Kids

On my desk, just past my keyboard, I have a keyboard-shaped whiteboard for taking quick notes.

And I use it with some frequency to scrawl a message, a reminder, a certain kind of note to myself, especially if I’m on a call.

What’s bizarre is I can’t tell you when I use it, why I use it, by which I mean I often or always am typing notes, but sometimes besides typing notes, if there’s a thing that feels like more time-sensitive in a way, I’ll write it down on this whiteboard.

And I don’t know why.

The downside to the whiteboard is I rarely erase it.

So just now as I was recording, I erased it clean because it had notes from days and weeks ago that were no longer relevant.

But it is funny to me every time I use it because it’s for a certain kind of mental reminder, not one that is time-based, but still one that is time-sensitive.

Very confusing.

I have no explanation and I have no point other than I was thinking out loud while I erased it.

Theme song.

Your Daily Lex.

I was going to record an episode of this podcast yesterday.

I was all set to record it.

And I was like, I don’t have anything to talk about.

And now here I am now, and I still don’t have anything to talk about.

But my assumption was it would come to me.

I do have my old document of ideas and I just opened it up while I’m talking here.

And all of my YDL topics, YDL for your daily Lex, are checked off.

So they’re not useful at all.

Let me give an update on the fam.

Ani will finish school on May 1st.

And my plan is that’s also Lauren’s birthday, but I’ll be driving to Boston and getting Ani and then turning around and going home all on May 1st.

So that’ll be a fun day.

Liam and Sierra are in the thick of it.

They’re in the final quarter of the year for school.

And Liam is still not loving school.

It was my sincere hope that he would love school this year now that he’s going to this music performing arts high school.

But he still finds that the academic classes aren’t challenging enough that they’re boring.

And there are times when he comes home and says, oh yeah, we did nothing in this class today.

And I’ll push him on it.

Like you actually did nothing?

He’s like, no, no, we really did nothing.

Like they did nothing in gym yesterday because it was the start of the marking period.

Now, what he did for all the prior marking period in gym was walking.

But still, walking while you’re chatting with friends or whatever is more interesting than sitting on the bleachers and doing nothing, which again is what he said they did.

And I find that super frustrating.

Both Liam and Sierra have a bunch of late in the school year show performances.

And normally when you’re Liam’s year, he’s a sophomore.

Is that right?

I’m never good at this.

He’s a freshman.

He’s ninth grade.

But normally when you’re a freshman, you don’t get to participate in this one big end of the year music show.

But because he’s so talented, they’re like, hey, why don’t you just play in a couple bands?

So he’s playing in three different musical acts, I believe.

But it’s a two day show.

And meaning they do two different nights of this, two different performances, each of the, you get it, it’s two nights.

And he has to go to dress rehearsals for them.

But he’s only in the second night of performances.

So he has to go to dress rehearsals for all of it.

And apparently during these dress rehearsals, even if you’re not in that show, you have to watch the whole show, watch the dress rehearsal process and no phones or anything like that.

So he came home yesterday pretty grumpy because he’s like, it was boring.

I had to sit there for three hours while they rehearsed it.

And he didn’t think all the acts were very good.

He thought maybe a handful were, but that more weren’t.

And you can’t use your phones and you can’t talk because you got to be quiet while they’re doing all the performing.

And like, I don’t like how this school runs certain things.

There’s a lot of things I like about their school and there’s things I don’t like about their school.

Meanwhile, Sierra just loves school.

And I mean, she’s got a teacher she doesn’t like, that’s for darn sure.

And she’s not wrong.

From everything she tells us about those teachers, there are teachers who shouldn’t be teaching.

The teacher who uses ChatGPT to make the assignments and uses it so transparently that the end of the assignment is like, would you like me to rewrite these questions with more of a this or a this?

And like, that’s the last question of the thing because it’s what ChatGPT is.

That’s crazy.

But she helped out with a elementary school’s production, middle school’s production of Legally Blonde, the musical.

That’s just kind of for fun.

As a volunteer, she’s got a bunch of acapella stuff.

She’s got her end of year shows.

And I’ll see most of the end of year shows.

I know I’m going to have to miss one or two for rehearsals for my own show, but I don’t mind.

They mind a little bit, but they don’t mind tremendously.

Sierra was saying, oh, I’m going to have to skip Liam’s big show on Thursday night this week.

And I said, you can’t do that.

She said, well, no, I have prom Friday, so I have to do some prep on Thursday.

And Lauren and I vetoed that because we’re mean parents or because we’re good parents, depending on which kid you are.

But yeah, there’s so many shows in this family.

You can’t see them all.

And that’s true with friends too.

You can’t see everybody’s shows every single time.

I see the ones I can, and I skip the ones I can’t.

My kids very frequently don’t see my shows because they’re too something inappropriate.

They didn’t want to see the play I did because they didn’t want to see me kiss some other lady who wasn’t their mom.

They don’t see the inappropriate ones like Avenue Q or Sierra didn’t want to see Misery because she thought it’d be too scary.

But I think at least two, maybe all three of my kids will see Jagged Little Pill.

So that’s something.

Anyway, that’s all I got.

Look at that.

We came up with the topics anyway.

Hope you’re having a wonderful April 21st.

And maybe tomorrow I’ll share with you my Earth Day song from my forthcoming album that I really have to finish because tomorrow’s Earth Day and I have a song about Earth Day.

So there you go.

Lex.