My Favorite Things This Week #108

The Friday High 5: Parenting Is a Long, Slow Lesson in Learning to Say Good-Bye

Disney+

My daughter was very attached when she was little. To the point that we expected a major scene the first day of preschool—clutching legs, gnashing teeth, tearing of garments. Biblical level emotions. Instead, she just calmly walked in the door. Didn’t even say goodbye.

My wife and I stood there looking at each other. We’d game planned for a lot of scenarios but had never considered this possibility. That she was ready to leave the fold—eager, even—and leave us behind.

I was reminded of this after we recently accompanied her on a college tour. College is the first real goodbye. From then on home becomes a way station, a place to rest before making the next push into adulthood.

The permanence of home has always been fleeting. You lose sight of it in the daily minutia of diapers and practices and homework. This truth takes on sharper features once your kids being gone is the rule, not the exception.

People who’ve walked this path before will tell you to enjoy it while it lasts, because it does go fast and once it’s gone, it’s gone forever. But it’s a truth you can’t truly appreciate until you’re forced to grapple with it yourself. When you and your kids are young, time is the one thing you have too much of; our son had colic as a newborn and those nights were so long I swear time moved backwards. Everything is in front of you. You can’t imagine life any other way because it’s literally all you know.

Like the Matrix, one can’t be told what it’s like on the other side. You have to experience it yourself.

So why am I writing this, then, if anything I say can’t be fully absorbed by those with younger kids? Honestly, I’m doing it for myself, just like everything else I write. The fact that people seem to dig it is just a bonus.

My son attends college less than an hour away. He returns home every month or two. When he’s home, it’s like nothing has changed. And when he leaves, the heartache returns. Not as bad as the first time, but still surprisingly powerful. It’s a little death. Now I know why my parents stand in the driveway waving when we leave. You just want to hold on a few seconds longer. Even if I’m in my 40s and haven’t lived there in over 20 years. It never gets easier.

I’ve realized that parenting is a long series of good-byes, as they grow up and move on and leave you behind. It’s good and natural and right, but that don’t mean it doesn’t hurt.

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Every Friday I share 5 things I enjoyed this week. Also, high fives are inherently cool, and I think we can all agree Friday is the bestest day. Hence the Friday High 5. 🙏🏻

D&D Birthday Party

I recently celebrated another trip around the sun, and as is tradition, assembled a posse of ne'er-do-wells and rogues to mark the occasion. I don’t know how you adult, but let me tell you something, brother—few things are more fun than throwing the kind of birthday party you would’ve enjoyed when you were 10. We need to normalize adult birthday parties. Why do kids get all the fun?

We’ve been doing this for about 10 years. And it really is the kind of party I would’ve loved as a kid, a buffet of pizza, Doritos, Starburst, Mountain Dew, and chocolate cake that we enjoy while I run my friends through the twisted halls of my imagination.

This year the group played inner city ruffians trying to survive in the capital of a newly-fallen empire. It’s all part of an ongoing interwoven narrative almost a decade in the making. The original characters have become major figures in the world—barons and popes and kings—which has made the setting come alive in a way no other game ever has.

What started in my basement has migrated to two of my friends, who also celebrate getting older by rolling funny-shaped dice. Whether you consider that an infection or a movement is really a matter of perspective.

Full Swing: Season 3

I’m a huge fan of this Netflix series about professional golfers. Which is weird because while I like golfing, I’m not someone who spends weekends watching golf on TV. I actually like watching golf—there’s something meditative and relaxing about it—just not enough to invest an entire afternoon. Though I sometimes picture myself watching golf in retirement.

I’ve been trying to put my finger on exactly what it is about this series. There’s an element of the voyeur, of seeing what life is like for the young and rich. I keep making comparisons to the Kardashians. Not a comfortable thought. But there’s definitely an element of looking through the window into a life of privilege I’ll never understand. The other Netflix sports documentary shows—Quarterback and Receiver—have that too, but here it feels ramped up. Maybe because golf is a country club sport? I don’t know.

But yeah—much as it pains me to admit, I love the reality TV of it. Getting a glimpse of who these guys are, where they live, what their significant other situation is (9 times out of 10, a thin blonde), if they have a fenced-in basketball court with plexiglass backboards (the ultimate sign of wealth when I was growing up). There’s also something relatable about a guy chilling in a multi-million dollar house while wearing basketball shorts.

I might not be wealthy but I can dress the part.

The biggest disappointment so far: Netflix was there when Scottie Scheffler got arrested—he actually asks the camera crew for help!—but we don’t really learn anything new about what happened.

In My Time of Dying

Sebastian Junger—author of several books, including The Perfect Storm—had a near-death experience a few years ago. He wrote about it as a rational atheist and the son of a scientist. It’s a short book, roughly 140 pages. I finished it in 2 days.

In My Time of Dying is a blend of memoir, history, science, and philosophy. It’s a thoughtful book, willing to consider death through every lens available to us. Junger presents no final conclusions to the great mystery, other than that life is precious. It’s still a trip worth taking. Though he takes some crazy-ass tangents to get there, like a side trip where he plays 6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon Erwin Schrödinger (e.g. the physicist/cat murderer) to show how his family knew the guy.

Here’s a handful of quotes I highlighted.

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Context: Junger and a companion decide not to accompany desert nomads deeper into the Sahara, and instead return to their normal lives.

We leave one version of ourselves behind and pick up where we'd left off with the old versions, our more courageous doubles now forever condemned to our imaginations and what might have been.

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The price of getting to love somebody is having to lose them. The price of getting to live is having to die.

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If the ultimate proof of God is existence itself—which many claim to be the case—then a true state of grace may mean dwelling so fully and completely in her present moment that you are still reading your books and singing your songs when the guards come for you at dawn. The past and the future have no tangible reality in our universe; God's creation exists moment by moment or not at all, and our only chance at immortality might lie in experiencing each of those moments as the stunning extravagance they actually arc. But how is that even possible?

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Context: Junger considering the science behind the Big Bang, and therefore also life, a lot of which frankly went over my head. I did a lot of skimming. But this bit grabbed me.

There are more than thirty such parameters that must have almost the precise values that they do in order to permit a universe with life. The odds of that happening have been calculated to be one to the negative 230— that is to say, one chance in a number that has 229 zeros after it. Randomly finding a specific grain of sand on the first try among all the grains on earth would be millions and millions of times more likely than the universe existing. And yet here we are.

30 for 30: The Fab Five

I was looking for something to watch Monday while riding our stationary bike. Full Swing wasn’t out until Tuesday, but its mere proximity had me in a sports documentary sorta mind. I briefly considered rewatching The Last Dance—the mini-series about Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls—for what would be the 4th or 5th time. I know, I know. The first step is acknowledging you have a problem.

I have been a Michigan Wolverines fan my entire life. The Fab Five era is the pinnacle of my fandom. That’s a strange admission considering they never won a championship, and I’ve seen the football team win two titles. The Fab Five just hit different. They were fresh and exciting. They changed the game.

I love watching football but have never played it. Basketball is a different story. I lived basketball for a good stretch of my life. Basketball kept me sane when we moved from Metro Detroit to a tiny Northern Michigan town. My brother and I practically lived at the community center. I planned my days around basketball. I cut class to play basketball.

There’s nothing earth-shattering in this documentary, nothing I didn’t already know. It offers a window into the past. Its history is my own, and it feels good to remember.

Andor: Season 1

Maybe you don’t know, but the second season of Andor is around the proverbial corner—April 22 if you want to pencil it in somewhere, as I have—and it’s coming in hot.

Knowing the second coming was… coming… I have started to perform the sacred rituals to attune my body and spirit to receive the power of this fully armed and operational battle station.

I’m only one episode into my rewatch. It’s my first ever, which is crazy when you consider how good Andor is and also the numbers I put up with The Last Dance and Moneyball. I’m not going to call those disposable, but they are certainly easier to dip into. Andor is a harder watch, in what it demands of the viewer, and also what it posits about the everyday bureaucratic ordinariness of fascism. But that’s also what makes it more than mere entertainment.

I’ll probably write about Andor sometime between now and April 22.

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Your turn!

What’s giving you good vibes this week? Let me know so I can check it out.