Tough times make strong kids

There seems to be a direct correlation between market performance and my productivity. Days like yesterday, with big news and big gains, distract me from doing what I’m supposed to do, and I wind up wasting most of the day staring at charts. Days like today, when my portfolio is down, I can actually tuck my head down and get some work done.

I managed to get a bank account today for the SDIRA today. I’ll should have confirmation tomorrow when I get the account numbers, then I’ll be able to start moving forward with my plans. First the exchange account, and then it’s time for the real fun to begin.

I actually managed to spend some time trying to prepare for the SetProtocol deployment. I’m still a long ways away from being able to call myself a Solidity developer, by any stretch of the imagination, so it’s pretty challenging for me to figure out how to do this. I want to interact with the contracts and try to deploy things on Ropsten testnet, but I really have no idea what I’m doing. I took a good look at the SetProtocol contracts so that I could deploy them in a dev environment, but they way they’re setup is a little beyond what I’m able to understand. I got a lot of work to do.

Of course, I could just deploy the set on mainnet using the GUI, but I still have lots of questions about how the operation will work. The Set team seems to have neglected the documentation at the expense of development — no suprise there — so I’ll have to let the code speak for itself. It just takes longer, but I’m sure it will ultimately prove useful.

Things around the house have been up and down. Elder is dealing with a chronic illness, and she’s been extremely sensitive about it. Wait, let me be clear, she’s been extremely sensitive about everything. Especially the amount of attention her sister gets from me. We try to have a bit of “special time” every day, fifteen minutes when the girls get to decide what we do. Usually they just want to wrestle me, or jump on the trampoline. It’s fine, but gets old when that’s all they want to do. I’ve started giving Younger her time when her big sister is in class, and I’ve been playing card or board games with Elder when her younger sister is in bed asleep. It’s worked pretty good the past week or so.

Still, it is so hard to keep up with them. I keep telling myself that I’m doing the things I’m doing to make sure that they have a secure future. They’ll understand money in a way that I didn’t figure out until my late twenties, and they’ll start out with enough bitcoin when they’re of age that they’ll never have to work a traditional job a day in their lives. Yet, all I hear is that I only let them watch two TV shows after dinner, or that Missus got to eat Lucky Charms every day of her entire childhood and turned out fine, or that I didn’t have to do my laundry when I was eight. Whatever.

Elder is especially good at rattling off a litany of grievances against me like the ones above, and then gets into the injustice of inequality between her and her sister, who apparently doesn’t pull her weight around here. I tell Elder that her sister is half her age, and that Elder doesn’t even remember what her life was like then, so she has no basis to stand on. It doesn’t matter. She’s bored, she never has any fun, I never want to spend time with her like I do with her sister.

I lost my temper tonight, after hearing this argument for the nth time again. I told her that I’m sorry that her life is so difficult. That I’m not trying to raise an exact copy of myself or my wife. I’m not raising her the same way we were raised because we don’t want her to turn out the same way we did. That we don’t live in the same world that I was raised in, so she’s not going to have the same life. That I’m sorry that her grandparents and those came before wrecked the world and were selfish and that’s why she’s gonna have to clean up after all of us. I was speaking of her generation, of course, but it shut her up from talking back for a breath or two so I kept going, and things escalated a bit until Missus came in to take over and calm her down.

It’s frustrating, realizing in real-time all the ways that you’re failing your kids and fucking them up for life. It’s the human condition, I suppose. I remember reading research in various parenting books over the year that said that parents actually have little control over how their kids turn out, that most of their personality and habits comes from their peer groups and so forth. I wonder how much of that holds up in this current COVID world. It’s the whole argument behind homeschooling, I suppose. We’ve all taken on a larger responsibility for the neuroses that we pass on, I suppose.

I’ve been reading through The Fourth Turning, slowly. It seems very repetitive, but I can’t stop thinking about it, a lot of people in my Twitter feed seem to take for granted that we’re living in a crisis phase. To use it’s nomenclature, I’m a very late Gen-X nomad, but I’m not quite sure what it all means if it’s accurate. It seems like a bit of a generational horoscope, to be honest, but I’m looking for the flaw in it beyond selective generalizations. I’m not sure I can dismiss it. The Trump presidency does seem like the symptom of a crisis, and I know that climate change is only going to make things worse in the coming years. Bitcoin, COVID and the economic situation does strengthen the case, but doesn’t every generation think it’s got it the same? To some religions, the world has always been ending. We are in the midst off a hundred-year pandemic, and the Spanish Flu was followed by WWI and the great depression. So we probably are due for another one.

Hopefully, this too shall pass.