Phthursday Musings: The End of 2020

It’s New Year’s Eve. What do you want me to say about 2020? That things will magically get better tomorrow, just because the calendar flips? Well, okay then: Things will magically get better tomorrow.

We lost a lot of baseball Hall of Famers this year. This week, it was Phil Niekro, a truly remarkable man who retired at 47 and logged the most innings pitched of any man since the deadball era. In all-time leaders in innings pitched, he’s the first man whose photograph is in color. (Seriously, get a load of those guys. But hey, you’ve got time. Nobody is dislodging any of the men pictured there. Not the way the game is played now.)

Phil Niekro was the greatest Phil ever to play baseball. In this respect he beats out the only other Hall of Famer named Phil - that being Phil Rizzuto - and a whole cast of characters behind them.

But who were the other greatest Phils? And we’re talking Phils here, guys who went by Phil, not Philip or Phillip or Philemon or Philodendron.

Basketball: Phil Jackson. That’s even without his post-playing career. What other Phil had such a solid NBA career?

Football: Phil Simms, I’m pretty sure. Do you remember that for a while one of his wide receivers was Phil McConkey? I’m pretty sure that by default they were the best ever Phil to Phil combo.

Hockey: Phil Esposito. This is an easy one.

Soccer: Phil Neville, I suppose?

Singer-songwriter: Phil Ochs. Who else?

Rock star: Phil Lynott. We’re talking greatest here, not simply the most famous. You really expect me to go against Thin Lizzy? David Lyons would be very upset with me.

Alas, at this point I might be out of meaningful categories. I could go incredibly narrow and identify celebrity doctors or voice actors but you all already know who would fill such categories.

No, this was apparently all a subconscious, convoluted diversion into getting me to think about Thin Lizzy. Now I suppose I need to watch one of the Phil Lynott documentaries. And maybe line up Jailbreak for the META-REVIEWS treatment…

So this section was longer. I’ve shortened it. I thought you might get impatient with it.

I think “patience” is not just one thing. I think there are many different kinds of patience. And so while I believe that it can be accurate to say that someone is a patient person, I think it more accurate to say that different people are more or less patient as regards different things.

For example, it’s easy for me to imagine a teacher who is “incredibly patient” with young children, but who freaks out at the prospect of solving a puzzle which “requires patience”. It’s also easy for me to imagine a running back who is considered “incredibly patient”, able to wait for his blockers to develop a hole in the line, but who has “no patience” for dealing with the media.

Patience is consider a virtue. But it’s also possible to be too patient. Assertiveness is also considered a virtue, after all. So not only do I think there are different kinds of patience, I also think that the kinds can be counterbalanced against other disparate things.

In a word, patience is a spectrum.

Patience, understood as a spectrum, I think gives us more insight into ourselves than when we think about it linearly. I suspect this is especially the case with children, who are all the more dismissed as impatient, when in reality they may be very patient about a great many things, but impatient about others - and perhaps for very good reasons!

I think of the marshmallow test here. A young child has a marshmallow placed in front of them. They’re told they can eat the marshmallow now, or they can wait a while, and then they’ll get a second marshmallow. Children with the impulse control - the patience - to wait are “rewarded”, and this was supposed to be indicative of greater success as they got older. But years later it was determined that if you control the experiment for the child’s socioeconomic condition, the findings melt away. There’s a good chance you’re more familiar with all this than I am - after all, I’ve never had a psychology class - but this is something where I think that what was being measured wasn’t patience but rather a type of patience, and perhaps not one which was intrinsically “good”.

I am, and am not, a patient person. My dear spouse is, and is not, a patient person. I happen to think that our patience spectrums are complementary. Or maybe this is all something I’m imagining. She might tell you that I imagine a lot of crazy shit. She’s probably right.

Anyway. I think it’s helpful to think about things non-linearly. Thinking about things in multiple dimensions. You can do it too. If it’s a little hard to imagine… just be patient. It’ll come to you.

2020, of course, has been an ultimate test of patience for many (most? all?) people. Some have done alright. Others have not. I suspect there’s a connection between what I’m calling the patience spectrum and a lot of behaviors during the pandemic. But that’s probably something for someone who knows what they’re talking about to work out.

I’d like to think I’ve become more reflective, more empathetic, trying to wait out this madness. But maybe come April I’ll be running around like a lunatic, driving a Camaro, I don’t know. (Can y’all see me in a Camaro?)

I also think though that in certain respects I have become too patient. Or, maybe, I already was. Maybe patient isn’t the right word. Are patience and acceptance occasional synonyms?

I feel like I have a whole lot more to go out and do. And I’m keen to get on with it all. In the last week I’ve had occasion to bring up some trips we’ve taken. I realize that I haven’t been outside North America in over a decade. Now, we’d talked about taking a European trip in 2020 before 2020 derailed everything. But it’s not the pandemic that’s kept us home for so long. All of my vacation this year was staycation. But almost all of my vacation the last couple of years has been staycation. There’s a world to go out and see, and I’m letting myself down - and letting others down - by not getting out there.

Travel is just an example, but it’s one a lot of people can identify with, especially after this year. There are a lot of other examples. And while I’m not flipping them into resolutions, I’m actively thinking about a lot of these things. I’ve got a 7 year old now and it’s not hard to imagine a life that primarily revolves around things like soccer practices, to the exclusion of anything else we might imagine doing. Well, we’re not going to be like that. Maybe the pandemic has done some long-term good for my mental health if it’s gotten me to more directly confront something like that.

One other thing, and this goes back to a long-standing conversation I’ve had with my dad. It’s easy to imagine in the aftermath of the pandemic prioritizing seeing a lot of people: parties (or whatever the equivalent is now), larger gatherings, etc. But while there are a lot of people I’d like to see, what I really want to do is talk to people, and that requires something other than a scene with 17 people. That requires time together. What I really want to do is spend time with people. And that has to become a true priority when circumstances finally allow for it. (For what it’s worth, I do not like the phone. Other people can truly talk on the phone. Mostly, I can’t do it. Oh, this is a story for another time.)

There are a lot of other things I’ve been thinking about as regards the end of the year, like the insanity of how a lot of sports are navigating the pandemic, a lot of things about politics… but I don’t feel like writing about most of that stuff. It’d be nice to sit down and talk to people about some of it all! But I’ve been so mentally exhausted that these musings need to be lighter. Like, these musings are like things that have to give you energy in a video game, as opposed to taking energy away.

Wouldn’t it be amazing if there was something you could ingest and it would give you energy?

Wouldn’t it be super amazing if there was an expert as regards such things? Like, someone who could tell you what kinds of things you could ingest and whether you could get energy from them?

You know, this might be my best idea yet. I should see what my incredibly patient life partner thinks.

Finally, with the end of 2020 also comes the end… of support for Flash.

Which means - I think - the end of Homestar Runner. Or, at least, Homestar Runner as we know it. Him. Them. Just right. (If you have no idea what any of this means, the rest of this will probably only make your head hurt worse.)

Inexplicably, the Brothers Chaps, with like two weeks to spare, rolled out the long-awaited final level of Stinkoman 20x6. But here at the Dance Ranch, we caught it in time. And yes, friends, I did indeed manage to beat Mecha-Trogador!

We caught it in time because, absurdly, this was the month where I decided to have my impressionable, wacky child watch Homestar Runner. Specifically, I thought he, mmm, needed to see Sweet Cuppin’ Cakes.

He is now obsessed with Eh! Steve! Of course he is. Aren’t we all?

Oh, and here’s the proof that I beat Mecha-Trogador, and the proof that I really do have extreme patience:

So. 2020 might be ending. Flash might be ending. But rest assured. As part of the true meaning of Decemberween, Eh! Steve!’s mouth will explode the universe for perpetuity.

Catch you next year.