Year in Review, 2019

What’s it say about 2020 that i didn’t really find enough time to put together my charts and graphs for 2019. Here we are in the first days of 2021, and thinking back to 2019 and looking at the numerical detritus of a different madness is hard to wrap my brain around. Not to say 2019 was normal, it was nuts, but it was a hell of a lot closer to normal than our current moment.

Off we go.

Running: 161.6 miles.
An absolutely embarrassing year. Excuses: In March, we traveled. In June and July, we traveled. In September through December, i worked an unholy amount.

Bicycling: 1,056 miles.
Nearly three weeks of traveling in France, and two weeks in Germany meant that this was less than it could have been. Not a lot of trips outside of commuting.

Soccer:
33 games. 16 wins, 15 losses, 2 draws.
16 shots on goal, 1 assist. 47 goals allowed, one own goal.
We were decent this year. Missed a lot of games due to travel. While i was generally really pleased at how often i got into the attack, and i forced a lot of good saves, one of these days i have to score one.

Commuting and Transport:
197 bicycle commutes. 31 run commutes.
21 MBTA trips.
There were 15 car commutes in there, but in my defense, 10 of those were in a foreign country and four of them involved a U-haul and 500lbs of prototype. Our T usage was, of course, heavily Orange Line-centric, considering it’s a block away.

Work, Sleep, and Sanity:
This is the part where you can start to see some effect of the mad pace of the hellproject, even though the averages sort of mute the drama of it. In September through December, i worked too much and slept too little, and that shows here. Sometimes i would put my laptop away at 2, climb into bed, and the man would immediately begin yelling, and i’d go kneel next to the crib, put my head down on the bar, my hand on his back, and shush him back to sleep. For what seemed like ages. And i didn’t never pass out on the bar of the crib. Looking at some of those average hours of sleep though, holy crap, how did we survive that. And that outlier in March? That was due to trading off a stomach bug that resulted in entire days of sleeping. And work got worse in November and December, but the man started sleeping through the night. So those canceled each other out a little bit. And even though our vacation in France was a well-documented disaster, both the we and the baby man slept great. 2019 was a stretch, is what i’m saying.

Drinking: 203 beers.
You might imagine that the weeks-long vacation in France might be the peak of my beer drinking. Instead, it was in May, where my first work trip to Germany involved several nights of getting a solid buzz on with round after round of Dinkel Acker with clients and colleagues. Then we did that again in June. And while there were many 1664s by the pool, there was also a lot of wine. And also there was a lot of things going wrong and relentless hustling.

Food:
11 trips to McDonald’s.
14 times getting ice cream.
489 total cups of coffee.

Travel:
41 nights spent somewhere other than home: 8 in Germany, 16 in France, 3 aboard airplanes. 10 in Florida.
11 airports.
4 countries. Not actually that impressive, but i did spend a lot of time in two of them. For a period from the end of May through mid-July i spent more weeks in Europe than in the US. Look at how fucked up things are here, can you blame me?
6 states.
5,319 miles on our car, the most in August and September for trips to Rhode Island. A considerable additional number of kilometers on two rental cars in France and two more in Florida.
3 theme parks visited: Disneyworld in Florida, Disneyland Paris, and Sesame Street Land in Florida. Baby man does not lead a bad life, i don’t think.

Entertainment:
We saw zero movies in the theater. Won zero games of bar trivia out of maybe two or three. I went to 8 Revs home matches, and they were 4-3-1.

Internets:
Here’s how you can tell I was busy in 2019: I only uttered 1,056 tweets. averaging a mere 70 per month for the second half of the year. 78 Instagrams, though. Not so bad.

The Baby Man.
Back when I could still keep stats on his bodily functions.
Barfed 18 times.
Pooped in the process of diapering 3 times.
Peed on me 6 times.
Blew out 65 diapers.

But none of these things happened any later than July.

A Hand Up, Not a Hand Out

By that i mean we’re living in a country where the middle-class and below can lower their expectations of a hand reached out to help, and get ready to hand their hard-earned money up to the richest among us.*

For the last year or so, i’ve had the feeling of watching a favorite soccer team playing two men down (no comment on the refereeing), and clinging to a 0-0 scoreline.  You’re happy that they’re holding on, but you know it can’t last.  Sooner or later, the Republicans were going to get their wayward members lined up behind something, and that would be that.

As it turned out, those wayward members were almost comically hypocritical and/or cheaply bought, considering that the bill the Senate passed last night basically contained everything they previously objected to, deliberated upon (or not) in an equally objectionable way.

On Election Day last year, there was a palpable feeling of something having been taken from us, a physical thing.  Money.  Forgetting for the moment the ideological aspects, the moral risk, and the geopolitical peril, it was just plain going to cost us.  Stuff that we had and thought of as things our government was paid to care for was simply going to be taken from us.  Things that we’d fought for and achieved as a society were going to be scorned and discarded.

And unless, against the odds we can yet stop this, this is that bill coming due.  And like most bills, this effectively gets paid to people who have more money than we do.  Big companies who hide profits overseas get to pay less in taxes.  Rich people get to pay less in taxes in general, and less on inherited wealth.  And since it’s so, so partially paid for in a fig-leaf of an attempt to say it is deficit-neutral, it means that other stuff’s being cut now.  Health care for poor people.  Tax deductions for teachers.  Graduate student stipend deductions.  And in the most relevant fuck-you to me, tax deductions for local and state taxes.

That’s right, they rigged it so that those of us who paid high state and city taxes and received good service for them now have to pay tax on those taxes to the federal government, which already didn’t do many of those things we were having our local governments do, and doesn’t want to do those things because of selfish assholes in backward states want to do nothing ever and force that choice on the rest of us.  We’re going to be paying them taxes on money we spent on services they wouldn’t provide.   

And that money goes to the rich.  In their tax cuts.  In their private jet deductions.  In their breaks for one particular religious school.  In their reduced taxes on luxury cars.  In their new ability to drill for oil in the last untouched part of Alaska.

And for as long as this law stands, it’s going to do damage.  It’s going to mean that the 2019 version of my erstwhile roommate wouldn’t have been able to afford grad school, no matter how cheap our rent was and how many coupons she clipped.  And dozens of people like her won’t be making the breakthroughs that human civilization doesn’t know it needs yet.  It means that insurance costs will go up, people will lose coverage, people will die. People will just die because of this, people who might have lived a hundred years.

And that’s just the start.  This is where this bill leaves us, but this bill leaves The Deficit in horrendous shape.  The same pious fucks who so grudgingly sold their vote last night are going to come for their real targets.  Education.  Welfare.  Medicaid.  It’s a war on an America for everybody, waged by the somewhat-rich on behalf of the stupid-rich.

Every single day this law stands, every single day these monsters are not voted out, damage will be done.  And for every day of moving backwards, untold days will be needed to even get back to where we were when Obama left office.

So fuck your wallet and fuck my wallet, and fuck paying more so that rich assholes can pay less; i mean, i can afford it for a while, and i hope that in doing so it delays whatever’s coming for someone else.  But this can’t stand, because they won’t stop.  They’re coming for it all.  Anything you think you might have, any sliver of anything that they might find a pretense for not paying for, they’re coming for.

And they will leave us a hollowed-out country, with the children of the Baby Boom dying young and wondering why their parents’ generations saw fit to take everything from them so thoroughly.

* Did i work too hard repurposing that quote?  Maybe.

Call it what it is.

The other day, while proofreading the teenager’s essay on The Crucible, i counseled her to choose another adjective instead of ‘evil’ to describe the ringleader of the witchcraft hysteria. There had to be room for interpretation, i argued, some nuance to the description—she wasn’t wholly evil, surely. She was immature, lovelorn, made bad decisions when confronted with big trouble, and even though she doubled down when real people started paying the price, ‘evil’ remained an oversimplification. Didn’t it?

Then again, this week’s news (and all the ones before it) makes me doubt my certainty about overstrong adjectives.

We’ve got Republican politicians and Alabama voters supporting a pedophile. A guy who was already shown unqualified in multiple objective settings, before being outed as a serial harasser of 14-year-olds and a fugitive from a 1980s shopping mall (and i don’t mean in some cool John Hughes kind of way). But the Red Team is so hopped up on needing to win at everything, on #librultears, on their bloody tax cuts, that they need him. Better a known pedophile than a Democrat.

And about those tax cuts.  The ones that turn grad students, especially ones in the hard sciences into paupers, or, as likely, into an endangered species.  The ones that take away the little bit of their own pocket money school teachers could deduct.  The ones that annihilate people’s healthcare as an oh-by-the-way, a measure that people describe as a ‘sweetener’ or a concession, to the legislators who don’t feel it’s awful enough.  Journalists say that with a straight face now.  Thank goodness they’ve got the votes of Senator Vader, Congressman Skeksis, and the Death Eater Caucus.  Hell, going back to the theming element of my little rant here, the teenager’s also been studying the battle over taxes, the budget, and deficits from Bush I to now; a former religion of the GOP badly in need of a thesis or ninety-six.  There’s no high-minded consideration of the size of government here, this is a 1. a reward for not the rich, but the filthy rich, and 1a. a full-throated ‘fuck you’ to blue states and everything they like, chiefly education and the educated.

Let’s not forget some of the source of my renewed interest in blogging, the imminent demise of net neutrality; corollary: the certainty that neither of my two readers will pay their ISPs an extra $6.99 a month to read this website.  The non-Nazi part of the internet truly despises Republicans and Trump, so it’s ominous that he’s basically going to just end it.  When users have to start paying for Twitter and Facebook, these services are going to wither.  When ‘fake news’ can get shunted to the toll roads by administration-friendly ISPs, it becomes more and more of a prophetic lie/insult.  When poor people are functionally walled off from parts of the story, or from their means of telling their own stories (I would’ve uploaded that video of the cop shooting that innocent man, except it’s not on my plan), the promise of the internet will be dead and buried.

Not to say that old-school news is faring any better.  Monday, the toddler-in-chief called them to a meeting to berate them, not for the first time in person, never mind the hundreds of times in press conferences, rallies, and on Twitter.   The laws are clearing the way for the dreaded Sinclair to own more and more stations and funnel actual propaganda into the homes of people like my mom and dad.   And they’re working to engineer the conditions of the Time Warner/AT&T merger to take revenge on CNN, a network he hates as being mean to him (if only they were, and if only they were, sooner).

These are policies designed to protect the abusive.  To hurt the innocent.  To advantage the powerful and take from the average American.  These are policies to cement power and control information, to wage war on truth.

These are evil policies.  The Republicans are an evil party.  And America has an evil President.