You Be Illin'

The Wolf woke up sick, today. Inexplicably. He was fine--excellent even--yesterday. Today, he had a fever of 103F for a good hunk of the day. We dosed him with Tylenol and tried to keep him hydrated. A good hunk of his calories today were chocolate milk.

By mid-morning, we thought we had him under control enough to go to breakfast. We headed to one of our favorite brunch spots, the Busboys & Poets location in Hyattsville. It was a somewhat damp but nice morning and we opted to sit outside. The hostess put us as close to the main road as we could get and not actually be in the road. We were a little puzzled by this, but hell.

We go to this spot about once a month, but it has been less often of late. The last few outings haven't been stellar. There weren't any screaming problems, just rough edges. A muffin was stale, they didn't bring the side order of eggs, they forgot to refill coffee.

Today wasn't terribly busy. It was busy, just not terribly. We sat and entertained the kid, commented on the fumes and noise from the road, people-watched. And waited. About 25 minutes later, we hadn't seen a server within about 50 feet of our table and no one had come to get our drinks order or anything. So we left. We walked down to Franklin's, where we were seated immediately and the friendly people took our order. They don't do breakfast, but it was already almost noon, so we just opted for light lunch options.

Unfortunately, by this time the Wolf was beyond his comfort level, his fever was creeping back up, and Everything Was Wrong, so we had to box all the food up and head home. It could have been worse, but it really kind of ruined the day.

The kid was up and down all day, and we just put him to bed without a whimper--he was just exhausted. We spent most of the day watching TV and snacking on whatever was around.

It's rough when the Wolf is sick, and he's been sick a lot. He was born early and has a sensitive immune system. His lungs aren't super strong because they weren't as developed as they could have been when he had to start using them. He just goes from hero to zero really really fast. It's hard to watch. All his hilarious vibrant sweetness becomes a long, sour, flat note on a viola, dragged out for hours.

He's also had a share of injuries this week. He headbutted my knee when trying to climb over the dog the other night. He faceplanted on the stairs of a slide at the park and scraped up his chin. Some kid at daycare got into a tantrum and clawed up his pretty face. Throw in his general paperwhite paleness and he looks like a hockey bruiser coming in after a particularly long bender.

Poor Wolfie. At least chicks still dig scars, amirite?

Debtor's Prison (a high-pitched whine)

Every Tuesday, I get together with three of my best friends to play Diablo III. One of them is in Ohio, one splits his time between State College, PA and somewhere near Ann Arbor, MI, and the third one lives about six miles from me and works about a mile from my building. I went to law school with two of them, I was in two of their weddings and attended the third's (on a day where I thought I was supposed to take the MPRE but got the dates mixed up and Pam, O Pam, you dragged me through the brambles over that one). Two of them were in my wedding. We're great friends and we get together on Google Hangouts every Tuesday to talk while we play a video game.

While we're all logging in and checking our characters' inventories and tweaking our builds, we talk about stuff. It's one of the few times I get to vent openly about whatever bothers me.

The thing that upsets me the most, of late, is how, with all this education and resources, my wife and I were living paycheck to paycheck for the last few years up until about February. Between moving and changing jobs and hustling to find the right place to stand and not get terrible sunburn, we have had to burn our savings, max out credit cards, and defer student loan payments basically forever.

In all this, we have been kind of screwed by the bank that gave us loans on houses in Akron that we couldn't really afford way back when, just like everyone else who got loans back then, and our credit has been crushed. Every little thing puts us further and further away from actually settling down and planning for the future. But we've finally gotten over the hump and squeezed a few of our assets to get some liquidity and pay down some debts. Finally, about eight years after law school. Even then, it's not great--we've managed to dedicate all of our free money for things that are ultimately going to tank our finances anyway, but it won't be as bad as it could have been. More on that later.

We're not alone in this. Many of my friends are just sort of coasting or crawling along, doing everything they can to secure future paychecks and maintain some level of happiness along side that goal.  The painful part is when we actually talk about the details. On paper, Carly and I make a lot of money. We aren't eligible for a lot of tax credits that regular people are. Based on our income, we're in the top 5% of U.S. households. It doesn't feel like it. If you look at our student loan debt (about three times the rent I paid in law school) and rent (more per month than my first car cost) and other expenses and it puts us somewhere closer to the median. And still, no summer homes or white picket fences in our future for a while.

Now I feel like I'm whining. But it's somewhat justified. I'm most concerned with how the Wolf is going to make it through his first decade or two. In the last few years, we've moved four times. We're looking at doing it again in a year and a half. We want our kid (maybe another one by then, who knows?) to have some kind of stable physical home. Because of that, I have set my career aspirations on a slightly different path and I'm pretty sure we'll never move back to the NYC area. 

We're going to live in the Great Swamp forever, I think. Carly really loves her job. Mine's good enough--I have opportunities on the horizon in DC. I don't want to cause another move again for a long time. I want to buy a house. I am considering changing my phone number to a DMV area code.

Before all that, we need to bail out of two houses in Akron and pay down about $10,000 in credit debt. It's do-able. Hopefully this year. We have a realtor and a plan.

But hell. Maryland still has goofy blue laws.

FOMO Part 2: The Reply All Edition

It has been over six months since I quit Facebook and pretty much all social media except Instagram (which isn't super social) and Google+ (which is nothing at all, in its entirety). And in the last month or so, I have started to feel the pull again. I've started to feel it because of a podcast called Reply All.

This year, I made a couple of resolutions. My first one was to do something creatively significant. Specifically, "to create something of merit." Carly considered that a reason to procreate a second time. I mean that I want to write or paint something that I'm proud of. Another genetically engineered semi-clone would be OK, too, I guess.

The second, easier resolution was to read at least one book a month for fun. My first four included:

• Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
• Shadow Divers by Robert Kurson
• Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer
• Dreadnought by Cherie Priest

I was ahead of schedule for April, so I decided to take the rest of the month to catch up on podcasts. I like podcasts. My favorites include, but are not limited to:

• Love & Radio
• Planet Money
• Welcome to Nightvale
• Radiolab
• Criminal
• and many more (This American Life, Too Much Information, Serial, The Moth, The Truth, FilmSack, Invisibilia, The Soundtrack Series, and so on and so on and so on).

I made Carly download Player FM (these are all so linkworthy) to listen to some of these wonderful things. She, of course, discovered a few more. One of them was Reply All.

The first thing I noticed about the podcast was that all of their episodes were labeled "Explicit Content" on the app. Considering the authors (many of them contributors to other radio shows related to podcasts I listen to), I was somewhat surprised. So I gave it a whirl.

The podcast is ostensibly "about the internet." The hosts are proud of their geekdom and try to make sure that we all get a chance to see inside the weird world they live in. The main part of the show, though, is trying to explain and give context to this bizarre electronic universe that occupies so much of our lives. To accomplish their goals, they heartily utilize the tools of the internet to tell a broader tale--mailing lists, Facebook, Twitter. They respond to their social media commentors during subsequent shows. They have this huge conversation--this huge, interesting conversation--going on, and I only hear a bit of it.

To geek out a bit, it's like reading the Marvel comics Civil War crossover back in the day... but not any of the related sub-parts of the story in the various ongoing series. You only get the highlights, the bold plot changes. You don't see the fine-grained bits of the story.

And I feel like I'm missing out.

They make me want to start a Twitter account again. If only to follow food trucks (to figure out when they'll be near my workplace) and occasionally enter into Reply All contests.

Rotten bastards, those Reply All guys.