Quiz bowl

Graham has an online Quiz Bowl tournament today, which is awesome. He spends all too much of his days and nights just lying on his best reading his iPad. We never are sure what he's reading about, and I really do wish he would read more books because I am a deep believer in the book and the positive impact of making the effort to ingest large amounts of experience and wisdom that somebody else has worked hard over long period of time to fuse into a coherent whole. But he is reading and also engaging in discussions. And watching some videos, to be sure.

Occasionally at the dinner table we experience eruptions of what he has been ingesting (i.e. the content, not the food). For example, last week he talked to us about a long debate he had had with someone on one of the online discussion fora he frequents about Biden's VP selection. Also a long disquisition on the history of mercenaries (that had been informed by reading an article in this week's Economist, which kept him sitting on the living room couch for much longer than usual).

My readers who have known me a really long time, going back to Glen Heights, will recognize this as being a lot like me when I was much younger, and would stay holed up at home reading the World Book Encyclopedia in the afternoons. Really, the main thing that pulled me out of that mode was having a group of contemporary peers -- Niklaus, Josh, David, Adam, and various siblings -- who came and pulled me out -- sometimes using downright cruel methods -- and made me do sports or go in the woods and build forts.

Unfortunately, Graham doesn't quite have such a cohort, and the world is different. Now he is less the exception than I was back in the day. Lots of kids live their lives buried in their devices. Plus he has his autism diagnosis, which in some ways offers him a diagnostic validation of his way of life. Coronavirus and the distancing of everything has not helped him and kids like him, not that it has really helped anyone.

So, to return to where I began, this Quiz Bowl tournament is awesome. I hope he and his buds kick some ass. But also get kicked a little, because that's part of the process.