Category: Life

Summer does not feel like the right time to shop for Christmas, but August is only a few months away from the holidays.

Aside from picking stuff up from sales, my main christmas presents are boardgames and books.

Books are a dime a dozen (actually 50 cents a pop at the local library) so I got plenty of those ready for the holidays, but we do have limited shelf space so I need to be careful with my game purchases.

It seems that I need to do a purge of my wishlist on boardgamegeek, but more importantly, I need to rank my games by age, so I can buy the appropriate games at the right time.

That is still easy while the kids are young, but once they hit the 10+ range, the whole world of gaming opens up to them. At that time, I just need to be judicious.

Not an easy thing in this hobby.

Or maybe it will be easier because honestly, my whole collection is geared to big kids, so I really don’t have to buy anything at that point.

Then again, I don’t “have to” anything at this point either.

The other day, a friend posted a link to an interesting article about privilege, or more correctly a chronological list of the racial crud that this author has dealt with over the years. In the ensuing conversation, one person pushed back hard against the concept of “privilege” and this was my response.

Privilege is an odd concept because everyone has certain advantages and disadvantages in life due to family circumstances, luck, health, etc. Further confounding the discussion, people who talk about privilege often focus on their single variable and don’t acknowledge the holistic circumstance that surrounds each individual’s upbringing. 

However, it is still true that being white affords someone more advantages than disadvantages. A single racial advantage will not counterbalance all the other disadvantages one race is granted at birth or the winds of fate, but to say that race is not a factor in society is being willfully blind.

Even apart from outright racial discrimination, there is a lot of mental drag that one deals solely because that person is a minority. I’m not saying some other white guy’s life was automatically easier, but on this particular issue they didn’t have to deal with the constant feeling of “otherness” and “not belonging” solely because of their skin color. This is white privilege.

To be clear, I think we call it “white” privilege because people of European descent are the dominant race in our country. I suspect other nations of have similar dynamics with different skin colors or using other criteria altogether. This is a societal issue, and each of us needs to do our part as individual actors to push this society forward, and acknowledging the problem is the first step.

I went into the weekend with moderate plans. Tidy up the bedrooms, the kids’ play area, and my own desk.

For once I made it.

There was plenty more to be done, but I did play a lot with the kids.

Once in a while, I will guess “enough” correctly.

I’ve decided to reassess the daily blog every solar event this year and this solstice I realized that if I had to pick one item every morning, I really need to pick exercise over blogging.

So who knows if this gets more sporadic going forward, but I thought I’d put it out there.

Daily blogging has been a good route for self expression over the past nine months – I’ve noticed a lot of ideas getting stuck in the noggin over the past week where I stopped sitting down and typing first thing in the morning.

Returning to the theme of tradeoffs, the only way I can do both blogging and exercise in the morning is to go to sleep early, and that makes for a pretty dull nightlife, if not outright going to sleep before the kids. And that really isn’t a great scenario either.

So we’ll see where this goes, but seriously, I need to do a minimal amount of exercise, this bag ‘o’ meat ain’t getting younger!

You take technology for granted until it doesn’t work.  Or in this case, when Hostgator is suddenly not loading up and you’re wondering if your blog post will upload.

Then you’re get frustrated.  After which, you take a deep breath and remind yourself that this is the first time its glitched like this.

Unfortunately for them, that means the next time this happens, it isn’t the “first time”.  But if their second chance is a long time from now, well that’s technology.

We’d like it to be perfect all the time – as it should be – but the real world is a little messier than that.