The mathematics of love

What does it mean to be rich? What does it mean to be thriving? Well, if it isn't killing it at karaoke at Ellis Island in Las Vegas, I don't know what it means.

I probably had my best Vegas trip ever last week, although, officially, I place it tied with my bachelor party 25 years earlier. This time around, I rendezvoused with Sophie, who had turned 21 two days previously. It was just Dad and Daughter vs. Vegas. 

We had a ridiculously fun time, and we gambled in eight casinos. We had a slight money loss with the gambling, but it wasn't too bad for all the time we spent at the tables. Plus, we won in our final two casinos, so it felt like we won.

(By the way, the eight casinos we played were Caesar's, Bellagio, Horseshoe, Linq, Park MGM, New York/New York, Casino Royale and Ellis Island. Also, we went to others, too, including Aria and Cosmopolitan, but didn't gamble there.)

Two days after turning 21, Sophie drank a cosmopolitan and played roulette. She didn't like the cosmo and had just one other drink (red wine) during our three nights there. She is not a fan of the drink, and Dad is very, very happy to see that.

In stark contrast to her disdain for alcohol, Sophie (who actually goes by Irene now to the rest of the world) is a big fan of probability and figuring out odds. So we played roulette — A LOT. She is a math major at Berkeley, and at one time, she wrote equations in a napkin to test gambling ideas we had. Earlier on, I played a little video poker, but realized she didn't like it. So, OK, we focused on roulette.

We are lowball specialists. We normally would play the lowest stakes possible, which was a $3 bet for each spin. Plus, we learned to take off spins and spread out six bets each time while always giving ourselves a long-shot chance. That made it pretty darn fun, and it felt like we won the Super Bowl when our long shots hit.

When we would win 18 whole dollars on a 50-cent long-shot bet, we typically would celebrate, cash out and leave the casino. Victorious!

We also explored shops and casinos and had some incredible food. Angry Gordon Ramsay's Hell's Kitchen delivered as did Wicked Spoon. The Bellagio buffet and vegan dim sum were solid, too, but those other two places were superior, bordering on spectacular.

When Sophie was growing up, her grandma had a vacation place in North Vegas, and she has memories of being being a youngster and often visiting the Bellagio garden and parts of the strip. So a lot of our trip unlocked memories of her youth, and we ran into landmarks in which she has pictures.

"Your Chippewa Lake is the Las Vegas Strip," I said in reference to my family's cottage where I have tons of child memories. 

Sophie and I pretty much spent three full days straight together and had a blast. We also had a great time at the Pinball Museum, which should be named the Pinball Warehouse, by the way. Yet I can only place this awesome trip in a tie with my bachelor party. 

In that trip, I thought I was meeting my brother and two cousins for four nights (that's a lot of nights). In addition, my dad (the XMan), uncle and two friends, Dave and Jeff, came as a surprise to me. No way! Mathematically speaking, my dad was 53 at the time, and I'm 52 now.

The highlights of that trip were playing three rounds of golf with my dad in various foursomes and battling in fun poker games with our group. The gambling and the glitz lingered in the background; it was more about hanging out with my crew. Even though Sophie and I threw a brick through Vegas' windshield, took it out and chopped it up, it was much more about spending time with her.

Maybe our love language is math 'n' fun. She says that if we played her roulette system infinitely that we would actually net a slight monetary profit. Hmm. She says she has the math to prove it.

I figured out that our relationship netted a major profit. I beheld the sophisticated young woman she has become and saw that she has a great sense of humor and is kind, fun and chill. As we said goodbye, it all added up to me being overwhelmed with emotion as I said between sobs, "I love you. It's impossible to have a trip this incredible."

Odds are, my dad let out sobs and said the exact same thing to me when we departed Vegas 25 years earlier.

Foodies packed their knives and went

What ever happened to foodies?

At this point, I'm pretty sure the term "foodie" is outdated. I don't really hear it any more. It's passé.

But I must say there was a nice stretch, when calling one's self a foodie was totally OK. In fact, if you didn't call yourself a foodie, what was your problem?

I estimate that it was en vogue to be a foodie from 2006 to 2016, when I watched Top Chef. Soon, the United States fell into extreme polarization and something called "doom scrolling." We've been a non-foodie, stressed-out nation ever since.

Not that long ago, a story in the Associated Press fascinated me. It was about how some influencers are reminiscing about how good things were in 2016, when people were doing more fun, non-serious things, perhaps still pretending to be amateur foodies.

The simplicity of enjoying an elevated dinner now has been erased by inflation, talk of inflation or somebody ruining it by taking a photo and posting it on social media. OK, while I can't say posting a food photo would ruin my dinner, that whole posting of food always seemed peculiar to me. Who does that anymore? What was that all about?

This past summer, I tried improving my food game by taking the Rouxbe (pronounced Ruby) Forks Over Knives online class. The class gears itself to vegans, and while I am not vegan, I do believe that the Standard American Diet (SAD) overdoes it with meat, oils and processed foods.

I realize that some of the best meals of my life have not been in the United States. While I'd love to travel more and experience more different cuisine, the best meals I've ever had were in Italy and France. In a trip to Italy about 10 years ago, I returned switching to espresso from coffee and adhering by the idea that "Your day might only be as good as your lunch."

Too often, Americans rush their lunches at their desk or don't put any thought into their food. They unwittingly dehumanize themselves on a daily basis. To be human, or a privileged human, is to eat and enjoy. Right?

With Forks Over Knives, my big takeaways were the power of healthy grains, including brown rice, farro (ancient grains) and quinoa. I pretty much stopped eating white rice and gluten-filled noodles. I eat a lot of bowls nowadays, and it's best when I mix up the types of veggies and flavors in those.

I also got much better at my cuts, and I learned some basics, like properly steaming vegetables and how to handle onions, that help immensely. The power of fruits and vegetables, and health benefits, indeed will stay with me.

I actually give Top Chef some credit with helping me learn more about cooking. I loved the show so much that in 2013, I named it the fifth best TV show of all-time.  By the way, The Sopranos was No. 1 on the list, and looking back, I binged about one zillion shows since then. Maybe I need to update the list with the likes of Breaking Bad, The White Lotus and Stranger Things. (Or not)

Top Chef continues without me, or anybody I know, watching the show. Padma Lakshmi apparently left the show two years ago. Tom Colicchio and Gail Simmons still are hosting, apparently. For 10 years, I watched the show, but the show just can't escape this criticism: "Hey, wait a minute, don't we have to taste the food?"

I tried tasting the food once by going to Colicchio's Craftsteak at the MGM Grand in Vegas. It just wasn't good at all. The quality was mid at best, and it was overpriced. Didn't really enjoy it, and this is coming from a guy who didn't mind Ponderosa in the '80s.

Of course, when the 2020 pandemic shutdown wiped out a lot of restaurants, that put a wrinkle into would-be foodies plans. Six years later, many restaurants have come back, but many haven't. I guess I need to accept the fact that foodies are gone.

Ponderosa has dwindled to 15 locations in the United States, after peaking at 150 in the '80s. And Pizza Hut, which has been pretty horrible for decades, recently announced it would close 250 of its 6,000 stores. But I swear, Pizza Hut was cool in the '80s.

Foodies, we need you back!

Playing gin rummy with the deceased

I find myself at the Chippewa Lake cottage, and I'm sitting at a card table with my dad, the XMan. I touch the top of this card table, and it's an odd texture — dark green and kind of rain proof, maybe elastic, I don't know.

People are chatting around us, including my grandparents, Ed and Adele. Dina, Sophie, Chloe and my mom are there, too, smiling and talking with relatives. At this table, it's just me and my dad. I'm locked in a Dad vs. Son game of gin rummy.

Maybe these details wouldn't matter in real life, but they matter to me in dreams. I am soaking in this impossible possibility, the comfortable feelings of place and multigenerational love. So many people I care about are there, but the star is my dad, the XMan.

I've had many dreams with the Xman since he passed 15 years ago this month, and I adore these dreams. I didn't know what to do with them at first. Good god, some have been exceptionally vivid. Often, at some point, I'd realize I'm dreaming — just dreaming — and I'd wake up in tears, missing my loving dad.

But now, 15 years into this situation, this loss, this reality, this acceptance, I embrace these random dreams with my dad — usually at Chippewa, for whatever reason, or sometimes in a basement in Brecksville or Garfield Heights. I've learned how to elongate these dreams, milk them. Ooh, baby, I must say this: It feels so good to spend time with my deceased dad.

I wonder how many other people dream about their lost loved ones and enjoy the experience. Who knows? But I wonder.

OK, I'm not trying to be overly emotional, or sentimental. I'm not calling out for help or attention. I also must say that they're not too common. Maybe one, or two, a year? They emerge more around the holidays.

I've learned how to just step back, let the moment develop and cherish the time — in life and my dreams. X and I will be playing gin rummy, and we'll just glance at each other. He'll play a card; I'll play a card. Nothing special on the surface, but I'm with him. And something feels right, loving. It's wonderful.

Memories. Dreams. How do they work? SS. Peter & Paul. Chippewa. Los Olivos. Naples, Fla. I'm in New York now. My memories and dreams often converge on different, distinct places.

Of course, I had to do an Internet search about what dreaming of deceased relatives might mean, and, honestly, whatever, I don't know and don't care. It's more important to know the depth of love I have for those close to me.

I guess meaningful moments are all around us, and maybe a little wisdom is that I recognize them more and stack the deck. When I recognize something incredible happening in actual life, I try to expand that moment and recognize the specialness of that time — yeah, kind of like the slo-mo scenes in The Matrix. Maybe I'll just concentrate on creating more memories with loved ones that one day will return to someone in a dream.

Gen Xers must resist the distraction economy

"I'm working, but I'm not working for you. Slack mother******!"

Well, Happy New Year, Gen Xers! Something hit me the other day: It's possible that we Gen Xers have lost our way.

While I know variance exists within generations, Gen Xers — universally — used to stand for something. We used to be disaffected and cynical, and we popularized alternative rock, grunge and indie rock. We used to be cool, man.

Now, I'm not so sure what we stand for. We sold out, man, and we sold out for cheap. So this is a call for us Gen Xers to get off our phones, stop being distracted, get informed and fight for something we believe in. It's time to return to our Gen X roots.

Considering how the United States' media appeals to the lowest common denominator, it's time to give up on the gross, mainstream pop culture of this country and seek information elsewhere (if you haven't already). I highly recommend using DW from Germany as a national/international news source, and I also recommend limiting news infotainment and social media to 10 minutes a day and getting off that darn phone.

Unfortunately, in our current attention economy — which is more accurately called the distraction economy — many of us consume ourselves with nonsense. Whether it be social media, video games, political b.s. or reels, we give away our time to the digital slop-o-sphere, and I contend we don't actually want to spend our time that way.

We need to return to our Gen X roots of the '90s, when we knew that we'd have to fight to keep our souls because the U.S. economy had grown so huge and cruel that corporate life couldn't possibly work for us. (And, yeah, we knew that way back in the '90s.)

Recently, DW published the International Rescue Committee's Top 10 crises the world can't ignore in 2026. Guess what? I did not see the presidential ballroom, Epstein files or mindless U.S. propaganda in echo chambers on the list.

Rather, I realized that, more or less, the U.S. has turned its back on the actual world's crises and instead, enabled crisis No. 2, Palestine, in which 70,000 have been killed, 80 percent of the buildings have been destroyed or damaged and 90 percent of the population has been displaced. What peacemakers we are!

The U.S. ended USAID this year, and I find this morally reprehensible. The world's largest economy killed a huge international humanitarian organization. Yes, it kept 17 percent of its budget and put that in the State Department, but this is a loss. USAID had been around since 1961, and it is estimated that it help save the lives of 90 million people in its existence.

Now, USAID is wrangled lawsuits, and do we ever hear about this in any U.S. news sources? I don't think U.S. citizens are meant to. We have some sort of two-party-echo-chamber system in which discussion of actual issues rarely happens. I believe the masses are meant to consume, consume and consume, mostly digitally, and be sucked into this distraction economy and just accept that.

So what are we to do? Well, remember that the Superchunk anthem says, "I'm working, but I'm not working for you..." We got to get off our phones and get to work.

My suggestion is to think of a cause that really matters to you and do something about it. Replace screen time with action. If you can't find a cause, then maybe replace it with creating some sort of art or craft. Let's replace all this distraction with something worth our time.

I believe this sentiment is leaking through U.S. media, too, thankfully. This week, the Associated Press ran a story about how the U.S. needs a return to volunteerism, and I agree with this. With the billionaires and oligarchs and their corporations obviously not stepping up to help societal ills whatsoever, we everyday individuals are forced to do that on some level. ... Might as well. 

While it's unrealistic to go completely without screen time, we can reclaim our lives by limiting our digital world and living the Gen X life we want where we actually help ourselves and others. Yeah, slack, mother******.