Good morning. Hello. How are you? #1031
Dad's birthday, Wikipedia on Palestine, imminent Threads enshittification, middle age and parenting angst, school stuff, Mom is coming, missing Mitski, SNL pop star intros
Good morning hey what’s up what it is it is Tuesday what is happening. So much going through my brain all at once for hours and hours now, it is exhausting and disorienting and I do not like it. So I’m just gonna dump it all here and forget about it.
It is my father’s birthday. He would have been… eighty-two? I think? Yes. Eighty-two. He was a good man. I think about him often. Today I was thinking about how he got… I think it was a game-boy? He would have been in his late forties or early fifties, and he loved that thing. At the time I thought it was so absurd. An old man playing video games ha ha ha how weird. But now I see man who is my age now, exhausted, doing his best in life, working nights, raising two kids, living slightly beyond his means, also active in his church and in his community, never a spare moment for himself, never a moment to just turn his brain off. I can imagine it so vividly now from a different perspective. I feel it. We don’t become our parents but we also become our parents.
Speaking of which my mom and her sister will be here in three weeks for a two week stay in the other house. So I’m back on the cause of getting all her doctor’s appointments made since Alaska is a joke somewhat lacking when it comes to medical care and it’s not the easiest thing to get a brain scan with and without dye or, you know, just a brain scan. Or, I guess, perhaps more accurately, it’s not easy to convince a doctor you need one, because the machinery is rare, if it exists at all, so you have to really need it but here in the medical capital of America they hand the things out like candy. Seriously, there are brain scan chains here.
Took Jane to school and was thinking about how opaque school rules were and it occurred to me they are willinfully, intentionally opaque as a security measure. Like as a non-parent you don’t know what those stupid little placards we have to have in our car look like, and you can’t really loiter around the school to figure it out without drawing suspicion. There’s a lot of security by obfuscation, which is depressing AF but… also seems to work? Security by obfuscation works better with murderous loner psychopaths than it does with coordinating larcenous psychopaths on the internet.
Speaking of which the stupid school called us during the day yesterday to let us know there was going to be a fire drill. Don’t fucking call in the middle of the day unless there is an actual security event or if something is up with my child. You could have told us this yesterday and not freaked us out.
Emma and I are both wrestling with how stressed to be as a parent, how… active? Obsessed? Trying? Like I am trying to not fuck my blood pressure any more than it already is, I am trying to not stress about every single parental decision. I know rationally that this girl has already won the lottery in every way. She is rich and white and healthy and safe and housed and it doesn’t fucking matter. She’s 85% certain to bne fine even if we check out completely.
Besides. What did my intellect ever do for my happiness? I mean, my intellect got me out of Alaska and for that I am profoundly grateful (sorry Alaskans, I love it, I do, I just love it more from afar) but Jane doesn’t need to leave North Carolina for her safety and health the way I did. She doesn’t need to do anything. So here I am completely outraged they are wasting her time learning about the freakin letter S when she can already read at essentially an adult level. It absolutely enrages me. But also… who cares! Who the fuck cares! Why does she have to learn as fast as possible. She loves already knowing shit. She said to me once she wants to be a teacher, let her spend her time in class feeling smug and smart and talking all about the letter S. It doesn’t matter! It doesn’t matter!
I’ve been thinking a lot about growing up and adulthood being when you’re able to do all those things you wanted to do when you were a kid. There’s a schism that happens in adults. Okay maybe a spectrum. It grows from the moment when you’re a kid when you say “when I grow up I’m gonna do X all the time/whenever I want/etc.” And the parent says “okay kid.” Some adults are still living the dream of trying to make that happen. Some have given it up. I am leaning toward the former but a bit in the middle. But my god, as a kid I just wanted to lose myself into Apple computers and the modem and games and screens and by god I have done that with my life and that is a success. It’s also sad and stupid.
And my wife was kinda calling me on it and I think I sort of subconsciously thought maybe part of our marriage pact was a pact that we would both support the other in falling into their childhood fantasies but maybe that is stupid and maybe being an adult isn’t about that at all maybe we’re supposed to do adult things like, I don’t know, make proclamations and stuff, but, then, like I said, thinking about my dad, he was such a do-gooder in his community and so was I and I kinda miss that and Emma’s always trying to get me to volunteer for PTA things or campaign activities and I’m like “no sorry I am busy waging Don Quixotean wars against online advertising monopolists” but you know maybe I should just fucking volunteer at the food bank and manage their inventory like my dad.
In what was clearly a horrible mistake I spent about three hours today reading Wikipedia pages about Palestine and Hamas and Zionism and Israel and whatnot. It was intense and depressing. I learned all the old stuff in college because a shit ton of my professors were ambassadors but I got a little hazy after the Oslo accords and who wants to learn about Bush I’s failed “roadmap for peace” or the exact mechanics of the 2007 Gazan civil war or this or that or god it is all so depressing.
I spent like thirty minutes looking at the Gaza strip on Google Maps and man that will fuck you up. Also the maps are way more hi res of Gaza than they are of the farms and kibbutzes just outside its borders. Also Google has all the place names in Gaza in English, in Israel in Hebrew and Egypt in Arabic and… why? What does this accomplish and where is the setting in Google that just puts them all in English for me, a person looking at this map in an English speaking country all very weird. But look I am already deflecting from the horrible “facts on the ground” (a loaded phrase, as many are, in this case.)
It was interesting to see the propaganda battles play out on the pages of Wikipedia. The wiki pages about the more major themes and issues of the situation are more contested, and, thus, the mods have forced upon them a bit of a truce, where every topic has “Arguments for” and “arguments against” in separate sections, but when you get to older events or more obscure topics, this does not happen and you can just see the propaganda efforts from both sides in the text, which veers wildly, line by line, bordering on unreadable.
What the use was of all of this knowledge I have no idea. I feel more educated, and I tried hard to be open-minded but it did not especially change my opinions or get me to some point where I feel comfortable speaking out about the actual issues, as opposed to these meta ones. People are losing jobs and throwing giant protests about loose words on one side or the other — the 92Y has basically imploded after cancelling an author’s appearance, multiple universities are facing revolts from their donors and board members. Random Americans with mid-level jobs are losing them for expressing opinions it really is bonkers. Crazy time, crazy time.
I absolutely cannot wait to be old to just say whatever the fuck I want. I understand old people so much more now. I can feel it coming, I can see it on the horizon. But we are not there yet.
I would like to apologize to Secretly Canadian and Mitski for being all bitchy (to myself) that they had not sent me a copy of Mitski’s new record yet, and I grumbled to myself for weeks before going and logging in to my Secretly Canadian account (what you don’t have one?) and discovering that in fact, no, I did not order a copy of the new Mitski album, you were thinking of the new Cherry Glazerr album. But also now that I’ve listened to the new Mitski I don’t love it? Also she is playing some giant place in Durham this time, which I suppose makes sense since she sold out Cat’s Cradle in like 2 seconds last time but also who wants to see Mitski in a giant theater but also her shows are very theatric, or at least the last tour was, so maybe it makes sense?
Middle age, god, I feel so middle age, I am getting increasingly unsure about everything, convinced the best days of my life are behind me, I feel lonely and I don’t want to go anywhere but I want to do things and see people but also I would prefer to not leave my house and it is so humiliated working outdoors with this strong young laborers who can lift giant stones like it’s no big deal while I’m like “ow my arm ow my back” and I swear to god I use my muscles all the time but they are like the UAW or something and they’re just like “nope.”
Lady Gaga introduced Bad Bunny on SNL last night and maybe this is just going to be a thing all season – women pop stars randomly popping up on SNL to introduce the musical guest, with no other interaction with SNL material. Maybe Paula Abdul will show up next week, Beyonce the week after to introduce Blackpink. Also Ben told me a story about Jenny from Blackpink and how she performed at Crazy Horse for a week and that is somewhat mind-blowing, I must admit. Also I think I am finally tired of the “Ddu-Du Ddu-Du” video and the “Ice Cream” video and Jane really has to start delving into the rest of the Blackpink corpus.
Threads is great but my god Instagram has so many ads now it is absolutely bonkers sometimes there are two, three ads in a row on Instagram. And then yesterday Facebook decided to start putting Threads content into Instagram and Facebook, since no one posts to Facebook anymore, and so the whole thing was a giant slap in the face slash wake up call about how shitty Threads will inevitably become now that the enshittification has begun. In a year or two, half of your content or more will be ads and the whole thing is going to suck and Facebook made (checks notes) $8 billion a quarter but it is not enough and they now have almost decisively won the battle for neu Twitter just so they can fuck it up and use our content as meth to juice their other dying properties and man why couldn’t Post or Bluesky or whoever have gotten their act together except of course Facebook used their social graph to trounce the competition and will the fucking courts ever actually accept that the social graph can be monopolized or are we just going to live like this forever. Lina Khan keep at it please but I fear this is a decades-long fight and all your efforts will only make the tiniest dent.
Jesus and Mary Chain re-released Munki for it’s 20th anniversary my god, new Jesus and Mary Chain albums are old at this point but it still sounds great and honestly it is absolutely one of their best records it doesn’t get enough credit.
It did not help that they were absolutely hammered on that tour to the point of being unable to perform.
Anyway back to Jane she spilled her lunch yesterday and her teacher called and said she was such a trooper and her message was so weird it raised so many questions for me. Is the spilling of a lunch something that universally results in kindergarteners throwing giant tantrums, therefore Jane was exceptional in that she did not? Or does Jane throw tantrums at school all the freakin time therefore it was exceptional that she did not, in this instance, but only compared to her own past behavior? And why in god’s name do they serve corn dogs in elementary school (someone helped Jane get a school lunch as a replacement)? And wait a second.. Jane at a corn dog?? She hasn’t eaten meat in, like, years? But, then, there were leftovers in her lunch box so maybe she did not? But also wait a second, those things don’t look like corndogs! They look like breaded hot dog bits, the breading looks like panko, not corn meal. But Emma ate one (ew) and said it tasted like corn meal. WTF!
School is just one continuous mystery and our daughter has zero interest in illuminating it for us and I hate it.
Dance party last night was rote, desultory. Two Blackpink songs, two Taylor songs, my god the video for Karma is unhinged and a thematic mess it’s just all over the place and her acting in the first, like, five cuts is absolutely all over the map and incompatible with the visual themes but boy does Ice Spice’s eyes save the day. Jane and I are mesmerized. Also Jane insisted on going to bed in her clothes, and I let her. I am a bad parent.
But we did a bunch of LEGO together and two puzzles and played two games of Connect Four and I let her win one and man I am such a good parent.
Synthpop playlist for you. Cuz my dad just loved synthpop. Correction, my father did not love synthpop. But this playlist rules. You will like it, I swear.
Feel better. Talk soon.
Julie has gotten Oliver into Blackpink and sometimes we listen to it in the car and I'm a fan.