February | 2019 | Exile on Pain Street

I’ve been on Instagram for about nine weeks and here are a few things I’ve learned:

Everyone is having a better life than I am.
No, they’re not. It just seems that way. It’s the place where people put on their best face.
Real photographers use a proper camera. They don’t muck about with a mobile phone. Technologically speaking, mobile phones can’t touch a real camera. Yet.
The trend in photography is to saturate photos with so much color and gleam they look like ads for LSD. Why does that feel like an appropriate reflection of our times?
People are too lazy to write a pithy word or two in comment sections. Emojis are the last refuge for the verse-challenged.
Instagram has revealed that I might have a latent addictive personality disorder. I check it far too often. I’m hoping the newness wears off soon.
I’m disappointed over my desire for more followers. It’s not dissimilar to when I first started blogging. I got over it here. I’m sure I’ll move on there as well

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My bride and I went out Saturday night to see comedians John Mulaney and Pete Davidson. I enjoyed Mulaney but found Davidson vulgar and unfunny. In all fairness, we are not Davidson’s target audience. The same people who find him funny are the same folks who’d attend Coachella, which is something I’d never do.

They announced that cell phones would be locked in a Yonder pouch so the show couldn’t be recorded. The pouches are unlocked on your way out. We didn’t want to deal with all that so we left our phones at home. We sat at the dinner table and tried to remember the last time we left the house for a night out (or ANYWHERE) without our phones and we couldn’t. Initially, I was concerned that not having my phone might give me an anxiety attack but do you know what? Dinner + show – phone = emancipation. We didn’t miss it one bit. An uninterrupted dinner was a genuine pleasure.

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After all these years, having kids finally pays off. I waited a long time for this day to come.