The rain and the kayak tour

I had no plans this weekend. You see, I got divorced a little over a year ago, and with 50-50 custody, the kids are with their mom this weekend. In addition to that, I very recently ended my first post-divorce relationship, which stings pretty bad, because for a good while, I thought it would be my only post-divorce relationship, and I miss her; I didn't really want to end things, but the circumstances just weren't right. We are also in the midst of the corona virus pandemic, which is challenging for a social person like me, who longs for connection and struggles with loneliness being so isolated. Maybe this is sharing too much, or it's too personal, but I say it to provide context to my empty weekend and my state of mind going into it.

I went back to work (from home) two weeks ago following a three month layoff, and I knew that I wanted to do something for myself this weekend, having it entirely to myself. I knew if I didn't come up with something, I'd probably waste the whole time in my house consuming various forms of media. As the end of the workday neared on Friday, I started scouring the internet for things to do within driving distance. I'd always wanted to try kayaking. I spent quite a bit of time in canoes throughout my 8 summers at camp, but I have only been in a kayak once or twice, and only on a still lake, never a river with current. It turns out that at Starved Rock State Park, you can go on a kayak tour on the Illinois River. This sounded great to me, so I looked at the schedule.

The Saturday tours were all booked, but I could get into either the 9am or 3pm tours on Sunday. The weather looked pretty good, but knowing Illinois, I decided I'd wait until Saturday morning to see if the forecast changed. Saturday morning came, and the weather looked perfect up there for Sunday, so I booked my ticket.

I started Saturday with a long run (7 miles) and then spent most of the rest of the day installing a ceiling fan in my oldest daughter's bedroom. If you know me, you know that I'm not handy whatsoever, so this project was a major undertaking. It felt like every step of the way, the number of problems grew exponentially. Time and time again, I felt frustrated, useless and defeated. Through persistence, a ton of sweat, a cut on my finger, and multiple trips to Lowe's, I somehow managed to get this fan installed, and while it doesn't look as pretty as it could, it is wired safely, and it works. That said, I'm never installing another again...ever.

I relaxed after that, listening to a White Stripes record I just got earlier in the week, while playing some Euchre online. Then I watched an episode of The Wire and went to bed early, knowing I wanted to get up to go for a run prior to taking off. (Okay, I guess there was some media consumption, but not the excess that I wanted to avoid)

I didn't sleep well. I was excited about the kayak tour, which was part of the problem, but I think what really kept me up was my imagination. In a half-awake stupor, I kept thinking that insulation was falling from giant cracks next to the ceiling fan, and that the hole I cut grew, expanding into a giant gape, consuming the entirety of my daughter's bedroom.

The alarm went off at 6, and I was tired, but today was my day. I got out of bed, got dressed and ready to run. The plan was to run three miles, but about half a mile from my house, I noticed the sky was rather ominous. The thunder came right at that point, so I turned around and hightailed it home.I had run just enough to work up a sweat, so I took a quick shower (my third in less than 24 hours) and got dressed.

I looked at my phone to check the weather at Starved Rock, and to my dismay, it was not the perfect forecast it had shown the day before. It was scattered thunderstorms straight through to 9:00, when my tour was supposed to start, then was like 50% chance of rain until noon.

Oh well, I was going to chance it, because I had nothing else going on, and I wanted to get away. I browsed Reddit for a bit, then took off to grab some coffee and head on up. As soon as I got my coffee, the rain started. It rained. It poured. It lightninged (I'm not sure "lightning" can be verbified....nor am I sure "verb" can be verbified.) It was so bad out that Marty McFly could've forgotten about syncing the DeLorean with the clock tower and just driven around Central Illinois to get back to 1985.

When I got to Starved Rock around 8:30, it was still storming. The rain had died down, but it was still thundering, and if you know anything about water sports, you know that that's a no go. I texted the owner to see if the tour was cancelled, and she responded that it was under a weather delay.

I sat in my mini-van and listened to some music.

The rain had died down to a drizzle, and I didn't hear any thunder or see any lightning for a while. Even so, at about 9:15, I got a text saying the tour was cancelled, but they had room for a single on the 12:00 tour. I responded that I'd take that, then I left to go hike for a bit.

I had always parked at the main visitor's center the times I had been to Starved Rock before. It was always super packed, with many hikers and tourists. Up by where the kayaks are, there are some smaller parking areas to lead to canyons that would be pretty far hikes from the visitor's center. I parked at one of these and I started hiking to the Kaskaskia Canyon. It was still raining, but it was light enough that it didn't bother me; it's how I imagine rain in the Pacific Northwest to be most of the time.

I took my time walking. I was the only person out there. I used my senses. The bird songs, the light rain on my arms, the mud on my feet, the high sandstone walls surrounding me, even the solitude...it was all so refreshing. In this moment, in this place, I experienced peace. I kept walking, and another sound caught my ear. It was the sound of running water, and I knew I must be nearing a waterfall. As the sound increased, I could tell it wasn't a light trickle; it was gushing!

The photo does not do it justice.

I came upon the most beautiful waterfall I have ever seen. Then I started thinking. I wonder if it would be running like this without the rain. Usually the waterfalls are crowded; I wonder if the rain is keeping people away. I might not have even come here had my tour not gotten cancelled. With all those things combined, I may not have even experienced this.

I stayed a few minutes, took some photos, then headed back to the van to drive to another canyon. Just before I got back to the van though, the thunder started again, so instead of hiking some more, I drove into a nearby town to get some more coffee.

Fast forward to 11:30. The thunder is completely gone; the rain is just a drizzle. I checked in, and the tour was on. They gave me a life preserver (man, everything makes me think of Back to the Future) and told me all I had to do was wait. A group of about 15 folks who had just rented their kayaks boarded and took off before the tour group did. There were probably about 10 of us.

A few minutes after noon, we got in our boats and headed out. It's hard to write about the actual experience, but it was life-giving. We kayaked through a channel, saw bald eagles, looked up sandstone dells, and I even got to kayak under a waterfall. The light rain was nice, and as we went along, the rain stopped entirely. The clouds cleared, and a cool breeze blew the entire trip. I was out there for  two and a half hours, but it easily could have been two and a half minutes.

After getting back to land and cleaning up, I headed over to another canyon to hike, this one was a bit busier now that the rain had left, then I went to dinner at a local brewery.

On the drive home, I thought about the day some more, and I thought about my life.

I planned for the weather. I looked in advance to make sure it wasn't supposed to rain, but it didn't work out that way. Such is life. I healed from my divorce before entering another relationship. I readied myself mentally and emotionally, but it didn't work out the way I hoped.

Because of the rain, my tour was delayed. But because of the rain, I got to see that beautiful waterfall, and because of the rain, I went on a kayak tour with perfect weather. There were even times I enjoyed the rain itself. I could've just as easily seen the rain and went home, missing it all.

And like this also, such is life. I look back at being laid off and quarantined; though it was for a bad reason, I enjoyed getting to spend that time with my kids and away from work. I once lost a dream job that I had poured myself into, and at the time, it was devastating, but I look back now, and had I still been there, I never would have met some of my closest friends.

Sometimes life doesn't go as planned. Sometimes things don't work out the way you want them to, or at all for that matter. And sometimes, because of that, great things can happen that never would have otherwise. Sometimes, you see the rain, and keep going anyway, opening up unfathomable possibilities. And while I'm still in kind of a sad and lonely place right now, that gives me some comfort.

Fears from my Childhood

When I was a kid, somewhere around kindergarten or first grade, I developed a fear that stuck around for several years. This fear was responsible for many sleepless nights, hiding under the covers, hoping not to be found; hoping nothing would happen to me. Although it's somewhat my parents' fault for instilling this fear in me, I don't blame them. No, I place all the blame on one man: Robert Stack.

The mid to late 80's was an interesting time in television for a young child. On one end of the spectrum, you had the lovable Disney show, Ducktales, whose theme song we 30-somethings can still sing by heart and smile, fondly remembering those afternoons when we would get home from school and sit around the living room chowing down on Fruit Roll Ups and Jello Pudding Pops with our friends. On the other end, you have Unsolved Mysteries, whose dissonant theme song is what nightmares are made of. Conjuring images of ghosts and murderers, I would have to leave the room when this show started.

The song, as terrifying as it is, was not this great fear of mine that I mention. Some people fear clowns, some fear heights, some fear enclosed spaces or nuclear war or dying alone. My fear was much scarier than any of those things, at least to me. I was afraid of alien abduction.

My childhood before Unsolved Mysteries was a sort of naive utopia, where the greatest dangers were going upside down on carnival rides or getting hit by a pitch in baseball. But when Robert Stack introduced me to the concept of alien abduction, I learned that my perfect, innocent world was full of scary things; serial killers, ghosts, bigfoot. Why had nobody warned me?

(Serial killers were real, but that type of thing didn't happen in Morton, IL. Surely I would've already seen a ghost if my house were haunted. And the Sasquatch live in the Pacific Northwest. But aliens...they can be anywhere, and they can take anybody.)

Unsolved Mysteries was not a work of fiction. These were based on true stories. Real people, actually getting taken by these pale-skinned, black-eyed beings, boarded on their ships and being experimented on. Painful experiments. I remember one story of the aliens sticking a needle into someone's eye, and that was what I feared would happen to me. A couple movies, Communion starring Christopher Walken and Fire in the Sky, affirmed all my fears, as both of these films were also based on true stories.

Things got worse when I discovered the paranormal section at the library. There, I was able to learn more about aliens thanks to Time Life's Mysteries of the Unknown. All the books I checked out from like 2nd through 5th grade were about the paranormal. I was the expert. And I believed everything I read and everything I saw on TV about the subject.

One time I saw a show where someone said that most alien abductions happen between 1 and 3 A.M. So if I were awake between those times, I would not be able to go back to sleep out of fear. If I woke up to go to the bathroom at 1:15, I would hold it until 3; thinking, "okay, I'm safe now." My goal was always to fall asleep before 1:00, because if I were asleep, the aliens wouldn't take me. My bedtime prayer every night included, "God, please don't let me get abducted by aliens." (I'm dead serious; you can't make this stuff up.)

I don't know how old I was when I started to question whether or not aliens were real; embarrassingly, it probably wasn't until high school. My rationale was, "Look at how many people report the exact same thing, so how could it not be real? Maybe they're doing this just to get on television, but it seems like there are way too many people for that to make sense. Maybe it's a conspiracy of some sort, but there's no reason why. There has to be something to it. The most logical explanation is that they're telling the truth." 

It wasn't until college that I learned about sleep paralysis. Essentially what happens is your mind halfway wakes up but your body is still paralyzed. When this happens, you can have hallucinations of creatures, often-times performing types of torture on you. For hundreds of years, people reported encounters with the Incubus and the Succubus, two demons that would perform painful sex acts on you in the middle of the night. The correlations between the experiences of sleep paralysis, the Incubus, and the Succubus were uncanny to the experiences detailed by alien abductees.

Finally, everything snapped into place. These abductees aren't lying. They're experiencing sleep paralysis and believe their hallucinations are real.

My questions shifted from, "Will I get abducted by aliens?" to "I wonder if aliens are even real" to "How could I be such a dingus to go from like 1987 to 2002 without understanding that there was a perfectly rational explanation for this? Why was I so gullible? Why did Robert Stack and Christopher Walken want to ruin my childhood? Why was there never a show called Solved Mysteries hosted by someone more comforting, like Fred Rogers or Bob Ross, with a nice happy theme song? Why? Why? Why?"

I may never know the answers to those questions, and I don't really know what my point is in telling this story to begin with, but I know that I no longer fear being abducted by aliens. In fact, I don't believe they exist. If my kids ask me someday whether they should be afraid of them, I'll say, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself...and Sasquatch."

Yanny, Laurel, and Jesus

"Shut up," I said aloud after I started the video. "Yanny, Yanny, Yanny," repeated the nasal voiced man as I thought, "There is no way in hell anyone could hear 'Laurel' in this." If you have no idea what I'm talking about, I'll explain. A viral Twitter post provides an audio clip of a man speaking, and like the Great Dress Debate of 2015, the internet can't decide what he's actually saying. Around half of the people think he's saying "Yanny," while the other half think it's "Laurel."

I fell into the "Yanny" camp. Crystal clear, plain as day. I listened repeatedly to no avail, trying to see how someone could possibly hear "Laurel." At this point, I assumed it was probably some sort of inside joke. Those in the know are trying to make us who hear "Yanny,"  which it clearly says, feel like we're crazy because we can't hear what they do.

That's what I thought...until I plugged my headphones in, hit play and heard the deep baritone repeating "Laurel, Laurel." I did a double take. I checked to make sure I was indeed listening to the same audio sample; I was. I tried to listen again to get back to "Yanny," but I couldn't hear it anymore. Only "Laurel."

I wanted to figure out how this was happening, so I found clips online of the voice being sped up and slowed down. There are specific points where I could hear it switch from "Yanny" to "Laurel" and back again. And now that I've heard both, I can go back and forth hearing it both ways. It turns out there's some science behind this. A portion of it lies in the ambiguity of the low-quality audio, some happens because of the similarities between the sounds being used, and some of it is just personal bias.

Maybe this is why we mishear song lyrics, like Elton John's "Count the head lice on the highway," Jimi Hendrix's "'scuse me while I kiss this guy," or the Saved By the Bell theme song's "If I can have an enchilada, it'll be alright." Or maybe this is why when I say, "Time to get ready for bed," my kids hear, "Run around the house like you've just chugged three Red Bulls."

Regardless of the reasons behind it, people experience this recording differently. The same audio sample is heard differently by different people, yet their individual experience is genuine. Likewise, those of us trying to follow Christ experience Him differently from each other. I believe Jesus is calling us all to him, but we hear that call differently. For example, the more I know about Jesus and who he was, the more I'm convinced that Christians are called to be pacifists. Yet, I have friends who, through their deep convictions and understanding of Jesus, deeply believe that there are times when violence must be utilized to do the right thing.

We are both responding to the same God's call. We both genuinely believe what we hear. We even both point to the same scriptures sometimes to back up our views. What often happens is we get into an argument about who is right, who is wrong, and why, eventually ending with "Well they're just too [stupid, naive, stubborn, brainwashed, etc.] to get it." This does little to help anything other than bolstering one's own rigidity, and at the same time, it belittles the other person's spiritual journey. I believe this is the reason we have so many denominations.

In John 17, Jesus prays for unity for his followers, that we be one as He and The Father are one. What does this look like when we have so many different denominations and exponentially more individual views? I think the keys are grace, humility, empathy, and love. I've known so many faithful followers of Jesus who believe differently from each other and from me, but I can tell by their actions they are in Christ and trying their best. Give people the benefit of the doubt; most people following Jesus sincerely believe they're doing so the best way they know how.

This doesn't mean we embrace relativism, or that there is no objective truth, but it means we try to understand where people are on their journey and why. Or as the prayer attributed to St. Francis puts it, "Grant that I may not so much seek...to be understood, as to understand." Maybe we will learn more about Christ, the other person, or ourselves through this. Take my pacifism versus just war example; maybe as a pacifist trying to understand someone who believes just war, I will better understand God's justice, and they in turn will better understand God's peace. I can’t do this if I’m grasping on so tightly to what I already know to be true that I'm arguing instead of listening. It doesn't mean my beliefs on violence change. What does change, though, is my understanding of God and my relationship with the other person. By assuming the best, keeping an open mind and heart, and genuinely trying to understand, we avoid what could become malice and instead cultivate love.

Father, will you answer Jesus’ prayer for unity? Make our collective and individual pursuits of You relentless, yet clothed in grace, humility, empathy, and love.

The Mysterious Case of the Disappearing My Little Pony Appendage

The erratic text messages started at 12:10 pm.

They came through so fast that I was only able to see the last one saying "There" flash across my phone screen. My phone then rang, but I was already talking on my desk phone to a candidate about an internship. The next text came, and this time I saw it. "Call me!!"

I wondered what was going on, but I had to finish my phone screening before I could call back. As soon as I hung up with the candidate, my phone rang again, and I saw that it was Jamie, so I answered. I could tell Jamie was flustered as she told me we needed to take Dulci to the doctor.

"Something is stuck in her nose," she informed me, adding that it was so far up she was unable to see it. "It's a plastic part of a toy. The horn broke off a My Little Pony, and she put it in her nose. I looked it up, and it's possible it could get into her lungs. I don't know if we need to take her to the ER or her pediatrician or what?"

I hung up with Jamie and called the pediatrician's office. They were booked for the day but wanted us to come to another clinic in the same building to see a nurse practitioner. I scheduled the appointment and realized that my coworkers were laughing when I described the situation over the phone. "It's a piece of a toy. About the size of a grain of rice. No, she's not choking; if she were, we would be calling 911, not you."

I cancelled my afternoon phone screens and emailed my boss to let him know that I had to leave for an unplanned trip to the doctor's office. When I got home, Dulci ran up to the door with her coat on and excitedly shouted, "I get to go to the doctor's office!" Afton was sick from school today, but she was miraculously feeling well enough to come along with Dulci and provide moral support.

We checked in and had a seat in the lobby. Dulci and Afton grabbed matching Pregnancy and Parenthood magazines that they flipped through while I read a book I had brought along. They came to a page advertising nursing bras and began chanting "bras, bras, bras, bras." I encouraged them to look for children's magazines, to which I was informed, "but look, Papa, there are bras."

Thankfully our wait in the lobby was a short one. The nurse called us up to get weighed, measured and taken back to a room. We were informed that we would be meeting with the Nurse Practitioner, Dana, and the grad student, Dina. Dina asked what it was that was in her nose, and I handed her the plastic My Little Pony doll whose broken off horn was allegedly hiding in Dulci's nasal cavity. She asked, "Okay, so is it purple like the rest of the pony?" Afton said, "No, it's lavender."

We settled on mauve.

Dina took a good look and couldn't see anything in either nostril apart from some snot. Dana, the Practitioner, came in and could see nothing but snot as well, so she decided we would try to get Dulci to clear her nose. After about a box and half of kleenex, 6 treatments of saline solution, a suction bulb, and 4 q-tips, the verdict came back inconclusive. "I can see there's nothing in the left nostril, but there's this big mucus blockage in the right one that I can't get clear, and there could be something lodged behind it. I'm going to give the Ear Nose Throat doctor a call, and see what he says."

...so we headed over to the ENT clinic, which thankfully was only about a mile or two away. Upon arrival, I was handed over some paperwork to fill out on Dulci's behalf. The first part asked what brought us in today, and I wrote something along the lines of "Twilight Sparkle's horn is caught in my nose." The same page asked for most recent occupation, to which I put "Princess".

The second half of the paperwork was scantron, like the standardized tests we took in high school, where you have to fill in the bubbles with a #2 pencil. This was obviously not written for a 3-year old, so I filled it out as best as I could. "How often do you use tobacco products?" was fine, because I could just fill in "Never have", but the follow up question "Please select the nearest amount of cigarettes you smoke per day," left no choice for "N/A", so I had to choose the most accurate given the choices, which was "1/2 a pack per day."

We were brought back into the office which looked like a hybrid between a dentist's office and a hair salon. After only a couple minutes, we were met by Rich, the Physician Assistant who would be checking Dulci out. He took a good look and confirmed that the right nostril was too clogged to see. He hooked up a suction machine that he introduced as "Mr. Slurpee" whom was going to "help clean out your boogers." Afton thought it was funny that he said, "boogers", while I pondered about how "Mr. Slurpee" is a rather peculiar name for a piece of medical equipment.

Rich suctioned for a minute or two, then took another look and said, "I don't see a unicorn horn in there but it is really clogged." Afton said, "She didn't put a unicorn horn in there; Twilight Sparkle is an alicorn."

Another minute or two of suctioning, and he saw something, grabbed a pair of forceps, and pulled out what looked like either a crumpled up piece of paper, or the grossest, biggest booger that you can imagine. The object was rancid, causing Rich to gag and say, "That stinks." He checked her nose again and could see that it was perfectly clear.

A nurse put on a pair of gloves and unfolded the foreign object, which opened up to reveal itself as a bandaid. "I don't know how long that's been there," Rich said, "but with the way it smells, it's definitely been there for a while. Certainly longer than just today." Part of me wanted to bring the bandaid home for a scrapbook, or to snap a picture of it, but I thought that would be in bad taste.

I would say there were some major lessons learned today. Dulci learned that it's not okay to stick things in your nose, or you might have to stick more things in your nose, to remove the thing you stuck in your nose. Jamie learned that Dulci's recent bad breath has nothing to do with her toothbrushing capabilities. And Rich learned that a Pegasus is a horse with wings, a Unicorn is a horse with a horn, and an Alicorn is a horse with both wings and a horn.

We still don't know where the horn is.

The inward journey

Today, I turned 29...for the 7th time. It's an interesting season of life. I'm a husband, a parent to young kids, a son, a friend, a musician, a bodybuilder...okay, not the last one. And amidst all those things, I'm me. In spite of all the roles that I take on, whether chosen, born into, or fallen into, I remain myself, and I want to take my 35th year on this planet to really dive into who I am, what makes me me, how I can better myself, and how can I become more like the person God created me to be. Hopefully by taking some time to focus on myself, I will be able to improve not only my own quality of life, but my roles as husband, father, and so on to improve the quality of life for those I care about.

I will (try to) engage in some sort of daily self-reflection exercise throughout my 35th year, beginning today. Some of these I will share; some I will probably keep private. Some days, I will just do something fun or funny or random, while some days I will do some serious soul searching. My plan is to do this through utilization of the arts: music, photography, writing, drawing, and whatever else I can think of. Unlike the 365 photography project I did a few years back, I am accepting help from others, for example, I will include pictures taken by other people, as I did above.

Here we go.

Disclaimer: I am new to drawing. I started at the end of 2016, when I probably hadn't tried to seriously draw anything since at least Junior High, maybe earlier. Some of these drawings will probably be pretty crude until my skill improves through practice and time, but hey, Van Gogh didn't start until he was 27, so maybe all is not lost at 35.

The idea here, is that I'm turning 35, but I'm still a child in many ways. A person in their mid 30's should have some things figured out, but I don't. I don't even know what I want to be when I grow up. The parentheses show that the "3" is there, but a lot of people, myself included, will glance over it. 

Fun With Facebook Part 2

This has been a really heavy few weeks for me with some family stuff going on and also with the divisiveness and negativity of this election.  I need to take a break and just laugh for a little bit. These are old, but I've been saving them for a while. Kent Thurman is my fake Facebook; Jeff Thurman is his older brother whose password I forgot.

I would be remiss not to make a nod to Ben Palmer and Ted L. Nancy.

Food Poisoning at White Castle 

Cut Off at Olive Garden

Monkey Trouble

The Day We Were Wed

Steak 'n Shake's Core Values

Flirty Cashier

Ikea's Motto

Gå och knulla dig själv AND  Kväva på en häst kuk

Tall Order

Keep Checking

I'd Like to Return this Parrot

Morton Pumpkin Festival

Life in Morton, Illinois has its perks; some of the best schools in the state, low crime, and Pegasus Pizza to name a few, but one of the biggest things people get excited about here is the annual Morton Pumpkin Festival. Being home to the Libby's canning factory, rumored to be the world's largest pumpkin processing plant, Morton dubs itself "The Pumpkin Capital of the World"; although Half Moon Bay, California and Floydada, Texas may disagree with that title. I've never been to either of those cities, but if they're anything like Morton, the first signs of autumn are not fall foliage, or brisk air where you begin to see your breath, or even Halloween costumes at the stores (which come out around the 4th of July nowadays, I think), they are the unmistakable stench of pumpkin and manure, which lingers in the air like an overbearing houseguest who doesn't pick up on your subtle passive-aggressive clues to leave.

Even after moving to another town, my family attended the Pumpkin Festival every year as I was growing up. Year after year, my brothers, my sister, and I would be handed our tickets and we would go our separate ways with a time to meet up later. 

At that point, the Pumpkin Festival became a sense of mystery and adventure. The flashing lights, the aromas of the deep fried funnel cakes and grilling meat, the passion of the crowd, and the blaring crappy hair metal music the carnies played, put me under some sort of trance, where I thought this could be the best night of my life. Maybe I would finally go through the haunted house, which was really just a truck trailer with broken pop-up animatronics. Maybe I would become a millionaire playing the coin pusher game with the quarters and the automatic sliding wall. Maybe I would meet the girl of my dreams, fall in love, and propose to her on the ferris wheel. 

None of these things ever really happened though. I would go wait in line for the most exciting, most daring ride, and then I would chicken out because it goes upside down. I would then go wait in line another half hour for another ride that fit somewhere in the middle of the spectrum between The Octopus and Bumper Boats.

Once I was out of tickets, I would walk around the exhibition tent and collect stickers and swag from local businesses and people running for public office. I probably looked pretty dumb, wearing stickers for both the Democrat and Republican candidate, though I was too young to vote for either, nor did I know who any of them were. I would sign up to win anything I could from local raffles, which resulted not in prizes, but my family receiving sales calls for weeks to come from companies installing windows or selling life insurance policies or teaching karate.

Eventually, I would make my way over to the carnival games, where I would test my luck to see if I could figure out the trick and win the big toys showcased at the top of the booths. Unfortunately, my luck always popped the balloon with the lowest number behind it, or knocked down just 2 of 10 pins, or picked up the duck that only won me a useless plastic coin purse.

With any change I had left, I would venture over to the 25 cent Coin Pusher game and meticulously scour each station to find my best odds of knocking multiple quarters off the edge and putting them into my coin purse. Of course I won sometimes. I would win 50 cents after I put in about 3 bucks. I would lose it all by the time the night was over, but when I met up with my family and went home with my political swag, my plastic coin purse, and my shame for not being brave enough to go upside down, I would feel exhilarated and start to look forward to next year.

As I got older, the Pumpkin Festival changed; well, maybe it stayed the same, but I changed. My family started to go to Six Flags regularly, whose behemoth rollercoasters put the standard carnival rides to shame. At Six Flags I braved a roller coaster that went upside-down around 7th or 8th grade and then realized that the Salt and Pepper Shaker or the Zipper, both of which I was so terrified of as a child, really weren't that scary or exciting.

My understanding of carnival games shifted from a place of hope that I could beat whatever trick they had set up with enough practice to a place of skepticism, that the tricks were unbeatable. I think it was the Guess Your Weight, Age, or Birth Month game that got me to think critically about carnival games, specifically the birth month part. There's no way other than random luck to guess somebody's birth month (within 3 months) accurately. I assumed a group of data scientists must have created a mathematical formula to calculate which months to guess and how often to maximize their number of wins and ensure that they were winning more than they were losing. It wasn't until years later that I realized that it doesn't matter if they win or lose. That's the key. They could lose every time and still make money. The $5 fee to play the game is higher than the cost of the prize they give out if they lose.

My beautiful children after getting their faces painted

Tonight, this was confirmed for me. My father-in-law treated my family to the Pumpkin Festival, and when the kids went to play games, one specific carny decided to cut the crap and said, "Just give me $5 and you can pick whichever toy you want." The game went like this:

1. Pay the carny $5
2. Pick up a floating frog out of a baby pool
3. The carny says "You win! Pick any toy you want, or take the frog, I don't care. Except for the toys up top, they cost $10."

He knew very well that the toys cost like 50 cents from Oriental Trading, so he didn't even bother making up a game. There was no point to picking up the frog, no skill, no luck, just pay $5 and get your 50 cent piece of junk. My two year old son picked a plastic toy trumpet, which has two reeds in the end pitched about a quarter tone apart from each other, and he cannot put down. My two year old daughter picked a princess baton, of which she took the caps off in the van spilling glitter and confetti everywhere. And my seven year old daughter picked a blow up mermaid, which she realized popped by the time she got home.

I've changed. I'm cynical about this stuff now. I think most of the rides are pretty lame; some of the ones that spin just make me queazy. Instead of being enthralled by the lights, the aromas, and the crowd, I get overstimulated by them. I realize how silly the exhibition tent is. I don't care who is running for public office, and I don't need their stupid stickers (except for my college history professor who is running for Congress; I brought home his button). I know I'm not going to win any raffles I sign up for, and I don't want to be pestered with the sales calls. 

And I wonder, is this how my parents felt taking us to the Pumpkin Festival? Yeah, it probably is. They didn't do it for them; they did it for us kids. And to see my kids' eyes light up as they ride in circles on the kiddie cars or motorcycles, or hear them giggle as they get their faces painted, or see them hunt for candy in the exhibition tent, or feel their excitement as they "win" their game and get to pick their prize, I realize that's why my parents did it. That's why I do it, and that's why its worth it...except for that damn trumpet; I'm going to have to hide that thing.