Good morning. Hello. How are you? #818
The Wheat Thins story resolved, wet January, a nightly drunken penance of Zinn, kindergarten indecision, Evan Spiegel grew up, Brainwashed reader's poll
Good morning. Hello. How are you? Happy Groundhog day!
We will start off congratulating Kellianne, who got closest to the truth during yesterday’s Wheat Thins saga. She guessed I received Sundried Tomato Wheat Thins. Which would have been a glorious final twist on things. But I, in fact, received the Tomato and Basil wheat thins the shopper mentioned that the machine was telling her to scan for no reason, and in direct contradiction to my express instructions. The world is a strange place. What am I going to do with fucked up box of flavored crackers. Should I drive it to the food bank? That seems… extreme.
I am well. More or less. Rather than doing a dry January, I pretty much did the opposite. I drank pretty much every evening. Wet January. It was fun! But also a kind of terrible idea? Well.. I guess it was fun and then in the last few days it sort of stopped being as fun, though it was still somewhat fun. More than you would expect. But it needs to stop now, which seems both a huge relief and sad. So that means it must be done.
One thing that has made it rough is my ongoing reading of The People’s History of the United States, which, my god. I mean, I am not reading anything new I didn’t know about. Maybe little anecdotes here and there, but Zinn’s masterpiece is so wildly influential that, save for the DiSantisfying of America, seems mostly canon these days. Certainly it is the basics of my middle school through undergrad education. So to read this book now, for me, doesn’t feel so much educational as… religious penance. It’s an endless litany of horror and abuse and injustice and it is utterly depressing. There are, of course, heroes both large and small, and incremental justice, but the overall story is one of evil. And it hurts very much to read it. And I’m lying there in bed, and I ask myself, at this point in my life, what is the functional purpose of this? Am I learning? Learning what? Some nifty new trivia point to use in the hypothetical debate I might have someday with a DiSantis lackey? That’s never going to happen. Barring social collapse I’m probably going to live out my days in my liberal bubble. Is it going to inspire me to… what? I am already overwhelmed, steeped in the knowledge of this country’s past wrongs — and to be fair, its past rights, but that’s not the point here. I’m already doused with the good-old fashioned horror at the inability to make a difference. I already pay out the wazoo for modern-day indulgences in the form of donations to the right causes. I already plan to extricate myself from the working world and embrace volunteerism the moment I am able. What does this nightly penance functionally do for me?
And that is basically how I fall asleep, tipsy from one too many glasses of red wine, every night in January. Fun!
Jane’s been drawing kitties into my Kindle, though, so at least when Zinn gets too intense I can just switch over to the notepad and look at this winking Hello Kitty wearing a t-shirt that says “Cute” on it.
Jane did not, though, alas, successfully win the lottery to get into Woods Charter, the best school in the state, a free public charter school just up the road. The lottery is open to every kid in the state and there are like 30 kindergarten positions available so, logically, I knew she was not going to get in. She is #242 on the waitlist, so it’s never going to happen. At the same time, my luck is so endlessly solid I kind of just assumed that was going to work out because so much stuff just works out for me. I mean, I wasn’t expecting it… but I… well, I guess I was.
So now we gotta make an alternate kindergarten plan. There’s another lottery soon for a Montessori school nearby that people like but I’ve only done cursory research into that. There’s the public school. The school district, having lots of remote areas, also offers a “remote” option that seems kind of interesting. This is a pre-pandemic thing. I only know a little bit about it. And of course we could home school. Emma and I are both torn, in similar ways but at different times, it’s kind of funny. One week I’ll be like “let’s home school” and she’ll convince me its a bad idea, and the next week she’s considering home schooling. I guess this week I’m considering just letting her go to the local public school and seeing if it does any damage to her and man this is such a horrible way to think about public schools Republicans really have done a hit job on all of our brains and schools.
But I mean, schools are cesspools of germs and yesterday she was very solidly trolling a grown man neighbor of ours over text so I harbor concerns about socialization I guess? But also she needs more of it. But also I don’t want to ever let her go we only have a decade or so left with her my god being a parent is insane.
She’s been calling me back up at bedtime these last few days. Happened last night. No trauma-processing questions this time that got me talking about car crashes. But I did accidentally use the word “lives” and she said “what’s a life?” And I was a bit stumped before I came round to “it’s when we move and breathe and love.” I kinda liked that. Got back to Emma and she said “I guess trees can love?” And I said “I got drunk with a forestry professor once and he told me they could, so I’m going with it.” At least that’s what I took away from that night of drinking.
Oh and continuing the drinking theme here, an hour or so before that Jane and I were dancing to Youtube videos and it was super fun and she was doing moves and making me repeat them and of course I’m an old man with a fused neck and could only do like half of them but it was still great exercise. “Your Mom” by Wet Leg came in and I manually bleeped out the F-bombs and she didn’t even notice I felt like a spy in the house of toddlers.
Then this band of some note came on with a live video and I said “I used to hang out with that guy he used to come to my house.”
And she said “What did you guys do?”
And I said “drink.”
Look she carved her waffles out to say “Love” because it was February 1st and she is very excited so excited about Valentine’s Day.
Changing the format a bit we’ll do all our Jane talk first and end with other topics. Three quick ones for you today:
I would like to tip my hat to Evan Spiegel, CEO of Snapchat, er, Snap, Inc. I realize that sounds insane. But my god has that guy grown up. I mean, now, I don’t know if he is still fraternizing with models and I don’t know if he ever #metoo’d or anything, not someone I would vouch for on a personal level or anything. But in keeping an eye on Snap’s earnings call yesterday, the dude is undeniably an adult businessman of some skill, even if that skill is just hiring the right executive team and listening to them and saying the right words to manage the stock analysts and market. And that is a skill on its own. Also he’s one of the few platform CEOs to expressly admit that Apple screwed them, and not try and pretend it’s a recession or looming recession that did it. Rip the band aid off, focus on the future. The best strategy. Many are still in denial
But really I say this because a) how fuckin’ hilarious is it that the dude who made an app with disappearing pics so people could send more nudez grew up into a sober-minded business man? and b) I freely admit that I did not see that coming. If freely admit that I absolutely thought Evan Spiegel should have taken the cool bil or whatever Facebook or whever was offering him to sell out early. I freely admit that I had absolutely zero hope for him as a CEO and I was wrong. I was right that Snap was not going to beat Facebook, but I was wrong that it was going to be a flash in the pan. It is here to stay. It is very big! It is growing! It made five billion in profit last year! Crazy.
Next, I would like to say that MacOS Ventura changed when the woosh sound happens on mail and it sucks. It used to not send the woosh sound until the mail left your computer and went out onto the internet. This necessarily might be a millisecond, a half second, or even a second or two after you hit send. But the thing is, if it was taking a second or two, you knew you were on a slow connection and that was useful information. Now it just does the woosh sound when you hit send and it is telling you nothing and I don’t like it one bit.
And, finally, on the rock and roll front, I would like to point out that Brainwashed, the timeless, stalwart music blog founded by my old friend and coworker Jon Whitney has released their 2022 best music poll results and there is so much good shit in there. I threw the top ten albums-of-the-year into a playlist queue and have been listening to them for a day or two and they are uniformly great. There are so few outlets for this kind of music that I even learned about two or three new albums from bands I love, because Pitchfork doesn’t cover them and the Spotify algorithm disfavors unpopular music. Or something. I don’t know why it doesn’t serve them up to me. Spotify is trying to make me a normie I swear.
Drone playlist for you today. A lot of this came from those Brainwashed findings. Well, three. Seefeel’s an old classic, and the Underground Lovers is a recent-ish classic, four years old. Restare from last year I think? Man there is so much good music. Anyway, this is a good playlist if you want to do some writing. At least it is for me. But, then, drone has been probably my favorite genre for a long, long time.
Have a lovely Thursday me lovelies. I’ll get you my pretty and your little dog too.