Keeping score

I am fast approaching my 52nd birthday, a milestone made particularly meaningful by the fact that it means I will be exactly twice as old as the guy who anchors the defense for me on our soccer team. A guy who, I should mention, in practice on Tuesday was trying to nutmeg me and instead hit me in the nuts as hard as I have ever been hit. It was excruciatingly painful. He may one day hear the end of it, but it is difficult to predict when that will be.

Actually, as I said in my last post, right now everything is framed by the fact that Natalie's high school graduation is fast approaching, and she is headed off to college soon. With all the planning I have to do in various domains, I get planning fatigue, and I have been dragging my feet on vacation planning. We don't know what we're doing this summer. In recent evenings, I have been digging into this topic. On the one hand, I am a little exhausted by two summers of point-to-point vacations, where we start in one place, end another, and have lots of logistics to deal with in the middle.  So I want to just more or less be in one place. On the other hand, I'd like for Natalie's potentially last summer vacation to be special and memorable.

Part of me does scorekeeping at the level of: "I went to Europe twice before college (she's been once), and visited more tropical places than she has (zero)." I feel like I should give her something roughly at parity with that. In my mind I even handicapped it and guilt-tripped myself: "The world is more globalized now than it was, people go to Asia and shit now."

But here's the main thing. She sings to herself in her room. When I was bored, I was driving around drunk, getting high, measuring my own self-worth by how many women I had slept with (and how hot they were), etc. The other night for fun she went to a candidates' forum and came back discussing the relative merits of the wise incumbent (David Price) vs. the breath of fresh air challenger (Michelle Cotton-Laws).

So I think I am doing OK.