#381

I can't park in the garage right now because my space is full of other shit (a wheelbarrow for mulch, construction materials, sports gear, more sports gear) so this morning Meg and I headed down the driveway to a frozen minivan. It was 17 degrees. This is no biggie for January in Chicago but it's early November. We shivered and climbed into the van which wasn't any warmer. I exhaled a plume of breath and looked at it. The car turned over slowly. Meg shifted in her seat, trying not to touch anything frozen, but everything was frozen. She said, "Do you have butt-warmers?" I'm pretty sure she knew the answer. No. I don't have heated seats. Then I noticed she didn't have a coat. No coat! Actually, she had a coat but she was carrying it instead of wearing it... which, you know, makes total sense when it's freezing out, dude. Question: Why is this fashionable? Michael wore hoodies and stubbornly shunned jackets also. At their age, I remember rolling jeans, fixing turtlenecks, spraying hairspray, spraying cologne, but the winter jacket meant nothing; its presence or absence, its style or brand, announced nothing about you. (Except for the cool kids who skied and had lift tickets dangling like jewelry.) Anyway, as a parent, I draw on my own young experience for a kind of comparative understanding. This, of course, is often futile, irrelevant, illogical. Things change. If you wore a hoodie to my junior high back in '88, you'd hear snickers. Sweatpants were a no-no. As for butt-warmers and cars: I buy base models because I can't afford to pay extra. Or maybe I choose not to (that sounds better). As grueling as life is without heated seats, I survive so I can do other things: travel, eat sushi, get tickets to Hamilton or a Cubs game. I didn't go to Hamilton or a Cubs game this year. My arguments with M 'n' m often blow up in my face like this, also. But my money is finite, which is a fun problem to have most of the time; I get to make decisions and enjoy them. My goal is to help M 'n' m with college, and at the rate things are going, I'll be able to pay for one textbook and a pizza.

A question just popped into my head: How many words are there in the English language? I asked Google. Literally. Verbally. You know how it goes: I tapped the Google microphone icon on my smartphone, said the question, and a pleasant female voice replied: "The Second Edition of the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary contains full entries for 171,476 words in current use, and 47,156 obsolete words. To this may be added around 9,500 derivative words included as subentries." I will ask Siri and Alexa and confirm consensus. Remember the days when you had to thumb through books to find answers? And sometimes you couldn't find an answer and were left to wonder. Yeah, that was the effin' stone age, man! How unenlightened we were. But we were thoughtful. And happy.

Meg had her first basketball tourney of the season over the weekend and did awesome. I love her.