My kid tested positive for COVID on Monday. We’re fortunate in that both my wife and I can work from home. This doesn’t come without hiccups, though.
On Tuesday, my kid finished breakfast and asked if she could watch Frozen. Outlook had just reminded me that I had a four-hour meeting starting in fifteen minutes, so I figured why not. I’m a sucker for a sick kid, so when she asked to watch it again after waking up from her nap, I obliged. Later that evening, she asked her mom if she could watch it again, and she obliged.
We’re on the third day of quarantine, and Frozen has played seven times. This isn’t ideal, but the cacophony of balancing work and parenting mixed with the groans of a sick toddler aren’t ideal situations. Given all this, we’re on target for Frozen to be my most-watched movie. As a dad, I think I’m supposed to balk at this, but it’s not that bad. I marvel at my kid’s interest in seeing it time after time, though, because it’s not how I process things or even enjoy them. I get caught up in how many books I have to read in my annual Goodreads challenge, how many shows are out there for me to watch. There’s not enough time to rewatch or reread because there’s so much to do, so much to check out that I don’t have time to go back to anything I’ve read or watched or loved before.
Raising a kid is cool in lots of ways, one being that it encourages you to step outside yourself. It can take you back to those things you were before school and work and bills and whatever else you have going on that sends you brain into a scramble when the alarm goes off. It might be for just a minute, sure, but who knows—maybe that fleeting thought is enough to nudge you back toward something you enjoyed.
Some recommendations (that I’m going to re-check out):
Richard Russo’s Straight Man is one of the first books I read that struck me as both contemplative and hilarious. It’s about a professor whose mid-life crisis spirals out of control over the course of a week or so. There’s work drama, there’s marital drama, there’s goose drama, but underpinning it all is a wit that resonates with how ridiculous our lives can be.
Meat Loaf died last week. My buddy reached out to me with the news at 7:00 a.m. or so, and the first thing I did was try to track down Bat Out of Hell III: The Monster Is Loose. This isn’t because the other albums are bad—that would be heresy—but Bat Out of Hell III came at a time in my life when I was enthralled by metal, particularly epics with swooping narrative arcs, and this album combined that with Meat Loaf’s killer voice in a collision of styles that was everything I wanted. It’s not on Spotify for some reason, but the title track is an absolute banger:
Cheers, y’all.