Learning the Progeny

Parenting is one of the most genuinely rewarding life experiences: not because you're given the opportunity to shepherd another life from birth to meaningful adult autonomy, but because it's a chance to relive your own failed life by proxy. Dropped a meaningless touchdown pass in a high school football game between two unspectacular 3-4 teams? Make your boy stand outside in a snowstorm an hour at a time catching passes with no gloves on. Didn't buy Bitcoin when it was a dollar? Enroll your daughter in a weekend time travel class so she can figure out a way to send you back to 2010 with a stack of 35 dollar bills and in the process prevent her own birth since your rich ass will be riding Instagram models instead of her mom. Farted in front of your junior high crush while everyone was quietly taking a test? Rap all your kids on the knuckles with a bamboo ruler any time one of them reaches for a bottle of hot sauce. The point: our children may think their lives are their own, but they're not - they're meant to atone for our own lost opportunities. But since we're supposed to pretend otherwise, we have to disguise our vicarious ambitions as advice, which is why I put together a list of shit my own son needs to internalize if he's going to experience the fulfilling life I missed out on. I know there's zero chance he will heed any of this, but at least now there will be something to point to after he comes to half these conclusions on his own the same way I did: by fucking up. Here's all the advice I'm going to give you, kid:

Boys don't have 12 inch penises - The root of any social anxiety I have goes back to two things: (1) having buck teeth (mom saved your ass on that one, mijo!) and (2) my fourth- and fifth-grade classmates telling me they had 11 or 12 inch penises. I told them I had a 13 inch penis, but I obviously knew that was a lie, and I consequently felt both inadequate and like a fraud. I can't possibly relate how much dread I carried with me during junior high worrying all day about gym class and how I was going to hide my perfectly normal oui oui when I had to shower with all the big dongs afterwards, and how that dread seeped into other parts of my life. I guess all this peen biz won't apply specifically to my son since he lives in Korea and will have grown up going to bathhouses so won't be susceptible to the specific disinformation I was, but we can generalize this little story of mine to say all elementary kids are full of shit and will exaggerate everything, whether it's the eight-second 100 meter dash they ran when no one was looking or how rich their dad is. I suppose I could have characterized this bit of advice as don't believe the hype but I really wanted to share how I thought all my friends back in the day had literal foot longs. 

Make people laugh but not at someone else's expense - Nothing better than saying some funny shit and being rewarded with laughter, but base your jokes on shared experiences - you're not the only one with that insecurity - rather than someone else's broken self-esteem. Unless that person deserves it, in which case: go to town!

Don't say the first joke that comes to mind - Five other people just thought of the exact same hardy harr harr. It's even more likely the person you're making the joke for has heard that punchline a thousand times before and now you're just like every other doo who dropped the same tired bromide. A kid whose last name is Polio should intuitively understand what I'm trying to say here. Hurr, hurr, Jonas Salk. Get it??? Hurr hurr hurr!

Count the trees - Count everything else too and also make note of what color they are. Get in the habit of noticing details and committing them to memory until you do it without trying. Do this with people too, especially when they get haircuts. Tell them you like it even if you don't.

Check your review every 10 seconds -  Same as last advice but different. Always be conscious of your surroundings, whether a car in your blind spot or some sketch ball following you around town. I sound paranoid but I'm mostly talking about the local milieu. One time when I was teaching in Detroit, I took a student to lunch with me. We ordered our food and I put the money on the counter while they got our drinks or whatever. My student looked at me completely baffled. "You leave your money out like that?" Completely understandable attitude in a city where you can never leave for the weekend unless you want to return to a house stripped of all its copper piping. Now I live in Korea where you can drop your laptop, car keys, and family pearls on any old random cafe table, run off to the bathroom for 75 minutes, come back, and nothing will have been trifled with; and there's always a couple days of adjusting whenever I travel between these to trying to acclimate to whether I need to turn up the vigilance (USA) or go back to being entirely clueless (Koko). Read the room, basically. 

Don't pull too close behind a car stopped at a red light on a hill - You can't give half a foot of clearance to a car that's about to roll three feet backward. Being alert and aware will save you so much hassle. 

Find a partner who hates the same things as you - Most cults are bonded by shared existential threats, and since relationships are basically two-person cults, you can figure out your mutual interests afterward. Probably want to do that before getting married or even your second date, though. 

Listen to the birds while you can - 'Cause suddenly it's winter and all you ever see are crows and they do is remind you that you're going to die one day. Also, walk your dog while her hips still work so you never get on Reddit to post about how you wish you could walk your dog just once more since you have all the opportunity in the world to walk her now. 

Judge people by whom they think is stupid - The most common generalized criticism you'll ever hear is: that guy's dumb, or he's stupid, or she's a moron, or some other putdown related to lack of general intelligence. Everyone says it since it's just a culturally understood fart at this point, but at the molecular level anyone who uses this insult believes they are operating at a higher level of understanding than the person they're slandering. 

"Durrrrrr, Obama's a moran!" 

"Okay, high school dropout who does your own research even though you can't spell: the guy who ran the Harvard Law Review definitely understands this complicated political issue far less than you do."

Write it down before you forget - For real, you're not going to remember. Idea go poof!

Stretch regularly - Not that I'm speaking from experience since I'm not as fat at the time of publishing the way I was when you were one year old, but you don't want to get to the point where you're sitting on the toilet and are having trouble reaching behind you.

"Hey, did you pinch a nerve or something?"

"No, I ripped my oblique in two trying to clean my bum." 

This also applies to putting on socks without the use of two chairs and a crane. 

Learn how to read and how to ask questions - Seems obvious but it isn't. This book will earn you automatic admission to a tier 2 law school without having to bother with the LSAT:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Similarly, read lots of random shit - Feels intimidating sitting at a dinner table with people talking about things you don't understand. Happens a whole lot less when you read books, magazines, newspapers, and even Reddit. 

But if you're the smartest guy in the room then everyone's dumb or you're getting played - Self explanatory.

Read yourself into stories but not too much - Reading is a great way to develop empathy by registering all the ways completely different people deal with the exact same bullshit you do, but it's also a great way to develop empathy by registering how their experiences differ from all the things you take for granted as normal. Just keep reading it and you'll figure it out.

Education is knowing what to do when you don't know what to do - That advice was coined by someone else but now that I've kind of cited it, it belongs to you. Basically, learn to read (already said that) and how to think critically (haven't said that yet). And when I say learn to think I don't mean that rightwing bullshit about reading some rando's misspelled blog instead of CNN because they've confused confirmation bias for critical thought; I mean dropping the who, what, where, when, why, how on that azz while trying to sort out the bigger picture here. 

Don't hold anyone's bag - This applies to financial pump and dumps or the rando who approaches you in the airport asking if you can watch his duffel bag for a minute while he uses the toilet.  

Don't simp - No one's worth throwing your self dignity in the toilet over. They definitely won't return the simp when it's your turn to be the narcissist.

Give him a salute and a giggle - Any time someone gets aggressive with you or says he's going to beat your ass, you have two choices: either respond in kind so you guys can yell "Naw, bish, I'll fugg you up" back and forth for seven minutes without doing anything about it other than looking like meatheads; or you just fall over laughing at Mr. Tough Guy and then he's completely neutered. Same goes for flipping each other off back and forth, harder and harder. Just tell him he has a small wiener and you win the whole damn thing without having to use fists. Just make sure you've been to the gym a couple of times in case the doof really does want to fight.

Clip your nose and ear hairs - If women have to carry unwanted pregnancies to term then I see no reason why we can't make men trim their weird orifice hairs. I don't know why this isn't a universally observed grooming law. The reason no one cares about the rain forests getting razed is because all the dudes they know got one growing from their nostrils. 

Focus on the love you have - Everyone wants cooler friends than the ones they have but ain't nothing cooler than having a friend. There's a fine line between fighting for a relationship and giving up but you should never have to convince someone more than twice that they should love you. 

Don't join a mob without asking why - You're going to feel like a real chump two days later when what you thought was, wasn't; and that you were the manipulatable dupe all someone had to do was wind up and set down on the floor. This goes for social media pile-ons or actual mobs.

Never punch down - You have a nice house, alright parents, and probably a couple pairs of J's. You're also insecure but so is everyone else. Don't make yourself feel better by shitting on someone who has it worse.

No one's keeping your secret - People are hardwired to like stories, and gossip is just storytelling using especially familiar characters. People like to talk and that's just the way it is. It's not bad since it's human nature, but it's also something to keep in mind if you really don't want anyone else to know. 

Move on if she says no - She thought about it and she doesn't want your Pepperos. Not a very good feeling but neither is hearing the same no a month later. More importantly, she don't need some desperate boy making PowerPoints detailing all the way her feelings are wrong. Fastest way to get over it is meet someone else who makes you forget why you wrote all those emo poems (would've been songs had you stuck with the guitar) so that when you're 42 you'll be happy she didn't like you because now you have the family you wouldn't have had she reciprocated your crush.

People are what they defend - If dude's response to a bunch of Nazis harassing elderly Asians walking home at night is to respect free speech and that the marketplace of ideas will enforce marginalization and two days later he's absolutely furious about "criminal race theory" and talmbout banning it from schools, then dude loves him some Naziing.

Don't pattern your life on the animal kingdom - Fools out here be saying lions eat what they take and ducks screw whomever they want so men should too, but be careful about following nature's blueprint since some animals have no idea if they're nutting up a boy fish or lady eel; some are gay just so their little penguin nephews and nieces have a fun, disco-loving uncle; and a mule is what happens after a drunk horse has scanned what's left of the bar at 1:59 am only sees a donkey. On a side note: did you know when dad is a zebra and mom is a horse that chile is a zorse, but when dad is a horse and mom is a zebra then chile is a hebra? So paternalistic.

Take stock of yourself by taking stock of your friends - If they're good people, then you're probably good people. If they're not then you suck too.

Don't do drugs in foreign countries - Rules are different everywhere: and-1's don't count in the Midwest and you can't smoke weed in Laos.

Don't date older men - You have nothing of intellectual interest to offer someone 20 years older except the bootay. Okay if you want a sugar daddy, but otherwise you're young and dumb and that's exactly what predacious dirtbags are looking for. 

The only principle is self interest - Don't waste your time pointing out hypocrisies or double standards because the underlying consistency is always me and mine. Black dudes breaking down systematic racism one minute then claiming women are the real sexists the next, feminists complaining about a glass ceiling the same week they pulled their kids out of public schools because a Black family moved to their neighborhood, gay folk shitting on trans folk, and whitey claiming America isn't a racist country while saying everything's reverse racist against whitey. The only real victimization is your own and everyone else is just pushing their agenda on you. 

Everyone complains - A corollary to the last point is that people say you whine too much if you're protesting something they don't find offensive right before they launch into a tirade about absolutely nothing. This is most manifest in the olds who tell you to leave the country if you hate it so much right before posting 45 times a day on Facebook about the transgenders even though they've never met a single one.

Don't forget to bring a book - They never run out of batteries.

It's all in the hips - Dancing; skiing; skateboarding; and, most importantly, no one calling you white boy. 

Use your experiences to empathize but not to judge - Just because you went through something similar and came out better on the other side doesn't mean everyone else is going to make it too. Every poor guy who joined the army and went to night school while working seven jobs before retiring a self-made thousandaire navigated a minefield that most of them have mistaken in hindsight for a pleasant open meadow. "Just win the Squid Games like I did!"

Doing anything is better than doing nothing, but you should do something - Stay active and you'll never waste money on a get-rich-quick fitness scheme to lose 50 pounds in 3 months. Any exercise is as good as any other as long as you actually do them. Literally 20 minutes a day and boom, cardiovascular health.

Drink water, don't slouch - I just solved 75% of your health and pain issues. 

Don't take the elevator to the second floor - Bare minimum of self discipline. Once that slips then you're going to be a greasy incel living in your parents' basement, which is a problem since we live in Korea and don't have a basement. Make your bed every morning while you're at it.

Don't be the hero and you'll be the hero - You can't dictate circumstances, but you can surf them. 

If they're an asshole 10% of the time, they're just an asshole - Even Hitler liked his dog and bought his girlfriend flowers.

Browsing is better than searching - You don't even know your favorite thing exists yet. Not going to discover it if you limit yourself to the things you already like. Similarly, let someone else be the DJ.

Make sure your counterpoints are counter to the point - Learn about premises, claims, support, and evidence before you set out to tell someone why they're wrong about everything you think is right. Fools out here bringing a baseball bat and glove to a football game, rhetorically speaking. Then they go home thinking you're the dumb one.

The only thing you really need to know is how to ask a question - All the univere's knowledge awaits, my little Einstein!

Catalog the annoying shit people do and do the opposite - If it bothers you then it probably bothers everyone else. You don't have to tiptoe around other people, but you also don't need to stand on a table in Wendy's shouting about the good lord while Rico and meemaw over there just try to have a quick lunch in peace.

You probably drank five more drinks than you counted - Another way to say you never spend less money than you thought. This is my way of telling you to establish guardrails to protect you from losing track of time and everything else. 

Be courteous even though no one else is - It may feel cosmically unfair that you have to give up your seat for Grandma Kim because the five other dudes in front of you were either too buried in their phones to notice her struggling past or just didn't want to stand up, or eternally frustrating that you're the only person in Korea who's ever held a door for the person behind them; but it's honestly one of life's great small pleasures to share small acts of kindness with strangers. Plus, the courteous spirit you nurture spills into the rest of your personality, and the right people will notice.

Take corners slow - You can't see what's around the bend, and also body go splat. This is supposed to be a metaphor. I'm sure you can figure out the meaning on your own.

Smart is fast - Speed is the most important skill in sports. Can either beat your man to the spot or already be standing there because you just knew.

Don’t build a belief system around a bad idea - I'm obviously talking about Jesus here but applies to any ideology - religious, political, or otherwise - promising the secret to a meaningful life. There is no secret beyond being a decent person, maintaining healthy relationships, accepting that both good and bad things happen to both good and bad people, and finding enough joy to counteract the vacuous drudgery of working for the man. 

Tell the truth even if you feel like a chump - Truth is going to get out anyway but without the three weeks of stress wondering if you're going to be found out. 

Ask the person who asked you where you're from where they're from - Uno reverse power move. A lot of weird, self-appointed park ranger faux-alphas will try to assert their dominance over you by interrogating your right to exist in public spaces. "Do you live around here?" Answering puts you on the back foot because now you're trying to justify why you have the right to even breathe "their" air in the first place, but turning their question around on them highlights that the only authority they have is the authority to go fugg themselves. Or just tell them you're in a cult and are out recruiting vulnerable outcasts you can exploit for money, power, and sexual conciliation, and if they're not busy right now then do they have time to hear the truth about God? 

Turn the question around but this time in a good way - Finish your answers in a friendly conversation with: "You?"  Keeps you from accidentally thinking you're the center of the universe. 

Scrub your feet - Your legs aren't clean just because water trickles down from above. (Oh hey, an accidental metaphor about the economy!). I mean, does drinking a glass of water clean your teeth, or do you have to actually brush them? Same same.

Everything is correct in its own context - It's okay to eat a donut for breakfast but it's not okay if you've already had seven in the same way it's okay to shoot someone chasing your friend with a knife but it's not okay to shoot someone eating their seventh donut for breakfast. 

It either did or didn't - Could've, would've, should've accompanies everything that will ever happen to you, but the only thing that matters moving forward was what actually happened. Focus on that cuz everything else is just noise. 

Poco a poco - Every little thing adds up, and since time goes by faster than you think, it's suddenly a year later and you can either do the thing or you still haven't started. Consistency is the most important word here.

Keep shining - You don't have to be the brightest star in the night sky but I can still see you all the way from earth. 

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That was an exhaustive list of everything I've learned in life, nothing more. Hopefully mijo uses it to become the astronaut or basketball player I was meant to be.

How to Survive the Global Corona Apocalypse by Discerning Betweeen Funkery and the Dumbfunkery

The virus all the zombie movies have been warning us about has finally arrived, and whoo weeee has the human spirit prevailed! Unfortunately, it turns out the human spirit is less about cooperation and all about hoarding whatever you own - whether that's $2 billion in stock futures or three rolls of scratchy one-ply - and acting like a dipshit because you know more than the smart people who went to college. Yes, I know you went to college too, but they went to real ones. Vaccinate your children, dumbass.

If I'd have gotten around to writing this in the early days of whatever Mayan prophecy we're living through right now, I'd have texted out like two paragraphs on staying your ass home because actual public health professionals said this is serious while your frat bros from Facebook State were saying it was just the flu so let's parrrrrrrr-tay. But since those early days this fucker has gone sideways, backwards, this way, thataway, up your butt and around the corner. There's no real coherence left to any of this other than everything is dicked beyond disbelief, so instead of writing anything focused I'm just going to respond to all the assery I've seen trying to downplay either the actual virus or the botched response. Guess that means I'm going to ramble on about Republicans for a good hour or two or until I'm dead from the rona. Anything in bold should be read in the shrill voice of a white woman named Debbie who has a silver-blond perm, isn't too racist, and supports our Lord and President Donald Trump because you should respect the office except when a socialist black man occupies it or there's a portrait unveiling to skip.

This is a Democratic and liberal news media coup to bring down the President! - Shut the fuck up. And great, I just exhausted the only reasonable response to all the other shit Real Americans™ are saying about this COVID thing. Going to have to get creative if I want to keep writing this.

You're making this a political thing! - Aside from politics and policy being related words that you can toggle between when making a bad faith argument, legitimately criticizing an absolute dump of a response to a global pandemic everyone kind of saw coming since 1918 and definitely saw coming since early January is not "political" in the same way making shit up about the ancient Kenyan city of Benghazi is. It's not political to point out facts when the context makes them even more damning than if they had only been taken out of context. Nor is it political to say Donald Trump wears orange makeup and stands like a Weeble; to mention he's sexually assaulted numerous women, including the mother of his three worst children; or to harp on the numerous dipshit things he's done to make this thing 40x worse than if he'd pulled out his wiener during whatever briefing he was first told about the rona and ordered everyone else - but not Jared! - to figure it out instead while he jerked off, literally and figuratively. But that's what happens when you only have four working synapses, and once you string those synapses together in every conceivable combination the human diarrhea bag still has exponentially less intellectual firepower than the dumbest gorilla in the zoo, which is why his answer to everything is the stock market.

This is a Democratic and liberal news media coup to bring down the President! - Shut the fuck up again, since COVID was a whole ass re-election gift from Republican Jesus himself. The economy - the single issue affecting Trump's re-election odds - was going to do whatever it did between January and November, but then some Chinese granny had a bowl of soup, and heyo. No one - not even the 13-year-old he raped - can blame that human bidet for an imported global pandemic. Close the borders to all foreigners and an American returning from abroad was invariably going to smuggle the virus in, and from there community transmission was inevitable. Once the rona hit, all that frayed carpet-headed fuck had to do to ensure his re-election was pretend to take this thing seriously. Could have even cut his working day short by handing the response off to people who had heard of coronaviruses before the prior Tuesday and sat in his rape room collecting all the credit for a successful containment strategy. Instead that insipid cow chose magical thinking over basic ass science even Don Jr. could understand, and now we have a severely depressed economy instead of one treading water. I'm no economist, statistician, or quantum physicist who deals in probabilities from parallel universes, but I can look at all the other countries dealing with the exact same rona bullshit and notice we're the only one who had 40 million people file for unemployment. That's all on Trump and the rest of you "open the economy" sub-human colostomy bags because this thing could have been far less painful - respiratory, economically, socially, or otherwise.

It's all China's fault! - I've read timelines about what China knew and when they knew it and were they forthcoming about what they knew or did they hide that info from the global community, and all I know is who really gives a shit since everyone definitely knew the rona was real two months later when Eric Trump was selling stocks on Twitter and his absentee dad was on TV saying it would magically disappear the following week. Rather amazing that little ol' me sitting in my kitchen drinking lukewarm coffee was reading about the Chinese government disappearing doctors sounding the alarm about a viral outbreak and knew something was up, yet the US intelligence and national security apparatus had no fucking clue until the Chinese Government announced the rona on their official Facebook page, or something. China going to surround the entire US mainland with nuclear missiles; say, no, those are just chocolate rabbits for Easter; and Trump going to say he couldn't have known because the Chinese never told him they were planning an attack. Alright now.

China will pay damages! - Bruh, you ever try to get a country to own up to breaking shit? The US, for example, where even when they say they'll pay reparations they give the mules they promised to the bank instead. 

The cure can't be worse than the disease! - There's this idea floating around the National Coalition of the Permed Gentry that the economic distress caused by social distancing measures will kill more people than the actual rona will, which is pretty doubtful. Maybe I'm wrong but I'm definitely not. But either way, now that we're emphasizing the economic impact on early mortality, I'm excited for the political right to have finally joined those of us on the left advocating for Medicare for All, student loan forgiveness, equitable school funding, food assistance for the welfare queens, and all the other issues that cause extreme systematic distress. Glad we're suddenly concerned about suicide though. Hope that concern lasts until the next pandemic.

You can't live in fear of the virus! - Okay, Susan and Greg, this is how that argument actually works: it applies when a fifth-generation Mexican family moves into your child's school district and you are only fourth-generation German; it doesn't apply when talking about a non-sentient virus that travels via sneeze and can only be mitigated by science, not moxy. Wear a mask.

Cars kill people too! - The frequency people have been referencing traffic deaths you'd think we were trying to take away their guns. I guess the argument here is that we don't stop driving just because people get into car accidents, so why should we stop eating at Red Lobster just because grandma got the fake flu? I actually don't think cars are a bad comparison here, but everyone whining about government tyranny has it completely backwards. Their analogy is that we still drive despite the risk, but a more accurate analogy would be to remove traffic laws, traffic norms, traffic signals, traffic signs, lane dividers, seat belts, air bags, crumple zones, bumpers, and whatever else makes driving safer than it would be otherwise, and then let everyone rip whether they've had 14 beers or none. Stay home.

Trump is so brave because he shut the border down with China while the librul Dems called him a racist - Trump didn't shut the border down: he stopped Chinese nationals from flying to the States. The difference between those two things is the half a million people who've arrived in the US on flights from China since our bio-hazard of a President "closed" the border. Maybe the Americans in China were immune to the rona, but looking at at a world map to see where all the sick people are, I'ma say probably not. Textbook racism.

Protect the vulnerable populations so the rest of us can get back to living! - Vulnerable or high risk just means fat or older than your dad, so half the country. Your big idea here is to lock up half the country while you go out, catch the virus, and bring it home to them instead of letting them get it themselves via curbside pickup? Y'all dumbasses have never taken a science class, have you?

But let's entertain this idea for a minute. Vulnerable or high-risk when talking about the rona refers to who's most likely to die if they catch it since everyone's equally vulnerable to becoming a carrier. So under current social distancing guidelines, your live-in grandpa is allowed full access to the house: can make a sandwich in the kitchen, take a doodie in the master bathroom, and take a nap in the backyard. But once we "protect" the vulnerable, grandpa has to pass the next six months in just a tiny room because your ass keeps going to the club and collecting complimentary rona with the paid gonorrhea. Multiply that by 150 million people and wow, you should go back to college because you've just been accepted to a Master's in Public Policy program.

Now, what Trump had really said was! - All these yokels spent eight years making fun of Obama for being so stupid that he couldn't speak without a teleprompter, and then we get a white moron as President instead and they're suddenly betraying their allegiance to nouns, verbs, and the other parts of speech to claim the random letters that dribble out of Donald Trump's mouth like applesauce represent a very profound idea, as long as you're willing to learn enough cryptology and Illuminati symbolism to even hazard a guess at the bullshit he's going to disavow the next day anyhow. Yeah, I get it: Donald Trump most likely didn't mean y'all should drink Clorox, and that "hitting the body with tremendous ultraviolet or just very powerful light" is an actual medical procedure; but at the same time, 30 people in NYC heard that and drank Clorox, and had someone even half as smart as Obama been speaking instead they would have called it UVR, or chemo, or whatever, not the "through the skin or up the butt" ultraviolet. Then we get three weeks of morons allergic to masks pretending to be medical researchers just to justify Trump's dumbfuckery even though the Orange Mold himself claimed the very next day that he was bullshitting.

Point: UVB phototherapy is a process by which ultraviolet B is administered to the skin to impede the growth of cells that cause psoriasis, which isn't rona but could be if you squint hard enough. 

Counterpoint: Trump said he was being sarcastic when he said to drink bleach. 

Response: Trump is a victim of the liberal mainstream media deep state. I own a gun, pussy.

So, yeah: the point of all these briefings is to communicate the facts as best understood at the moment and then explain the plan going forward. Having a bumbling horse clown read aloud from the book report he winged off the back cover only adds to the confusion rather than clarify anything.

These guidelines are so dumb! What's the difference between 6 feet and 6 feet 3 inches, huh, huh, huh? - It's about mitigating risk, not getting the patient count down to zero, you dumb ass dumbass. That argument applies to all your dumb complaints about masks not being 1000% effective or limiting gatherings to 10 people. Can play tug-of-war with 20 other people and go home rona free only to catch it on a coffee date. Then again, you a ho and met 30 people on that coffee date so math checks out.

Liberate Michigan! - Y'all peens with guns and gross beards are protesting the wrong government. Ain't Big Gretch's fault that the feds ain't testing and ain't tracing because they're too busy stealing the states' PPE equipment like this were an old Western about train robbers. There are actual sophisticated steps you can take if you don't want to shut the entire economy down, but since the one guy with the authority to do just that is actually sabotaging the process instead, well then. And yeah, sorry you can't mow your neighbor's lawn for an twenty extra dollars you could have used on potato chips. The Trump Government could have printed $4 trillion dollars and given it to you but they gave it to the banks instead. Throw the buffs on Big Gretch's face, y'all. She's doing a good job.

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Okay, I'm done quoting Meth Ann quoting Billy Bob quoting websites that end in -info, -max, or -ox News when making asinine points about killing your grandma but not mine. From now on anything in bold should be read in whatever voice you normally read bolded headers.

Trump's play - All these right wing rona-flavored Kool-aid drinkers taking cues from the Orange Menace talking about COVID being a manufactured crisis so they go outside without masks and either stand too close to you in the grocery store or cough directly in your eyeball to make a point about cuck snowflakes, yet MAGA Incarnated himself gets tested every day and becomes lava level mad if anyone within personal valet distance catches it, because he takes it far more seriously than he tells you to. Anyone else who gets on TV and tells you to go out and "do the economy" is also taking it far more seriously than they want you to. Bunch of Facebook anti-vaxx conspiracy theorists always looking for something nefarious in a pizza basement and then an actual conspiracy with elites controlling the prole sheep slaps them across the respiratory system and they decide to strap granny to a sacrificial alter next to the soft serve machine at an Old Country Buffet rather than wear a mask. So why the discrepancy between what Trump does and what he says? Well, aside from needing coal (you) to shovel into the fire (the greatest economy ever!), he's also as prisoner to MAGA groupthink as he is the leader. The toothless inbred high school dropouts who vote in Florida think the rona is bullshit, so Trump has to act that way too. There's a parallel universe where he steps aside to let the experts do their thing and barely anyone dies and most people keep their jobs, but in that universe he also gets called a RINO cuck pussy traitor by people who can't spell youre or you'r, and while he doesn't lose re-election he does lose just a tiny bit of the adulation from a class of people he wouldn't actually shake hands with or let into Mar-a-lago. Fortunately for him, most the current governors are slightly less narcissistic and have put in all the hard work of mitigating viral spread, so even though Trump blames them for the economy he still takes credit for less people dying than if Big Gretch hadn't stepped in.

This is the new normal - The faster you accept this thing is going to probably last until next year the faster you'll stop getting pissed every time your governor extends stay-at-home orders another two weeks. The rona is an active, virulent agent we have no natural or unnatural defenses against, so even if the numbers drop and feels like we can go outside and hug strangers again, we're always one clubber pooping his pants from getting sent back to Lockdown Street.

People just want a sense of normalcy - Who really gives a fugg if happy hour makes you feel like it's 2019 again if 40,000 extra grannies have to die just because you didn't want to drink a Long Island at home instead?

Your dad isn't picking you up this weekend and neither is football - There isn't going to be any football this fall so stop reading all those season previews. Playing football is contingent upon entire ass communities cooperating with numerous public health recommendations, the easiest being to wear a mask and/or not threaten the governor with your AK. Considering half of Twitter is yeehaws filming themselves pushing their Walmart carts the wrong way down a shopping aisle, probably won't get football in 2021 either. At least Michigan won't lose the OSU game this year.

That's, like, your opinion, man! - There's a class of fool who treats the rona as a difference of opinion, where I think what I think and you think what you think but at the end of the day we respect each other's right to think differently because we are both reasonable people. That's not how this shit works, at all. If you spend your whole life believing in Jeebus Christ, when you die you'll get put in a box and lie in the dirt for eternity, dead. Since I spent most of my life not believing in Jeebus Christ, I will also get put in a box and lie in the dirt for eternity, dead. The only difference between us is I won't have spent my Sunday mornings thinking I was going to heaven. That's how a difference of opinion works. In Rona Town, what happens is a school shooter is murdering up a school and we're all huddled in a room together hoping he won't come into our classroom. If all ten of us stfu then we'll survive, but if just one of us whips out their phone to record a Tik Tok then the school shooter is going to kick open the door and rapid fire sneeze until we're all on ventilators. So yeah, you can have your different opinion about the rona but it's fucking dumb.

You accept risk every time you leave the house - Sub-intelligent clowns you had two classes with in high school but friended you anyhow are suddenly members of the pop-philosophy club. "A comet could fall on your head any moment, but you can't let that keep you from chasing your dreams!" I don't know, kind of makes sense. I mean, there's risk of getting the syph if I stay home every Saturday night waiting for some STD petri dish in a mini-skirt to knock on my door. There's also a risk of getting the syph if I go to Hooker Town with a $10 bill and my mom's good looks. You can tell me - since you're smart and I'm not - if those risks are the same.

We're all anti-vaxxers - The thing with Trump being in charge during this shit show is that federal agencies have shown a willingness to bend the facts to fit whatever crazy shit he said the day before. I don't think anyone with experience in vaccine development expects one to be ready for at least 18 months, but now that Trump has promised one by the end of the year I fully expect there to be one. Probably two parts bleach, one part UV, and three parts Alex Jones' body hair, but a vaccine nonetheless. Who's injecting that cuz I'm not?

The numbers aren't that bad if you remove New York - Wish that logic applied when we were deciding to start a 20 year war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Why you need the federal government to do it's fugging job - As an avowed opponent of Build The Wall, it's nearly pointless to go all South Korea on the people in your state if the Southern Republican dickwad of a gov'nor in the state bordering yours tries to establish herd immunity instead. Someone's going to cross the border into your state looking to buy a bottle of liquor they can't get in their own and he's going to wipe a booger on a jug of milk, then your elderly aunt is going to buy that same jug of milk and drink herself to death even though she's been sober 7 years, 11 months, and 19 days. Also, her bingo hall is now a COVID hotspot. You can either have a unified national response or 50 local responses no you can't, you can only rock with the singular unified national response or everyone's going to die.

The real death count - They're either over-counting, under-counting, or have the death count calibrated just perfectly. The people who think they're over-counting know someone's sister's friend's mom who has a great-aunt who was a nurse in WW2 and said a guy got run over by a stallion, bus, and three pigs but they listed the rona as cause of death. Yeah, okay. The people who think they're under-counting look at charts comparing total deaths this year to last year, note the difference, and wonder aloud why Florida has blocked medical examiners from reporting rona deaths. 

Where did the rona go? - Now that it's peak Kill Black Men season for the police, the news has shifted their non-stop coverage from people coughing 12 hours in a row to video of cops shooting rubber bullets at protestors, rioters, news cameramen, crossing guards, and the occasional moth that flutters by; and now a bunch of un-smart not-thinkers think they're clever by re-posting memes talking about "I guess Corona is over, hurr hurr hurr." I get that the liberal media can shape groupthink and persuade the public to embrace an Iraqi war that conservatives wanted, but just because the rona isn't getting the breathless coverage it was before doesn't mean an extra 30,000 people haven't died since you personally stopped paying attention. Who's the sheep here if you're the one who needs the media to spoon feed you information about a pandemic for you to believe the pandemic is real?

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Hot damn this is long as hell, or at least longer than quarantine. Bottom line: this thing is real enough that the entire support staff in the West Wing has to wear a mask, so you should too. Here's a pic to help you illiterati understand:

All Your Jim Harbaugh Hot Takes Are Stupid and Proof You Should Stop Watching Football and Maybe Give Up Any Other Hobbies You Have as Well

Jim Harbaugh is the coach of an American football team at the University of Michigan. Monsieur Harbaugh is a very successful coach but you would never guess that by reading the professional analysis in the aftermath of one of his relatively infrequent losses since he is a college coach, not an NFL one. While it is a universal trait for fans the world over to be psychologically attached to the sports clubs they support, US college football is especially tied to personal identity since many of the fans have either graduated from the university they cheer for or claim they were accepted but went to a lesser rated school because "they had a better program for my degree." Because of these bonds between institution and a small, insignificant, powerless person screaming into the void about their $5 contributions to the Alumni Association, college football fans become irrational after losses and spit out #HotTakes on Twitter; some even get paid $45 a column to write like a high school intern at a junior high school newspaper. Michigan fans are especially rabid after a loss because their school is what is known as a blue blood, which means program lore promotes a mythos more idyllic than even the Founding Fathers because they won more games than everyone else when actual Ben Franklin was still alive, and any modern success - reasonable by any metric - is bound to fall short of expectations for perfection, hence the dumbfuckery on sports talk radio following a loss.

Michigan just lost a football game to Alabamar and all the predictable nonsense has polluted the airwaves, social media, and even the drinking supply in the hours since. Here are all the predictable #HotTakes and why anyone spitting them should be swallowed whole by a dormant volcano looking to get back into the eruption game:

OMG we lost to Alabamar! - Alabamar is one of the most historically successful college football teams and definitely the most successful in the past 10 years. They've won 124 games and only lost 15, all while playing in probably the toughest league in the sport. They haven't lost more than two games in a season since 2010. Michigan, by contrast, has won 85 games in that same span while losing 44 and has lost less than three games in a season twice since all the computers shut down on Y2K. There are also 56 former Alabamar players in the NFL right now; Michigan has 24. Suffice to say, Alabamar is the better program and better team, and the blog proprietor here made a measly $15 return on a $50 wager that they'd beat Michigan because the odds were so heavily weighted toward the obvious. WTF did y'all expect? No one anticipated a win beforehand so why you mad afterward?

OMG we lost to Ohio State, again! - Basically going to copy and paste whatever I wrote about Alabamar. Ohio State is one of the most historically successful college football teams and definitely the second most successful in the past 10 years. They're 117-18 in that span while Michigan isn't. That's like an 86% win rate, which they've actually turned up to 90% in the five years since Harbaugh started coaching Michigan. They've put 45 current players in the NFL; we've still only put 24 since the previous paragraph. They're better than us.

Harbaugh is overrated and just sucks! - While 0-5 against OSU is a bright red stain on the crotch of my white trousers, it's just the way the world is. Here is Harbaugh's head-to-head records against all Big Ten teams:

Ohio State 0-5
Penn State 3-2
Michigan State 3-2
Wisconsin 2-2
Iowa 1-1
Maryland 5-0
Indiana 5-0
Rutgers 5-0
Northwestern 2-0
Minnesota 2-0
Illinois 2-0
Purdue 1-0
Nebraska 1-0

Notice a pattern there? Homie gets smoked by the far superior team, splits with the equivalent teams, and smacks around the rest. Those splits with the other top tier Big Ten teams mostly break along the lines of who had the better team that season. Only one of those losses was to an inferior team, and if you want to be a dick about it and include non-conference teams then throw the South Carolina bowl loss on the big ol' pile of two. (The more telling stat is that he's 6-9 against land grant schools and 26-3 against the schools with admission standards.) 

But other teams beat OSU! - The guy with the biggest reputation for beating OSU is probably Mork Dantony from MSU, and he's like what, 3-10 against them? James Franklin from PSU has beaten them once, the Wisconsin guy hasn't beaten them at all, and anyone who's beaten them more than that has needed 20 years to get there.

Who cares if he wins all those other games? - Real ass evolved humans make this argument with a straight face, that Harbaugh is so boo boo it's not actually impressive that he wins nine or ten games each year because he starts the season with an automatic eight victories. Loads of middling Big Ten teams would kill for that kind of floor, the 2008-2014 era Michigan football team among them. I've seen a lot of dumb twisted logic - this being the Donald Trump Era and all -  but "he's so good he actually kind of sucks" is still a dumpster dive of a syllogism. 

Harbaugh hasn't won the Big Ten - This is related to the OSU albatross since we've been gerrymandered out of even a division title. Stick us in the Big Ten West and Harbaugh's won at least three division titles. Stick him in the Big 12 or Pac 12 and he's won three conference titles and been to the playoffs twice and all anyone can talk about is how he can't get past the semis. Basically, Michigan is all the legislation passed in the House and OSU is Moscow Mitch refusing to let the Senate vote on it. 

But he wastes all this NFL talent! - Yes, Harbaugh has elite talent to work with. The issue here is so do other teams. It's Big Ten football, not tri-county regional D3 football in Nebraska, Wyoming, New Mexico, and other states no one gives a shit about. The distribution of NFL talent on Big Ten rosters correlates perfectly to Harbaugh's head-to-head records against those teams: OSU has twice as many players in the NFL, Penn State and Wisconsin have a few more than Michigan, and everyone else has less. 

Harbaugh can't recruit! - In the very breath after saying Harbaugh has too much NFL talent to lose to teams with more NFL talent, people will actually complain about his recruiting. "Ohio State has eight of the top 100 recruits and we only have one!" I mean, fair enough, but also ignores the gap between us and the rest of the Big Ten: In the most recent recruiting cycle, OSU has 16 four-stars (two are actually five-stars), Michigan has 13, Penn State has 11, Nebraska has 10, and the rest of the conference has 17 combined. Yes, Michigan isn't recruiting as impressively as OSU at their historical apex, but no one else is recruiting as impressively as Michigan is at their not-historical apex.

Harbaugh can't win the big game! - Harbaugh has something like a 1-9 record against top ten teams; which, so? That record against top ten teams doesn't mean anything out of context, that context being 99% of college coaches have losing records against top ten teams and 90% have just as lopsided records as Harbaugh, especially if you're in a division with Alabama, Clemson, and OSU. The dirty little secret in college football is that the better team usually wins. The other dirty little secret is that every time Harbaugh wins a big game it's no longer a big game. Guy has beaten Penn State, Michigan State, Wisconsin, Notre Dame, Florida, Colorado, and all the Big Ten that isn't in Ohio, which has undoubtedly earned a shrug from you despite the mattress you ruined peeing on it in your sleep the night before the not big game. 

Harbaugh can't develop a quarterback! - The QB Whisperer turned the backup Iowa QB into an NFL draft pick who's still bumming around the NFL; turned an Al Borges recruit into a third-team All-Big Ten QB before that whiny toddler broke his back and moved to California; struck out on a flier he took on a guy who couldn't hack it at Houston; and just finished his second year with Shea Patterson. About Shea Patterson: 

Shea Patterson sucks! - Definitely not a complete QB, and lots of warts; but he also had to learn a new offensive system before each of his two years at Michigan, and he somehow ended up with the sixth most passing yards in school history. That stat doesn't mean much since passing volume has increased as the game as evolved, but he's also the sixth best Michigan QB as far completion percentage goes, which does mean something. All whining aside, put him on the 2016 team and we're Big Ten champs. 

Harbaugh won't play the backup QB! - Since Shea Patterson sucks, the logical thing is to play the QB who isn't as good as Shea Patterson. The other variant of this dipshit take is that even if Shea Patterson is better than the backups he should still be benched so the younger guys get experience for next year. Which, awesome for the seniors who don't have a next year and whom these same doobags would be shitting all over if they opted to sit out the bowl game to protect their draft status. "You owe the university and the fans this last game but we're going to make it far less likely you actually win because next year is more important than now, mmkay?"

Next years QB's suck because they're not as good as this year's shite QB! - Shea Patterson is a talented player at a position where experience is usually more important than physical ability. The guys behind him are mere children. A freshman or sophomore QB is rarely a good thing, and the only time they're functional is when the talent on the rest of the team makes up for their deficiencies. Whoever is the Michigan QB next year will have improved exponentially from this season. Second team All-Big Ten, guaranteed. 

Harbaugh thinks poo stain Shea Patterson played a great game! - In the aftermath of Shea Patterson going 8/45 for 87 yards, 0 TD's, and 6 interceptions, Harbaugh will tell the assembled press that Shea Patterson played alright and did some good things and will be even better next week. Then all the Russian bots will lose their collective hive mind and say Harbaugh is a fuggin' moron if he really thinks Shea Patterson played well and maybe his inability to evaluate what's a good and bad performance is why we can't beat Ohio State. Then they'll go straight to YouTube.com to watch five-year-old videos of Tom Izzo throwing his players under the bus and comment on what a shitty human he is. No one dies from cognitive dissonance because that's the only syndrome US health insurance willingly covers.

Harbaugh preaches meritocracy but then auto-plays upperclassmen! - This is entirely true except for all the freshman and sophomores who play positions of need. Tell me who our best safety, linebacker, running back, and wide receiver are then kindly shut the fuck up. 

Don Brown sucks! - 75% of the time the Michigan zeitgeist is whining about Don Brown I look at the box score and see his defense has given up 17 points and 250 yards, 51 of which came after pulling the starters in the third quarter up 35. The other 25% of the time is when he's getting torched by OSU receivers running crossing routes against man coverage ("Run zone, you stubborn fuck!) or finding holes in zone coverage ("Why are we running zone here?"). Frustrating but that's just what happens when they can run out five future NFL picks against your crappy DB's whose athletic ability only measures in the 98th percentile compared to OSU's 99th. (That too is Jim Harbaugh's fault because he should've convinced three of those guys to go to Indiana or Northwestern instead.) Sometimes when Don Brown's not getting murdered by OSU he's getting smoked by someone like Saquon Barkley just so Michigan Twitter can say dumb shit like "wtf I know he's good but we should have shut him down" right before drafting him second overall in their NFL fantasy football league. 

Harbaugh can't scheme a good game plan! - This is the clarion call of someone who says "great play calling" after a touchdown drive and "the play calling sucks" after a three-and-out even if the TD came on a horrible call that worked just because a defender slipped on a banana peel while the three-and-out included terrific plays that would have gone for 80+ each had one blocker not stopped mid-play to tie his shoe. Terrific analysis. You should be on TV. 

But the Bama game! Michigan abandoned the run in the second half! - 112% of people who whined about this complain Michigan is too dedicated to the run every time a rush goes for less than 25 yards, and 120% of the people who whined about this have zero clue about defensive coverages and can't tell you a single thing about the adjustments Alabamar made to stop the run. Michigan responded to Alabamar's response by throwing more and it just didn't work out, because Shea Patterson sucks. Is either crying about that or crying about running into a stacked line just so long as there's something to cry about.  

Harbaugh is too stubborn! - Throughout the first few games of every season homeboy finds out what his team can and can't do and abandons the things they can't. Some of the stuff they can't do is score at will so fans complain all season long that Harbaugh doesn't want to score touchdowns anymore because Bo didn't either. "The O-line doesn't pass protect very well so he's installed more TE blocking into their schemes not to cover up a glaring weakness but because he's addicted to manball!" For someone so entrenched in the ancient ways of the Schembechler he sure was quick to fire Best Friend 1 and replace him with the old Ohio State O-line coach and even quicker to fire Best Friend 2 and replace him with a guy he met on Tinder 15 minutes earlier whose profile read: "Speed in Space!" And then, after four years of complaining about manball, the Michigan offense hiccups a little and these same fools start complaining that we don't do the manball anymore. 

The team went on that trip to a different country! - Inbred doos legit think Michigan loses football games in October because they went to South Africa with their friends in February. Michigan State doesn't take team trips like that and they suck even worse, so explain that.

The refs suck! - I totally agree and think all refs should be marched in front of a firing squad and dropped unceremoniously into an unmarked mass grave. 

Harbaugh doesn't know how a clock or timeouts work! - This is also true. Someone buy that man a watch and a shock collar. 

But MSU won their bowl game! - MSU played Wake Forest, an ACC team. ACC is like one level down from Division 5 in Michigan high school. Also, did you see what happened when two of MSU's best teams ever played Alabamar? Eight whole quarters and I think they may have scored once. 

Oregon was 4-8 like seven seasons ago and they just won the Rose Bowl! - Oregon plays in the Pac 12. The Pac 12 has never sent a team to the College Football Playoff. Also, they beat Wisconsin. Their big program defining win was against a team Michigan beats regularly. 

The bald Row the Boat guy only been at Minnesota two years and he already won 11 games! - Minnesota plays in the Big Ten West. Clean your butt twice a week and don't schedule any tough crossover games against the East and you too can win 11 games. Would've only been 10 if they played Michigan instead of Rutgers or San Jose State.

BUT WE CAN'T BEAT OSU! - This is the absolute crux of all the complaints about Harbaugh. By any metric he's one of the best coaches in college football coaching one of the best teams, except he can't beat Ohio State. There is some valid criticism in there, but it all just boils down to he can't beat Ohio State. It's not because he doesn't try hard, or he can't recruit, or he doesn't care enough, or he doesn't make the game a priority, or he doesn't unveil his sorcerer's stone at the right time, or that his son is the running back's coach, or that he refuses to modernize the graphics department, or he's not fiery enough on the sideline anymore, or he's complacent, or he's too into his Bo cosplay, or he makes his players go to class, or that he only wants to win with a 1970's game plan, or whatever dumb shit you can tweet off in the next five minutes. It's because OSU has had the better team four of the five years to go along with a perfect storm of mistakes in key moments, bad luck, and refs who had previously been barred from officiating OSU games on account of being too close to the program spotting the ball on 4th down runs in overtime. 
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A coda about why I'm smart and you're stupid - Being one of the best teams but not the best is a special brand of frustration, which okay, I get it: your team loses and you want something to yell at. But say something out loud and chances are you're going to sound as stupid as me in a group chat I have with my friends where I blow off steam. But at least I don't record a podcast talking all sorts of irrelevant nonsense. You shouldn't either. 

If you truly have feelings about Harbaugh then I recommend you set aside one season to root for Indiana, Minnesota, Northwestern, Maryland, Iowa, Nebraska or MSU instead and spend the moments after their games rage tweeting about losing to Michigan yet again. If you prefer to leave the Big Ten then I recommend Texas, Florida State, Washington, USC, Miami, or any other traditional power that's barely hacking seven wins a season. If you're a whiny clown who just wants something to complain about then make a list of all the college football teams who have it better than us then go find something else to do because that list will be so short it won't take up any of your time.

Eden Lennard Elago

My son turns two years old today, which means I've been meaning to write about him for the last two years but never have. At first I didn't write anything because one day I wasn't a father and the next I had this perfect baby boy so completely ineffable I had no idea where to even begin; but now that he's two and I've had plenty of time to think about what to write, I have even less idea. All my feelings are archetypal, and the emotions I feel touch the parts of my heart that existed before language evolved, so best I can do is go the vignette route and hope their sum total communicates the rough contours of all my love.
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I don't know what the worst night of my life was but whenever I wonder when that was the very first thought that comes to mind is when my girlfriend miscarried. We'd only been dating a bit over a year at that point so weren't planning on having children together, or even getting married; we weren't even living together since I was working on Jeju Island while she was still in Seoul and we only saw each other on the weekends. But one Tuesday she called to say she'd taken two home pregnancy tests and both said LOLOLOLOL GOING TO BE A DADDY LOLOLOLOLOL; and my response, for the first time in my life, was: Not the worst thing I've heard today! That Friday I picked her up at the airport and we went to dinner where we basically had our first date all over again, since that's how it felt being together for the first time as expectant parents. The following morning we went to the doctor's and got confirmation that the baby thing was real and then spent the rest of the day in a waking dream, simultaneously pondering the family life that awaited and settling into it immediately.

That very night, however, she miscarried. She'd gone into the bathroom with a pain in her stomach and came out scared and unsure of what happened, but we both knew. And even though we both knew we still lied in bed together pretending it hadn't while waiting for the morning light so we could return to the doctor's for a second straight day of good news. But the waiting: the waiting was torturous. I tried to fall asleep to make the hours pass quicker, but I just lied there feeling like shit listening to both my own thoughts and my girlfriend's quiet sobs. My own thoughts oscillated between accepting what I already knew and then kicking myself for having given up hope and then back to being pragmatic about what's real and what's not and then the self-flagellation again because it felt like my child died and I didn't fight, at all. My girlfriend, meanwhile, continued to sob, and in the morning we went to the doctor and he told us what we already knew. 

The aftermath was obviously difficult since, like I mentioned, it felt like we lost a child. Independent of what you think about abortion - the onset of personhood, medical viability, and all the other parameters of that debate - there is another dimension to pregnancy that factors into your emotional vulnerability, and that is whether or not you welcome it and have begun taking for granted that your little bean is going to sprout. At that point a child is born into your imagination and might as well be real. We'd obviously planned to see this thing through, and even decided to get married because of it, so to suddenly have this little person we could see so clearly with our heart's eye even though we had no idea what she looked like, to have that little person suddenly taken away felt like something had been amputated. 

We mourned in different ways. My girlfriend felt the loss more acutely and carried an air of somberness with her the next few months. My pain was more philosophical, as the miscarriage forced me to contemplate loads of uncomfortable questions about the nature of existence and randomness and how to either assign or extract meaning from any of this. What I settled on was that the child we lost, painful as it is to say, wasn't the one; that one day we'd have a child we wouldn't have had this pregnancy worked out; and when the child was born it would become impossible to imagine the alternative where our first pregnancy was a success and this one never happened. I'm glad I found that thought convincing because we tried, with varying degrees of intensity, to conceive the next three years, but nothing. At first it was no big deal since we weren't married yet and then just married and in no hurry to abandon our honeymoon, but after a couple years of letting them fly with no success a fear began to loom. We were at a crossroads then - looking back toward the miscarriage and imagining what life would be like with that child; looking forward to the other child we desperately anticipated - and it became ever more difficult to soothe the loss and regret with the comfort of a future promise. But we continued to cope, and then one day:

I'm relieved to report from the other side that I was correct, that Eden immediately swept away all the anxiety, fear, and pain that preceded him; and everything that built upon his arrival is a crucible I'd gladly endure again. I occasionally ponder the thousands of little things that could have gone differently, leaving us with someone other than Eden, and they all make me shudder. Yes, we would've loved whoever dropped out of that birth canal just as much; and it feels sociopathic to think, in essence, that we prefer Eden to the child my wife miscarried; but the feelings I have toward my son far outweigh the discomfort of any difficult paradoxes here. I've never loved anything more.
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It is absolutely disorienting to ponder all the decisions and events that led to this specific child being born. Had I or my wife done a single thing differently, then no Eden. Had my parents done a single thing differently prior to my conception, then no Eden. Had my wife's parents done a single thing differently prior to her conception, then no Eden. So on and so on ad adsurdum. Less ridiculously, I'll look at Eden and immediately think about the night I met his mother and dwell on on the innocence of my first hello, how I had no idea that would set off the chain of events that led to this child. From there it's right back to the hypotheticals: What if I hadn't gone to that party? What if she hadn't gone to that party? What if either of us hadn't randomly joined an ultimate frisbee league - a sport neither of us played before or since - since that was the reason for this party? What if she had liked the guy who commandeered her attention all night and decided to go out with him instead? What if he hadn't commandeered her attention all night, effectively preventing someone else from wooing her that night? What if I hadn't hosted my own BBQ the following week and had nothing to invite her to? What if I didn't look so good? And so on and so on ad adsurdum.

Each line of similar inquiry leads quickly down just as deep of a rabbit hole. What about before I'd ever met my wife? What if the relationship I had just before hers worked out? What if it worked out a little shorter or a little longer, the timing of which led to meeting someone else I'd eventually marry instead? What about the relationship five years prior? What if I had a bit more ambition and left Korea after two years like a responsible adult should? What if I'd been more proactive about the job search in Portland so never applied to a school in Korea? What if I studied math instead of English? What about all the similar parallel decisions in my wife's life? And so on and so on ad absurdum. Speaking of absurdities, the what if's also extend to the absolutely ridiculous. Masturbation, for example. I'm not sure if I did or didn't on the day Eden was conceived, but if I did then what if I hadn't? And if I hadn't, what if I did?
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Along those threads of serendipity, my son was also born my Holy Redeemer, since his birth transmogrified every good decision and every bad decision I'd ever made up to that point into the correct decision. Don't really care about the night I spent in jail now since if the police hadn't carted me off I would have either (1) gotten three ladies preggo that night, smooth talker that I was, and effectively confined myself to a lifetime of Ypsilanti, Michigan; or (2) gotten into a fight with a much larger man and ended up mostly dead. If any former regrets pop in my head I now dismiss them as a blessing in disguise, since if things had gone better for me then I wouldn't have Eden now.
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Eden's name has no special meaning aside from we like it and it's an English-sounding name pronounced the same in Korean, which was probably my number one concern. Korean pronunciation turns English names like Jeremy into Jay-ray-me, Michael into My-ee-kul, Andrew into An-duh-roo, Kristin into Kuh-rih-suh-tun, and Your Mom into Yo' Mom. Eden, however, is pronounced Eden, and if he decides when he is older than he is actually a woman then her name will still be Eden.

The little homie has two middle names: Lennard and Elago. Lennard is from my Great Grandma Lenna. Had Eden been born a week earlier it probably would have been spelled Leonard just because I'd only considered the name aurally, and of course that's how you'd spell it. Wasn't until I was taking a shower two days before he was born that the more appropriate IKEA spelling occurred to me. Elago is an Owambo name from Namibia and means lucky. It was bestowed by my old kuku there, though I'm still not convinced she actually did the naming. I had sent message through her daughter asking for a name, and her daughter, named Nelago, responded with Elago. Elago is the male version of Nelago, so we'll just assume she didn't pull a fast one on me even though half the comments I've ever received while in Namibia were along the lines of: "Name your firstborn after me." 
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I look at Eden and am so relieved for his sake that he ended up with us as parents. There are probably better parents out there, but you look around at all the shitty things that happen to children - abuse, hunger, negligence, abandonment, trafficking, child labor, and even simple disinterest - and he's managed to avoid all of that. He instead has two parents who wake up five times each every night to tuck him back in after he's kicked his blanket off.
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I can't believe how paranoid I've become. Before you could have told me the house I'm sleeping in was on fire and I would've rolled over and gone back to sleep since that's the fireman's job to care, but now an impossible thought flickers through my mind and no way I can't not investigate. That's fine when it comes to normal parenting concerns like SIDS, as I'm not the only person who has dashed into his child's room 15 times an hour to make sure everyone's still breathing; but some of the scenarios that run through my imagination are straight loco, yet still have to make sure. The silliest of these was while my wife and Eden were staying in the post-natal spa the few weeks after Eden was born. I was sleeping over there as well, and one night around 3 am I started thinking about North Korean ninjas kidnapping newborns to sell into Chinese slavery. Ridiculous thought, obviously, yet the longer I lied awake the longer it seemed more plausible: we were in a newer development still under construction on the outskirts of town, so not much police presence; and security there was a locked glass door, beyond that three, possibly four 60-year-old women manning the nursery; and my child was especially cute so would probably command 10 times the normal asking price. Definitely leaped out of bed and speedwalked my ass over to the nursery half expecting to walk in on a real life ninja the exact moment he was lifting my boy out of his bassinet. Found an old woman passed out in a chair instead, snoring. Whatever, I think it was entirely reasonable to move my family from a tenth floor apartment to one on the first. I've listened to Tears in Heaven and know how that story ends. Two years into fatherhood and no one seems to care when I tell them I'm a better dad than Eric Clapton.
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I never want my child to be sad, but I also kind of like when he cries because it gives me a chance to hold and comfort him. My favorite is when he wakes in the middle of the night and I rush into his room, pick him up, tell him Papa's here, then he drops his head on my shoulder and drifts right back to sleep.
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A common answer when you ask expecting parents if they want a boy or girl is they don't care, they just hope their baby is healthy. Not me: I wanted my child to be cuter than all the others. I'm also glad he's healthy, but first thing's first.
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Everything's a gamble with your child. If you're strict with your children they'll resent you for not allowing them their space to learn and grow; but if you're hands off, they'll resent you for failing to provide discipline and structure. At Eden's age right now I'm either the worst dad ever if I don't let him drop his finger into his doo-filled diaper, but I'm also the worst dad ever if I do let him. This game has no rules and too many rules at the same time.
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I've had a dull pain in my heart ever since Eden was born and can't tell if it's from the constant fear something bad might happen to him or trying to cram all this love into a space built for much less emotion. Probably both.
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My biggest fear during my wife's pregnancy was that I was going to be a miserable, disinterested father. I went to all the doctor's appointments and made the right noises when anyone asked me about it, but was otherwise just a nine-month-long string of days with a larger than normal deadline looming, which worried me since I assumed the way I felt then was the way I'd feel forever. But then Eden was suddenly a real boy and I was a real father, emotions and all. Maybe I was just saving them for when they were truly needed.
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In Korean preggo class the dad is told to choose a song to sing to his unborn baby every night and again while bathing his newborn child just after parturition, the idea being that the baby will recognize the song and consequently recognize its father as well. I didn't sing shit to my wife's belly during the pregnancy but I did plan to sing to Eden during his initial bath, if only because I expected a stern marm of a nurse glaring at me if I didn't. The song I planned to go with was Amazing Grace, but when the moment came I started singing This Little Light of Mine instead. Tempo was set to halting since tears kept catching at the back of my throat.
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Almost got myself killed when my wife was four months pregnant. I was riding my motorcycle to a basketball game. Sped off at a green light and started to drift into the left lane. I'm usually religious about checking my mirrors, but I also generally get a large jump on the other traffic at lights so assumed no one was near me. No honk, no nothing, just a flash of black at the very edge of my peripheral vision the split second I crossed the white line. I leaned right just in time to feel a BMW race past, still accelerating. He kept going but I pulled over to hyperventilate a solid five minutes while thinking about my unborn son. I still think about that moment while watching him play with his blocks or go down a slide. I also still think about that moment while on my motorcycle calculating if it's worth it to pass this slow ass truck on the right. It's generally not.
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I feel a primitive joy whenever Eden mows through a waffle I made for him, probably because even the cavemen used waffle makers.

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The great accomplishment of my life is that I'm the only person who can get Eden to sleep quickly. Not sure how or why, but my wife can't and I can, so even if I didn't feed him, dress him, change his diaper, or push him out of the way of a speeding bus that day; or even if I did all of those; it's still my exclusive responsibility to put his ass to bed every night. A blessing and a curse, certainly, since there are some nights I say to my wife - though not out loud - "Why can't you do it for once?!?!?!?" But then I look at him as he drifts off to sleep and think about how fortunate I am for these few moments, and that every other bond seems to be tilted toward his mama but this one is mine.
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Eden is a human Explosions in the Sky song.
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All the juxtaposed thoughts in a parent's head has made me slightly more wise than I was just over two years ago. It's fascinating to me the way I can go from wanting nothing more than to drop him off at nursery school so I can have a few hours to myself to feeling lonely on the walk home without him. Or how an hour of constant crying has me ready to murder at least 12 people and 20 minutes later he's asleep and I'm staring down at him with reservoirs of fresh love. Or how stressful it was that he wasn't walking yet to how stressful it was when he started walking and we had to monitor him all the more diligently. Or how I can't wait to see what he's like 20 years from now but want these moments to slow the fugg down. There's no middle ground between these feelings so only thing to do is grab onto both at once and hope they don't rip you apart.
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Eden's laugh is a crack rock. The dumb things I do just to hear it at random times of the day or to hear it again after he's stopped.
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I still can't believe this person is my son and probably never will. My capacity to wonder has waned as I've grown older but it returns with childlike vigor whenever I look at Eden and think about how ugly testicles are yet that's where this perfect little homie got his start.
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And that's all I have to say about fatherhood.

Best World Cup Preview for Anyone Who Lives in a Country that Didn't Qualify for the World Cup or Lives in One that Did

World Cup 2018 starts today when the two main architects of US foreign policy, Russia and Saudi Arabia, face off. The loser has to guarantee loans for half of Jared Kushner's failed real estate portfolio while the winner gets 10% off a one night stay at a Trump property but still has to pay for anything missing from the minibar. If you don't follow soccer or sports in general you still probably know that the World Cup is the one time every four years Americans care about ice hockey since they want to complain about all the diving and fake injuries but NFL players do that too so guess we'll use Sven and Igor instead to draw a favorable contrast between us and them.

If you're an average American you might not yet be aware that our national team failed to qualify for this year's World Cup after losing a one-on-one play-in match against North Korea last week. But don't despair: there's still plenty of good reasons to follow along, and not like we were going to do any better than two convincing losses and one unlucky close loss. So if you're still reading along then here's a collection of random thoughts posing as a stunningly comprehensive primer for how to understand the people who don't understand the World Cup, how to experience all the emotions of a sport you don't care about, and what to expect in 2026 when the US is a full blown banana republic and thus a world class soccer team.

Anyone who watches soccer for more than 45 minutes will suddenly begin using British slang. Before the World Cup I will call the goalie a goalie. Five minutes into the first game I will call the American goalie a wall and pretend every team we play is from Mexico. And after the first match has ended I will call the goalie a keeper, spell center c-e-n-t-r-e, say bollocks when I'm mad, ask my wife for a shag even though I haven't done anything the last week to deserve one, and drink enough tea to turn my teeth permanently crooked and brown.

You will discover who is 12% Columbian or took a train through Belgium that one time. Oh really, Nancy with the strawberry blond hair, you have to wake up at 5 am to watch Japan because some of your 23andMe results were written in Kanji? And yes, Dakota, we all know that you are spiritually connected through Kiva to an indigenous tribe in Paraguay so are rooting for Uruguay since close enough. For real, Rachel Dolezal is really just a woman who turned on the last 30 minutes of a Cameroon match four years ago and got a little carried away.

Except for Switzerland. You will notice not a single person you know or anyone you know knows is ethnically Swiss in the slightest. You will hear nothing positive said about the Swiss team all World Cup long; and, coincidentally, you will hear nothing negative either. Take a side once in awhile, Switzerland, and the world will start to care.

A bunch of sexless bros will let you know just how much they don't care about soccer. Wahhhh, soccer's sooooooo boring. I'm going to watch baseball - baseball! - instead. Or this four hour football game with three hours of commercials and twelve minutes of actual football.

Russia is hosting. Putin was waging a disinformation campaign through social media in an attempt to rig the FIFA vote when awarding the 2018 World Cup but accidentally undermined US democracy in the process. Trump was going to say something stern to him about it this week but oh yeah the US didn't qualify so he's FaceTiming Kim Jung-un instead. 

Analysis and predictions. The primary objective of soccer is to discern between who's visited Europe and who hasn't. "Football? Oh you mean American football. How does my scarf look?" The secondary objective of soccer is to win at least a silver medal in 10 meter platform diving. And the third objective is to scratch out like two goals over three weeks and if you manage that you have a 95% chance of winning the World Cup. Based on those criteria I predict....

...Poland will win, just because. Go Poles! 

Never mind. Spain will win:













Go Blue!

This primer wasn't very comprehensive. Sorry for wasting your time. I don't know much about soccer. 

If Your Argument for Holstering a Gun in Your Underwear Is A, B, or C Then You're Dumb

Las Vegas just hosted the newest convention on the convention scene, called "How to Use These Insane Guns the Government Lets Us Have to Kill as Many People as Possible." Only one guy bought a ticket but everyone else had to attend against their will since that's how gun rights work in the US. "Oh, you and your kid are going to leave a half-finished banana split behind just because this AR-15 slung around my shoulder makes you uncomfortable? Freedom ain't free, libturd!"

Standard histrionics in the aftermath from both sides of the gun debate. Whatever argument the Guns Are Stupid side of the argument comes at you with can be distilled as "guns are stupid," thus the name of their official lobby: Guns Are Stupid. The Guns Make My Dee Hard side of the debate, however, has a whole host of reasons to own guns, all of them fucking stupid. Here they are along with impeccable logic proving them wrong:

You going to ban cars and knives too? Fucking stupid.

You can't regulate the evil in a person's heart. Fucking stupid.

Laws won't completely stop mass shootings so why even try? Fucking stupid.

Good guy with a gun, baaaaaby! Fucking stupid.

I am my family's personal Secret Service body guard protector! Fucking stupid.

My favorite issue of Playboy had the Founding Fathers on the cover and the only clothes they wore was the Constitution. Fucking stupid. 

Let's get people the mental healthcare they deserve instead of taking away our guns. Fucking stupid.

Your mom. Fucking stupid.

Guns don't kill people, people kill people. Fucking stupid.

But I'm a RESPONSIBLE gun owner! Fucking stupid.

You don't need a gun to commit mass murder. Fucking stupid.

I need my guns to hold off the US military. Fucking stupid.

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Okay, while my reasoning has been impeccable, I'll admit there's not enough logic. Let's start again: 

You going to ban cars and knives too? Get me video of five non-idiots using a Glock to make a PB&J or an AR-15 to cut the beating heart out of an elk and I'll concede you have half a point. To get that other half-point you'll have to introduce me to just a single clown who rides a DDM4 to work because the bus takes too long. If you don't understand the point I'm trying to make here then ask yourself the following questions and I'll answer them:

What is the primary use of a car? It's a tie between sucking up 35% of your salary just to look like you're keeping up in today's economy and the place you sleep because you can't afford rent in San Francisco.

What's the primary use of a knife? Spreading butter on your toast.

What's the primary use of a gun? To kill someone.

What's the secondary use of a gun? To kill another someone.

What's the tertiary use of a gun? To accidentally shoot yourself in the foot while walking around looking like a cowboy even though you've never seen a real life horse before.

Also, bet you store your gun somewhere moderately safe but will leave your car overnight in a Taco Bell parking lot without a second thought.

You can't regulate the evil in a person's heart. The Catholic Church is aware of this. At least they've tried to counter it by shuffling their shitty pedo priests through different parishes, which is more than the US Congress has done. "Thoughts and prayers" that are technically true because those thoughts are about money and the prayers are that the NRA will still cut those checks.

Laws won't completely stop mass shootings so why even try? That's a really great argument. I'm going to pass it along to Jerry Sandusky's lawyers. When you read that he was released from prison because laws won't completely stop child rape then you'll be able to sleep at night knowing your legal acumen set a guilty man free.

Good guy with a gun, baaaaaby! Imagine a bunch of do gooder good guys in Las Vegas sensing this is their moment to be a hero as they unclasp the button on their holster, remove their gun, set their feet shoulder width apart and parallel to the target, flex their knees into an athletic stance, shift their body weight slightly forward, and then take aim with both hands at...well, wherever the shooting was coming from. Did anyone even know? It took a while to sift through reports of multiple shooters because that's just how sound works when someone's firing 8 million bullets a minute at a crowd of people. Feels like it's coming from all directions, and it's a lot to expect that a good guy with a gun is also a good guy with a gun trained in live shooter scenarios. Two most likely outcomes are that the good guy with a gun starts firing indiscriminately toward the Mandalay Bay and hits every hotel room but the shooter's or he gets mistaken as the live shooter by another good guy with a gun and ends up dead.

I am my family's personal Secret Service body guard protector! The only time your gun will effectively confront an intruder is when your 10-year-old son intrudes in the back corner of the closet where you hide your gun. RIP, champ.

My favorite issue of Playboy had the Founding Fathers on the cover and the only clothes they wore was the Constitution. I respect the Constitution as the basis of the rule of law in the US, but it's not sacrosanct. If you find my position here disagreeable then we will have to argue and argue and argue until we reach a three-fifths compromise, and that is: the Second Amendment may give you the legal right to own 42 uzis but it's not a good idea just because George Washington co-signed on it in between buying a shipment of slaves and beating them afterward.

Let's get people the mental healthcare they deserve instead of taking away our guns. But we'll take it away just as soon as we get 50 votes in the Senate to kill off Medicaid.

Your mom. 100% true, actually.

Guns don't kill people, people kill people. You ever see Stephen King's It? I haven't, but from what I understand the clown who charms young children into the sewer is an allegory for a gun. You buy one thinking you'll just take it to the shooting range now and then, but soon enough it's whispering to you as you try to fall asleep. "Shoot someone, shoot someone now!" And next thing you know you're at the mall firing away. Guns definitely kill people.

Or more succinctly: Nuclear bombs don't kill people, people kill people.

But I'm a RESPONSIBLE gun owner! Responsible gun owners own 12 gauges, not seven separate FN-15's. Don't forget either that just about every mass shooter ever was a responsible gun owner right up until they mass killed a bunch of people.

I'm also sure you're a responsible car owner. How many times have you accidentally left your dome light on overnight? Ummm hmmmm.

You don't need a gun to commit mass murder. Anyone who says this invariably Google's "mass murder no gun" and then posts the first three hits to whatever Facebook argument they're having. Oh lookie here, someone with an axe killed six people way back in 1926! Or, 900 people died from Kool-Aid inhalation in 1978! Or, seven masked bandits stormed a toy train with sharp rocks and killed the five people on board! Which is a lot of time and space to travel in order to compile of a list of 15ish incidents while I have to count back like two weeks to get the equivalent in US mass shootings.

I need my guns to hold off the US military. I've played paintball with paramilitary types. There will be a grand total of 17 minutes between the military turning tyrannical and them dispatching these clown fakesters, and 15 of those minutes will be spent flying their F-16s to whatever shed the Chuck Norris Fanboy Militia has stored their weapons cache and missiling them all dead.

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Summary: Guns are stupid. RIP to anyone who has died or will die because Americans have decided an AK-47 is how to best express all that freedom.