Why I am not wearing a safety pin.

Yesterday, I got out a safety pin and put it on my coat. Friends have been changing their profile pics, talking up the idea of showing that you are an ally and advocate, pleading to apply a pin to your coat as a way to build a circle of safety in public spaces. My pin was well sized, properly shiny, and fit nicely over the Eddie Bauer logo.

#safetypin

I took off the pin and put it away.

Hopefully, the safety pin campaign is massively successful. At best, for me, it was untrue. At worst, it was selfish. The spectrum between is a fertile ground for misunderstanding. I'm not going to spend my energy on correcting that misunderstanding when there's a lot of other work to be done.

Election 2028 and Generation O

The girls laugh at me that I ask them to send pictures to my old phone. Six years and it still trudges on. Brightest and biggest screen that I ever had, and I replace the cover every few months when I drop the thing. They think I should get the display in my glasses. But they grew up with that technology, so it’s second nature to them.

Today, they sent pictures. I’m glad I could take my glasses off and still look at my phone and see the pictures through big ugly happy tears.

My oldest girl was born days before Barack Obama was elected. My youngest daughter was born almost exactly two years later. Today is November 7, 2028. They sent me pictures of their ballots. Today, Generation O voted in its first presidential election.

Daily Personality

I am trying to decide on the personality of my day. For the last three years, my day has been dictated by school drop-offs, potty breaks, and naps. We had dual schedules. One, the older child moving from pre-K to elementary school. The second, the younger child moving from all-day with me to pre-K. Never were they in the same places at the same time, or starting at the same time, or ending at the same time.

Not any more. There is only one drop-off and one pick-up for both kids. We are in the era of all day school. From 9:10am until 4:00pm, my calendar is mostly open. And I don’t know what to do with myself.

Never trust a monkey

This video has showed up in my feed a few times. Some thoughts. TL;DR, the video says more about your selective vision than it does about society's brainwashing.

We can wait while you watch the video:

The video outlines an experiment of five caged monkeys where one monkey's attempt to reach bananas resulted in punishment for the other four. Eventually, the punished monkeys began stopping any monkey going for the bananas. Then each monkey was progressively replaced, and the community of monkeys used gleeful beatings to prevent the new guy from reaching for bananas even in the absence of punishments. When all five monkeys had been replaced, they still delivered beatings.

It doesn't take much psychic twisting (or giant block letters) to get the point. The abused masses will beat aspiration out of you.

As you should have learned from the internet by now, generalizations are lies. Most of them anyway. There's no record of this experiment. Most articles about this experiment point to a guy named Stephenson in the 1960's who blasted monkeys with air when they played with a fork. Eventually, when one of the conditioned monkeys was put in a cage with another monkey, they kept the new guy from playing with a fork. Sometimes, that is. Like 40% of the time in six of the eight experiments.

The summary of Stephenson's article is "Observational learning and admonition are distinguished as two types of information transfer between subjects which mediate the acquisition of culture in monkeys." In short, monkeys learn from each other or try help each other out.

So, if the original experiment wasn't about the damage of group dynamics or about society keeping the climber down, where did those ideas come from? They were already in your head, ready to be confirmed by a silly little internet video.

In that way, it's kind of funny that the original experiment was about ways to avoid the mistakes of others.

The Big Rock Candy Mountain

One of the great joys of parenthood is that you get to return to your own youth. Specifically, to those days when you could listen to a song on repeat. Endlessly.

We're pretty lucky that the girls are young at a time when there are some really fantastic kid albums around. Musicians we love are making music for young'uns. There is the occasional tune that wears thin. Usually that happens when we watch something old with a song that was terrible to begin with. On the whole, the girls have some good music.

The album we've had on repeat recently is a bunch of traditional songs and nursery rhymes from Lisa Loeb. The opening track gets the most play. It's a familiar one.

It's only after one turns a song over in their mind for the fiftieth or hundredth time that you can appreciate when a new insight pops out. I had one of those insights to this song. Unfortunately, it's not been a good one. Now the Big Rock Candy Mountain makes me incredibly sad every time I hear it.

The Many Faces of Facebook

Today, Facebook made its "biggest change since 2010" by adding a host of reaction emoji instead of the simple like thumb.

Why would it do this? Well, a more expressive list of reactions has been demanded by users since the service started oh those many years ago. Mostly, though, people just wanted a "dislike" button.

Well today folks got what they wanted, which was a bright new way for Facebook to screw up your interaction with your friends, loved ones, and asshole ultra-conservative relatives.

Much like the plot of Inside Out, Facebook chose five pretty simple reactions to include beside it's classic Like button. Instead of Joy, Sadness, Disgust, Anger, and Fear, they doubled down on the happy and combined Fear and Disgust into Wow.

Facebook's new icons: Angry, Love, Wow, Haha, and Sad.

So, who should they have added? It would be obvious to add the middle finger or the high-five, but what we're searching for here is nuance in the discourse. We want to elevate the way people communicate over their chosen social media platform. Here are a couple of ideas:

In Defense of New Lego

Legos are a battleground. Not just figuratively in the world of our imagination, but literally. Conservatives hate their populist message. Liberals are disgruntled that the girlification takes away from the engineering. Some of the argument is understandable, since Lego did drift away from a gender neutral start, and is now very heavily invested into quite segregated product lines.

Now that the children have attained the ages of 5 and 7, we have moved into the thick of Lego building. As they are girls, we have focused on two sets: Lego Friends and Lego Elves. Oh, and a third set, Disney’s Frozen, but that feels like an extension or combination of the other two. The girls have a smattering of other sets, including Batman, Spiderman, and Lego Movie vehicles. There are also a couple of our large older sets that have hung around, including the USS Constellation and the Space Shuttle/Hubble set.

But the Elves and the Friends are here in force. To be honest, I was apprehensive. These sets were not the ones I grew up with. But I shouldn’t have feared for a couple of reasons. New Legos are awesome, and here’s why: