Ep. 232: “The Going-With Years”
Merlin: This episode of Roderick on the Line is brought to you by Casper.
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Merlin: Hello.
Merlin: Hi, John.
Merlin: Hi, Merlin.
Merlin: How's it going?
Good.
John: I'm a little bit sick.
John: Yeah, you had a sore throat, right?
John: Yeah, but now it's not a sore throat.
John: What are you eating?
John: Oh, a chocolate croissant.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: You sound dolorous.
John: I'm a little dolarous.
Merlin: Oh, don't be dolarous.
Merlin: Come on.
Merlin: Oh, it's a little bit everything.
John: No, no, no, no.
John: No dolar.
John: Oh, I was up very late last night.
John: It's a long story.
Merlin: So the day before... This is the place for a long story.
Merlin: This is the home.
Merlin: You look forward to this.
Merlin: This is your life raft.
John: It's a long story place.
John: So years ago, when I moved into my house, the people that had fixed it up
John: I've talked about this.
John: They did a terrible job.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: It sounds like they made some pretty weird decisions that did not have the long view in mind.
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: They didn't think to put in a monk hole, but maybe some weird recessed lighting or something like that.
Merlin: There's no fireman's pole.
Merlin: Oh, come on.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: How about your bookshelves?
Merlin: When you move your bookshelf or you pull back the head on your Shakespeare, are there switches?
Merlin: Is there anything that affords you an unseen location in the house?
Merlin: Not a one.
Merlin: Ugh.
Merlin: How do you not put that at the top of the list?
John: Oh, wait, that's not true.
John: There are two hidden doors.
Merlin: But here's the thing.
Merlin: If you're going to make changes to your house, you really should begin by making sure that you have cool hidden panels, doorways, and tunnels.
Merlin: Now, everything you do after that, the wiring, the plumbing, where you put the new half bath, it's all going to be governed by where the corridors are because you've got new corridors now.
John: Precisement.
John: That's one of the things that infuriates me the most about Quantum of Solace or whatever the fuck that movie was.
John: That's the Moncol one?
John: Yeah, where he's got this beautiful house in the middle of nowhere, and he's got this amazing escape...
John: Tunnel next to the fireplace and it goes down into this amazing warren of escape rooms and then It's never fully covered in the movie but you go out a tunnel and then it just sort of appears in the yard and there's no
John: It's like a big field where you'd be easily spotted.
John: Well, that, yeah, right.
John: It doesn't go, it just goes out into the septic field.
John: But also, it's never clear in the movie, like they never show the last hundred yards.
John: Like you get down, there's a scene where they go down and then they're in what it looks like the basement.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: And then the next shot is of...
John: of them or him sort of poking his head up out of the grass like a gopher.
Merlin: Is it the grass or is it a shed?
Merlin: I might be conflating this with another movie.
John: I don't think there's a shed.
John: I think he just pops up in the middle of the grass.
John: That's really poorly thought out.
John: But there's no door or anything.
John: You know, that's 100 yards or more.
John: 300 yards.
John: He's really out there in the yard.
John: It's a long way to go.
John: And my question is...
John: Obviously.
John: Is that whole distance like a stone-lined corridor that you can stand up in?
John: And then you get to the end and there's just like a little... It's like you push some grass apart.
Merlin: Oh, it feels like a metaphor.
Merlin: Yes, it feels like a metaphor.
Merlin: You put all this care into the tunnel that didn't need to be that nice.
Merlin: And when you end it, you could at least have, say, you get a Hogan's Heroes where the doctor...
Merlin: Remember when the doghouse goes up and the head pops up?
John: Is it LeBeau?
Merlin: That might have been LeBeau.
Merlin: Oh, see.
Merlin: God, that's a really good point.
John: If you're going to have a monk full.
John: Yeah, or a well or a chapel or some other thing that you pop out.
John: You don't just pop out in the grass somewhere.
John: It'd be an easy shot.
John: Yeah, exactly.
John: You know, if the sniper's pointed at the house, all the sniper has to do is turn 180 degrees.
John: Right.
John: Anyway, so my house was equipped with what is described at the hardware store as decorator switches, which are switches, light switches, that are both ugly and unusable.
John: Okay.
John: They don't look like light switches.
John: They look like something else.
John: And they were dimmer switches.
Merlin: Are these like the theater lighting effect?
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
John: Those aren't very satisfying to hit.
John: No.
John: Well, they don't.
John: The thing is, these don't even have a click because they are touch sensitive.
John: So you put your hand on it and you roll your fingers up it like you're on some kind of, like you're playing an 80s keyboard and you have like a sensitivity strip.
John: You've got a portamento switch.
John: Yeah.
Wow.
Wow.
John: It's like a therapy, but they don't work So you walk into the house and you're like lights on and the lights like they sometimes don't respond to your touch They sometimes respond, you know They sometimes go all the way on and then all the way off immediately like a beautiful woman
John: that's so frustrating john well so when i first moved in i was like this will not stand and i took two of them out and i put in normal what what are they look like light switches normal light looking switches but they are dimmers right so you move the little lever instead of going flick and the light is on you move the little lever and the light goes off
John: I thought that that was a good, you know, like a nice balance.
John: Dimmers have their place.
John: And I found a thousand watt switches.
John: Which were big switches at the time with these dimmers on them.
John: And I put them in.
John: Well, the other day, that was 10 years ago when I bought this house.
John: The other day, I walked into the kitchen.
John: I turned the dimmer down almost all the way to the bottom.
John: And the switch went, oh, no.
John: And I was like, oh, no.
John: So I sat there and monkeyed with it.
John: Can I get it to do it again?
John: You know, that's the number one thing you do.
John: Sure, you've got to replicate the error.
John: And yes, you can get it to do it again.
John: In fact, every time.
John: And then the room smelled with the smell of smoke, like that smell in the 1970s when you put too much ice in a blender.
John: Oh, boy.
Merlin: Oh, you get that engine working too hard smell.
Merlin: Oh, I don't like that smell.
John: No, it's bad.
John: And it's really bad when it's coming from your light switches.
John: Yes.
John: So I said, this is particularly bad because the dimmer is a thing that you're going to put all the way down.
John: And somebody's going to do it and walk away, and this thing's going to be sitting there shorting.
John: And it's going to start firing the wall.
John: So I was like, I've got to do something about this immediately.
John: I'm sick.
John: I don't want to do anything.
John: It's cold.
John: I went to the hardware store.
John: They don't sell 1,000-watt switches anymore.
John: The guy at the hardware store was like, what?
John: There's never been such a thing as they always do at a hardware store.
John: Where did you get these?
John: Alternate facts.
John: That's right.
John: And I'm like, I bought them here at this very hardware store 10 years ago.
John: Oh, wow, 10 years ago.
John: Yeah, 10 years ago.
John: What's the life expectancy on these things?
John: Look at me.
John: I can remember things I supposedly bought.
John: Yeah.
John: Yeah, that's right.
John: I'm Mr. Ten Years Ago, I guess.
John: Anyway, so I bought some new switches and then I figured, you know what?
John: I'm just going to change all the switches in the house because that's the kind of thinker I am.
Merlin: Oh, you're thinking big, big scale.
John: Here it is.
John: Buy them en masse.
John: So I bought a bunch of switches, and then I'm sitting in the house changing all these switches.
John: And I'm a little bit of a, you know, I'm a little lackadaisical, so
John: So I made an error at one point, and it caused some arcing.
John: Oh, no.
John: It's not good.
Merlin: So I'm sorry.
Merlin: I should have asked you this earlier.
Merlin: There's all kinds of things in my house that I keep meaning to fix, and a lot of them I put off because I'm thinking, oh, I've got to go shut off the power before I do anything.
Merlin: Is your power off while you're monkeying with the arcing switches?
John: Yeah, the power's off, but I went down.
John: I had the things wired, and I was like...
John: I should go down, turn the power on, and test that everything works.
John: But I hadn't zipped them all back into the wall, and a couple of things were hanging out of the wall, and they touched one another and ground themselves out.
John: Stupid rookie mistake.
John: But in the course of it, I fried one of my new parts.
John: So I had to go back to the hardware store.
John: Oh, God.
John: The indignity.
John: It was one of these days.
John: I mean, I didn't have to tell them what I'd done, but it was just like, oh, yeah, it turns out I needed another one of these.
John: Yeah, I was so good at this.
John: I want to get more of them.
John: Exactly.
John: Yeah.
John: So I got them all in the house.
John: It works a lot better.
John: For 10 years, I've been living with these switches that I just hated.
John: Everybody hated them.
John: It was like coming into my house and turning on the lights was not just an intelligence test, but it was an intelligence test that gave you a different result every time.
John: Madness.
John: Yeah.
John: So people would come in and they'd reach out to the lights, which I think a lot of the people that would, you know, guests in my home would just leave the lights off.
John: Because they didn't even want to deal with the interface.
John: But now I have normal looking switches that do normal replicable things.
John: Nothing shorting out.
John: But in the process of fixing this, I had the doors of the house open.
John: Both front and back door.
John: Because I'm running in and out.
John: And then late at night, because I'm up late right now these days.
John: I'm lying in bed.
John: And a mouse runs by.
John: Oh, no.
John: I've never had a mouse in my house.
Merlin: And it's cold outside right now.
Merlin: It's cold outside.
Merlin: So the mouse says, I want to come in here.
John: I left the back door open and the mouse is like, hmm, seems cool.
John: And so I've just created a whole other problem.
John: I've never had a mouse.
John: I mean, you know, there's mice in the... There's mice around.
John: There's toys in the attic.
John: Yeah.
John: But never a mouse in the house.
John: So now I've got, like, hopefully a mouse.
Merlin: It's probably a mouse.
John: Hopefully not a pregnant mouse.
Merlin: It's probably a ranger, an explorer.
Merlin: You know, you send some boys out to go, like, check things out.
Merlin: This is a good place to have some mice in the heist.
Merlin: Mm-hmm.
John: Get in there, check it out, come back and tell us.
John: And then I closed the door, and he was like, huh.
Hmm.
John: But, you know, I mean, a mouse can get a mouse can get out.
Merlin: So you were already up later than you might have liked.
Merlin: But then the mouse kind of compounded the.
John: Yeah, I'm laying around and I'm thinking about this mouse instead of instead of sleeping.
John: Anyway, so that's where I'm at.
John: Oh, God.
John: Is it still in there as far as you know?
John: Well, yeah, I mean, I didn't tell him to leave.
John: Yeah, I think I have to dispatch him.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I don't like the trend.
Merlin: I've got to be honest with you.
Merlin: If I had my druthers, I wouldn't even have power windows in a car.
Merlin: Because in my head, I know this is 30, 40-year-old information.
Merlin: But power windows to me...
Merlin: We might have talked about this.
Merlin: What if you go into a river?
Merlin: What if you go into a river?
Merlin: Sure.
Merlin: Now you need a special tool to not die in a car.
John: Yeah, you need the window breaking tool.
Merlin: It makes the doors very heavy because you now have to have an engine.
Merlin: Another, you have to have the engines in your doors to make the windows go up and down.
Merlin: Engines in your doors.
Merlin: Engines in the doors.
Merlin: And I'm not loving that.
Merlin: Also, you know, it's another one of these things.
Merlin: And this was before cars got good.
Merlin: There were all these problems where, like, the rich guy stuff that you would put in a rich guy car would all pretty consistently be the stuff that broke first.
Merlin: Yep, yep.
Merlin: So, like, if you had an AC Delco AM-FM radio in your GM car, you know, if you still have that car, I bet you the one part of it that still works is the AM-FM radio with the chunk-chunk buttons on it.
Merlin: You know, you pull it out to program it, program it.
Merlin: Fuck you.
Merlin: You pull it out to set it.
Merlin: Chunk, chunk.
Merlin: Chunk.
Merlin: You listen to Q105.
Merlin: It tunes perfectly, flawlessly every time.
Merlin: It doesn't sound great, but you know what?
Merlin: Your 50-year-old radio is probably still working fine.
Merlin: At least one window on a car would usually break.
Merlin: It would still be heavy, but now you didn't have a window that worked.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: You know, all that kind of stuff used to just so like even to this day, like our last car we had had manual windows.
Merlin: We had the least costly version of our particular model of car that was available and it was fine.
Merlin: Yeah, it was totally fine.
Merlin: But then you get into your house and there's stuff where there's a trick and it's cute.
Merlin: I don't like the stuff where it's cute to turn a light on or off.
Merlin: You don't have a you don't have a nest.
Merlin: I don't have a nest.
Merlin: My house is too old for a nest.
Merlin: I do have a lot of smart lights.
Merlin: I won't take you down this particular K-hole, but I am a... Smart lights?
Merlin: Yeah, we could get into it.
John: Let's not go all the way down the K-hole.
John: Let's just dip into the K-hole.
John: Well, I'll dip a little.
John: All right.
Merlin: What is a smart light?
Merlin: I just want to get one thing out because it's on my mind.
Merlin: All right.
Merlin: Because I have two bits of related stuff here that are totally unrelated and yet completely related.
Merlin: I'm going to let you finish.
Merlin: Thank you.
Merlin: Thank you.
Merlin: You're Kanye in that case.
John: That was a Kanye reference.
Merlin: We struggle with mornings sometimes.
Merlin: Oh, yes.
Merlin: I don't think we are unique in this regard.
Merlin: We have a multivariate struggle with mornings.
Merlin: There are many small things about mornings that are difficult.
Merlin: The primary driver of a morning being tough is that we have a kid who has to be at school.
Merlin: At a certain time.
Merlin: And ideally, she will have food with her for lunch.
Merlin: She has to have homework in the backpack.
Merlin: She has to not have Hermione Granger hair.
Merlin: She's got to look presentable.
Merlin: She's got to be clean.
Merlin: She has to have brushed teeth.
Merlin: And I'm sorry, I'm going to bring it up again.
Merlin: She's got to be wearing shoes.
Merlin: Oh, there's a lot to do, it sounds like.
Merlin: Well, you know, an hour seems like it would be enough time.
Merlin: But I don't know if you've struggled with this.
Merlin: Socks and shoes are where it all falls apart.
Merlin: And I feel like, again, I'm just going to say this.
Merlin: I really feel like the whole thing needed to move to earlier.
Merlin: All adjustments, we need to add 20 to 30 minutes in front of everything.
Merlin: Because...
Merlin: As a retired project manager, I'm just here to tell you, there are many things that are not being accounted for.
Merlin: And there are enough things that aren't accounted for that by the time you get the shoes and socks, everyone's crying.
Merlin: So you're saying you need to wake up a half hour earlier?
Merlin: Well, that's what we've done.
Merlin: We've got a whole thing.
Merlin: This relates to your light switch problem in that I'm about to make an analogy about my child being like a theater lighting light switch.
Merlin: But it also has to do with sleep because I've started going to bed earlier in order to get up earlier in order to be more helpful in the morning and to not just be the person who says to my wife, you know, you guys should really do this earlier.
Merlin: Like, how about you fucking help out?
Merlin: So I'm trying to help out more earlier.
Merlin: It's a cascading chain of decisions.
Merlin: And I feel like I'm not gonna say I'm the only one that understands this, but I feel like I have this knowledge in my bones in a way that my daughter does not.
Merlin: Which is that, like, if you don't go to bed earlier, if you keep reading Lemony Snicket until 10 o'clock, like, God bless you.
Merlin: How do you tell a kid to stop reading?
Merlin: I mean, how do you tell a kid to stop reading Lemony Snicket?
Merlin: And, you know, yeah, absolutely.
Merlin: It's, you know, that's my dream.
Merlin: I wouldn't give a fuck how the kid turned out.
Merlin: If she's healthy, great.
Merlin: If she learns to like music and likes reading, I'm done.
Merlin: I'm ready to retire.
Merlin: That's all I care about.
Merlin: I just want her to read.
Merlin: It's like one of my very few super selfish things is I hope my kid likes to read.
Merlin: And that's all she likes to do is read.
Merlin: Which is great.
Merlin: So, you know, I don't want to be that guy.
Merlin: But if you go to bed at 10, you're not going to be getting up at 6 anymore because you're a kid and you need more sleep.
Merlin: And that means you get up and you're tired.
Merlin: And now the toast is getting pushed out later.
Merlin: The toast pushes out the reading because she's got to read in the morning before school.
Merlin: She pushes that out.
Merlin: And we're pushing, pushing, pushing, pushing.
Merlin: Suddenly it's four minutes until like we're at the drop dead leave the house time.
Merlin: And that's when the hair brushing and tooth brushing begins.
Merlin: Now comes the tears.
Merlin: And as I said to her today, I put a clock on her.
Merlin: I gave her a watch.
Merlin: I purchased three new clocks for the house because it's going to be all about clocks.
Merlin: Oh.
Merlin: Yeah, no, I'm turning into kind of a martinet about this.
Merlin: Clocks and watches.
Merlin: Clocks and watches.
Merlin: And so I says to her, I says, I say, look, you know, it's mom and I are here to be your helpful assistance.
Merlin: But at a point you need to become more cognizant about how the time works.
John: Yeah, it sounds like the mornings in your house are going to be like the beginning of a Pink Floyd song.
Merlin: And now I'm like a crazy person because I'm running around going, OK, guess what time it is right now?
Merlin: And she goes, I don't know, 705.
Merlin: I go, it's 712.
Merlin: That means you need to be out the door with shoes and socks on, you know, in this many minutes.
Merlin: Yeah, you're seven minutes behind already.
Merlin: So I'm already a crazy person.
Merlin: I'm the one saying this over, and then it's, okay, it's 728.
Merlin: Wait a minute, 728.
Merlin: Here come more tears.
Merlin: And so we had a, so we recently implemented something new, which is everybody tries to go to bed earlier.
Merlin: Everybody gets up earlier.
Merlin: Dad's helping more in the morning, which I'm happy to do.
Merlin: I mean, not happy to do, but which I think it's important to.
Merlin: do right but now we've gotten into this thing where like now i'm doing post-mortems post-morta with her oh wow you're you're talking about talking about it after school now oh no this is like this is like the this is like what went wrong with the with the mercury uh launch like i mean do you do it in the car on the way to school or do you do it like we have like eight hours later this is the insane part is like you know we she has friends
Merlin: who live outside of town, that it takes them 20, 25 minutes.
Merlin: Without saying too much, I will just say that we are very close to our daughter's school.
Merlin: We can walk there at a pace that will not have us out of breath in less than 10 minutes.
Merlin: It's manic.
Merlin: There's no reason to ever be late for school.
Merlin: But because it takes so little time to walk to school, you can guess what happens.
Merlin: Sure, you push it to the limit.
Merlin: You get a little loosey-goosey.
Merlin: Okay, so here's me this morning.
Merlin: This is my Mercury postmortem with my daughter.
Merlin: I said, you know what we didn't account for?
Merlin: I said, we didn't account for socks.
Merlin: And that's how we lost yesterday.
Merlin: We were out at 732 instead of 730.
Merlin: Now, the thing is, the difference between 730 and 732 is all the difference in the world.
Merlin: You missed that first bell.
Merlin: If you didn't get out, we got the new program.
Merlin: We're not getting out.
Merlin: If we're not out at 730, we have failed.
Merlin: Mercury is down.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Okay?
Merlin: You know, we went and saw The Hidden Figures.
Merlin: We both love this movie.
Merlin: So, you know, we're talking a lot about John F. Kennedy and astronauts and stuff.
Merlin: And anyway, every family should talk about that, especially in the morning.
Merlin: So today I felt like kind of a dick this morning, but I was really like I was I was really heavy on the clock.
Merlin: She's got her new watch on showing how the light works and getting very excited.
Merlin: She's going to wear a watch to school.
Merlin: And and so, you know, I'm walking around in my underpants about how many minutes after seven.
Merlin: Mm hmm.
Merlin: So on the one hand, I'm really tired because I got five hours of sleep because the new program is slow to launch.
Merlin: But here's the other thing about your light switch is that the difference between a traditional light switch and what you had in your house is the difference between your life before a child and your life with a child.
Merlin: Because it used to be you could say, for no particular reason, I feel it's 11.52 p.m.
Merlin: and I feel like walking to a light post five blocks from here.
Merlin: Whatever.
Merlin: Doesn't matter.
Merlin: You want to leave the house, you leave the house.
Merlin: Sure.
Merlin: If you want to go pour a bucket of Gatorade on your head, you can just go do that right now.
Merlin: Sure.
Merlin: Ramble on.
Merlin: You just grab your keys and your wallet.
Merlin: Maybe you put on some pants, bathrobe.
Merlin: You walk out and you just go and you go and you come anytime you feel like it.
Merlin: You just move around.
Merlin: and then you get to be like john's light switch where it's like i honestly don't know i cannot tell you within with certainty i can't tell you within certainty more than plus or minus 20 minutes when we will be able to do anything because there are so many unknown factors and when you're running your goddamn finger along that lady light switch and trying to make it light up same thing it's the same feeling in this case we didn't account for socks
Merlin: You should not have to deliberate about how long it will take for your lights to come on.
Merlin: I've accepted my happy lot in life is that I have to account for socks and minutes.
Merlin: But you do kind of pine for the days when you can just walk to a light post.
John: Well, my way of dealing with this, Merlin, is a very simple hack that I've been using my whole life, which is that every clock in my house is 11 minutes fast.
Merlin: But who was that?
Merlin: Vince Lombardi did that, right?
Merlin: Didn't Vince Lombardi famously set all of his clocks and watches 15 minutes fast?
John: Well, 15 minutes is too easy because you... It's got to be a prime number.
John: Yeah, you gauge, oh yeah, it's 15 minutes.
John: But 11 minutes, you forget that it's there.
John: 11 minutes is just this number that's very hard for people to throw...
John: to just be like, oh, it's burp.
John: Oh, yeah, you round up.
Merlin: You round up way too easy.
John: Yeah, so, and, you know, and I change the amount that the clocks are off.
Merlin: This was going to be my hack on your hack, yes.
Merlin: The way to have this really work is they're all fast, but they're all fast a little different.
John: Yeah, and sometimes it's 7, sometimes it's 12.
Merlin: And if you don't have NPR on, you're not going to know when they're wrong.
John: That's right.
Merlin: NPR screws the whole thing up.
John: Well, see, and I don't have NPR on.
Hmm.
John: And so everybody's just looking at clocks and I just take the clock at its word.
John: And generally, we're in the car driving and I pass some clock that a business has thoughtfully put up that's visible from the freeway.
John: And I'm like, whoa, we got plenty of time.
John: But I fool myself every morning.
John: It's like every morning I go, oh, check it out.
John: I never remember it because I intentionally don't remember it.
John: But if she's wearing a watch to school, now you've given her some kind of connection that she can take into the world, her watch can't be wrong because she's going to be measuring it against the school clock.
John: Yeah, that's true.
John: She's not going to sit there in the house and be like, oh, I believe the house clocks.
John: She's going to go to her watch.
Merlin: Oh, there's one thing about this watch, though.
Merlin: Oh, my God.
Merlin: This is not a precision timepiece, John.
Merlin: This is something I got off Amazon for $13.
Merlin: And, you know, it's amazing what kind of watch you can get for $13 for a kid today.
Merlin: But there is, first of all, like most all digital, it's an analog and digital watch.
Merlin: It's got like, it's a chronograph.
Merlin: Like many of these, you know, you get the modal buttons for setting things and there's many things to set.
Merlin: Are you ready for this?
Merlin: I'm not even like a super OCD guy, but this this is already driving both of us nuts.
Merlin: Like one hour into having this watch, this is driving her nuts, which is the the the you set the time on the analog and the digital separately.
Merlin: So you say digital, and neither of them is necessarily correct.
Merlin: They're both manually set.
Merlin: So you get the watch, you take it out of the box, you put it on.
Merlin: You say, okay, what time is it?
Merlin: 718.
Merlin: Okay, well, you set the analog to 718.
Merlin: And then you've got to go and set the digital.
Merlin: By the time you set the digital to 718, it's already 719.
Merlin: And then the sweep secondhand is not matching up with the seconds.
Merlin: You've got to do this separately.
Merlin: So the whole time she pointed this out this morning, the secondhands aren't the same on these.
Merlin: And I didn't know what to say.
Merlin: I was like, it's a $13 chronograph.
Merlin: It's not a Rolex.
Merlin: But that would drive me nuts all day at school.
Merlin: I'd be looking at the secondhand on the clock, the secondhand, sweep secondhand on the watch.
Merlin: I'd be looking at the digital seconds, and I'd be thinking, what fresh hell is this?
Merlin: What time is it really, John?
John: There's a clock that I bought for one of the rooms of the house that I liked the look of it.
John: It looked like one of those old-fashioned diner clocks.
John: I would kill for that.
Merlin: That has been banned from our house, and I want one so much.
Merlin: Why is it banned?
Merlin: Aesthetics.
Merlin: My goodness the aesthetics are unimpeachable.
Merlin: I have so much to say about the sea.
Merlin: This is one last thing about this because this is This is only for us.
Merlin: This must never get back to my house.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: I have pointed out to my partner That we need to have a clock
Merlin: in the area where the drama begins having clocks in other places has not been working there needs to be a clock in our face at the place where the tears happen now my preference for that would be to get a diner clock like an old school kitchen clock like a school clock you put it here by the pictures in the hallway but you know what I understand that is not aesthetically pleasing I want the largest conceivable clock that will fit in that area and I want it to hang over my daughter like the dark mark
Merlin: I want this to be something she cannot avoid seeing.
Merlin: Now, I'm capitulating by buying about three different clocks from Amazon, and I'm going to let my wife pick which one she thinks is least odious.
John: But she has strong enough opinions about the...
John: The vibe that a clock imparts to a room.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: She's right.
Merlin: If we put it next to all the framed pictures of people, it's going to look weird.
Merlin: Our hallway's got lots of pictures of the family.
Merlin: It's a nice little area that's very homey.
Merlin: And I'm trying to turn it into a commissary or something by putting a giant clock on the wall.
Merlin: And I get why she doesn't want to do that.
Merlin: I just feel like I feel like we need something.
Merlin: We need a very large very intimidating tick-tock actually literally makes the noise tick-tock clock Well, here's what's crazy about this one that I bought.
John: Yeah, I bought it I brought it home and I and I knew when I got it that it was not I could go down to the salvage yard and find some clock from an old school and and should have done
John: But I was at some, you know, I was at some store and I saw this thing and I, excuse me, and it was not expensive.
John: And I said, ah, you know, throw a couple of dollars at this.
John: It's great.
John: Brought it home and there was a, and it's battery powered and there was a separate battery that
John: For the little hand.
John: Whoa.
John: That's very, very troubling to me.
John: Well, absolutely.
John: There's a lot of reasons that bothers me.
John: Well, here's the number one reason.
John: The only reason really is that the operation of the little hand does not bear on keeping time.
Merlin: You have two clocks and neither of them may be right.
Merlin: That's a recipe for madness.
Merlin: Yeah, the little hand is just spinning around.
John: These are some seconds, mostly.
John: Yeah, this is what seconds look like.
John: But the clock itself is like tick, tick.
John: It's just on its own.
John: So every time I look at the clock, I'm like... That's so weird.
John: You are living a lie, clock.
John: But I'm kind of, you know, I like what it does to the room.
John: It really ties the room together.
Merlin: Are you able to put it out of your mind that you've got two clocks in your clock?
John: Because the clock is in an adjacent space.
John: It's not a regular space.
John: I don't refer to this clock.
John: The clock is visible from the guest bed.
John: So it's really a clock for the benefit of guests.
John: And I'm already fucking with them because it's 11 minutes fast.
John: So the second hand is sort of a rounding error.
John: And the second hand is just like, if you're taking your own blood pressure...
Merlin: uh like it is keeping seconds it would be pretty funny if you changed it like not to where a minute is 90 seconds but you know it'd be great if you changed it to where a minute was like 47 seconds oh wouldn't that wouldn't that make you feel like a crazy person yeah it was running faster than it should but it wasn't affecting the time
John: And what I imagine is that you're lying there in bed and if you, like I, would be the type of person that would lay in bed and watch the little head go around.
John: But then the big hand ticks off another minute.
John: But the little hand is at like 40 seconds.
John: Oh, my God.
John: And you'd be like, whoa, whoa, whoa, what?
John: What?
John: Whoa.
John: What just happened?
John: Oh, my God.
John: And then it did it repeatedly.
John: You would, yeah, you would really doubt.
John: Talk about gaslighting.
John: It's like a black mirror situation.
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John: So, and I have, you know, I have the clocks on the stove and the clocks on the microwave, and those two, because they're right next to each other,
John: I'll set the time on one, and then I will sit with my finger poised over the other.
John: This is an art.
John: Because I do not want them to be even four seconds separated.
John: And I wait, I wait, I spend that whole minute watching this pot boil, and then boop!
John: I try and just nail it with the other one because I want those things to be, and that's irrelevant.
Merlin: I think the fact that everybody has a mostly exactly correct clock on their phone.
Merlin: Yep.
Merlin: That is interesting to me, because that's a canonical source of time.
Merlin: If you want to know what time it is, look at your phone, because your phone is actually, first of all, it's a really good timepiece, better than most of us could afford on our wrist, I imagine.
Merlin: And it is getting the nuclear time update.
Merlin: But I don't think people think about this or sweat this stuff as much as our generation did.
Merlin: I think about the clocks we had in my elementary school.
Merlin: And man, I mean, the clocks in our school, they had a sweep secondhand.
Merlin: And first of all, they were all, every clock in the school, which could be set remotely, every clock in the school was always exactly right.
Merlin: Yep.
Merlin: And if it was a bell that rang at 1 p.m.,
Merlin: It did not start to ring until the clock turned to 1 o'clock.
Merlin: And it did not turn to 1 o'clock until the second hand, which went like this, talk, talk, talk, talk, until that went from 59 to 12.
Merlin: Every single clock was exactly flawlessly perfect all the time, in every room all the time.
Merlin: And if it wasn't, it would have been really troubling.
John: Do you remember the last day of 8th grade?
John: Was your junior high through ninth grade or did it end in eighth grade?
Merlin: Oh, so seven to nine, ten to twelve.
John: Oh, my God.
John: I don't even know what it's like to be one of you people.
John: That's junior high and then you had middle school.
John: Did you do six to eight?
John: No, we didn't have middle school.
John: Junior high was seven, eight.
John: Oh, that's so strange.
John: Sixth grade was the last grade of elementary school.
John: As it should be.
John: Should be.
John: As it should be.
John: And then seventh, eighth.
John: And then ninth grade was freshman in high school, as it should be.
Merlin: It's sort of like the way Europe makes you put your dog into a kennel for like a year.
Merlin: Oh, right.
Merlin: See, also cutting trail.
Merlin: Two years, that's a containment facility.
John: It really is.
John: It really is.
John: Because when you're a sixth grader, you're like, la, la, la, la.
John: G.I.
John: Joe, G.I.
John: Joe.
John: Pow, pow, pow.
John: Hi.
John: You know, and right about sixth grade is when the girls start to say, like, do you want to go with me?
John: Who's going with who?
John: Yeah.
John: Oh, he's going with her.
John: Oh, the going with.
John: Yeah, the going with yours.
John: And I was like, did I ever tell you the first time a girl said, a girl came up to me.
John: Because a lot of it isn't, do you want to go with me?
John: It is, do you want to go with her?
John: Oh, yeah, you get proxies.
John: Yeah, I'm here as an intermediary.
John: And it was like a small group of girls that approached me on the playground.
John: And said, let's call her Stacy, because that's a name from my generation.
John: That's a terrific name.
John: Do you want to go out?
John: Do you want to go with Stacy?
John: Do you want to go with Stacy?
John: And I was such a child.
John: I was like, go where?
John: And they collectively rolled their eyes and sighed.
John: Yeah, just sighed at me.
John: And I was like, what?
John: What?
John: What have I done?
John: What did I do?
John: Even by saying that dumb thing I had sort of like blown my chances with Stacy.
John: Oh No But then you kind of outed yourself Because I was like, you know, I stopped for one second playing like time tip travelers like time traveler space ninja But that was also the year that I sat at the Arctic Roadrunner and
John: oh my god this was the worst moment of my life i so we were doing some kind of theater show and it was me and another friend of mine and lori basler oh lori some other there she is again and the four of us went to the arctic road runner which was the hamburger place that was around the corner from my elementary school which was north star elementary
John: You'll notice you'll begin to pick up a theme that everything in Alaska is named after Alaska.
John: Oh, okay.
John: North Star Elementary.
John: It's kind of like Los Angeles.
John: That's right.
John: Yeah.
John: Except, yeah, in Los Angeles, every name of everything is something you've already heard a thousand times from the movies.
John: Yeah.
John: Okay.
John: Like, whoa, Melrose?
John: I know what that is.
John: No, you don't.
John: You just know it from a TV show.
John: But the Arctic Roadrunner used to only have one location, which was on Arctic Boulevard.
John: And then they had another location.
John: But I found that second location to be non-canonical.
John: But I went to the Arctic Roadrunner with my friend and Lori Basler and her friend.
John: And this was a very unusual situation.
John: We were off campus during school getting a hamburger that we were paying for with our own money.
John: It was like...
John: Big deal.
John: It felt like a scene from Greece.
John: And I got my hamburger first.
John: And I went over to the booths.
John: And Arctic Roadrunner is a hamburger joint from the 50s.
John: And it looks like the 1950s.
John: And I walked over and here was the booth.
John: And I said, oh shit.
John: What do I do?
John: If I sit on one side, I want, see, what I want is Lori Basler to sit next to me.
John: But I'm going to sit on one side and then tell my friend to sit next to me and, or I'm going to tell my friend to sit across and then, and I just, I wasn't sure exactly what to do.
John: And I sat down in a booth and my friend sat across from me and I was like, okay.
Merlin: But you're running through scenarios.
Merlin: You're doing like tween chess.
John: Yeah, I'm just like, how is this going to play out?
John: And then Lori and her friend came and sat in a separate booth together.
John: Oh, see.
John: And I was like, what?
John: No, that's not.
John: We're all together.
John: Oh, shit.
John: This screws up my arrangements.
John: No, you can't go in a separate car.
John: Tom, can you get me off the hook?
John: Sorry, Sally.
John: And so it was like the whole thing was screwed up.
John: And I mean, the only worst scenario would have been that Lori sat next to my friend and her friend sat next to me.
John: And that's not what happened.
John: So it ended up remaining neutral.
John: But boy, there was a lot of tension there.
John: And that is sixth grade to me.
John: By the time seventh grade rolled around, people were smoking cigarettes and getting drunk before school.
John: Oh, jeez.
John: Oh, my God.
Merlin: Such a narrow aperture.
John: Yeah, that's Alaska.
John: But the last day of eighth grade, I remember sitting in class, and spring in Alaska is one of the great seasons of the world.
John: It's the season of the witch.
John: Oh, is that right?
Yeah.
John: Because spring is just like it.
John: Winter is so awful and breakup is so awful.
John: That when full spring arrives, everything blooms.
John: It's beautiful out.
John: You know, by June, the sun is up in the sky for a long time during the day.
John: Like sun goes down at 10.
John: You know, it's wonderful.
John: And you're still trapped in school.
John: It's just crazy making.
John: And the last day of eighth grade, I still remember watching that little hand tick, tick, tick, tick, as it went around.
John: And, you know, here it comes.
John: Like, we're one minute out.
John: And just watching.
John: And the teacher's still like, well, over summer, blah, I want you to read this.
John: And just tick, tick, tick.
John: And it hit that bell.
John: And it was like the...
John: the ceiling lifted off the world.
John: Because I was done with junior high in addition.
John: I was out of this nightmare and I was basically headed to college, which was ninth grade.
John: Which, you know, which everyone all through junior high is preparing you for ninth grade.
John: Like, well, you know, when you get to high school.
John: That's right.
John: When you get over there to high school, like, look out.
John: You can't keep playing around.
John: And, you know, I began what would effectively be the last true summer of my childhood.
John: And it was all staring at that clock that represented the uniformity of school.
John: The same clock that had been in every classroom from the time I was in kindergarten.
John: Just watching this famous black clock tick it down.
John: Whenever I'm doing a big budget Hollywood film and they say, can you cry?
John: I just put myself in that situation.
John: Call it sense memory.
John: Yep, yep.
Merlin: Just tick it down.
John: Boy, clocks used to be so important.
John: I don't even know if, do kids today even have a last day of school?
Merlin: Oh, no, I think it's a sliding scale.
Merlin: It's just optional or something?
Merlin: John, everything's a mess now.
Merlin: I mean, everything's a mess.
Merlin: There's nothing to moor anybody anymore.
Merlin: The times change.
Merlin: It's strange times.
Merlin: Do you remember this?
Merlin: So it sounds like your big black clock was as tough and solid as ours.
John: It was as big and as black as yours.
Merlin: But do you remember on the Friday in fall,
Merlin: before the friday before the time change right before school would let out it'd be this amazing moment oh oh my god i just i still i feel like i so clearly remember the image because these clocks i just i can't say this enough these clocks were unimpeachable oh you're talking about when they moved remotely one hour at every there was a there was a weird moment where suddenly the clock that was never wrong
Merlin: would stir and then suddenly the little hand and the big hand would start moving backwards oh i do remember and it would happen it would take less than a minute it was like but it was such a strange it was like it would be like somebody resetting the sky it was so it was such a weird moment and i mean maybe i'm thinking about this too much maybe i think about clocks too much i think i think becoming aware of time oh let me say this
Merlin: I am a very disorganized and very confused person.
Merlin: But there's a couple things in my life that made my life more sensible and made me less stressed out.
Merlin: I'll tell you two things that have completely changed my game.
Merlin: One is always putting my wallet and keys, all my pocket things.
Merlin: I always put all of my pocket things in the same place every day, all the time.
Merlin: They never go anywhere but that one spot.
Merlin: Game changer, what is that spot?
Merlin: What is mine or what's it called?
Merlin: Mine is a white dish.
Merlin: It's a cross between a plate and a bowl.
Merlin: Probably from an Ikea, but it's like a flat... It's probably... I can tell you, it's about the width of an apple pencil square.
Merlin: It's a flat circle.
Merlin: Like an 8x8 McConaughey disc.
Merlin: And that's where it goes.
Merlin: Okay, so that's one.
Merlin: But you suggested that it had a name.
Merlin: Oh, I don't know.
Merlin: I call it the dish.
Merlin: The dish.
Merlin: But like, okay, that's just one.
Merlin: One of those, one of the things that has been a changer.
Merlin: And the thing is, it's like when you stop smoking and suddenly you can't understand how anybody ever smoked.
Merlin: And like now, the idea that your keys, for example, could be anywhere in the entire fucking universe, then the white dish.
John: Yeah, the dish.
Merlin: The idea that your wallet could be anywhere but either literally in your pocket or hand while you're using it or in the dish.
Merlin: It never goes anywhere else.
Merlin: I never put it anywhere else.
Merlin: And that has been my bulwark against madness.
Merlin: Well, now let me ask you this.
John: Yes.
John: All those things that go in the dish are all outside the house implements?
Yes.
Merlin: Put differently, apart from my phone, which may be in my pocket or being charged, it's all the stuff that I would never in a million years leave the house without.
John: Right, but they're not things that you use in the house.
John: Or if you do, you can go to the white dish, get your credit card out, make the transaction and put it back in the white dish.
Merlin: Yeah, exactly.
Merlin: Unless somebody has borrowed my two keys on a ring to use as fulcrum for some kind of a thing to make Wolverine pull out of the Barbie house, not mentioning any names.
Merlin: No, the keys are always there.
Merlin: Okay, so that's thing number one, the dish.
Merlin: And number two is, and this came much, much, much later, was learning to realize...
Merlin: I like that.
Merlin: Learn to realize.
Merlin: Oh, this is huge for me.
Merlin: Please learn to realize.
Merlin: Lots of people think they can change before they realize what they're trying to change, and they'll always fuck up because they never became aware of what the thing is that's actually wrong.
John: Yeah, they're trying to realize before they learn to realize.
Merlin: with time and like you know honestly it is it took like five years at a time for me to make a 10 percent increase in realization about how fucked up my sense of time was it wasn't i mean it should have been there it should have been a shamalan thing all the time of me going like wow it's really weird that i never turn anything in on time it's really weird that i am late for every single thing that i do it never occurred to me that maybe time was the one that was right and i was the one that was a little screwy and i think it really wasn't until college where like there were consequences for you know turning things in late
Merlin: The second thing was Accepting that like a clock Let's say let's say you've got a clock that for whatever reason is consistently 20 minutes wrong It seems like you could basically fix that what I learned to realize is like I need to realign my sense of how long it takes to do fucking everything and
Merlin: And then when I eventually did become a project manager, it was even worse because everything that's perfectly planned still goes wrong.
Merlin: When you're a project manager, you get to be part of the process of deciding how long things take, but you don't have that much actual control about how long it actually does take.
Merlin: And so what do you do?
Merlin: Well, in my case, I learned to always add 20% to every aspect of every project, and maybe sometimes that would be within the range of okay.
Merlin: So number one, the dish, and number two, the time.
Merlin: And so as somebody whose life has benefited, as someone whose sanity has improved by addressing or realizing and addressing those things, it is so hard for me when we haven't accounted for socks and now it's 732.
Merlin: And I'm like, we should never be in this position.
Merlin: And I realize that I sound like I'm out of my mind.
Merlin: I know.
Merlin: It's just that every morning I wake up knowing that we're going to be late and I won't have that much control over it.
Merlin: And I feel like if they just took my two power hacks and put them in place, they being my daughter, my power hacks could work.
Merlin: But so we had the postmortem this morning.
Merlin: We talked about it.
Merlin: We talked about we had our Mercury postmortem was like, you know what?
Merlin: We didn't account for socks.
Merlin: And then I had to explain the time thing by quoting John Kennedy in the film Hidden Figures.
Merlin: And I had to say, we go to the moon.
Merlin: We choose to go to the moon, not because it is easy, but because it is hard.
Merlin: Oh, yes.
Merlin: I would have said difficult, but I think he said hard.
Merlin: But that's the thing.
Merlin: And that's the thing with this.
Merlin: And this is why if it's 732, we failed.
Merlin: Mercury is down.
John: Wally Chirac could be fucking dead for all we know.
John: It's calibrated within centimeters.
Merlin: It's like, have you seen the movie Hidden Figures?
John: No.
Merlin: I can just say I thought it was really good, especially to take a kid to.
Merlin: But they're describing how they're going to have to nail.
Merlin: It's one thing to get the Mercury off the ground.
Merlin: That is hard enough.
Merlin: Getting Mercury into orbit and bringing it out of orbit.
Merlin: They had some crazy analogy about shooting a shotgun across this many football fields or something like that.
Merlin: It's incredibly complicated to thread that needle.
John: Oh, yeah.
John: Well, you know, I've spent a lot of time staring at the Saturn V rocket, as you do.
John: Yeah.
John: I built the Saturn V model rocket.
John: Did it go over budget?
John: Well, shit.
John: It was three feet tall.
John: Oh, was it an Estes?
John: It was.
John: Well, those were the motors I used.
Merlin: I'm sorry, but you got like a D engine rocket?
John: I had four D engines.
Merlin: Holy shit, Sherlock.
John: It was a massive, massive rocket during my model rocketry phase.
Merlin: Wasn't that like the .44 caliber of Estes engines?
John: It was a big, big operation, this thing.
John: And I launched it successfully.
John: And it went...
John: Oh.
John: It went so high that, I mean, and this was at a model rocketry event where people were shooting and we were in a giant field.
John: Ladies.
John: We were in a giant field.
John: Time travel space ninja.
John: Hello.
John: You may know me as Saturn V. Oh.
John: Is that your handle on the BBS?
John: Yeah.
John: It still is.
John: I have it on the back of my truck in stick-on letters.
John: Saturn 5, channel 14.
John: We were in a giant field with no trees around it.
Merlin: It just went away.
John: People were launching rockets all day and catching them as they returned on their giant parachutes.
John: This Saturn V rocket had huge parachutes.
John: It went up so high that it went away.
John: I couldn't see it anymore.
John: No one could see it anymore.
John: And then we just couldn't see it anymore.
Merlin: It feels like a James Bond munkhole situation where the sky is big and you would have to at some point...
Merlin: It has to arc, not arc, but it has to curve over and come back down somewhere.
John: Something.
John: It seems like that.
John: It has to blow its top and the parachute comes out and then you run or you get in the car and chase it.
John: But it just was gone.
John: And I'd spent a lot of time on this rocket and had also like a long time before launching it.
John: I completed it a long time before launching it and had just had it around.
John: and just would go look at it and caress it.
John: And I had scratch-built many parts for it and had laboriously made it look like a Saturn V. I mean, obviously it was made out of cardboard, but it was something that mattered a lot to me, and it just went away.
John: I still wonder what happened.
John: It was truly a puzzle, and the adults agreed that it was a puzzle.
John: And everyone was extremely impressed by it.
John: It went off like a rocket, literally.
John: and made a huge noise, and it just tore ass into the sky, and it was a thrilling moment, and then it kept going, which was also thrilling, and then it just kept going.
John: And it was like, what am I?
John: What now?
John: I expected to retrieve that rocket.
John: What's the universe telling you with that one?
John: I mean, I thought I would retrieve it and launch it again a million times.
John: Oh, Saturn V. And it definitely, like, that was the moment that I kind of walked away from the rocket field.
John: With my head held down and people going like, it's okay.
John: Charlie Brown music playing.
John: Yeah.
John: And, you know, my kite was stuck in a tree, except it wasn't even in a tree.
John: There's no tree.
John: It just didn't have a kite anymore.
John: Yeah.
John: It just went up and up and up and was gone.
John: Oh, that's chilling.
John: And it wasn't even a thing where, you know, you saw the parachute and it floated off into the next county.
John: It just kept flying.
John: It went all the way to heaven.
Merlin: It might still be up there, John.
John: God wanted it.
Merlin: They were short one angel.
John: They had to bring up a Saturn V. That's right.
John: A little Saturn V. And I can only imagine that some kid in some suburban neighborhood, some faraway place, it was like the Playboy bunny coming in through the window.
John: Yeah.
John: Oh, thank you, God.
John: Yeah.
John: It was like, what the Saturn V just landed in my backyard.
Merlin: They got out at 731 today.
John: At school.
Merlin: How do you get out at 731?
Merlin: No, to leave the house.
Merlin: Oh, I see.
John: I see what you're saying.
Merlin: Now, if you remember, the goal of this Mercury mission is... 730.
Merlin: No, no.
Merlin: Yeah, 730 is we've left the house.
Merlin: It cannot have swept second.
Merlin: 2.30, 7.30.
Merlin: We need to be out of the house by 7.30.
Merlin: Act like it's going to explode.
Merlin: But you were saying that 7.32 was already too late, but where does 7.31 fall?
Merlin: So yesterday, I took her in, and so I was running the project, but as I say, we didn't account for socks.
Merlin: Now, we eventually found some socks.
Merlin: She was not happy with the socks at all.
Merlin: She likes to save her old socks.
Merlin: I say, those socks are too small.
Merlin: She says, no, save them.
Merlin: Put them in the sewing box.
Merlin: So now I'm putting socks in a box.
John: And a mouse in the house.
John: Let me ask you this.
John: When you put the socks in the box, what's her long-term plan?
John: Does she want a quilt made out of them eventually?
Merlin: Well, the socks in the box, much like the clocks, are things that I... It's like me explaining molecules is how I feel.
Merlin: I feel like...
Merlin: I just want to stipulate I don't actually understand molecules.
Merlin: But I feel like every time I say it's 7-12, that means you have to get out within 18 minutes before the house explodes.
Merlin: I feel like I'm constantly giving her...
Merlin: Trying to tell her what a neutron is?
Merlin: Like how many moles the air conditioning weighs.
Merlin: Like, I feel like I'm going like, well, there's 300 molecules in a Bibidoo.
Merlin: And she's like, yeah, yeah, you keep saying that.
Merlin: Like, you just keep saying these words.
Merlin: Like, you keep saying 712, like it's meaningful.
Merlin: I understand.
Merlin: Those are all numbers that I'm familiar with.
Merlin: And I'm like, no, this represents the passage of time.
Merlin: The big black fucking clock is moving all the time.
John: I tried to explain molecules to my daughter the other day, and she did that thing where she turned and looked out the window.
John: I was like, oh, did I lose your attention?
Merlin: We've gotten to a point.
Merlin: I don't know how I let this get to this point, but we've gotten to the point where basically my daughter is not paying attention to me or she thinks she's in trouble.
Merlin: And that is a needle that this Mercury program is constantly having to thread.
Merlin: Those are the two options.
Merlin: Well, yeah, like, for example, to have the conversation about the new plan, the new Mercury plan that we're putting in place.
Merlin: This is a conversation we had two afternoons ago.
Merlin: And it was real mellow.
Merlin: I was like, hey, just come here for a second.
Merlin: She's like, what?
Merlin: I was like, no, no, just come here a minute.
Merlin: Like, I'm doing dishes.
Merlin: I just want to talk to you, like, for a second.
Merlin: You're not in trouble.
Merlin: I had to say you're not in trouble.
Merlin: And then she brings her comic books with her.
Merlin: God bless her.
Merlin: And she was going to read her comics.
John: While you talked.
Merlin: And I say, hey, hey, look at me.
Merlin: Let's just talk for a minute.
Merlin: She goes, what?
Merlin: And I said, you're not in trouble.
Merlin: I just want to talk to you in a way where you're not picking out the next Parks and Rec on Netflix.
Merlin: I want you to come here, and I want to talk to you, and you're not in trouble.
Merlin: I just want to talk about something.
Merlin: And she says, what?
Merlin: I said, look, mornings.
Merlin: mornings are becoming stressful you cry a lot in the morning now it's kind of a fake cry but like there's a crying in the morning a lot now just to get to this conversation though and now she's scared now she's put down her comic books she's gotten a piece of printer paper and a marker and she's starting to write down what i'm saying oh my goodness really is she doing it uh genuinely or is she doing it to mess with your head thinks she's and the thing is
Merlin: I think you can probably guess I'm not like a mad, angry, yelling dad.
Merlin: Like I'm not.
Merlin: She's very rarely in trouble.
Merlin: But yet she's so intimidated.
Merlin: She brings a piece of paper.
Merlin: She starts making a longhand schedule with the title, How to Make Mornings Better.
Merlin: And number one is make a schedule.
Merlin: So we really are cut from the same cloth, the same socks in a box.
Merlin: I love this.
Merlin: Did she use a 3x5 card?
Merlin: No, she was a big piece of printer paper.
Merlin: Ordinarily, she would just grab one of my expensive fresh notebooks right on one page, and then that would be how she did it.
Merlin: No, no, it's sitting there.
Merlin: I'll probably hang on to that, because I thought that was fun.
Merlin: But I have to tell you, yesterday, it got better.
Merlin: We still wrecked Mercury.
Merlin: And then today, again, I'm sitting there in my underpants on the steps watching them.
Merlin: I was like, I'm going to give you guys a B-plus for today.
Merlin: This is pretty good.
Merlin: And they're like, B-plus?
Merlin: What do you mean, B-plus?
Merlin: We're leaving.
Merlin: We're not late.
Merlin: I'm like, ha-ha.
Merlin: You're not late, but you're also not on time.
Merlin: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: Mercury crashes if you don't leave here by 7.30.
John: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: You've got to get out.
John: Daddy isn't crazy.
John: No, daddy's not crazy.
John: He's just organized.
John: Yeah, daddy's got a project, a plan.
John: Yes.
John: You know, my big hack that differentiates me from everyone else in my family is that I make no assessment of my daughter's costume.
John: The only thing I ever say to her about her outfit is, you have good style.
John: Does she mostly pick it out herself?
John: Entirely.
John: Okay.
John: That must be fun.
John: This is the problem with everyone else in the house, or everyone else in the whole family, which is that they have opinions about what she's wearing.
Merlin: Or do you think maybe sometimes they want to like unintentionally like want to reward her for either being creative or pretty?
John: I feel like at least in the case of her mother, her mother has is also someone for whom style and fashion.
John: Her mother's a dish.
John: Well, and, you know, and like treats her own clothes as a, you know, that's the thing she thinks a lot about and does a very good job with.
John: And so...
John: She has feelings about these costumes and my mom also has feelings about the costumes but all based on Practicality like oh my god.
John: That's not gonna It the weather is this or this is not a day for floor-length tool Yeah later on to you know later on in the day We have to do this so you need this with that and those shoes don't match with these and my mom is very matchy match
John: And as you know about me, style also matters to me, but I am a mixed pattern type.
John: Yeah, you're kind of a Costa Rican breakfast of a man.
John: Absolutely.
Merlin: If you feel like it goes, it goes.
Merlin: A sewer lid covered with sauce.
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: White sauce, not a problem.
Merlin: Not a problem.
Merlin: Bring it all in.
John: Eggs?
Merlin: Of course there's eggs.
Merlin: Fuck you, there's eggs.
John: Hash?
John: Of course you've got three kinds of hash in here.
John: Do you want white gravy?
John: Do you want sausage gravy?
John: Do you want brown gravy?
John: Or do you want cheese sauce?
John: Yes, and.
John: Yes, and is the answer.
John: Monkey dishes.
John: Just keep them coming.
John: Oh, my latest thing is, I don't want toast or hash browns.
John: Can I get one pancake?
No.
Merlin: Well, for people who have not eaten out with you, it is a peculiar joy of eating out with you for you to have the come to Jesus discussion with the waiter.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: At first I thought you were just being a little silly, but like where you will actually say, and listen, I don't want to, it's kind of a Ron Swanson moment where you go, listen, I don't want the potatoes.
Merlin: Give me extra vegetables or something.
Merlin: And they go, okay, whatever.
Merlin: And you go, no, no, no, no, no.
Merlin: Look, two right here.
Merlin: And you do the thing with your two fingers in the eyes.
Merlin: Look, look, right here.
Merlin: No, if there... I heard you say this.
Merlin: If there are any potatoes brought to the table, I will send them back and there will be a problem.
Merlin: Don't put...
Merlin: Don't get potatoes near my food.
John: Yeah, that's right.
John: I don't want them.
John: You know, the whole thing where I'm like, I'll have fruit instead of potatoes, and then they bring fruit and potatoes.
John: No, you didn't understand.
John: You didn't understand.
John: You just wrecked mercury.
John: No, no, no.
John: Bring another plate.
John: Start over.
John: New table.
John: Potatoes are gone.
John: That's right.
John: Everybody up, we're going to come in the door again.
John: You got like an L. Ron Hubbard, like the master moment.
John: Begin again.
John: Yeah.
John: But the wonderful thing is 98% of the time now when I say no toast, no potatoes, one pancake, the server looks up at the sky.
John: That's some food math.
John: And takes her pen or his pen and taps it to their lip and then says, I can do that.
John: And there's a moment where it's like – Because it feels like it might be a scam.
Merlin: Yeah, right.
Merlin: It feels like one of those like, oh, I want to get rid of some of this money.
Merlin: Can you give me a 10 for two 20s or whatever?
John: Yeah, right.
John: It would be the other way around.
Merlin: The other way around.
John: Yeah, exactly.
John: How about no potatoes, double steak?
John: I want to change this $100 bill.
John: Okay, now five 20s and four 10s.
John: Actually, I'd love to get rid of some.
John: Yeah, and you do, you pull a paper moon on them.
John: But they look up and they think, and they picture a plate of toast, and they picture hash browns, and I think they realize that one pancake is less than...
John: But they also the less than those so it's a deal in that sense or I mean But I also feel like they have to make the toast right.
Merlin: Oh Really this becomes a kind of like existential breakfast algebra.
Merlin: Yeah, cuz right I mean there's there yes, there's the food part like are you trying to get away with something?
Merlin: But there's also like you know what not a fan of making toast I would be totally okay to just have somebody else make a pancake Yeah, I all have to do now is ring the bell and say pancake
John: I don't have to say here's the order and now I've got to go make less work and easy custom thing to do.
Merlin: I mean, that's less work than giving you a coffee refill.
Merlin: That might be a better tip also.
John: And so and so 98 percent of the time they're like, I can do that.
John: Two percent of the time they say that's going to cost you a dollar, which is fine.
John: I'll pay the fucking dollar for a pancake.
John: But the real twister is, are they going to bring that pancake on a separate plate where it belongs?
John: Or are they going to bring that pancake touching?
John: And this is what happened yesterday.
John: Where the potatoes would have been.
John: Exactly.
John: So I was like, I'll have the pork cutlet with eggs and
John: And she was like, done.
John: And I said, and a pancake.
John: No toast, no potatoes, a pancake.
John: And she was like, I can do it.
John: And then it came on the same plate, which isn't a problem exactly, except the pork cutlet was covered with white gravy.
Merlin: Yeah, I mean, the pancake in that case, again, not that much more effort.
Merlin: Putting the pancake on its own on a plate would be a lot more fancy.
John: Well, sure, but if you're putting syrup on a pancake, there's going to be a place in the middle where you've got syrup, white gravy, and eggs.
John: And I was like— Oh, I see what you're saying.
John: I said, am I into this?
John: I might be.
Merlin: Yeah, no, I see.
Merlin: This is why I like a monkey dish.
Merlin: I like a separate plate, and I like a monkey dish.
Merlin: And I'm not even that weird about food touching, but one of my latest technologies, when we go to the diner around the corner you've been to—
Merlin: My daughter always gets the same thing.
Merlin: She always gets the pancakes, link sausage and scrambled eggs that she doesn't eat.
Merlin: My new thing is mushroom cheeseburger with side monkey dish of white sausage gravy.
Merlin: Oh, hello.
Merlin: What?
Merlin: So now I got a mushroom cheeseburger with crinkle fries.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And I got a side dish of white sausage gravy.
Merlin: So now I can deploy a little dollop of ketchup next to the fries, a dollop of mayonnaise next to the French fries.
Merlin: I am now deploying three different sauces freely.
Merlin: Oh, my God.
Merlin: And you're dipping fries in all three?
Merlin: Oh, everything's going in all of them.
Merlin: And the burger in all three.
Merlin: So you know what you didn't hear?
Merlin: What you didn't hear was me going, oh, I put a bunch of shit on my burger.
Merlin: No, no, no, no.
Merlin: The burger, it can and will be transmogrified into anything.
Merlin: If I want to put a French fry on this bite, I can.
Merlin: I can deploy any of those sauces.
Merlin: And in that case, the monkey dish is the key.
John: Yeah.
John: Well, see, I do this exact thing that you're doing.
John: I put ketchup on the plate and dip the burger in the ketchup because that's the only way to do it.
Merlin: That should be the third thought technology.
Merlin: You get a dish.
Merlin: You think about time.
Merlin: And then you deploy sauces tactically.
Merlin: Deploy sauce.
Merlin: But then I ask for a cup of au jus.
Merlin: Oh, God.
Merlin: I've got to start doing that.
Merlin: Because they have it.
Merlin: They've got a French dip.
Merlin: I don't want that much fucking bread.
Merlin: I don't get a French dip, but I wish I could get the juice.
John: There is nothing that you can't dip in au jus.
John: Oh, a French fry in au jus.
John: That is good.
John: Anything.
John: I mean, you could dip a piece of chocolate cake in au jus.
Merlin: I'll tell you, man, you take you a mushroom cheeseburger.
Merlin: It's got some red onion.
Merlin: It's got some tomato.
Merlin: You dip just the tip.
Merlin: Like you've taken a bite and you've got a little tip on the bite.
Merlin: You dip that into a little bit of sausage gravy.
Merlin: Dip that little tip in the sausage gravy.
Merlin: Dip the little tip in the sausage gravy.
John: This is bananas.
Merlin: This is so good.
Merlin: And then you come home and have a nap.
Merlin: It's the best.
John: This is exactly what – this is exactly the kind of like let's put every sauce on it that I – that's how I approach dressing.
John: Okay.
John: Yeah.
John: Sorry.
John: Nice pivot.
John: And my – so what I do with my kid is I make some –
John: I make some breakfast for her, and half the time it's just one egg in a coffee cup, which is the ultimate hack.
John: Which our listeners have been trying to much success, it sounds like.
John: Yeah, one egg in a coffee cup.
John: Sometimes it's a little bit of granola with a dollop of yogurt on it.
John: The breakfasts, she's pretty cool about.
John: She'll eat an egg.
John: She'll eat a hard-boiled egg even, which I wouldn't do.
John: You don't like a hard-boiled egg?
Yeah.
John: No, you wouldn't ask for it.
John: If you give me a hard-boiled egg and I put it in my pocket and carry it with me on the trail.
Merlin: Okay, like a Land Yeager?
John: Mm-hmm.
John: I'll get hungry enough.
Merlin: No, what do you call those little sausages?
John: What are those called?
John: Yeah, a Land Yeager.
John: Land Yeager, okay.
John: A Laund Yeager.
John: A Laund Yeager.
John: There will be a time in the middle of the day.
John: When I'm hungry and I'm way out on the trail and there's no place to get any food, then I'll pull that egg out.
Merlin: I feel very situational, contextual about a boiled egg.
Merlin: Like a boiled egg that I've just made in my very special way because of a very special way.
Merlin: I go to New York Times.
Merlin: I put a hole with a needle.
Merlin: You ever do that on your eggs?
Merlin: You get a nice hard-boiled... But at the other hand, like a bed and breakfast, like when they knock on the door and they want to give you a hard-boiled egg, what is it with those places and fucking hard-boiled eggs?
Merlin: That is an egg I do not want.
John: No, I don't want your egg.
Merlin: Keep your egg and your German muffin.
Merlin: Like, keep it all.
Merlin: I don't want it.
John: When you go downstairs at a German pension and there's a bastic of eggs... A bastic of breakfast...
John: If you have a Bastic of Breakfast and you're just like, Domka's showing.
John: Yeah.
John: But here's what I want.
John: I want some toast with jam.
John: Actually, I want one pancake, but I know you're not going to give it to me.
John: What I want.
John: And I want some cold cuts and one of your hard buns.
John: And then get me out of here.
John: You're going to hit the trail.
John: But so anyway, I microwave an egg.
John: She eats it.
John: We're having a good time in the morning because it's just like, you know, it's just the two of us.
Merlin: Without saying too much to provide triangulation, like there are days where you have to get her to school.
Merlin: Oh, lots.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: But like roughly how long is it from walking out your front door to her getting there?
John: There's no walking.
John: It is a half hour drive.
John: Okay.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: All right.
John: Good.
John: Okay.
John: But the problem is it's a half-hour drive.
John: It's a 20-minute drive if you leave on time.
Merlin: If it worked the way that you needed things to work and people would keep moving and get out of the way.
John: Yeah.
John: But traffic changes within that 10 minutes.
John: Ugh.
John: If you don't leave...
Merlin: Oh, I know this one.
Merlin: I know exactly what you're talking about.
Merlin: I used to get this with my commute down to the peninsula, where it was like within this 30-minute window, the traffic would come.
Merlin: You could add two hours to the trip by leaving half an hour later.
John: Yep.
John: If you leave at 722, if you leave my house at 722...
John: You are in the game.
Merlin: If people don't understand why I give a B-plus for a failed Mercury mission, look at what you're dealing with every morning.
John: 722.
John: 722.
Merlin: TikTok, TikTok.
John: 722, you can stop at the gas station and have an additional breakfast of a couple of chicken strips.
John: You could have an emergency travel jojo.
John: Yeah, daddy can get a coffee.
John: Yeah.
John: You could get a map.
John: I could.
John: I could get a tire pressure gauge.
John: If you leave at 732, forget it.
John: You're sitting in traffic and you missed the first bell.
John: So what I say, at a certain point, I look at the clock and I go, go get dressed.
John: And she lollygags for one and a half seconds.
John: And I say, what did I say?
John: Go get dressed.
John: And then she disappears.
John: Oh, God.
John: And reappears often in the most fantastical outfits you will have ever seen.
John: Oh, I love this already.
John: Like flowered pants, a plaid skirt, like a mohair sweater that I didn't even know she had.
John: some kind of rain jacket and cowboy boots.
John: She finds all this stuff.
John: And I look at her and I go, great, here we go.
John: And the only issue is come out of that room dressed in some costume by this moment.
John: And if she doesn't, all I have to do is... A real liberal arts approach.
Merlin: Like, hey, you do this however you want, but you have exactly one fitness criterion, which is that we, I mean, you could ultimately say 722, but you say, when I see you next, you need to be in this state.
John: That's right.
John: Go.
John: Go.
John: You should be headed toward the door and be able to make – if I get to the door before you do and open it, you should be able to continue to progress.
Merlin: You should be able to start throwing your keys through the air at 7-21-59.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: And you just be – you walk out of that room and be prepared to keep walking.
John: And that's the point at which I'm throwing her hastily made lunch into her backack, and I'm putting my own coat and hat on.
John: And so she 95% of the time appears in some costume that I think is magical that would drive both of her other caretakers right up the wall.
John: For potentially different reasons.
John: For different reasons.
John: Yeah.
John: I do not care particularly if her hair is a rat's nest because my hair is a rat's nest.
John: Interesting.
Merlin: You don't worry about how that reflects on you?
John: Nah.
John: I'll grab one of those little ponytail rubber bands and I'll throw it onto the top of her head in some way.
John: Not so that the ponytail is sticking up.
John: Not in a mean way.
John: But I grab her hair and pull it to the side and put a little top ponytail on it so it hangs down.
John: And tuck her hair behind her ears and go, good.
John: And she goes, good.
John: And we're out.
Done.
John: And so I think that she likes it because compared to her mornings elsewhere, it feels like team effort.
John: Yeah.
John: And she gets to go to school.
John: She's not getting beef.
John: No, there's no beef.
John: She's the only beef is why it's 721 45.
John: Where the fuck are you right?
John: Did you get distracted?
John: Did you get lost in your room?
John: You know what happens when you get lost in your room what happens?
John: Well, you're fucking late and then daddy's standing at the front door going.
Merlin: Oh Let's move
Merlin: Yeah, but what if she's looking at dust that's fallen from the ceiling and looking at books that got moved around?
Merlin: What if she's trying to discern her future?
John: She absolutely does.
John: But at that point, it's my problem.
John: Because I should be on my game enough that at 720, I'm saying, let's move.
John: If I haven't seen you at 720, let's move.
John: And often, I'm not.
John: Yeah, I know.
John: 728, and it's me that's the problem.
John: Yeah.
John: And then if I do open her door, she absolutely is staring up at the dust coming down or staring up trying to figure out what a fucking neutron is.
John: And it's like, oh, we're late now.
John: And that's because I was also staring up at a corner of the room.
Merlin: Oh, boy, look at that.
John: Child came home the other day.
John: Daddy's also the problem.
John: But sometimes we walk out of that house and we both look like Pagliacci.
Merlin: You know, like... Okay.