On My Mind This Week: Sports fandom. The cost of babies. The weather inside.

Is this how you use Substack?

Here are some things that have been on my mind this week:

Basketball: I found myself watching the Pacers game this weekend. There were several weird things about this, the first and probably foremost is that I haven’t been a fan or even a casual watcher of a professional sports team since the year of our lord 2001. That single season was my short stint of total basketball obsession. I can still name all of the Sixers stars from that team at the drop of a hat. Eric Snow. Dikembe Mutombo. Iverson. That year, for whatever reason I decided to try out being a real sports fan and let me tell you- the brightest stars burn the fastest. I was committed. I watched every game. Learned all of the rules. I mean I learned like 90% of the rules but I got the gist. I was a true Philly Phan. But then the Sixers and the Lakers had an epic showdown in the finals, and the devastation I felt when they lost it all was, in short, unreasonable. I was down. It stands out as a period of real turmoil from my teenhood. I flew too close to the sun. Eventually I regained some of the lost perspective but by then I had moved on to other hobbies more in line with my personal brand.

The fact that I was watching this game was remarkable enough but I was also watching it not in my adopted home NYC as you’d expect but in a living room in the suburbs of Indianapolis. I was there with my dad and brother getting to see where my dad grew up and meeting some of the 104 first cousins he has (each of his parents had 9 siblings and while that number of cousins is hyperbolic it isn’t by much.) As I sat on the couch with everyone watching the last quarter of the game, I realized that I might actually be having fun. I found myself rooting for the Pacers, because they felt like the underdog, and I can’t get enough of an underdog. It moved along at the kind of merciful clip that is rarely experienced in a football, or a baseball. It’s relatively simple to understand and you can see all of the player’s faces super clearly which I think adds a level of *drama* to the proceedings. Anything that takes a serious commitment to physical fitness and strength is impressive to me. It’s funny, though, the illusion of ease: the players are all freakishly tall but not compared to each other, so after a while you sort of forget how crazy everything they’re doing with that ball is and you don’t snap out of it until you see them towering over the girl interviewing them on the sidelines at halftime. I’m familiar with this phenomenon. Every time I show a picture of my family to someone it’s not immediately apparent how short every single one of us is because we look relatively proportionate. I’m gonna start holding up a quarter in family pictures for scale.

I dunno. It might be fun? To be a fan again? I’d have to pick a team to support, which is sort of an odd thing to do in your 30s. So many sports fans bleed their team colors, and have had that team loyalty passed down in their family for generations. It was never a choice for them. A lot of guys I’ve encountered in my life almost certainly fell out of their mother mid rant about Tom Brady’s record. But I’m a free agent. I guess if I’m going to commit to being a fan it’s gonna have to be a WNBA team. Men in the world are being so dumb right now. You guys have to stop. It’s so bad. It’s embarrassing for you. It would be funny if it wasn’t horrifying. I just wanna root for women who are the best at what they do and this is less embarrassing for ME than writing adulating recommendations for my female-identifying colleagues on LinkedIn (which, by the way, I will totally do.)

The cost of babies: If I’m being honest I bought a piece of chocolate for $2.50 today. But if I’m being actually honest I bought four chocolates for $10 today. This was not an occurrence that happens super often but it happens with enough regularity that I need to keep an eyeball on it. One of the mental games I play is telling myself that these are ILOC purchases, ILOC meaning In Lieu Of Children and referring to the money you can spend because you didn’t procreate for whatever reason. Despite recognizing this designation I don’t think I’ll ever be so irresponsible with money so as to be concerned. I was extremely low on cash for an alarmingly long time (frankly if that version of me heard of my entertaining a piece of chocolate that costs over 50 cents she would slap me across our face.) Being in such a precarious financial place really instilled a lot of financial fear in me that has directly resulted in panic attacks but it also resulted in me not taking on credit card debt or buying meme coins. I see my friends starting to have kids, many of whom are living in the city, and by all accounts it’s pricey. And that’s if you can have kids naturally. A friend is having a child with his husband via surrogate and they are dropping upwards of $200K before the baby even gets here and starts eating and pooping and otherwise costing maintenance money. The children door isn’t fully closed yet for me but it’s only open a tiny little crack. I think a big part of my disinterest is the risk to my financial stability. I also don’t feel the need to actually give birth at any point in my life. It matters to some women and I completely understand it. Frankly, biologically, it’s weird that I don’t but it’s just an urge I’ve never really felt. Plus you can’t take at least one of the meds I’m currently on when you’re pregnant, and that would be fun for nobody. To all of this you could say “kids more than make up for any dollar amount by being awesome” and of course, you’d be right a lot of the time. I just really like my chocolate.

Ambient room temperature: Speaking of chocolate (and I usually am) I recently completed the 5 Day Bonbon Challenge. Pause for applause. This was a five day video crash course in making bonbons from scratch compiled by a German chocolatier and food scientist whose Instagram content usually features him measuring the water activity of ganache or explaining in a deep German accent how to keep chocolate in temper. The content was excellent. The technology used to power this online course seemed to have been invented back when computers were the size of a room. The core of it was just a basic video player with odd, old UI, including no good way to scrub. He is extremely qualified and has a lot to impart but he also speaks slowly and gets a little drifty sometimes so any time I needed to go back to hear a point he had made again I would find myself stabbing around in a 60 second period to try to find when the plane had actually landed. Despite this, I made some really pretty purple bonbons that I was very proud of.

I’m a hobby girl, mostly because I can’t be alone with my own thoughts, and most of them have had their practical challenges. The cost of ice time at the skating rink. The lack of a big enough surface to easily cut fabric patterns out for sewing projects. But this is the first time something I’m working on has been entirely dependent on maintaining the correct temperature of the room. A couple of degrees in any direction and suddenly your chocolate is in a completely different form. The rough thing about learning this is the fact that for 350 days of the year I have very little control over the temperature on the inside of our apartment. It’s for sure impossible to do in the summer. The electricity you’d need to crank the window units until any room in my apartment was 68 degrees would cross over into reckless spending. But it’s going to be even worse this winter. It’s a pre-war building and our heaters kick on in November at a temperature that evokes hell and don’t let up until April. When we inevitably overheat, we take to opening the windows and every once in a while things balance out enough to unlock a livable environment for a bit but it’s fleeting. Engineering the room temperature would be impossible.

So I guess this particular hobby will be a seasonal thing. Like peonies. Or depression.