—I’m currently being treated on a regular basis to pronouncements such as “There’s no way I can possibly wait another NINE WHOLE DAYS for Christmas!”  Yeah, well: welcome to reality.  Suck it up kid.

Eggnog.  There’s lots of things you can pretty much only buy at Christmas, but the only one I really love is eggnog.  I suppose I could make it myself, but there are some perfectly good ‘nogs out there—almost certainly better than I could ever produce—and it’s nice to be able to just bring it home and pour it in a glass and kick back and relax.  Eggnog is somehow keyed to the spirit of the season for me.  The smell alone is enough to put me in a Christmas mood.  (Also, if you’re putting out milk and cookies for Santa, you’re gipping the fat man.  Eggnog and cookies is the classy way to go.)

The inescapable madding crowds.  Even though we make every endeavor not to do any actual Christmas shopping at physical locations, you can’t really get out of all shopping.  There’s grocery shopping, for instance.  And even though you may just be there for ordinary weekly supplies, try telling that to the rest of the crazed holiday crowd.  No point in bothering, really.  It’s a bit like being at the amusement park: you square your shoulders, tuck your head down, and push on through.

Watching my diet go down the toilet.  As you may recall from my Saladosity series (specifically in part 3, my take on Whole30), I am not “on a diet”; rather, I’ve changed my diet.  As a general rule, I do pretty well at avoiding added sugars of all stripes, grains, and legumes, plus miscellaenous other bits and bobs (like fries and chips).  But the one-two punch of Thanksgiving followed by Christmas is pretty much guaranteed to crush my newly improved eating habits all to hell and back.³  Partially that’s because of seasonally available food like candy cane faux oreo’s and chocolate oranges; partially it’s because of family recipes that come sneaking out of the woodwork, like my grandmother’s pound cake, or her ginger snaps; partially it’s because Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve dinners are, by tradition, celebrations of abundance.  But the exact reason isn’t important.  The point is, there’s a few extra pounds coming my way.

Quiet family moments.  One of the advantages of moving nearly three thousand miles away from one’s parents is that you get to have quiet little holiday gatherings with just the immediate family: The Mother, myself, and the children: 3 humans, 2 dogs, 3 cats, 1 guinea pig, and various assorted fish, shrimp, and snails.  Intimate family meals, lazing around on the couch watching movies (or watching the kids play video games), sharing the excitement of gift discovery, snuggling with a child (human or feline), enjoying the warmth and glow.

Inevitable holiday sicknesses.  I think this must be the 4th or 5th year in a row that some or most of us have been sick for the holidays.  Perhaps it’s the change in the weather, which comes fairly late in the year to southern California.  Perhaps the universe just hates us.  But, whatever it is, some of us will be sniffling, and/or hacking, and/or barfing, this entire coming week.  We’ve already started, actually.

Lack of sleep.  It’s tough to get enough sleep any time, but this time of the year complicates matters even further.  There’s so much stuff to do, and Christmas Eve is full of preparation—try to get the kids to bed, frenzied preparation for Santa, requisite picture-taking, plus it seems like there’s always at least one massive thing to assemble—and Christmas Day has a tendency to start very early, typically with small children jumping on your head.  Is it any wonder that parents tend to drift off on the sofa in the middle of the afternoon for the next few days?⁴

Flashes of simple joy.  Kids love Christmas, no doubt.  But parents love it just as much, if they’re honest.  Because Christmas is one of those times when you get to see straight into your kids’ hearts, via their smiles and looks of wonder.  Every person has a face they wear—even young ones.  Kids are just not as likely to be so adamant about it ... they let their masks slip quite often, at first, and only learn to be more cautious as life throws more and more crap at them.  And of course, a lot of times even when the façade cracks, you don’t happen to be around.  But there are certain times when you can count on your children’s social camouflage to drop away and allow you see straight into their sense of awe at the world around them.  We have a tendency to call this “child-like,” as if it’s only something fit for children, something that you leave behind you when you become an adult.  Bullshit.  You lose it.  You have it stripped away from you, because life sucks, and it’s hard to be a grown-up, and having people depend on you and having to pay your rent and keep food in your belly and having to show up for work every day is arduous and exhausting and we just don’t have the time or the energy to be child-like any more.  But you always want to go back there.  You always want to—no, need to—be reminded of that time when you could delight in simple things, when your standards for being amazed were delightfully low, and you could be happy for hours or even days just because you got a lick from your puppy, or a hug from someone who loved you ... or the perfect gift on Christmas.  That’s why parents give their kids way too much crap on Christmas (or whatever holiday is appropriate for their culture): because you’re hoping against hope that one of those silly pieces of plastic and yarn and circuit boards and wood and metal and wires—just one!—will trigger that ephemeral reaction that transports you back to your own childhood and reminds you that life doesn’t have to be complicated.  It’s quite simple, really.  There’s family and play and being with the people you love, and then there’s the other shit.  And all that other shit doesn’t really matter, no matter how much it seems like it does.  It’s just a distraction from what’s actually important in life.  Christmas is particularly good at reminding us of that.  And that’s why we need it.

And, you know what?  If one of my kids ends up throwing out the toy and just spending all day playing with the box, I’ll take that.  As long as they’re happy.

__________

1 Well, usually.  To be fair, The Mother just broke down a few this weekend.  Which was much appreciated, to be sure.

2 “CCFs” means “crazy Christian fucks.”  These are the tiny minority that give the rest of the Christians a bad name by putting extremely tortured interpretations on Jesus’s message of peace and love.  (Personally, I blame Paul.  Honestly, he’s a bit of a prick.)

3 Helen Back ... heheh.  My surname is Mucus.

4 In retrospect, the lack of sleep probably has a lot to do with the inevitable holiday sicknesses ...

Merry Yule

Today is Yule.  This is the darkest night of the year, the night when the Great Mother will give birth to the new Sun King.  I hope you all are lighting your yule logs tonight and gathering around them with your loved ones to wait out the dark night of our souls and welcome the spark of thew new year.  The Lord of Light shine on you, and the Goddess bless your ways.

Tonight we’ll light our yule log and a few candles, say a few words, and eat some soup, and perhaps watch a holiday movie.  (There aren’t any good Yule movies that I’m aware of, but I’m sure we can come up with something appropriately festive.)  Hopefully this is the start of some peaceful times which can last us into next year.

Today I’ve mostly been wrestling with CD burning software, and mostly losing.  For some reason, I’ve had horrible luck with GUI programs such as K3b or Brasero.  Either they don’t have all the features I want, or they can’t easily deal with my playlists, or they just don’t burn properly (which admittedly could be more of a hardware thing).  So I’ve moved on to fiddling with the command-line burners, primarily cdrdao.  Now I’ve discovered that they hate me as well.  I’ve been fighting with cdrdao for two days now, and I finally managed to produce a CD with it, but I didn’t get the CD-Text, which was one of my primary goals.  Still, I’m starting to think I need to be happy with what I’ve got.  Perhaps I can gradually improve my functionality over time, as I get a little more familiar with how all this stuff fits together.

The CD I managed to burn, by the way, was a copy of my Yuletidal Pools mix, which I developed 3 years ago and which (unlike most of my mixes) hasn’t been changed since.  I’ve been very happy with it over the years.  And while, in that introductory post, I claimed that “only 3 of the songs could even remotely be considered serious,” I find that, over time, I can get just as choked up over “Christmas Wrapping” as other people can get over “O Holy Night” or “The Little Drummer Boy.”  I mean, come on: that is a 5-minute nugget of Christmas miracle going on right there.  How can you not be inspired by that?  And while Run-D.M.C. does advise us to “give up the dough on Christmas, yo,” they also give us “one you won’t believe: it’s better to give than to receive.”  Truly, can’st thou gainsay such instruction?  And, as for “Oi to the World”, it practically makes me tear up these days.  If the punks and the skins can get along, then surely there’s hope for the rest of us.  Go back and listen to it again, and really listen to the words.  Then you too can rappel down the roof with the rest of your turban and go back to the pub and buy each other bourbon.  ‘Cause that’s what the holidays are all about.

Wishing you and yours safe and happy.

Smoke and Mirrors

or, Why Do People Have to Suck?

It’s been a while since I had a good old-fashioned rant on this blog.  As one gets older, one must keep one’s blood pressure down, you know.  So perhaps I’m just overdue.  But this new ban on e-cigarettes by the Los Angeles City Council is just too much.

(Warning: If crazy ranting and/or dropping the F-bomb offends you, please bail out now.  I must remind you yet again of the name of the blog.)

Some background: I started smoking at 18—later than many, I suppose, but long enough ago now that it’s unlikely that my habits are going to change at this point.  I was in my freshman year of college, my first time living away from home.  I had a roommate who was a bit of a dick, college classes were tough (not unexpected, but it’s one thing to know how tough they’re going to be and quite another thing to experience it), my grandfather had just died, and my situation with my parents was very rocky at the time.  For some reason, walking around campus late at night one night, feeling pretty crappy about life in general, I had a sudden urge to smoke.  I have no idea why: the only time I’d ever even tried cigarettes before was under the bleachers when I was 14 or 15 once, and I’d absolutely hated it.  No one in my family smoked: not parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, nor cousins.  My grandfather’s elder brother was a 3-pack-a-day man, so I’d heard, but I’d never even met the man, or didn’t remember if I had.  Both my grandparents on my mother’s side used to, I was told, but they quit well before I was born.  My dad had one friend who did, and we all felt it was disgusting, myself included.  There is no earthly reason I can come up with why I would have thought smoking would help relieve my stress, or that I wouldn’t choke to death just trying it.  But, for whatever reason, I had a sudden urge, and I went to the store, and bought a pack of Yves St. Laurent menthols.  And, if you know anything about cigarettes, you’re probably snickering to yourself about now, because YSL is typically considered a “woman’s” brand.  But I quite liked them, as it turned out, and never had a problem with smoking “girly” cigarettes (nor with drinking “girly” drinks, although that’s a whole different topic).

For about 8 years I smoked anywhere from half a pack to a full pack a day of menthols.  Then a friend (and fellow smoker) convinced me to try CigArrest with him.  I found that all the herbal/homeopathic crap was totally unnecessary for me; the behavior modification tips were what really worked in my case.  Soon I was smoke-free, while my friend had relapsed.

I stayed off the smokes for 3 or 4 years, but stress has a way of creeping up on you.  And I still had that weird urge that I couldn’t shake whenever I got stressed.  I picked up a pack of cloves one night, telling myself that they weren’t “real” cigarettes.  But of course cloves have just as much tobacco as other smokes, plus they tear your throat up.  (This is because the eugenol in the cloves temporarily numbs your throat, which allows you take in more smoke more directly, which leaves you in a pretty sad state once the mild anaesthetic effect wears off.)  I eventually made a deal with myself: I would go back to smoking, but not menthols any more.  I would smoke ultra-light regulars in the hopes that I wouldn’t enjoy them as much and therefore wouldn’t smoke as much.

Believe it or not, that actually worked.  For the next roughly 15 years, I smoked no more than a pack a week, on average.  During stressful times, I would creep up to perhaps two packs a week, but during calmer times I might drop as low as half a pack a week.  I was pretty happy with this level of smoking.  It kept me calm and sane, and it fulfilled my worldview of “everything in moderation.”  (Yes, even smoking isn’t all bad.)  So everything was good until another friend convinced me to stop smoking with him, and this time the method was e-cigarettes.

I love e-cigarettes.  I can smoke whenever I like, for as little as I like.  It used to be a chore to have to finish a cigarette, but I also hated wasting them, especially since they’re stupidly expensive.  Now I can have a puff or two and put it away.  Or I can smoke for half an hour straight if I want to.  Except I’m not actually smoking: e-cigarettes use flavored water vapor.  So not only do I not get any smoke, neither does anyone around me.  It’s just water vapor, which my exhalations contain anyway, except you can see it ... no different from when I breathe out on a cold day.  And I’m paying less now, and I’m back to menthols, and I’m “smoking” more while smoking less, ’cause I’m not smoking at all.  Also, I’m not even inhaling any nicotine.  Oh, sure: many—most, even—e-cigarettes have nicotine.  But you can get them without, if you so choose.  And I do so choose.  As it happens, I don’t need the nicotine any more than I needed the herbal whatever-it-was: once again, it’s the psychological aspect that’s key.  I just need something to puff on.

So I’ve been doing e-cigs for a few years now, and you can see why this kind of crap from the LA City Council really chaps my ass.  First the anti-smokers told us that the tobacco companies were adding all sorts of horrible crap to cigarettes and that’s why they were so terrible for you.  The tobacco industry responded by coming out with additive-free brands like American Spirit, and even changing some existing brands to be additive-free, like Winston (both of which I’ve smoked).  The anti-smokers promptly freaked out and pursued legal action against both brands.  These suits were designed to force the companies to admit that additive-free cigarettes were ”‘no safer or healthier’ than other tobacco products.”  So, wait: the additives make them bad for us, but taking them out isn’t better?  What kind of fucked up logic is that?

And now somebody comes along and invents a “cigarette” that doesn’t even involve any actual smoke.  The anti-smokers were counfounded by this new developement for a while.  Inhaling and exhaling water vapor certainly isn’t bad for you.  It isn’t even bad for anyone standing next to you.  How the hell can we object to this, they wondered?  We better find some way: if people continue to exercise their freedoms in this way, anarchy will surely ensue!

So, here we are, with the LA City Council apparently not the first nor likely the last.  It was damned difficult, but they finally thought of something to object to:

Foes of e-cigarettes said they threaten to make smoking socially acceptable after years of public opinion campaigns to discourage the habit. Young people who get hooked on the nicotine in e-cigarettes may then turn to tobacco use, said Jonathan Fielding, director of the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health.

Ah, yes, the classic “slippery slope” argument.  We all know how awesome those are.  Because they don’t require any proof.  Hell, they don’t even have to make any sense.  Allow gay marriage and pretty soon people will be wanting to marry turtles.  That follows, right?  Let me ask you this: what is more likely?  That e-cigarettes will get people off smoking in such numbers that it will radically reduce the amount of second-hand smoke you’re exposed to?  Or that, by exposing children to them, we’ll teach them that there are ways to be responsible with your vices in such a manner so as not to endanger yourself or others?  Oh, wait: those are both positive outcomes of staying the fuck away from my e-cig.

What I can’t understand is how I became a persecuted minority.  And not only a persecuted minority, but one that it is perfectly socially acceptable to persecute.  Encouraged, even.  Let’s think about this for a minute. Every day, you breathe a metric fuck-ton more car exhaust than you do second-hand smoke (and that was still true back in the days before smoking was banned everywhere).  But we don’t disallow driving in public, do we?  And then there’s alcohol: even if you believe the wildest statistics about the dangers of second-hand smoke, they pale in comparison to your danger of being hit by a drunk driver or shot by a drunk gun-owner.  So do we ban alcohol?  God forbid we let the little children see us driving, or drinking ... who knows what that could lead to?

I don’t work within the city limits of LA, so I’m not banned from using my e-cigarette at work.  Nonetheless, my boss asked me to stop because of complaints (more likely a single complaint) from one or more co-workers.  On the one hand, this doesn’t bug me that much.  Hey, I go around everywhere with no shoes on: I’m already used to people being dicks about my lifestyle choices.  But on the other hand, it’s really dispiriting to be punished for making such a positive change in your life.  Imagine that you embarked on a fantastic new effort to get into shape by riding your bike to work every day, and, just when it was starting to work and really show some positive results, your co-workers started a campaign to keep big, clumsy bikes out of the office.  They’re unsightly, and you could bump into people with them, and who wants potential customers having to come in here and see bicycle parking?  (Before you laugh and say this is a ridiculous example that would never happen, I have to tell you this actually did happen to a friend of mine at my last job.)  So, of course we would never tell you that you can’t ride your bike to work; you just can’t bring it into the office.  Park it outside.  Where it might get stolen.  Or rained on.  Or vandalized.  You’ll probably need to buy an expensive new bike lock, if you can even find anything convenient to chain it to.  But, you know, definitely keep riding your bike to work.

This is exactly how I feel.  Sure, I can still use my e-cig by going outside.  Just like the bad old days when I was actually smoking.  I can interrupt my train of thought, go down three stories, hang around outside for a while, then come back, try to figure out where I left off, and eventually get back up to full productivity again.  I don’t have to wonder if that’s how it will work: I’ve been there.  I already know how it works.  So, sure, I could do that.  It’ll cost me time, effort, and mental capacity, which means it will cost my company money, but I can do that.  At least my co-workers won’t have to ... well, what?  They won’t have to breathe my second-hand smoke?  They’re already not doing that.  They won’t have to breathe my second-hand nicotine.  Nope, already not doing that either.  They ... won’t have to breathe my second-hand water vapor?  Ummm ... I got news for you, people: you’re breathing my second-hand water vapor, every day, whether you can see it or not, just like I have to breathe yours.  My boss, casting around for a rational reason, vaguely suggested that perhaps it was the smell that bothered people.  But, remember: I smoke menthols.  The smell of my “smoking” is a variation of mint.  So that one doesn’t make a lot of sense either.

I suppose the primary benefit to my co-workers (or more likely one particular co-worker) is the smug sense of satisfaction they’ll have that they successfully trod on someone’s freedom of expression.  Speaking as a fellow who’s gotten kicked out of a hell of a lot of places for being barefoot, I can tell you with some authority that you should not underestimate this.  I was once kicked out of a record store by a guy with about 15 earrings in one ear and blue hair, essentially for being non-conformist.  There are some people who enter the service industry to actually be helpful to people, but there are plenty who find a great comfort in being able to tell people what to do.  Makes ’em feel powerful.  Makes them feel like they control their world, and I’m guessing they have a desperate need to feel that.  And I’m sure there are plenty of people out there who have that issue and yet don’t go into retail.  Whatever will they do?  In my experience, they generally become middle managers for medium-to-large companies, where they can boss people around and feel really important.  So I sort of feel like I have a co-worker (or two) who’s missing their calling.  But, hey: there’s yet time.  This is a great start towards their lifelong dream.

Best of luck to ’em.