I have deleted
my accounts
that were on
Twitter and Threads

and which
I clung to
despite
knowing better

Forgive me
they were unhealthy
so fashy
and so rage-baiting

(Find me at Bluesky and very occasionally Instagram.)

Let’s talk about stuff I liked in 2022. No, not the best of anything. Just stuff I liked. And not necessarily stuff that was released in 2022. Just stuff I found in 2022. OK? OK. Let’s go.

GAMES

Marvel’s Midnight Suns: I know a lot of folks bounced off the story/dialogue/relationship stuff—and bounced hard. But a.) the core combat is so frickin’ magnificent that it’s really easy to forgive. The idea of tactical card combat with Marvel characters sounds ridiculous; it really shouldn’t work. But oh my, it really really does. And b.) I actually enjoyed the hell out of the story/dialogue/relationship stuff. The core conceit of “superheroes at home” is really compelling to me; I think any superhero fiction is at its best when it’s looking not just at the suits but the people in them. Yeah, it can get a little goofy at times, and the game is clunky in some other significant ways. But man, it just hooked me with both pincers.

Marvel Snap: I’m not sure if I dug Midnight Suns more because of Snap, or Snap more because of Midnight Suns, or neither? Or both? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ But this one really has its claws in me, too. The speed and simplicity are just perfect for quick little diversions, but there’s a real depth of strategy there once you get familiar with the game. This is probably unsurprising to fans of other CCGs; I never was one of those. But a single moment in Snap made me finally get the whole idea of deck synergy in a way that no previous game I’d tried was able to. (It was playing Odin after White Tiger at a location that had just morphed to Bar Sinister, if you’re curious. Just delightful.)

Vampire Survivors: I lived through the 16-bit era, so retro-styled games often make me roll my eyes so hard I can see myself think. But this one showed up one day on Game Pass so I decided to give it a try. And I was this close to quitting and deleting within the first five minutes. (“Where the hell is the attack button?!”) Many dozens of hours later I think it’s one of the most fiendishly addictive and subtly deep games I’ve ever played. Really cleverly done and oh no it’s on iOS now.

Into the Breach: I heard so much good stuff about this game that I bought it when it came out on Switch pretty much sight-unseen. And I…didn’t like it. It just did nothing for me. I bounced off. Fast forward to 2022 and Netflix’s push into games, which included an iPad version available free for subscribers, and I gave it another shot. And something about the touch interface made all the difference in the world. I lost track of how many times I beat it before eventually having to delete it for space reasons.

And of course I played Tunic and Elden Ring and Immortality and Atari 50 and they’re all great. Believe the hype. (And there are also a few notable games I haven’t played enough of yet to form an opinion, like A Plague Tale: Requiem and Pentiment.) But these four, man. These four got me.

TELEVISION

Look, I do not watch a lot of TV. When I have downtime I tend to want to dive into a book instead of firing up even the most celebrated hot new series (a fact which will likely become very clear in the next section). But I did have some really great TV experiences last year. Like:

Midnight Mass: A dear friend of mine kept pushing me to watch this. He said he was convinced I’d love it, that it was practically made for me. I yeah-yeah-yeahed for months, because like I said, I just don’t really prioritize TV? And when some dumbshit website put a significant spoiler in a FRICKIN’ HEADLINE, I yeah-yeah-yeahed even harder. Then I ended up with a free weekend, when my wife and daughter were out of town, and decided to finally put it on and oh my sacred heart what an unbelievably great series. The writing, the performances, the cinematography—my god. Just unbelievable. I’d never seen any of Flanagan’s other stuff but now? I’ll watch anything the dude makes. I don’t think the show gave me nightmares per se but for weeks I’d wake up in the middle of the night and the first thing I’d think of was that scene. With Joe. You know the one. Oh, and the weekend that I ended up binging the whole series? It just occurred to me it was Easter weekend. I started the series on Good Friday. Might need to make it part of the yearly celebration now.

Severance: Yep. Yes. Uh-huh. It’s a real good show, Brent. They had better explain the frickin’ [redacted] though. My heart can’t take another Lost-scale disappointment. I re-upped Apple TV+ almost exclusively for the next season. Enough said, I think.

Sandman: Having pretty strongly disliked American Gods in spite of an absolute adoration for the book, I was skeptical of this one. I shouldn’t have been. It’s a spectacular, moving, gorgeous experience, and I’m so very happy it’s getting a second season. Now, maybe my appreciation stems in part from the fact that for this one I didn’t have anything other than the most cursory experience with the franchise. I’ll let you know once the series is done and I finally read the comics.

Jeopardy!: I’m not kidding about this. While temporarily re-subscribed to Hulu Live TV to watch the next entry, I happened to catch an episode live and remembered how much I’ve always loved this show. And when I discovered that it airs on CBS here, which means I can stream it every night on Paramount+, it instantly became appointment viewing. I’m not a huge trivia geek but I do know a little bit about a lot of things, which means I can feel like I’m holding my own in an imaginary matchup against most of the contestants who are actually, you know, on the show. But also, holy crap is Ken Jennings a great host! It was such a pleasant surprise to see how well he’s taken on the unenviable task of following Trebek. He’s as personable as Trebek was, just ever so slightly more cheeky, and very, very quick. (And speaking of Paramount+: To my absolute astonishment, it’s something we actually use very regularly. So that was another nice surprise in 2022.)

The Cleveland Guardians: I am not a huge baseball geek either, but I try to catch games when I can. Last year, our newly rebranded team made a real run at a spot in the World Series, and they were fun as hell to watch. Considering they were the youngest team in baseball that season, they’ve got me optimistic for a really spectacular season this year.

Curling: I am so happy when the Winter Olympics roll around again, because that means I get to watch as much curling as I can handle. I have an unironic love for this sport. I watched nearly every match last year. I adore it.

BOOKS

Wayward (Chuck Wendig): The weakest Wendig books I’ve read (and I’ve read them all except the Star Wars novels) are better than like 90 percent of what else is out there. And this is most assuredly not one of his weaker books. It is, in fact, a heart-wrenching (and occasionally gut-wrenching) followup to his masterpiece Wanderers, and while it may not quite—not quite—live up to its predecessor in every way, it’s just wonderful in its own right. This one follows the aftermath of a global pandemic, so as with the first book (which came out just before the fan started spinning up on our current shitshow) there’s a lot of resonance here. Which is to say, it’s not exactly escapist fiction? But it is nevertheless fantastic. The fact that he could figure out where to go from Wanderers at all is halfway to a miracle. The fact that he did such an amazing job of it is most of the rest of the way.

The Broken Room (Peter Clines): Clines may be the best science fiction/horror author you’ve never heard of. His book 14 got me hunting down everything he’s ever written, and I recommend it unreservedly to anyone who likes creepy otherworldly horror like Silent Hill or the whole Lovecraftian thing. So when this one hit it was an instant buy. And while 14 is still my favorite of his, this is a very, very close second. Picture, like, a buddy-cop thriller, but one cop is an insanely capable government operative in the Jason Bourne mold, and the other cop is a preteen girl with supernatural powers…and the first cop’s former partner’s ghost living in her head. Also lots of horror and weirdness and violence and man do I love this book. I’ve seen it described as “Jack Reacher meets Stranger Things” and while I have no direct experience with Jack Reacher that sounds pretty accurate. I think Clines admitted to plans for a sequel, which can’t come soon enough.

Project Hail Mary (Andy Weir): After loving The Martian, I was really excited for another book from Andy Weir. And then Artemis came out. I have no memory of that book. I read it! But I have no memory of it. I just read the summary on Amazon and I still have no memory of it. It is not a good book, is what I’m saying. So I was ready to write Weir off as a one-hit wonder. Hey, it happens, and that doesn’t change anything about the excellence of The Martian. So it was an absolute delight to read Project Hail Mary. The biggest criticism I can think of is that it’s perhaps a bit too similar to The Martian, and as criticisms go that’s…not exactly strong. It’s another fun-as-hell spacey romp with smart characters and Actual Science. If you liked The Martian (and especially if you were then as disappointed by Artemis as I was), you’ll love this book.

The Ash McKenna Series (Rob Hart): A fun twist on the hard-boiled detective genre, where the main character’s journey is just as important as the mysteries he solves—probably more so, actually. I plowed through all five of these in, like, a week.

Gideon the Ninth (Tamsyn Muir): Goth princess and her assassin frenemy go on adventures and discover lots of death stuff. OK, it’s a lot more than that, but it’s a fun and thought-provoking book and well worth reading if you like your fantasy a little weird and snarky. There are two more in this series, including one that released in 2022, but I didn’t like either of those nearly as much. Still, I can definitely recommend them—especially if you’re a fan of Gene Wolfe and like to have to figure everything out on your own.

The Craft Sequence (Max Gladstone): Smart and often funny fantasy where the main magic system is based on economics. It totally works, trust me. There are more in the series now than just these five, but this is a real great place to start.

The John Dies at the End Series (Jason Pargin, originally as David Wong): Starting with a caveat here: While the first book is good, it’s also very dated in a lot of ways. (Like, it mistakes “offensive” for “edgy” a lot.) The sequels just keep getting better, though: JDATE is followed by This Book is Full of Spiders: Seriously Dude, Don’t Touch It and What the Hell Did I Just Read, and while I haven’t yet had a chance to dive into the newest one—If This Book Exists, You’re in the Wrong Universe—it’s on my Kindle and I’m really looking forward to it. Just insane contemporary horror with an extremely twisted aesthetic and some memorable, awful, and memorably awful characters.

The Violence (Delilah S. Dawson): Another pandemic novel, one so tightly written and compulsively readable that I devoured it in something like two days and then immediately turned to:

The Shadow Series (also Delilah S. Dawson, as Lila Bowen): Gothic Western fantasy with a trans male lead. Fascinating and delightful. The first book is called Wake of Vultures. All four are great.

MUSIC

2022 was a depressingly sparse year for new music for me, but I’d be remiss in not mentioning these three fantastic releases:

Strange Mornings in the Garden (The Loyal Seas): Tanya Donnelly from Belly and Brian Sullivan of Dylan in the Movies (who, to be clear, I’d never heard of until just this moment) joined up to make this lovely collaboration. It’s a grownup summer album that hit at just the right time for me to fall deeply in love with it. The way their voices blend is just magical.

The Revisionist EP (Jawbox): This is two dramatic re-imaginings of tunes from Jawbox’s first album, Grippe, plus a Wire cover. The fact that one of those re-imaginings is of “Consolation Prize”—which on odd-numbered days is my absolute favorite track from that album—and yet I still actually like this one anyway is a testament to the magnificence of this band. I’m so very happy they’re touring and recording again and oh MAN do I hope they do some all-new tunes sometime soon.

Holidays 2022 (Belly): Yes, two of my three recommendations have Tanya Donnelly in them. Fight me. These two new, piano-focused versions of “Red” and “Seal My Fate” from 1995’s King are warm and haunting and gorgeous and I NEED MORE BELLY PLEASE.

MISCELLANEOUS

Beats Fit Pro: When they first came out, I absolutely jumped on a pair of AirPods Pro. My wife had a set of the OG AirPods and I liked the functionality, but active noise cancelation had become an absolute must for me. So when the Pros hit, it seemed like the perfect set for me. And I hated them. HAAAAAAaaaated them. I thought they sounded like crap, the ANC was next to worthless, and no matter what I did they refused to fit. (In their defense, the first two issues may have been caused by the third—but I simply could. not. make. them. fit.)

But now that I had a taste for it I really wanted to find a set of earbuds with good ANC to use while mowing our once-spacious lawn. I tried a few cheaper models, the best of which was an Aukey set for $60 (no longer available as far as I can tell) that actually had amazing sound and pretty decent ANC—except that it would only cancel higher-frequency noise, so it had almost no effect on the lawnmower. I ended up with a pair of Sony WF-1000XM3s which had great sound and at the time the best ANC available on earbuds (or at least earbuds outside of the absolute top of the range, I dunno). But those are bulky, the touch controls are stupidly finicky, and the app used to control them is a mess.

Then this year I happened to stumble across a review of the Beats Fit Pro. I knew Beats was now owned by Apple, but it didn’t occur to me that they might have the same seamless functionality as AirPods. But they do. And they fit. And they sound fantastic. And they have actual physical buttons. And the ANC is unreal. And they stay in snugly. And I love them so much. (And they’re regularly discounted fairly significantly—often well below the dramatically inferior AirPods Pro.) Now, a big caveat here is that I have not tried the newest generation of AirPods Pro. But I honestly can’t imagine they’re significantly better, if at all. These things are so great that I am always astonished how little I hear about them. I know Beats have a bad rap (HA HA SEE WHAT I DID THERE) among audiophiles but these are the real deal.

Razer Kishi: This is a controller built to straddle your phone and you can miss me with your outrage, Backbone fans. Review after review mentioned how the Kishi feels like an Xbox controller and the Backbone feels like the Switch Joycons and my giant hands made their own decision. I’m very happy they did; it genuinely does just feel like a regular controller and oh no Vampire Survivors is on iOS now.

Mickey and Minnie’s Runaway Railway: In February we spent a long weekend at Disney World to celebrate my parents-in-law’s 75th birthdays. It was a lovely time. It hadn’t been that long since we’d been there, but it had been decades since I’d been to Hollywood Studios and I was SO EXCITED to visit Galaxy’s Edge and especially ride Rise of the Resistance. And that is all amazing. But go ahead and revoke my geek card because Mickey and Minnie’s Runaway Railway is the ride that must not be missed if you’re at Hollywood Studios. The tech here is unreal; the ride is long and surprising; it’s just a fantastic experience all around, and it made me super-excited for Remy’s Ratatouille Adventure at EPCOT (another “trackless dark ride”—and brand new last year). But when our reservation time rolled around, it was closed for maintenance. Something to look forward to next time I suppose.

Hocking Hills for Thanksgiving: We ended up trying something new for Thanksgiving this year, heading to the Hocking Hills region in the southeast quadrant of Ohio—basically north Appalachia. The place is loaded with secluded cabins, lovely scenery, and beautiful parks with caves and waterfalls. It’s a lovely place to go to relax, just far enough from Cleveland to feel like a real vacation but close enough for a quick getaway. This year, it being Thanksgiving, we met my in-laws there, so we got a larger and nicer cabin than we normally would—and we barely left. It was just a delightful, relaxing, long weekend with good food and family, pool tournaments and holiday movies. A real highlight of the year for me.

DISHONORABLE MENTION

Billy Summers (Stephen King): I truly love a great deal of Stephen King’s work. I think his massive success causes people to overlook what an absolutely beautiful, poetic writer he can be. He does horror so well because he can make you feel it so well. Yeah, he’s terrible at endings, but when he’s at his best his work is just magnificent. Billy Summers is the opposite of King at his best.

This entire book is essentially about two people: Billy and Alice. Billy is former military sniper who’s became a reluctant hitman and aspiring author. Alice is a 21 year old woman who was violently, graphically sexually abused. That’s it. That’s her backstory. I kept waiting for King to deliver any kind of justification for introducing her like this—any kind of reason beyond mere shock value. It never came. The book is gross. Avoid it.

The Ol’ GE-Home Depot Tag Team Experience: One day our dishwasher stopped working. We liked the dishwasher. So we bought a newer, slightly nicer version of pretty much the same thing. But we made one fatal mistake: We bought it from Home Depot. When it arrived, the installers hauled out the old one and prepped to put in the new one. But when they opened the box, they discovered it was crushed. Crumpled. And to be clear, I’m not talking about the box—the box was fine. This was the dishwasher itself. Now, this was clearly not Home Depot’s doing, but rather GE’s. It sucked, but hey, things happen, and we’d only be without a dishwasher for another three or four days until they could send over a new one. When that one came, the installers came in, checked that the area was still prepped, and then unloaded the machine from the truck.

Then they called me outside.

This time the dishwasher itself wasn’t crushed—but the drain hose was. Feeling increasingly nervous about this purchase, I called GE to overnight a new hose. To their credit, they did. And to Home Depot’s credit, they sent out a team of installers quickly once the hose arrived.

Trouble was, this third team of installers had, quite clearly, NEVER INSTALLED A DISHWASHER BEFORE. So I got to hear the head guy call his boss three times—THREE TIMES—for advice on how to mount a dishwasher under granite countertops. Which means I got to hear his boss tell him THREE TIMES what to do. Which means it was VERY VERY OBVIOUS that he didn’t do it right. The first time we opened the door after they left, the entire thing tipped forward. Not great!

…But it ended up being moot, because this unit had a broken heating coil. Now, remember, while this was the third installation attempt, this was only the second machine—and it had obviously been packaged badly. So we were willing to give GE one more chance to get us a working machine. A week later, a new team of installers brought it in.

And refused to install it.

They claimed that they’re “not allowed” to install machines that are hard-wired electrically—only if they plug in. This was…a surprising revelation. They insisted. They left. I called Home Depot. I sat on hold. I spoke to a very very nice woman who did her absolute best to get this taken care of. But apparently, it is their policy not to install appliances that don’t plug in to a regular outlet. And the first three installers were…I dunno, visitors from another dimension? Regardless, our options were to REWIRE OUR HOUSE….or pay a different company to install it. My wife finally said, “Fuck it, let’s try to do it ourselves.” And we did. And it worked. And it was secure. And after three weeks of hand-washing we finally had a working dishwasher once again.

Long story short: OH GOD DON’T BUY APPLIANCES FROM HOME DEPOT.

And finally:

Elon Musk: lol what a tool

Hi. So, as many of you probably know, I come from a very large family. With such a large group, there is a correspondingly large diversity of sociopolitical opinions, approaches, positions, beliefs—I dunno what you want to call it, I am SO TIRED. Long story short, it became pretty clear to me pretty quickly that a significant percentage of my loved ones might not be fully on board with the whole treating-COVID-as-a-real-and-serious-thing… thing. So in a fit of optimism and a need to feel like I was doing SOMEthing about *gestures wildly*, I sent the following e-mail to all 43 people on my sister’s family reunion mailing list. I tried to write it as simply, clearly, and non-confrontationally as I could, and I know it could be better but I feel like I got pretty close to where I wanted to get. That being the case, I thought I’d share it here in case someone else might find it useful. Feel free to crib from it if you feel driven to write a similar e-mail. And stay safe out there.

Hello family!

Sorry for piggy-backing on the [reunion] email but I have something I want to share with everyone, because you’re my family and I love you. It’s this:

Covid is extremely serious. But vaccines are extremely helpful. Please get your shots. 

Look, I know there’s a lot of weird baggage around this issue. And before I go any further I want to clarify that the absurdly long message that follows is not, like, copy-pasted from somewhere else. This is all me — your brother, your brother-in-law, your cousin, your nephew, your uncle — and what I’ve learned by reading things by people whose job it is to know about this stuff. I am not one of those people! I don’t claim to know everything about these issues! (I will include sources so you can see where I’m getting my info from, though.) But among people who do actually know about this stuff, these things are very, very clear:

1. Covid is extremely serious. Early on in…all this…some folks tried to downplay the severity of the disease, saying it’s no worse than the flu (or worse, that it was a total hoax) and that the seriousness of the pandemic was being exaggerated for reasons I’m still not totally clear on. By now I hope we can all see that this approach was pretty misguided. As of this writing 4.7 million people have died of it. 

I know none of us finds it easy to wrap our heads around numbers that big, so to add some context: That’s a bit more than the population of all of Northeast Ohio. Imagine literally everyone in your hometown just…gone — empty houses, shops, schools, for miles in every direction. 

Of course, the flu is serious too! In the roughly 1.5 years since Covid hit, we could have averaged as many as 750,000 deaths from the flu. Still really bad! But Covid is six times worse. And that’s not taking into consideration “long Covid,” where some folks lucky enough to survive the initial onset of the disease continue to experience some of the symptoms for months afterward (and maybe even longer; it’s not fully understood yet). (Also, side note: I say “could have averaged” because this past flu season had dramatically fewer flu cases than average — like around one fiftieth —for reasons I’ll get to in a bit.)

So, yeah. Covid: It’s real bad! Which makes us really, really lucky that…

2. Vaccines are extremely effective. We currently have three Covid vaccines approved for use in the U.S.: Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson. The first two (those are the ones that require two doses) are currently shown to be at least 80 percent effective at preventing infection by Covid — even the more infectious “Delta variant” — and at least 85 percent effective at preventing getting sick from that infection. The single-dose J&J doesn’t seem quite as effective, but it still more than halves your chance of getting infected or getting sick. (All stats as of August 9, from here.) 

(For more about effectiveness, here’s a good primer from the WHO, but basically “80 percent effective” means that the infection will only sneak through the vaccine’s defenses in about one out of every five people — when considering the group of all vaccinated people. So that apparent effectiveness can vary pretty significantly depending on specific situations; like, places where people are in closer contact might see more people getting sick because they’re more likely to be exposed to more people who are already sick.) 

But the really great thing is that even if you get it after being vaccinated, you’re way less likely to get seriously ill from it than unvaccinated people. The effectiveness there gets into the high 90th percentile. (And the effectiveness against death from Covid is very close to 100 percent!) We hear about “breakthrough infections” a lot right now, and I personally know four vaccinated people who have tested positive. Of those four, though, one had no symptoms, two had what felt like bad colds, and one had to spend a day or two in bed. Compare that to a week of misery (at minimum) that Covid brings to unvaccinated people. If you ask me, that’s a pretty fair tradeoff, especially since…

3. Vaccines are extremely safe. I know this is a sticking point for some people. Here’s what we know: Aside from the kind of side effects you might get after a flu shot — slight fever, muscle aches, fatigue, etc. — there have been two issues that have shown any significant link to vaccines. First, a treatable blood-clotting issue called TTS showed up after some folks (mostly women) got the J&J vaccine, at the rate of no more than seven in a million. Three people who did not get the condition treated have died (page 26) — out of 8.73 million doses. The other thing is myocarditis that has shown up in a small number of (mostly minor-aged) recipients of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines. That’s a potentially bad issue if it lasts, but these cases seem to clear up quickly. 

So why might we have heard stories about other illnesses or deaths from the vaccines? That’s probably because of how the CDC collects data. They have a database called the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS, where anyone can submit details about conditions that arise after getting vaccinated. There’s two really important details in that previous sentence: 1. Anyone can contribute, and it’s not curated by the CDC. That is, it’s intended to be for collecting information, not for spreading information; the claims are evaluated and investigated, and when the scientists and statisticians see a legitimate connection, that then gets shared with the public. (That’s how we learned about TTS and myocarditis.) And 2. The system asks for any symptoms or events that happen after being vaccinated — but “after” doesn’t mean “caused by.” To use a kind of extreme example, if someone got hit by a car walking out of their vaccine appointment, this could technically be submitted to VAERS as a death following vaccination. 

So there’s some statistics for you. I think it’s also useful, though, to consider a more personal side of vaccinations. Like, every living president (and their wives) have been vaccinated; every governor has been vaccinated; at least 80 percent of Congress has been vaccinated… These are people for whom death or debilitating illness would be a very big problem for a very large number of people. But they, their families, their staffs or administrations — they’ve all agreed it’s safe enough. (Source here.) I feel like that says something.

All that said, though…

4. Vaccines can’t do everything. This has been another source of contention, so let’s talk about what vaccines can’t do. So, we know that vaccines are very effective at preventing infection. What we don’t know at this point is whether it’s possible to carry and transmit covid virus without being technically infected. What we do know is that Covid is a sneaky little bugger that doesn’t like to let you know you have it for a few days. That’s one of the big reasons we’ve been in this pandemic for so long: You can have Covid for several days — and be infectious! — without showing a single symptom. And since no vaccine is perfect, that means that it’s entirely possible to be vaccinated, get a Covid infection, and spread it around to everyone closest to you without having a clue. 

So how do we combat that? Well, first of all, it helps a lot if anyone who can be vaccinated, is vaccinated. Think of it like this (though I don’t think this math is perfect): If you have a 20-percent chance of getting infected while vaccinated, your vaccinated loved ones have a 20-percent-of-20-percent-chance of getting infected by you — that’s 4 percent. And their vaccinated loved ones who you don’t see have a 20-percent-of-20-percent-of-20-percent chance of getting infected by you. Thats less than one percent! 

But because nothing is perfect, and we can have Covid without knowing it, it’s also really important to wear a mask and keep your distance when around unvaccinated people. I’ve seen a meme saying something like “If vaccines work, why do we have to wear masks? If masks work, why do we need vaccines?” The truth is, prevention methods complement each other. One virologist I follow calls it the “Swiss cheese method”: Each slice of Swiss cheese has holes, but if you layer a few slices from different blocks on top of each other, the holes are unlikely to line up. The vaccines are a slice of Swiss with very few, very small holes. Even something as “holey” as a bandanna can block a lot of them. 

And if you worry that these methods don’t do anything, remember from like fifty-seven paragraphs ago when I mentioned the flu being practically nonexistent this past season? That’s because we were masking regularly, keeping our distance, and washing our hands. We have proof that taking these simple steps is effective!

To put it another way…

5. Your choices matter. We’re currently dealing with this more serious Delta variant of Covid because the virus has had time and opportunity to reproduce a lot, which means it’s had time and opportunity for mutations to appear that have made the current vaccines slightly less effective. A bad enough mutation could put us right back where we were early last year. The more chance the virus has to spread, the worse off we’re all likely to be.

But that means the flip side is true, too: Everything you do to make things harder for this virus helps everyone. Like, in the world. Getting vaccinated protects you, yes, but it protects your community too — and it also, even if just a tiny bit, helps protect literally everyone else on earth, by taking one potential host out of the pool, giving the virus one fewer opportunity to reproduce and potentially mutate. You’re especially helping those of us with kids who aren’t old enough to be vaccinated yet (and those with loved ones who are unable to be vaccinated for medical reasons). 

I would be so grateful if you could help Eleanor in this way. 

So that’s what I wanted to say. If you’ve read this far, I really appreciate it. I appreciate you taking my thoughts under consideration. If you find this helpful, please feel free to share it. If you have questions, I’d be happy to do my best to answer. (That’s why I’m sending this via BCC, so we don’t have a reply-all tsunami.) Please, whatever you do, stay safe. This pandemic will be over eventually. I’d really like to see you on the other side of it.

With love and optimism,
-joe

I’m no stranger to loss. My dad died in 2003, my mom in 2006. One of my four brothers passed in 2012, another in 2013. And one of my dearest friends offed himself like an idiot in 2012. 

But this past week has been hard. 

Last Tuesday, after a freakishly quick sequence of unlikely health events, my nephew Dan died at the age of 33. There was no time to prepare, no feeling of reluctant relief at a cessation of suffering. He was fine…then he was sick…then he was gone. He left behind a wife of four years, who moved from South Africa to be with him, to join our vast family. (They met in World of Warcraft—a fairy-tale relationship in many senses of the term.)

Today was his funeral, and I couldn’t be there. (Work obligations, you know; when you’re self-employed you can’t always get bereavement time.) But I went to visitation yesterday, hugged his parents and three siblings as hard as I could, and told them that it will get easier. In time. 

That’s a hard thing to believe in the moment. In the moment it feels like things can never get easier. And maybe, as my wife pointed out, maybe on some level you don’t want things to get easier. Maybe it feels like a small betrayal to let yourself heal. But like it or not, we heal. Things do get better. In time. 

With that in mind, I wanted to share a few things I’ve learned about that process, from my experience going through it—as well as from being raised in the family business of funeral service.

1. However you grieve is the right way to grieve.

This may be the most important thing I’ve learned from my experiences with death. Everyone grieves in different ways; some may get angry, some may get goofy, some may make inappropriate jokes, some may go silent. It takes different forms even in the same person, over time—and no, it doesn’t always follow a handy five-step process. So grieve in the way that you grieve, and don’t give yourself grief over it! The important thing is to let it happen; the only “wrong way to grieve” is to not grieve at all. Don’t suppress it, and by all that is holy don’t be embarrassed by it! Allow yourself to feel what you feel. 

And a corollary: Allow your loved ones to feel what they feel, too. There will be situations when your grieving process conflicts with someone else’s. Recognize that both are valid, and try to be respectful of each other: If it’s a problem for you, communicate that you don’t feel comfortable with that approach, and ideally you can find ways to do your own grieving out of each other’s way. But try not to judge. And try to forgive.

2. Take care of yourself.

In this country we have this odd relationship with death, where you’re supposed to be sad but not express your sadness too loudly. Where you’re supposed to put on a brave face but not experience any strain from doing so. Where you’re supposed to look out for every other person in the deceased’s life…except, sometimes, yourself. 

Fuck that. 

You’ve just suffered one of the most horrible, stressful experiences a person will ever have to experience. I hereby give you permission to be selfish for once. That can mean stepping out from the services whenever you feel like it; it can mean taking that vacation you had planned; it can mean unashamedly walking away if you don’t like what the person you’re talking to is saying about your loved one. You do you. It’s what your loved one would have wanted, isn’t it?

3. It will get easier.

I know it’s virtually impossible to picture right now, so I’m not going to spend a lot of time talking about it. But I just ask that you trust me: There will come a time—and no one knows when—that you discover that when you think of the person you’ve lost, the good memories have, improbably, started to outweigh the bad. Just a little. I wish I could tell you when that will happen. 

4. But it might get harder first. 

I hate to have to be the one to tell you, but I want you to be prepared. Right now, you’re probably in shock. And you’re definitely in an unusual life situation: You’re planning or participating in or have just participated in a funeral ceremony, which is weird and totally out of the norm. At some point, though, you have to try to go back to “normal” life. And that’s hard.

At first, you will feel that person’s absence always. You’ll feel it everywhere and in everything you do, like a missing tooth that you can’t stop touching. And that’s hard. You will carry this absence with you, like dark matter: invisible, defined only by negatives, and unbearably heavy. But in my experience, that’s not all that different from what you’ve already been doing.

No, in my experience, when things get hardest is when you’ve just started to heal. Your brain will have begun to block off the pain, and so eventually it’ll turn out that you don’t think about that person’s absence for minutes, even hours at a time. 

And then you remember. 

Please realize that grief doesn’t have an expiration date. You get to grieve however you want to grieve; you get to take care of yourself; you get to trust that it will get easier—for as long as it takes. Only you will know when you’ve healed enough to feel that you’re “done” grieving. Don’t let anyone tell you any different. And if you find yourself in this situation…

5. Ask for help.

By now you’ve probably lost track of the people who have told you “if there’s anything we can do…” That’s a great sentiment, but you’ve probably realized by now it’s not terribly helpful on the surface. People say that because they don’t know what specifically to offer to do, but if you’re like me you’re not about to just call someone up and say, “Hey, remember when you asked what you can do for me? Listen up.”

But what you need to realize is that people actually mean this. They genuinely want to help, they’re just not sure how. So try as hard as you can to put any awkwardness aside and take them up on it. Here are some phrases to get you started:

“Hey, so, it turns out I actually could use some help…”

“I didn’t think of it at the time, but would you be able to…?”

“Hey, I’m not quite on top of things yet, could you possibly do me a favor?”

I promise you that everyone who cares about you will be delighted to be able to help. 

6. Get mushy.

Finally, I want to formally give you permission to be as expressive to your surviving loved ones as your heart can stand. If there’s one good thing about death, it’s that it reminds us that life is finite—but love is not. So hug your loved ones tight, tell them how much they mean to you. Cherish the opportunity to love and be loved. And know that, no matter what happens, that love will always be there.

Always.

I saw that on Facebook, linking to an article called “What Elections Would Look Like WITHOUT Electoral College” [sic], from a site called The Federalist Papers Project. Oddly—one might even say suspiciously—that article doesn’t actually include that map, though it does include this one:

That’s a map of population density; the most populated counties are in blue. “Now, if the Electoral College did not exist, what would happen to the grey counties?” the author asks. “They would be forgotten, they would not matter. Only the most heavily populated areas would be courted for votes.”

The implication, of course, is that the Electoral College is in place to protect the gray/red counties (read: Real Americans) from the decisions made by those in the blue counties (read: Kale-Munching Freedom-Haters). And there’s really only one problem with this idea:

It’s complete, unadulterated, one-hundred-percent-free-range horseshit.

Of course, the reasons why it’s horseshit are many. First off, let’s deal with the subtext, especially the subtext of that incredibly misleading, Facebook-friendly teaser image. What the article is clearly implying is that the gray counties are actually red, which is to say conservative, while the blue counties are full of true-blue liberals. But unfortunately for the author, reality doesn’t quite agree. Here’s a map of how counties actually voted in 2016, per info available as of November 10:

(Longtime readers may recognize this as being similar to the one in my Purple Nation post from 2008, and it comes from the same source. I strongly encourage you to read that whole page if you want a sense of how the country actually votes.)

Looks an awful lot less red, doesn’t it? That’s because this map uses a gradient from blue to red rather than, say, marking a county that voted 50.001 percent Republican full red and a county that voted 50.001 percent Democrat as full blue. The result? Look at all that purple! And as I said eight years ago, purple is good:

It means we have people of differing political opinions living right next door to each other. When President-elect Obama takes office in January, he should have a mural of this exact map hung in the Oval Office—a constant reminder that he’s not working for one group or another, but for everyone.

(I’d suggest Mr. Trump do the same thing except I’m not certain he knows how to read maps.)

Second, let’s look at another of the Federalist author’s implications: that since there are more non-blue counties than there are blue ones, if the blue counties get their way it’s inherently unfair. The trouble with this idea is that elections aren’t decided by counties; they’re decided by people. And if there are more people in the blue counties than elsewhere, then them getting what they want is exactly fair.

In fact, this author’s defense of the Electoral College has the issue entirely backward. The Electoral College gives those gray-or-red counties an unfair advantage over the blue ones, and here’s why: Electoral College numbers are dictated by the number of senators and representatives assigned to a state. (Plus three for D.C.) A state’s number of representatives is determined by population, but—and this is the important bit—every state gets two senators no matter the population. Therefore, states with very low populations (which tend to be rural, which tend to vote conservative) get an edge in electoral votes in comparison to the population. This is why two of the last five elections have appointed Republican presidents in spite of many, many more people voting for the Democrat. (Secretary Clinton’s lead in the popular vote is up to about three times the population of Wyoming as of this writing.)

Population numbers and math can quantify this (see here). When we run the numbers we see that 35 states have a number of electoral votes that outweighs their population (36 if you count Tennessee’s razor’s edge). Twenty of those voted Republican in 2016, bringing in 121 electoral votes for Mr. Trump, or 132 counting Tennessee. The other 15 “outsized” states brought 90 electoral votes to Secretary Clinton.

In other words, to make a very long and mathy story short, it’s the less-populated parts of the country—those gray counties—that have the unfair edge, and if the Electoral College is supposed to prevent such things from happening it’s doing a very bad job.

Finally, let’s talk about the idea, bandied about often in conservative circles and alluded to in the Federalist article, that those blue counties don’t represent “real America.” (Because why else would it be a problem for a greater number of people to have a greater impact in the electoral process?) My response to this idea will be much more succinct, I promise you, because it can be summarized in three words:

Go fuck yourself.

Real America is the immigrant with the newly minted citizenship papers as much as it is the weathered plains-state farmer. Real America is the gristly New York punk rocker as much as it is the Mississippi preacher. Real America is the newly married urban lesbians just as much as it is the suburban soccer mom. Real America is the Clinton voter just as much as it is the Trump voter, because there’s no such thing as “real” America—”real” America is America, with all its glories and failures, and you don’t get to decide who is and isn’t a “real” American.

You don’t get to decide. What you do get to do is vote, like we all do. The problem is, this year more than one in a hundred of those votes, 1.5 million and counting out of about 135 million, were ignored thanks to the Electoral College.

One hopes that the red-map-waving Electoral College defenders would feel just as strongly about this issue if they ever found themselves on the other end of this equation. But I wouldn’t count on it.

Still mostly asleep, I squinted at the clock. 4:15. Ugh.

The sound was like a deep scraping. And then I realized it was coming from inside my ear.

Here’s the thing: In the summer we put a fan in our window; sometimes it sucks tiny flying bugs through the screen. Sometimes they get in your ear a little. Is not a big deal. But this one seemed deeper than usual—it was clearly pressing right against my eardrum. So I sighed and dragged myself out of bed to get a Q-Tip.

Yes, I know you’re not supposed to stick them in your ears. I’m careful.

So I did what I normally do in such situations: very gently and slowly work the Q-Tip into my ear until it touches the eardrum, just barely. Stickiness and such is usually enough to get anything out. And I did see a couple tiny specks. But the scraping sound continued.

I tried again, fluffing up the end of the Q-Tip and swirling it around a bit. The scraping sound continued.

I was starting to get a little worried, but I tried again. A little more fluffing, a little more swirling. The scraping sound continued.

I was getting desperate. I was thinking about jumping in the shower to get some water in there, but checked the medicine cabinet first, for saline. I found something even better: an alcohol-based solution used for drying out stubborn water after swimming or whatnot. So I squirted a few drops in there.

Immediately I felt liquid running out, which was weird as I didn’t think I’d put that much in there. I reached up quickly and brushed the liquid away.

This is when I discovered it wasn’t liquid at all. It was in fact the thing that had been making the scraping sound:

It was a spider.

A spider about half an inch in diameter, including legs. A pale brown spider. In my ear. Scraping at my ear drum.

I did not sleep any more after that. I’m not sure I’m going to.

Maybe ever.

If you’re on a Mac, I found this just wonderful method of saving pages as PDFs. First, download OmniWeb here. Open it and go to your page. Hit Cmd+Option+Shift+S. Pick a destination. And you’re done. I went into my System Prefs and remapped “Save As PDF…” (caps and dots necessary) to Command+Shift+S so I could do it easier with one hand, and just numbered the PDFs as I went along. I just plowed through 76 pages of my blog in about 15 minutes. Better still, it saves the whole page as a single-page PDF rather than inserting unnecessary page breaks. Credit for this discovery goes to term at the Ars forum.

On Windows or other OS? Grab Firefox and the Print Pages to PDF extension. This one might even be easier, because it can save all open tabs as PDFs. Alas, it’s not available on Mac.

Now I’m going to go see if there’s an easy way to batch-crop PDFs.

UPDATE: Thanks to dakwar on the MacRumors forum for this easy batch-cropping step-by-step. Works great. Only caveat: It requires Acrobat Pro. No Acrobat Pro? Sorry, you’re on your own.

Yesterday took a dramatic turn for the better when someone (we still don’t know who) made the decision to transfer us down the hall from our four-bed, semi-private “pod” to a two-bed room, where the other bed was vacant and exceptionally unlikely to be filled. So basically, we got what was essentially a private room. With a door. And a bathroom. And densely engineered, cushioned chairs that folded out into not-very-comfortable-but-at-least-mostly-horizontal beds.

El still refused to consider the crib, but she was much calmer overall and would sleep if being held. So we took turns walking her around, sitting down when she fell asleep for as long as she’d let us, and then crashing while the other did the same. It’s not a routine I’d recommend for fun, but it was a hell of a lot better than the night before.

Now she’s asleep upstairs, probably on the rocking chair in Mommy’s arms, who I most fervently hope is also asleep. She’s still in some pain, and very unhappy about the restraints she has to wear to prevent her from digging in her mouth, but overall just immeasurably better.

Me, I’ve got a dishwasher to unload. But I wanted to say thanks to you all for your thoughts and prayers and offers of help. The next few weeks are going to continue to be tough, so we may take you up on your offers. (Who wants to rake our leaves? Don’t all speak at once.) But for now we’re just ecstatic to be home.

Who am I kidding? “Ecstatic” doesn’t even cover it. I showered today after being awake and unwashed for most of the previous 52 hours. I may have cried a little.

Very frustrated with facilities and staff here. Even after half a night of El’s screaming, none of the nursing assistants made any effort to figure out what was going on; we had to push them repeatedly to revise pain meds. We also had to make a special request to get a chair that wasn’t hard wood even though they knew she was refusing to be in the crib, forcing us to hold her.

It’s also a ridiculous pain to just get off the floor, thanks to some administrative genius’s decision to make the elevator that leads right to this ward off limits to anyone but staff.

Just lots of short-sightedness going around, which of course is twice as irritating when we haven’t slept.

I’m sure at some point we’ll be getting out of here.

I just have no idea when.

This is, as you might imagine, rather stressful for us.

The surgery itself is no big deal. The only part of the palate that’s open is the soft palate, toward the back of her mouth, so it’s a pretty simple procedure as these things go. And the guy performing the surgery is the head of the plastic surgery department so, you know, he’s qualified.

But she’s our kid, you know? And right now she’s completely in someone else’s hands, in a situation that, while routine, still has room for mishap. She’s completely under, and has a breathing tube taking care of that respiration thing for her. I have a beeper in my pocket (a beeper!) but no other connection to her or what’s going on. So forgive me for being a little tense.

I need to go distract myself now, because I don’t have felt food to do it for me. Will update when I can.

Here’s me: “Well, I could write a blog post. Or I could sleep.”

Sorry about that. But really, there hasn’t been much to tell. The Small Human continues to develop as expected: She eats, she excretes, she radiates adorable cuteness. You know, her standard M.O.

The big change recently is that she’s starting to walk. Like, a lot. Here, look:

(Yeah, that’s Flash. Sorry. Blame Facebook.)

Aside from that, we went up to Chicago this past weekend to visit PawPaw and Gram, and introduce Eleanor to all her Chicago aunts, uncles, and cousins. She did remarkably well, in spite of fighting a cold and suffering the occasional moment of overstimulation. She even did pretty darn well through the six-hour car ride. As a result, you Rybickis who are coming out to the Clambake this weekend will get some Eleanor time.

There’s not much else to tell. She’s doing as well as we can expect. She’s an amazingly adaptable and good-tempered child. She’s still not terribly fond of going to sleep. She’s still not speaking much, though she does seem to be understanding more. She’s still wonderfully (and sometimes maddeningly) clingy—a good sign for attachment purposes. She’s still surprising and sweet and adorable. <shrug> What can you do?

[Reminder: If you’re not following me on Instagram or her on Facebook, you can see my Instagram feed online here: http://ink361.com/#/users/2929469/photos — by popular demand I try to post new pics of her there as often as I can.]

Until about two years later, when I was preparing to move to Chicago. In retrospect, it became clear that he was simply sad that a new friend was leaving town, but the way he chose to express this was…contentious. As personable and welcoming as he could be, he could also be the biggest, nastiest dickhead you’ve ever met. Following an evening when he verbally flayed me for my reasons for the move, I washed my hands of him.

It took about three years for me to realize that a lot of what he’d been saying was spot on. So I wrote him a letter, extended an olive branch, and we renewed our friendship, stronger than ever. Over the next decade or so, we remained extremely close. He was one of the very few Clevelanders to visit us in California. We played a lot of poker. We drank a lot of whiskey. I named him Best Man at my wedding. He gave a killer toast. He was in town for a chilly barbecue on the 4th of July in California when we discussed moving back to Cleveland. He was ecstatic.

But just a couple years later, things started to go downhill for him. He bought a house that ended up needing a lot of work. Then he lost his job just as the economy was imploding. As a teacher in a Catholic school, the jobs simply weren’t there. He successfully completed a Masters program, but it seemed to make no difference for the job prospects. He started drinking more. He fell out with one girlfriend, then another. He started to feel like the world was out to get him, I think, and when he developed a massive misunderstanding about how I and our other friends thought of him, he relinquished virtually all contact with us and would not be persuaded that he was still welcome.

After something like two years of unemployment, he lost his house and moved in with his parents. This was, it turned out, a good development. He told me he felt like he was helping them by being there. Though his relationship with them was never great, I think he felt like he was needed again. He was writing more, he said, and seemed to be using his improving relationship with his parents as fuel for reaching out to other estranged friends. Our relationship didn’t improve much, but it seemed that he was making an effort to be more understanding — or at least more communicative. (His maddeningly cryptic emails are the stuff of legend.) So all in all, it seemed that things were getting better. Slowly, but noticeably.

Then his father died.

And a few days later — sometime around when we were driving to Hong Kong to return from China — he went into the garage and put a gun to his head.

One of the things that makes suicide such a reprehensibly selfish act is that we have no way of knowing at this point what he was thinking. But I have my suspicions: I think that he probably felt, once his father died, that he was somehow poisonous to everyone he was around. This is the way he thought of himself, and I could imagine this loss simply being too much to handle. They say that people on antidepressants have a higher risk of suicide shortly after they start taking the pills; there’s no definite explanation, but the theory is that once they start feeling better, a bad day — or other setback — feels so much worse. It’s a perspective thing; part of depression is that you don’t realize how bad you really feel. So once you start to feel better, it becomes clearer how bad the bad times really are. And some people can’t handle that. I suspect something similar happened here.

That is, of course, no excuse. I don’t know that there is an excuse for suicide — not like this, not for a person with friends and family and others willing and able to help one’s situation. As I say, it’s reprehensible, and another reason why is that it leaves those around you with nothing but questions. Questions, and regret.

Could we have done more to prevent this? The real pisser is that yes, we could have. There is always more that could have been done. Those left behind can imagine so many ways things could have been different, ways they could have tried to help, each more outlandish than the last. Could we have forced him into rehab for alcoholism? Should we have invited him into our homes instead of allowing him to move in with his parents? Should we have kept in better contact, simply not let him pull away in spite of any abuse he may have dealt out in response?

But that’s the emotional response. Practically speaking, I really believe all his (former or current) friends did as much as they possibly could. You extend what help you can, to the best of your ability, and you hope it’s enough. In this case, it wasn’t, but that’s his problem, not ours. I’m sorry if that sounds callous, but suicide is a callous business.

One of the things I hate about this situation is that my feelings about Brian right now are all negative: anger, regret, frustration at not being able to tell him what a dumbass he was for even seriously thinking about it. And that colors my older memories, the better ones. And there are many, because when he was at his best he was a remarkable person.

And so, though he specifically requested no ceremony be made following his death (such a cruel blow to his family, who lost father and brother in a handful of days), these are the memories I plan to keep.

I remember Christmas parties. Brian was legendary for his Christmas parties, which gathered a huge and ever-changing group of smart, funny, talented individuals to eat great food, drink great drink, and sing and play Christmas songs. Friends, family, colleagues, former student, and passing acquaintances were all welcome. For many years it was one of the highlights of the season for me.

I remember poker games, when he would play with brutal recklessness and (usually) good humor. He taught me to play, and for years we gathered a weekly group in my parents’ basement for nights of cards that could last until the sun came up.

I remember sitting on the floor of his house, smoking long-stemmed pipes and debating religion, politics, love, and anything else that seemed worthy of debate. I suspect a great deal of wine and/or whiskey was consumed.

I remember him making bacon-infused mashed potatoes in the kitchen of our rental house in San Francisco. Yesterday I saw the recipe he wrote out for us, to attempt to recreate the majesty.

I remember near-weekly breakfasts at the diner near his house, where he would shamelessly flirt with the waitresses (no matter the age, ethnicity, or body type) and devour corned beef hash and eggs while we gossiped about news of the day. Later I would attempt to resume these get-togethers as a way of jump-starting our relationship, but they never took.

I remember sitting in on one of his classes and realizing that, yes, he really was a phenomenal teacher of religion. Though he felt his relationship with the divine had soured, he was in the seminary once upon a time, and retained a passion for religion, and the knowledge to back it up.

I remember sending letters back and forth from Chicago or San Francisco, often written on the insides of whiskey boxes, full of literary allusions and snippets of poetry.

I have a picture that I took at a going-away party before he went to teach English in China for a year. He’s standing in front of a bonfire, head-high staff in one hand, hand-rolled cigarette in the other, smirking self-deprecatingly at something one of the other partiers was saying.

That was Brian in a nutshell. And though right now I’m angry, frustrated, disappointed, and hurt, that’s the Brian i’ll remember.

However, there’s not really much to report since the last update. Sleeping is still a challenge, though her schedule does seem to be improving. Still, we’re operating at a pretty severe sleep deficit at this point so it’s hard to find the mental bandwidth to blog just now.

Two bits of news: Kim’s parents came in for a quick visit on her birthday, and Eleanor behaved pretty much just as we’d hope, by which I mean she was just a little shy with them and turned to us for encouragement. It’s a good sign for the progression of her attachment, and it might — might — mean we could get to have visitors sooner than we thought. But first we need to get her sleep worked out, which could be weeks yet.

The other news is that we had to take her to the doctor today for her first exam…as well as five vaccinations…and two blood draws. Kim was on restraint duty for the injections, which was traumatizing enough. (El’s reaction when the nurse came back into the room with stickers for her was absolutely priceless. Heart-wrenching, but priceless. She may have been attempting to project herself elsewhere in time and space.)

Of course, that meant I was on restraint duty for the blood draws. I’m not entirely positive but I’m pretty sure we were in that chair for about a month and a half. I got to be a human straitjacket: one arm holding one of hers next to her body and her body next to mine; that hand holding her elbow; the other hand holding her wrist; chin and jaw trying to keep her head from whipping around while she demonstrated her impressive lung capacity. I also got to see the phlebotomist digging around a little in search of her tiny veins.

In case you don’t have kids, let me be explicit: This Sucks. You know that she’s terrified and miserable but you also know it has to be done to keep her healthy. Your heart is breaking for her but you have to be strong both physically and mentally, for her and for yourself. And of course the thought is constantly running through your head that she is never going to forgive you for the trauma you’re associated with here.

Fortunately, she allowed each of us to soothe her after her respective experiences, and after a lot of hiccuping, some ice cream, and a nap in the car, she appeared to have either forgiven or forgotten. Or perhaps just failed to recognize our role in all of this and just blames it all on the doctors.

I’m OK with this.

Just a few pics today, for those of you not on Facebook or Instagram. We’ll be taking more once we’re more awake, no doubt.

Our daughter, our little bundle of boundless love, is doing her best to help Mama and Baba experience the hidden secrets of the universe via extreme sleep deprivation. The last couple of days, she’s gone to bed around 7:30, popped back up around 11 and 12, and then come fully awake about two, clapping and laughing and ready to play.

This is challenging.

The girl is the most adorable human I’ve ever met, but that counts for surprisingly little when you’re working from a two-plus-week sleep deficit and you’re worried you’ll fall asleep on your feet and drop her.

I have a profound respect for single parents. The only way we’re staying even remotely coherent is by trading off nighttime duties and spelling each other during the day just to get a few moments to recharge. I couldn’t imagine doing this without Kim’s help.

On the plus side, this jet lag-induced sleeplessness is going to make the normal late-night soothings that are sure to come feel so much easier. So we have that going for us.

And fortunately the rest of this experience is so positive that it’s easy to forget the nighttime misery. Well, most of the time. In all seriousness, this kid is a joy and we continue to feel so fortunate that we found each other. But boy are we looking forward to something resembling a full night’s sleep.

But now that we are home, I figured I’d open it back up for general viewing. Feel free to follow along with our adventures.

I’d write more but my body still thinks it’s five in the morning. I’ll have more coherent thoughts soon…ish.

I have no idea what I’m saying.

Whilst I try to keep her entertained and me caffeinated, please enjoy this photo, taken mere seconds after Eleanor officially became a U.S. citizen.

We are fried.

Eleanor has been amazing but she’s starting to lose it now. We’ll update more once we get our brains back together, but I just wanted to say we made it and we’re well and we’re grateful for all your support.

Love, -joe and Kim and Eleanor

But then, on the other hand, we are now traveling with Baroness Squirmy Von Squirmington (of the Easthampton Von Squirmingtons) so who knows?

Will try to update from Newark if there’s time!

No time or access for long updates today. Leaving at 5:30 fir the three-hour drive to Hong Kong, then to Newark, then HOME.

Will try to update when we get home, if brain still works. That is, after all, more than 24 hours from now.

Love to all,
-joe & Kim

The most memorable part of the day for me was the electronics mall. Our guide, myself, and a couple other guys headed out to see if we could score some cheap geek stuff. And oh, did we ever. The electronics mall nearby is five floors of tiny stalls shoehorned together, selling anything having to do with anything that uses a battery or has a screen. In two hours we saw about seventy-five percent of one floor — and according to our guide this was one of the smaller such malls in town. My compatriots bought iPhone cases ($1.20ish), “Sony” earbuds (about $4), Bluetooth keyboards (about $12) and a zoom lens for an iPad (maybe $15).

Me, I got a nice webcam, a retro phone handset for my iPhone, and two retractable travel cables with iPhone, Kindle, and mini-USB connectors. Total cost: 85 Yuan — about thirteen dollars.

Afterward, my ladies and I went out for more souvenirs and stumbled on a shop we hadn’t seen yet, one with more authentic stuff than most of the tchotchke stands on the island. Kim was very excited to find a handmade crocheted doll for Eleanor (have you ever tried to find an Asian doll in Cleveland?) and we got some other fun stuff for L’s room and such.

(I have to say, though, my favorite souvenir is one we found yesterday: a shelf lamp in the shape of a beautiful book, with a woodcut on the front that the light shines softly through. It opens and closes like a book to give off more or less light. It’s very cool. It’s also a beautiful red color — the color of good fortune in China — and features lovely, subtle, stylized rabbits in the woodcut, which is appropriate for Eleanor since she was born in the year of the Rabbit.)

And speaking of Eleanor: she’s recently learned that she can walk if we’re holding her hands. This is very exciting for her. Very. Exciting. In fact, it’s so exciting that it’s pretty much the only thing she wants to do now. Food, play, bottles — who needs them? She’s got two feet and knows how to use them.

Fortunately the hallways in the hotel are long enough to wear her out pretty quickly. Unfortunately, her height is such that they wear our backs out pretty quickly too. We walk together when we can, each of us holding a hand, but she seems to prefer just one driver.

When we simply can’t handle the walk, we sit across from each other on the floor and let her plunge headlong from one to the other. She would do this for hours if we let her.

Meanwhile, we find ourself thinking a lot about going home. This has been a wonderful trip, full of happiness and laughter and adventures. We will look back fondly and look forward to returning. But, you know, it’s time to go home. We have one day of relaxation, then one very long day of travel. We’re sad to leave, but home can’t come soon enough.

With this in mind, we assembled the following list of things we plan to never take for granted again:

• Air conditioning
• Humidity below ninety-eight percent
• Ice in drinks
• Being in similar time zones to family and friends
• Walking or driving without fearing for one’s life
• Diners
• Couches with cushions
• Being understood
• Non-negotiable pricing
• Drinkable water
• The ability to eat raw produce
• Uncensored internet
• Blue sky
• Sleep
• Coffee
• Closets and dressers
• Sturdy cribs
• Recognizable food products
• Real bacon
• Appliances, especially dishwashers
• Western pharmacies
• Our cats
• Open space
• Home cooked meals
• The predictability of everything around us

At the same time, we already know there are many things we’ll miss a lot. Such as:

• Almost everything about Chongqing
• Never having to clean our room
• Not even momentarily thinking about work
• Ridiculously cheap electronics
• Walking everywhere
• Bao for breakfast
• The surprised giggles when we say “thank you” in Mandarin
• The gorgeous Asian architecture
• The supermarkets
• Creative transportation by the locals
• Awesome t-shirts
• The beautiful faces of the children
• Red and gold lanterns
• The newness of everything around us

In the balance, I think home wins. But we’ll be back.

And now, some random photos from the last day or two:

Today, we have have Eleanor for one week…our weekaversary?

This morning we went to our embassy appointment. All the paperwork has been submitted for Eleanor’s visa. Picking up the visa is the final step before we go home. That should happen tomorrow at 1530. We head back home Wednesday morning!

We both have mixed emotions about returning home. This has been an amazing trip. It’s one we’ll never forget. As I said in my last blog post, China is amazing. We’ve seen things that I never dreamt of seeing, but we’ve also slept in strange beds and eaten unusual food for the last two weeks. I am craving fresh veggies and the smell of my own sheets. I am also craving fabric softener and clothing out of a dryer (they don’t use either here). I will be happy to select my clothes out of a closet rather than a suit case.

Joe and I are already planning a trip back to China. In my version, we head back in a couple of years to adopt another baby. In Joe’s version, we come back in 16 years or so for Eleanor’s heritage trip. Either way, we are coming back.

Eleanor is doing great! She eats like a champ and is pretty happy overall. She seems to only get crabby right before sleep times and meal times. She’s babbling more now that she’s getting used to us and she happily shrieks fairly frequently. I am looking forward to getting home and getting her used to some sort of schedule. This has been hard on her, but she is showing that she is an adventurous and curious little girl.

As we say many times every day, we are so lucky.

We assume no responsibility for any effects that this magnitude of cuteness may have on you, your mental status, the local wildlife, or your fertility.

You have been warned.

Furthermore, I took a look at our hot water dispenser and discovered a crimp in the supply line. It now seems to be working, or at least mostly working.

The bedding is still damp, even after we asked for new linens last night, but our guide says that’s just the environment, so we can deal. And the food is a dramatic step down from either of our two previous hotels, but it is nourishing and plentiful.

As for the exam, it was reasonably quick and painless. L handled the poking and prodding wonderfully, and only cried when the doctor busted out the tongue depressor, which thankfully was the final test. I think it helped that MaMa is a nurse and knew what to do to keep her still so that insertions into ears and other orifices could be as quick as possible. It also helped that she didn’t need a TB test — so no needles.

I’m pleased that the doctors who examined her seemed to be observing sterile procedure, unlike the doc we saw walking the halls in shorts, sandals, a lab coat, and nothing else.

Guangzhou is funny. This is where the US Embassy is, which means that all US couples adopting from China need to pass through here. As a result: so many white people! It’s become a bit jarring to hear native English speakers after a 10 days of Mandarin or broken English. I feel like we’ll suffer culture shock once we get home. I know blue sky is going to seem magical.

And now, a few more pictures. Here’s a view from the third floor courtyard in our hotel:

Here’s the reverse view. See the tiny sliver of a corner of the arch right above the column? That’s our room. The only window in our room, in fact.

And here is our baobei (“precious,” or more accurately, “The Preciousss”) after her medical exam.

Incidentally, speaking of medical issues, we’re astonished by how quickly Eleanor has healed from the heat rash and random scrapes she had from the orphanage. Do all kids heal crazy fast? Because we’re pretty sure she’s Wolverine.

The day started well enough; Eleanor had a rough night last night but woke in a fairly good mood. We hung around the hotel and had Happy Family Ball time (look it up) (wait, probably better not to) until our guide arrived with Eleanor’s passport, to take us to the airport at 2:00.

At least, that was the plan.

Turns out, this morning someone carried out a huge bank heist in Chingqing, and much of the city was blocked off or drastically congested due to police searches. As a result, our guide wasn’t able to get to the adoption center to pick up the passport. Not a big deal, since they can just courier it over, and we had another form of ID for her that was acceptable for domestic travel. But it added just a little additional stress to the already stressful prospect of taking our new child on her first air trip.

The good news is that she handled it like a champ, flirting with everyone in view and not fussing at all during takeoff and landing. (We theorized that her cleft palate allows her sinuses to equalize pressure instantly. Unexpected bonus!) She had a couple very minor and brief meltdowns, but aside from incessant squirming managed the flight very well, even when the 1.5-hour flight turned into a 2-hour flight due to a delay on the tarmac.

Still, it was of course a relief to finally exit the plane for our final stop before heading home. We were thrilled to see our bag come out early on the carousel, knowing we could get back to the hotel in time to get her to a reasonable bedtime.

Trouble is, that was “bag,” singular. And we checked two. And once everyone else on our flight had left and our second bag hadn’t appeared it became clear something wasn’t quite right. a very nice baggage host approached us and asked if there was a problem. We gave him the number of the absent bag, and he peeked behind the curtain to see if it just hadn’t made it onto the conveyor. That gave us a momentary hope, which was soon dashed when he informed us we’d have to go to the baggage office and fill out a form.

Have you ever lost a bag? Have you ever lost a bag in a city where you speak only the barest minimum of the language, and the locals speak only slightly better English?

It’s a blast.

After about half an hour of very careful negotiation, we submitted our form, crossed our fingers, and headed out to find our ride. A very nice gentleman who didn’t speak a lick of English was holding a sign for us, escorted us to a large, rickety, manual transmission Vanagon-like transport, and squeaked us across the city to our hotel.

The Victory Hotel is one of a handful of hotels on Shamian island, a delightful little French Colonial area where the US Embassy used to be located. The island — as best as we could see in the dark — seems lovely, draped with hanging moss, ornate metalwork, and a French vibe. We had high hopes for the hotel.

Let me back up a moment. I haven’t said much about the hotel we were staying at in Chongqing. It was a Le Méridien, a high-end Starwood property, based in a bustling shopping district. It was stylish, well-appointed, and supremely comfortable. Honestly, it was one of the best hotels I’ve ever stayed at, and I’ve done a lot of traveling for business. Everyone seemed to know our names and how long we were staying. Everyone offered to fetch things for us, even when we weren’t with Eleanor. When we pressed the button for the elevator, a light lit up to show us which door to wait at. It’s was that kind of place.

The Victory? The lobby smells like a wet dishrag. There is apparently a new building and an old building; I sincerely hope we’re in the old building; otherwise I fear for the health of anyone staying there. We got in late enough that we just wanted to order room service. Kim’s tuna croissant looked like dog food — used dog food. The beef brisket in my noodles was unexpectedly…crunchy. Our bed is ominously damp.

I wish I were exaggerating. The best part: it’s about five dollars cheaper a night than the Le Méridien.

There are upsides to this location, fortunately: for one, there are faucets for purified (oh god I hope) drinking water, which means we no longer have to brush our teeth with bottled water, which has been a bit of an annoyance. There’s also a fascinating contraption called a Rabbit which dispenses hot and cold purified water, eliminating the need for the electric kettle. [UPDATE: When it’s working. Which it isn’t. Which we just discovered when L woke up in desperate need of a bottle. Awesome!]  And the room is a suite, which should make rooming with The Small Human a little easier. And, um. Free Internet?

Hey, at least it’s only for five days.

In all seriousness, we’re here and we’re healthy and we have little to complain about. I’m sure everything will seem better, and drier, in the morning. Meanwhile, we made it here with the only really important piece of baggage we have, now.

Anyway, I wish I’d thought to try what you see in video earlier, but by the time I’d thought of it she was already wearing herself out. Still, if you turn up your sound you can hear her — and though you’ll have to take my word for it, I assure you that she really is trying to sing. She only has vocalized like this when music she likes is playing loud enough for her to hear.

Today we head for Guangzhou, our last stop in China, where we’ll rejoin our group, have Eleanor’s medical tests, visit the US embassy for her papers, and do some more sightseeing. I sure hope all the other families are doing as well as we are. Otherwise they’re likely to hate us with a white-hot fury.

On the other hand, L had a hard time last night, so maybe the joke will be on us.

Seriously, why don’t these things come with instruction manuals?