The Klog

A friend of mine got engaged recently, and when I visited him and his fiancee, they asked me probing questions about kids. How does it change things? Is it worth it? Do you lose all your time?

I remember asking those same kinds of questions when my wife and I first started seriously contemplating having kids. In general, the answers I got were very positive - yes, it’s absolutely worth it. They were also, though, somehow unsatisfactory and vague. Those same people had bags under their eyes, would constantly be interrupted by their energetic offspring, and would be hard to do fun things with that did not involve kids. When asked why it was all worth it, they would use vague phrases like “Your heart is walking around outside of your body.” It was like a cult: they couldn’t clearly articulate why it was so great, they would mostly only hang out with other “cult members” (parents), and on many of the metrics a single man might care about (energy level, sleep quality, ability and time to do fun things etc.), they were clearly doing worse.

In the end, I concluded that there was really no way to know what it’s like to have kids other than to jump in and do it. And so, eventually, I did.

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I don’t have a lot to say here other than that Astro and I both agree that mountain biking is a great way to start the day:

LADWP has been trying to close the trails at Haines Canyon due to prodding by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife and the California State Water Resources board. Here’s hoping they all take a step back and do what Astro suggests and work with the community to find a win-win way to keep the trails open.

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In elementary school, each student in my class made a bookmark under the careful direction of our teacher. Were they each a unique artistic expression of the child who made it? No. They were very simple: just two columns going down, with spaces for a date and a signature.

We were to take these home every day, and our parents were to add the date and their signature when we read with them on that particular day. Then we brought the bookmark back to school to show the teacher that we had diligently practiced at home.

After a few weeks of this, my mom wrote “Krystof reads every day” on the bookmark, signed it, and never looked at it again. My teacher was amused by this, but what was she going to do? And so I showed her this bookmark every day, and every day she smiled and accepted it.

“Krystof reads every day”.

It was probably true, or at least close. My parents had a huge library that spanned most of our house growing up. There were books on huge shelves in all of the bedrooms, in my dad’s office, and in the living room. I genuinely thought we had a copy of all the books worth reading in the whole world. If someone at school recommended a specific book, I’d ask my mom, and I’d have it on my bed stand the same day or the next. If I didn’t have a specific book in mind, my mom would say she’d think about it and come back with something fun.

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When I was growing up in Czechia, there was exactly one TV channel, unimaginatively called “Czech TV”. When there was anything even remotely interesting on it, you and all your friends watched it. Later that same public broadcaster added a second channel (“Czech TV 2”), but that was more of the same, now with more soccer games. The big shift came when we finally got the first public broadcaster, TV Nova. They weren’t so tied to the old ways and introduced us to edgier American entertainment.

There are a few shows that stand out: Xena, Hercules, Renegade, Highlander. But there’s another one that made a powerful impression: Tropical Heat. Check out these intro titles:

Women in bikinis, sandy beaches, and driving around in a Jeep Wrangler with no doors (never mind a roof) - that’s what life in America was like. The protagonist, “Nick Slaughter”, always wears an unbuttoned Hawaiian shirt and solves problems with his fists. That’s what it meant to be cool.

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Twelve years after first setting foot in Japan I made it back (this time with Stephanie!), and the country and its people charmed me all over again.

We visited Tokyo, Jigokudani, Kyoto, hiked on the Kumano Kodo, finally spent a lazy few days on the Izu Peninsula. Hiking the ancient pilgrimage route on the Kumano Kodo was particularly special, so I made that a separate post, which you can find here. I’ll tell you about all the rest here.

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