Lego League is in the home stretch. TB’s team has its big competition soon, so it’s ramping up the practice schedule. The team meets in the coach’s garage, in which he has a massive robot obstacle course where his car should be. The team consists of a half dozen boys, all around ten or eleven years old.
The boys spend the first hour and a half or so actually working on the obstacle course, and the last half hour shooting each other with improvised lego weaponry. By the time I come to pick up TB, the geek-chaos is impressive.
Just walking into the garage, the “we will never get dates” vibe is palpable. There’s no rule against girls, but they aren’t exactly breaking the door down. Part of me wants to shelter TB against diving too deeply into geek culture, for fear of the social cost he’ll pay soon, but part of me is proud that he’s so un-self-conscious about it. He just really enjoys building stuff, and really enjoys being around other kids who build stuff, too.
He gets much more excited about Lego League than about basketball. I enjoy that more than I probably should.
Here’s hoping that junior high schools now are more geek-friendly than they were in my time...
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Meanwhile, The Girl marches proudly to her own drummer, too.
A few days ago she went to her friend Jason’s house (not his real name). Jason is a sweet, but very energetic, seven year old boy. Since TG play-wrestles with TB, she can rough and tumble when she wants to, but Jason’s Mom didn’t know that. So when Jason and TG started rough-and-tumbling, Jason’s Mom interrupted them to scold Jason for wrestling with a girl. As Jason stood there, sheepishly listening to his mother’s scoldings, TG flying-tackled him from the side.
I think she’ll be fine.
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Although Spotify markets itself as a music app, it works really well with comedy albums. I’ve gone through about a half dozen of them in the last couple of weeks, during drives to statewide meetings. After a serious discussion of important policy stuff, there’s something therapeutic about listening to Amy Schumer or Patton Oswalt in the car on the way home.
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Shortly after Thanksgiving, I heard someone actually say this:
“I don’t want to just stand here and thank everyone for their hard work. I just want to thank everyone for their hard work.”
Words to live by...