Category: Everyday Life

Posted in Everyday Life, Life With Kids

Maybe I’m The Screen Time Problem.

Posted on by Matt Gallagher

Here’s a short list of common sentences that, when said, doom the speaker to spectacular failure:

“That looks easy enough.”
“Instructions are for people who don’t know what they’re doing.”
“When I have kids, they won’t spend all their time just staring at a screen!”

Every new parent has declared that last one with the kind of foolhardy confidence that would make Florida Man proud.  It’s the “Hold my beer,” of childcare.

I started with high aspirations around screen time and failed miserably, too.  A single cartoon per day just so I had a moment of quiet slowly expanded into 2 per day, then 3.  Then Covid happened and the official household policy became “No, we still can’t do anything.  Go watch 17 hours of ‘Octonauts’ and try not to think about it.”  Between remote work and cabin-bound boredom, everyone in our house started living with a screen from dawn til dusk.  I’m pretty sure my dogs were binging old episodes of “Lassie” after I went to bed.

Eventually we got to go outside again and the screens started controlling our lives a little less. That is, they controlled our lives less until a few months ago when I did something idiotic that restarted the whole problem: after a thousand requests, I finally caved and bought my 9-year-old daughter Sloan a small tablet for her birthday.

I expected her to fall face first into it, which she did, but I was also expecting her to eventually stop using the thing as much once the novelty wore off, which she didn’t.  Not even close.

In fairness, it was a really rough summer for kids activities, so I wasn’t too hung up on her spending all day with the tablet at the time.  Like most of the country, Tulsa was dangerously hot, and no one was spending much time outside.  It’s not like there was a plethora of better outdoor options for her, particularly since Sloan shares my DNA and is therefore able to get sunburnt at night under a heavy cloud cover.

…But now we’ve reached the point where I’d prefer she chance it on the sunburn, because this new screen has introduced a deluge of just the worst content.  Stuff that made me realize that the half-hour toy commercials masquerading as kids’ TV that I grew up with never went away, they just changed shape. Also, they moved to YouTube, which feels way worse, but I can’t put my finger on exactly why.

I’ll admit there’s great content for a kid to find online.  There’s art apps that really bring out a kid’s creativity, science shows that put Bill Nye to shame, games that teach while still being fun, and more.

…But there’s also the other stuff.  Once you have a kid with a tablet you learn just how much digital detritus is out there that see kids as an audience with poor sales resistance and low standards for quality. 

Endless games designed to trick kids into making microtransactions?  We’ve dealt with those.  Unboxing videos funded by toy companies?  Yup, those too.  Reaction videos TO reaction videos?  Nobody at any age needs that in their life. I don’t know what the sales gimmick of terrible kids’ songs with sped up vocal tracks is, but can’t imagine the intentions of whoever made “It’s Hailing Taquitos” are anything less than sinister.

If I have to have this in my life, you do to.

So between the unhealthy amounts of screen time and the influx of low quality media, I think the only thing that’s keeping me from just yeeting Sloan’s tablet down a well is that I’m absolutely no better about my screen use than she is.

I’m not proud of that confession, but yeah: everything she does, I do too.  Head constantly buried in a screen?  I do that.  Playing mobile games designed to show me commercials every few minutes?   Gonna plead guilty to that one, too.  Watching reaction videos to reaction videos?  No…but reading think pieces about other think pieces probably doesn’t put me in any position to be critical of their video equivalent.

Plus, unlike Sloan, I’m on social media, which my wife and I at least had the forethought to prohibit.  Comparing a few kids’ mobile games to Twitter and Facebook is like comparing the energy you get from a sip of herbal tea versus chugging a Big Gulp cup full of cocaine.  It’s digital addiction on a whole other level.

What kind of position am I in to tell her to put down the tablet if I’m saying it with a smartphone in my hand?  When I was a kid, a favorite saying of adults was that TV and video games would “Rot your brain.”  If I say that to Sloan about her tablet, what am I implying about myself?  Clearly, so long as she sees me with my nose buried in my phone, I don’t actually believe what I’m saying.  That’s no way to teach positive habits.

Maybe the problem isn’t clickbait videos or shady apps; maybe the problem is me.

I don’t intend to give up my smartphone, and I’m not implying that you should.  What I am admitting, though, is that my kids are going to take a lot of their cues about how they interact with technology from me.  Teaching my kids about healthy limits probably involves a lot more teaching myself healthy limits than I’ve wanted to admit.

…That and maybe issue a blanket ban on songs with sped up, autotuned vocals, because if I hear any more of that chipmunk voice I’m gonna be ready to dismiss all of recorded sound as a failed experiment.

Posted in Everyday Life

Is Middle Aged Second Puberty A Thing?

Posted on by Matt Gallagher

There have been plenty of things my kids have done that have upset me. Messes they’ve made, things they’ve broken, money they’ve cost…but there’s one thing that upsets me more than I can even put into words:

They’ve turned me into a person who wakes up early on the weekend without an alarm clock.

I was always a night person.  I still am.  Half the time I write this column long after everyone else in the house has gone to bed, and only finish up after 2.  Then I lay down, doze for what feels like 4 seconds, and wake up in time to watch the first light of dawn pool in the hollows beneath my eyes, because I can’t NOT wake up with the sunrise anymore.

It’s not that I’m even getting up to do anything. I don’t spring out of bed and start my day on a high note.  I’ll stagger to the kitchen for a coffee or an energy drink, sip it bleary-eyed while leaning on the kitchen counter, and ignore my children (who are already wide awake and yelling for my attention) as my cells fight to be first in line for every micro-gram of caffeine coming into my body. 

I will not start my day with a morning workout, I will not prepare a healthy breakfast, and I absolutely, positively will not seize the day.  Carpe DENIED.

…and yet, for all my laying in bed willing myself towards another hour of sleep, I just can’t seal the deal, and there’s more to it than just the fact that my kids start shouting while the moon is still up.  It’s because I’m not Matt anymore; I’m Dad now, and dads my age get up early whether the kids wake them up or not.

I’m becoming a middle-aged male stereotype, and don’t know how to feel about it.  I mean, I REALLY hit all the bases: I wake up early, wear cargo shorts all the time, love to grill, and bore my kids with advice on the importance of maintenance.  I tell dumb jokes, worry about my hairline, grumble about the thermostat, and even smoke a pipe like some sweater-vest clad dad from a 50s sitcom.

I didn’t want any of these things, they just sort of happened.  You own a home for a long time, so eventually you begin to care about how it’s maintained.  Your kids want you to spend time outside with them, so you spend more time outdoors grilling and mowing the lawn, and put on cargo shorts to store all the acorns and weird rocks they want you to hold.  It’s not a change you intentionally set out to make; you build this new version of yourself slowly, one sensible New Balance sneaker at a time.

So looking at all those changes in myself, there’s a question that really worries me:

Is there a second puberty you hit around 40 that no one tells you about beforehand?

I know that sounds like a joke, but it’s the closest comparison I can draw.  I’ve changed in both my mind and body; I’m not the guy I was in my 20s and 30s anymore.  It’s everything about the first puberty, but reversed: instead of raging hormones turning your emotions up to 11, you finally start to chill and not take things so seriously.  Your drives for money and sex relax and shift towards family.  That “Hair in new places” thing happens again, except now it’s more “Hair starts disappearing from places you’d prefer it stayed put.”

I have new priorities, and my old priorities are starting to seem kind of hollow.  It feels like looking at your old toys about the time you turned 13: you still remember why you liked them originally, but just don’t feel it anymore.

Just one example: I don’t need to be the first to know about trendy new pop culture anymore, and I don’t feel like not knowing about it first is shameful.  That ate up so much of my energy as a young man.  I felt so cool every time I knew about some indie band or Sundance movie before my friends, and like a complete loser every time I came late to that party.  Now I have no idea why I cared.  All I have to show for all that spent energy is a box of scratched CDs I never enjoyed that much in the first place and an old Maximo Park T-shirt that aged as well as leftover guacamole.

Ever since I passed 35, it feels like I’m shedding those sorts of impulses, and growing up all over again.  I wasn’t expecting to go through a second puberty, but it’s becoming abundantly clear that’s happening, whether I want it or not.

…I guess if I’m gonna do this, I might as well do it right: time to put on some Dashboard Confessional and get out my mopey poetry journal.  If any of you need me, I’ll be in my room.

Posted in Everyday Life

It’s Time We Admit That Kids Are Kinda Gross.

Posted on by Matt Gallagher

I’m tired of pretending my kids are something they aren’t.  Every social media post, every family photo, every adorable little toddler outfit…they’re all trying to use cuteness to cover up the same basic truth:

My children are gross.  Yours, too.

Babies?  Gross.  Toddlers?  Gross.  Kids?  Gross.  Teenagers?  I don’t have a teenage kid, but based on my own experiences at that age, EEEEEWWWWWWWW.

It’s just a reality of being young: you have no idea what the social norms around cleanliness are yet.  Kids don’t understand that leaving a half-drunk cup of milk in the back of a closet just isn’t done.  All they know is that taking that cup to the sink costs valuable seconds that could’ve been spent fingerpainting, and that time spent washing their hands after fingerpainting costs valuable seconds that could’ve been spent touching all the clean laundry.

I’ve mentioned how hard it is to keep a house clean with kids before.  I’m beginning to realize it isn’t a failing on my part, and it’s not really a failing on the kid’s part, either.  It’s nobody’s fault.  There’s just a span of time where kids have enough mobility to make a serious mess and no idea how to keep their living space hygienic or why it matters.  From 10 months up until they get their first apartment, kids might as well just be some form of unusually tall racoon.

For example, while I was writing that last paragraph, my 2-year-old, Penny, who had been quietly playing on the floor behind me, started giggling.  I didn’t think much of if until a pattern emerged: laughter, 6 second pause, laughter, 6 second pause, etc.  So I turned around to see what the joke was.

She was taking big sips from her spill-proof cup (a detail that will be funny in 2 seconds), waiting a moment, and then opening her mouth to let huge mouthfuls of milk spill all over herself.  The kid looked like she’d just gotten out of a pool.  Drenched in milk from head to toe.  Kids love to laugh at a milk mustache; Penny had milk leg hair.

How do you even address something like that?  A 2-year-old can grasp the idea of “Don’t do that!”, but how would you even go about preventing that kind of event?  What instruction could you give ahead of time?  “Don’t marinate yourself in milk over a shag rug,” isn’t the kind of instruction I ever expected to come up.

(…I don’t even know what I’m gonna do about that rug.  There’s no cleaning product in the world that’s gonna stop that thing from smelling like a bowl of feta cheese that’s been left out in the sun.  Right now my plan is to just let the dogs lick it nonstop for the next hour and hope for the best.)

I’m beginning to wonder if the idea of dealing with a future mess is too abstract for a kid’s sense of cause and effect.  Granted, Penny is still too young to understand that milk becomes disgusting when it soaks into shag carpeting, but it’s not just toddlers that do this kind of thing. 

A year ago my older kid (7 at the time) had to have all of her snack-times restricted to the dining room table.  I had assumed that, so long as she was bringing her dishes to the sink, it was ok for her to eat a snack on the couch while watching cartoons.  That was before I learned that when she had a bite of food she didn’t want, she was stuffing it between the couch cushions.  I had no idea until I went looking for a lost television remote and instead found two banana peels and a dozen rotting grape tomatoes.  The rest of that evening wasn’t fun for anybody.

What stuck with me, though, is that she seemed shocked that they were still there.  The kid understands object permanence, but seemingly had this idea that the area between the couch cushions was like ejecting her trash into another dimension.  Surely, reality doesn’t persist there.  It’s the kid’s version of dumping trash into the ocean: once it’s out to sea, it’s gone forever!  …right up until you’re eating a tuna sandwich that contains as much plastic as a G.I. Joe.

I’m trying to take a long view of all this and see it as a potential learning opportunity.  It’s never too early to learn that a small mess left to fester now becomes a disgusting ordeal to deal with later.  The attitude that would rather cram a mess under a bed than pick it up is the same attitude that turns a credit card debt into a quagmire of late fees or lets a minor cavity grow into a root canal.  Better to try and instill an understanding of long-term cause and effect when the stakes are just a gross mess to clean up and a lingering smell to live with.

…but in the meantime, I might need to start tracking milk in this house with the kind of tenacity that the  UN uses to keep tabs on plutonium, because I am DONE will half full sippy cups of curdled yogurt under the furniture.

Posted in Everyday Life

The ER Is A Weird Place To Write Comedy.

Posted on by Matt Gallagher

I should open by saying that I’m typing this column on my phone in the waiting room of a hospital ER.  I had mild heart attack symptoms earlier tonight, hyped myself up until “mild symptoms” became “terrifying certainty,” and went to the hospital.  Now I’ve been sitting here in the emergency room, probably fine, and feeling like a complete tool for the last 5 hours.

I’ve never had an issue with false alarm hospital visits before.  Some people will go at the drop of a hat, but I really dislike seeing the doctor and tend to avoid going until I’m sick enough to start hearing dead relatives beckon from beyond the grave.  The only other time I’ve ever gotten scared enough to visit the ER, I went into emergency appendectomy surgery within a couple of hours.

What I’m saying is that unnecessary doctor visits are not a pattern of behavior for me, but if I went every time I wondered whether or not I should go, I could probably list the hospital as a forwarding address for my mail.

I hate feeling any unexpected physical symptoms, because no one has figured out a good system for what is and isn’t ER worthy. The easiest way to decide if something is serious enough for a trip to the hospital is a Google search, which is also the worst possible place to turn for medical advice.  Beyond the sites shilling conspiracy theories, metaphysical healing, and miscellaneous mumbo-jumbo, even the serious sites are no help. Nobody wants to get sued, so every symptom, no matter how minor, comes with a recommendation to visit the emergency room.

Short of breath?  ER.

Bad gas?  ER.

Disappointed with the last “Avengers” movie?  ER.  Better safe than sorry.

“We thought the time travel subplot was pretty thin, too, but you should probably get checked for a stroke just in case.”

Regular readers know that I mostly write about my experiences as a parent, and today is no exception.  I’m finding that the older I get, the more my medical decisions are made with my spouse and kids in mind.  I’m sitting in this miserable waiting room, trying to type next to a guy whose combined snoring and sleep farts could probably drown out a basalt mining drill, purely for my family.

(Seriously: some doctor is gonna miss a code blue because this dude is louder than a marching band getting hit by a train.  I didn’t know the human body could produce this kind of volume.)

Supposedly married men live longer, and I think I can see why.  The long running joke among guys is that a spouse will make you go to the doctor rather than just duct tape your leg back on or whatever, and yeah: that isn’t entirely wrong.  I’ve gone to the doctor before purely because my wife Sara drug me there by the scruff of the neck (metaphorically, though my neck scruff is probably equal to the task).  It’s more than that, though; once you have a family, your health stops being about you.

When I was in my 20s, dropping dead unexpectedly never really scared me all that much.  Some pain, a moment of wondering if you still have time to erase your weird browser history, and then you’re forever beyond having to give a damn.  Seemed pretty easy. Your mom will cry, someone will have to clean your grungy apartment, and then everyone will move on with their lives.  It’s the ultimate no call, no show.

…But dying unexpectedly with a family absolutely scares the crap out of me.

What would happen to my kids if I disappeared tomorrow?  Would my wife have to break the news to them?  I can’t imagine having to do that if the roles were reversed.  Who would take care of the 3 of them?  Would Sara’s mom move in to help with the kids?

I don’t think I’m here because I’m worried about my heart; I’m here because I’m worried about how my heart effects my spouse and children.

Between starting this column and now, I’ve been discharged from the hospital.  An EKG, a chest x-ray, and 2 sets of blood work confirmed that my heart is fine.  Honestly, by the standards of a heavy 40-year-old, it’s actually in pretty good shape.  For all the drama of tonight I guess I had nothing to worry about, besides what this is going to cost me and finding a ride home at 2 AM.

…But I think I need to view this as a disaster averted instead of a clean bill of health.  A Get-Out-of-Hospital-Free card I lucked into, not something I’ve earned.  I’ve never paid a ton of attention to trying to stay fit because I like who I am.  My lackluster physique isn’t something I’m ashamed of, but I’m beginning to realize it’s something I need to be prioritizing, because my health isn’t my own any more.  It’s time to take it seriously.

It’s also time to call the hospital and see if I can wheedle out what was wrong with the snore-farter, because whatever he has, I don’t want it.

Feel free to buy me a cup of coffee at paypal.me/inessentialreading if you enjoyed the column.