Refrain From Hibernating

For the first time in what feels like two months, I'm getting to this exactly when I mean to on a Thursday night, not scrambling after half-remembering I forgot to start it, right as I fall asleep. So I'm not tapping this out with my thumbs, in bed, in the dark, on my phone. I know Paul McCartney jotted down "Yesterday" in the middle of the night when he woke up from a dead sleep or whatever, but I'm not a Beatle. I know this because I watched that whole Peter Jackson documentary and I wasn't in it once. So that's two things I know about myself, definitively: 1) I need to sit down and think about this shit before I start typing anything if I want it to make any kind of goddamned sense and 2) not a Beatle. As half-baked as these posts can be, they really are the best I can do, and none of them are going to be a Beatles song, not even the embarrassing ones they make Ringo sing. If anything I wrote came out half as good as the one about the octopus, I'd retire this blog and retreat in arms-raised triumph, forever.

But see already, it turns out that having time to sit and consider what I write, my default is going to be undisciplined nonsense and word games that appeal almost singularly to myself. And actually, that's not the worst lesson to learn. I have three kids who are all college age or older now. It is a miraculous fluke I've covered here (probably) and in therapy (definitely) that my children have required almost zero oversight in terms of direction or achievement. They all did all their homework without a single assist from me, passed every test they took, got jobs on their own, signed up for the AP classes, did extracurriculars here and there, were responsible for zero pregnancies or class A felonies and if they had debilitating drug or alcohol problems, at least had the courtesy and creativity to keep them completely hidden from their mother and me this whole time. And still through all that, none of them got into UCLA, even though they all more than met the minimum acceptance requirements. None of them had their hearts set on going there, but, importantly, more other people did than just about any other state-run university in the United States. So even though the standards are about what you'd expect for a school that spends as much as it does on football, it can have an acceptance rate comparable to the really snooty nerd schools who only do rowing and fencing and shit.

My Christmas message to you this year, then, is this: stop trying so hard. It's very possible to do an extraordinary amount of preparation and effort and still come out just about the same as the people who spent all their time on reddit trying to convince others that Prince was an alien or whatever. You can do literally everything right and all the dummies around you are just going to try to give you Pandemic anyway. Watch, we did all the masking and distancing and lock-down-ing and all the reprobates who have decided that a garden gnome like Anthony Fauci can make them apoplectically enraged(?) who weren't killed or debilitated by COVID are still going to come at you with "See, I told you I'd be fine! It was just like a flu!"

This is not meant to encourage a sense of nihilism or despair. It's the holiday season, so it's a message of hope: give yourself a break. If the last six years or so have taught us anything, it's that we're capable of surviving a lot. And we should reserve our energy to spend on things that really matter, that can really make a difference. Like the fight for voting rights and voter turnout in Georgia. That worked out great! So we wait for those big ones to come along (like, for example, voting rights in Georgia, again) and maybe we can half-ass the lesser ones in between, culturally and personally. Skip leg day. Wear a poncho. Stop watching that show you don't really like. Read less. It's already a thing for the young, who use "try-hard" as an insult. They also spend way too much time on Discord and are worryingly in to anime, but not all their cultural instincts are garbage. Let's learn from them. They can make space to keep themselves grounded, settled. But I guess maybe if they did less of that, they would have gotten into UCLA.