Dad Brog #148: an example of having to take it on the chin

I don’t really know anything about Judaism, but for whatever reason, my kids have the entire week off because of Passover.  I don’t really know anything about Passover either, but far be it for me to question any religion’s stuff beyond the fact that my kids are off school, but some of my colleagues at work who are Jewish are all in the office like it’s any other day of the week.

The thing is we’re a week removed from a week in which both mythical wife was off on spring break on account of being a teacher, and the au pair was off on spring break on account of her being a student and going to school.  In previous years at my kids’ preschool, they’ve usually just aligned with the county school schedule, and this is the first time that I can recollect them having a separate Passover week off.  This has never been an issue in any of the previous years that my kids have been going to their school, but for whatever reason, here we are, this year.

All I know is that it really sucks because as is often times the case, I’m the one who has to take it on the chin and alter my days in order to accommodate this misalignment of time off, and further illustrate that I don’t get time off, ever, and this is just my life and I really have no other choice but to cope with it.

So, for this week, I have to stay home with my kids until my au pair gets home from class to which then I have to go into the office late, play catchup the entire days, and probably have to stay late a little bit to make up for lost time, so that I don’t fall behind on more of my shit later on.

Yeah, I know it doesn’t seem fair, but there’s little sense in calling it out because nobody listens or would be willing to do anything about it.  So it’s just grin and bear it, and make the best of my shitty situation where I don’t ever get a fucking break, and try to take solace in the fact that I can spend a little bit of extra time with my kids and try to push out of my mind the meetings I may be missing and the optics that goes along with flaky attendance, even if I do manage to get all my shit done.

As I’ve opined a thousand times, I would just like a little bit of help and a little bit of breaks from having to be the hard fucking hyper carry in my household.

#TRYHARDSZN2025: There’s a bigger world outside of California

KGTV: High schooler from Torrey Pines accepted into 63 different colleges, amassing $3M in cumulative scholarships

$3 million bones from 63 acceptances; an average scholarship value of $47,619 isn’t bad, but in the grand spectrum of the #TRYHARD game, is fairly pedestrian in comparison to some of the #TRYHARDs that have already emerged this #SZN. 

Ultimately, I’m liking that either Google and news outlets are either being lazy and not reporting, or the possibility that #TRYHARDING isn’t as wrapped up as it used to be in previous years, and there just aren’t as many insufferable #TRYHARDs this year as in years prior, because that’s less stuff for me to write about, as if I didn’t put myself in this situation wanting to write about all the #TRYHARDs of the year.

After some of the #TRYHARDs that have already been documented, this kid really isn’t that exceptional.  His academic haul is still pretty good, but it’s hard to keep up in the game, when there are some who have doubled his scholarship dollars, and/or number of acceptances, like the one who could boast about having an acceptance from every single one of the 50 United States.

Normally, I’m at the point in the #SZN where I just want to skip writing about all of the #TRYHARDs once the truly exceptional ones have come out, but in this case, it’s the article itself that I want to nitpick about and provide me with some inspiration to blather some words out:

A graduating senior from Torrey Pines High School has accomplished what some might consider impossible — earning over $3 million in scholarships.

Impossible?  $3M?  I know Torrey Pines, California is basically akin to paradise, but these so-called journalists need to look at the world outside of their own, because not only is $3M possible, there’s already been at least one teen who has amassed $6M in scholarships this #SZN alone.

The lack of credentials and failure to name drop any of the acceptances other than the one he selected lends to imply that many of them weren’t very prestigious or impressive, and comes off as one of those #TRYHARDs that actually didn’t #TRYHARD as much as they were just good at filling out online forms and getting what I’m guessing are free applications.

It’s also funny to me that someone in this part of California is even in a position to need to be applying to every school under the sun, because that chunk of land slightly north of San Diego is home to some gorgeous earth, that I also imagine probably costs the arms and legs of several generations’ worth of wealth to be living there.  I have a hard time believing that there are people who actually live out there who are in positions to be needing scholarships, but I suppose while I’ve been thinking about money fervently over the last few weeks, the wealthy don’t stay wealthy by being frivolous, they’re usually wealthy because they’re often times good at finding other people to pick up the check instead of themselves.

Whatever though, good on this #TRYHARD and I use that term lightly on account of comparing him to others in the game, for getting accepted into a buttload of schools, and of course picking a fairly mid one to actually go to, in Howard University.  I’m sure it’ll be an interesting culture shock to go from the vast picturesque paradise of Torrey Pines to going to school in the dump of Washington DC.

#TRYHARDSZN2025: Good effort, but not enough trying hard

11AliveOnMySide: Fairburn, Georgia teen accepted into 53 colleges with $1.5M in scholarships earned

After writing about the chica that notched 155 acceptances and $6M in scholarships, #TRYHARDs like this one just seem so pale in comparison to write about.  Which really sucks for them, because being a student with a 4.0 GPA and hoovering up 50+ college acceptances really is something to be proud of, but I guess this is what happens when #TRYHARD culture has become the thing it’s become, and gives a glimpse to why #TRYHARDs #TRYHARD.

As important as education is, to those in the #TRYHARDing game, attention and notoriety seems to matter just a little bit more.  What with all the insufferable humblebragging, the photoshoots and general look-at-me behavior by all those that #TRYHARD, it’s apparent that the actual education at the end of the journey is secondary to the two seconds of internet notoriety that comes with being the best of the best when it comes to #TRYHARDing and accumulating as many college acceptances as possible while more than likely, not having to pay a cent in application fees.

Which is a shame, because a lot of the stories of the people who become #TRYHARDs are really fascinating and inspiring up until the point where they decide to do what they do because they want the attention.  Like this one chica from close to where I used to live, which was a pretty desolate wasteland back then, and is seemingly worse now, has still managed to emerge from the muck and be a student with a 4.0 GPA, volleyball player, and somehow has the tenacity to be working two jobs, really is the embodiment of hard work.

But at some point in her journey, it was decided to become a #TRYHARD, and the question becomes if the grades, the extracurriculars, and the jobs, are they for the purpose of building character and necessity, or are they the purpose for padding a personal resume to feed into the next stage of life to where additional #TRYHARDing is all that life is going to be until they’re anonymous adults who hate their lives and wonder what their formative teenage years went.

I can’t remember who said it between Larry Bird and Magic Johnson, but one of them had a story about when they were young and in high school, and they were being touted as future megastars and can’t-miss prospects, they were reminded that as great as they think they were, inevitably there would always be someone out there who was working harder, and was probably better than you were.  And as inevitable as greatness finding greatness is, Bird and Magic eventually encountered each other at the college ranks, a rivalry was born, carrying into the NBA, and the debate still lives on whom of the two was the better player.

And as impressive as 53 and $1.5M should be, in the grand spectrum of things, just up the street from where this #TRYHARD was doing her thing, she probably wasn’t aware of a queen bee #TRYHARDingn way harder than she was en route to her 155 and $6M.  And there is no debate on whom of the two was the bigger #TRYHARD.

As I said before, it’s going to be a real hard act to follow, and I almost don’t want to waste my time writing about lesser #TRYHARDs unless a real noteworthy #TRYHARD comes along, but we’ll see how time permits in the coming months of #TRYHARDSZN2025.

So many easy jokes about the Mariners repping Nintendo

LL: Seattle Mariners agree to wear Nintendo Switch 2 patch for the 2025 MLB season

I don’t care enough to dig deep into the finer details, but Nintendo doesn’t own the Mariners like they once did, but they have enough pull with the baseball organization to ensure that throughout the 2025 baseball season, the Mariners will have a sponsorship patch on their away uniforms for the Nintendo Switch 2.  Their home whites will have a regular old Nintendo word mark logo on those alternatively.

Regardless, the jokes write themselves about a company like Nintendo being the uniform sponsor for a baseball organization like the Mariners, because in more ways than one, they operate in similar manners.  Now such could be as the result of the once ownership and the influence Nintendo clearly still has within the Seattle Mariners organization, or maybe they really are two peas in a pod in how their business philosophies are concerned, but the fact of the matter is that there really is a lot in common between both companies.

Nintendo is notoriously Japanese, as in that they are more than happy to operate in a completely risk-averse, efficient manner that prioritizes a zero-waste mentality.  For example, despite the fact that a billion people on the planet wanted the Wii when it first came out, they were all like ehhhh, let’s make just 20 million units, can’t possibly risk there being some false demand and us being stuck with extra units and being forced to sell at a discount.  And for the next several years, nobody could get their hands on one, and they were selling on the resale market at insane markups, and by the time demand was truly fulfilled, the Wii 2 was knocking on the door, and the process kind of repeated itself. The point is, Nintendo prioritizes efficiency and avoiding all risk over possibly making consumers happy and meeting demand a lot closer in which they operate to this day. 

And the Mariners are kind of the same way, because they just, always kind of suck as an MLB franchise, and no matter how much the market changes, how much talent they luck into from their system, and the availability of free agents throughout the years, the organization just somehow manages to always suck at winning baseball games, and much like Nintendo, letting consumers down by taking no risks, avoiding any possibility of dead money by signing no free agents, and routinely letting their fans down on a yearly basis.

It’s funny, because I actually wrote about the Mariners not too long ago and how it’s pretty incredible how much they’ve sucked historically.  Because this is an organization that has had the likes of Ken Griffey, Jr., Randy Johnson, Ichiro Suzuki, Alex Rodriguez, Edgar Martinez and a prime Robinson Cano, and in some cases, an overlap of some of these talents. Yet they never won anything, beyond the magical 2001 season where they won 116 games, before crashing out unceremoniously in the playoffs to the Yankees.  They rarely saw the playoffs, didn’t do much once they got there, and no matter the talent that has been on the squad, they just, well suck.

Just recently, the Mariners successfully signed their catcher Cal Raleigh, to an insanely team-friendly deal, six years at just $105M.  The guy is an average 4 WAR player, not even hitting his prime, and could easily have been worth double of this, in just a few years.  But he clearly likes something in Seattle and has agreed to stay there, but the real question is if the Nintendo Mariners will actually do something with this centerpiece, or if it will just be more of the same, operating like Nintendo, where they will only produce the absolute bare minimum in order to be relevant, but absolutely nothing more in order to even attempt to be anything but afloat.

It’s really a chicken and egg situation on whether the Seattle Mariners are operating like Nintendo, or if Nintendo is operating like the Seattle Mariners; but if I’m a betting man, I’d say the former, but either way, neither is a particularly enviable position to be in, because jaded video gamers all resent Nintendo for their Nintendo-ey business practices, and Mariners fans all resent the Mariners for simply never really trying, so ultimately, this sponsorship marriage seems to be a very fitting fit for both parties involved.

#TRYHARDSZN2025: Meet the front runner

Yahoo: Westlake High School senior accepted to 155 colleges, with at least one from every single one of the 50 United States, and has accumulated over $6M in scholarship offers

Welp, just when I was thinking about how Westlake High hadn’t produced a #TRYHARD yet, here they come to join the fray, guns ablaze.  It’s like the school itself doesn’t seem to be concerned about absolutely anything other than raising kids to be fixated and obsessed with applying to as many colleges as humanly possible, so that they the kids and the school can insufferably brag about their success rates, and effectively cockblock a metric fuckton of other kids throughout the country who will be inevitably be put on waiting lists while all these attention hounds make their decisions like they think they’re LeBron James.

But yeah, Georgia teen from the seemingly most notorious college application factory in the nation, 155 acceptances, and $6M in cumulative scholarships so far.  Sounds impressive, but when you do the basic average there, we’re looking at $38K per acceptance.  Sure, it’s not a flat $38K being offered by every single acceptance, but the reality is that some of the higher-tiered schools probably haven’t offered anything remotely close to a full ride, and if a full ride is what chica is looking for, she better be prepared to be going to Florida A&M or Howard, and not any of the Power-5 schools she probably got into. 

And let’s not assume she made any of the Ivies, because if there’s one thing I’ve learned about #TRYHARD culture, is that if you’ve been accepted into an Ivy, that name is ensured to be mentioned, early in the article no less.

I had a moment when writing about the last few #TRYHARDs about why I’m taking time to pick on these kids, seeing as how they’re really just trying to get a free ride to whatever college is willing to give them one.  But this queen bee #TRYHARD is a reminder of why I started writing about them in the first place, because it feels like they’re doing what they do for all the wrong reasons, prioritizing attention-seeking and the right to brag and boast ahead of actually giving a fuck about their educations when the opportunity to grasp 15 minutes of internet fame is on the line.

I mean seriously, 155 schools is one thing, but it’s very apparent that the real coup de grace here for this chica is simply the ability to say that she got into a school from every single one of the 50 states.  Because I have a hard time believing that any teen from the southside of Atlanta would have any remote interest in attending a school in Wyoming, the Dakotas, Montana or any other flyover state where the mortality rate of black people is probably noticeably lower than it would be in any actual civilized metropolitan area in the country alternatively.  I refuse to believe that there’s actual interest in any schools from any of those remote parts of the country, and that the sole goal was to check off gaining an acceptance in those states.

The University of Alaska, Fairbanks was mentioned as an acceptance, and a quick Google search has them ranked at 635 out of 650 accredited American colleges, so big win there.  Hawaii isn’t mentioned at all, but I’m going to guess that the acceptance from that state is probably along the lines of the University of American Samoa from Better Call Saul, or some other extremely low-difficulty school.

It’s funny when I think about it, because although she got 155 acceptances, I have to wonder how many rejections she got.  That’s one thing that all of these #TRYHARD stories fail to mention, unless they have an abnormally high success rate, and they brag about having gotten into like 50 schools out of 50 applications, but there was no such context here.

And as is often times the case, despite the fact that they might have over 100+ acceptances, in the end, they’re inevitably going to go to some generally low-tier school, mostly because of the fact that the most free-est ride is going to come from there.  And despite the fact that this #TRYHARD wants to become a bigwig pharmacist, her front runner schools are Florida A&M, Howard and THE Ohio State.  There’s nothing wrong with phishing for a free ride, but I do think it sucks for all the kids throughout the country who is put on a waitlist on account of all these attention-seekers just trying to amass acceptances and scholarship dollars.

But anyway, it comes as no surprise that the de facto front runner of #TRYHARDSZN2025 is a kid out of Westlake High, and the bar has been set extremely high now.  It’s going to take some real Ivy League #TRYHARDs to gain some consideration over this one, because 155/$6M is going to be hard to surpass, but it is still extremely early in the #SZN, so never say never.

#TRYHARDSZN2025: Is this becoming a Georgia thing?

11aliveOnMySide: Marietta teen accepted into 52 colleges, amassing at least $1.8M in cumulative scholarship offers

So I have a tab open with a generic Google query for “college accepted” with filters to show me the most recent news.  Location is not turned on.  Yet all the stories that I’ve come across in regards to #TRYHARDs have all been kids from various Georgia areas, and not just seemingly out of Westlake High like they were highly concentrated from last #SZN.  Which is leading me to believe that the whole practice of applying to every single school under the sun for probably free seems to presumably be a very Georgia thing to do, especially seeing as how I have yet to come across a single #TRYHARD story from anywhere outside the state of Georgia yet.

Anyway, we have a new #TRYHARD for the #SZN, and what stands out to me for this one is the fact that the chica isn’t from one of the more commonly found #TRYHARD regions, but is actually quite the opposite.  Wheeler High School in Marietta is a school that’s not on the south, west or southwestern part of the Metro area, and isn’t just in Marietta, but in East Cobb Marietta, where the snobbery is real, but the general performance scores of the schools in the district are above average, generally.

Frankly, it’s one of the first times I’ve heard of an actual #TRYHARD coming out of a more upscale location, and I’m curious to what the criteria for getting to apply to a gazillion colleges with presumably no concern over application fees is, because if they’re allowing kids from Wheeler to do it, then geographical location isn’t necessarily a deciding factor in this privilege to shoot as many shots as you want.

But unlike many of reported #TRYHARDs, this one was considerate, and clearly egotistical enough to have a straight up graphic made, because it gives us a little more insight to some of the 52 schools that she was accepted into, because so many of these #TRYHARDs don’t actually disclose it, because as much as they want to brag about getting into 52 schools, they don’t want to brag that 48 of them are like small commuter schools nobody outside of their general locations actually know of.

Anyway, among the schools that this particular #TRYHARD got into are basically the entire SEC, with Auburn, Florida, Alabama, LSU, Tennessee, South Carolina, Kentucky, Mississippi State (but oddly no Georgia), and then randomly some other Power-5 schools like Clemson, NC State, Oklahoma, Michigan State and Ohio State.

What seems apparent to me is that with the exceptions of Oklahoma, Michigan State and Ohio State, this girl doesn’t really want to stray too far out of the Southeast in general, seeing as how just about every school she got into is at the very most, like an eight hour drive to, less if flown.  But also, of all the aforementioned schools, they’re all notable college football programs, so if I had to guess, this girl really wants to go somewhere with big football cultures, and probably end up becoming an alcoholic at some point in her college career.  Even many of the non-Power 5 schools she got into have football programs that some people may have actually heard about, feeding the hypothetical narrative of the importance of football to our subject #TRYHARD over here.

Anyway, in the grand spectrum of #TRYHARDSZN, this is a solid contender, but if I’m a betting man, no chance at being top #TRYHARD.  58 and $1.8M are decent numbers, but it’s still early and the Ivy Leagues haven’t released acceptances yet.  I’m sure the #SZN still has a lot of gas left in it, and hopefully we’ll start to see some #TRYHARDs emerge from places outside of the state of Georgia, because this can’t be the only state where they’re all going to be coming from.

#TRYHARDSZN2025: We got a Doogie over here

11Aliveonmyside: 13-year old Georgia teenager accepted to his dream college – Morehouse

At first when I read this, my thought was like, Morehouse?  That’s your dream college?  But that was just from the headline alone, the kid’s age wasn’t really mentioned, nor any of the context to why he wants to go to Morehouse seemingly above all others.

But yeah, 13-year old kid, from Conyers.  Now I have a Google alert set for any and all #TRYHARDs regardless of where they’re from, but it seems apparent that Georgia seems to be the #TRYHARD capital of the country, seeing as how out the gate, it’s Georgia 2, everyone else 0 as far as putting #TRYHARDs on the board.

Anyway, Black Doogie over here seems to have an impressive story, being a preemie and how overcoming obstacles early on seemed to set the tone for his overachieving nature throughout his young and diminutive life thus far:

By 9 months old, Joshua was talking; by 18 months, he was reading. At age 3, he wrote his first book.

Joshua has skipped multiple grades, jumping from second to fifth, then to seventh, and later to 11th.

And despite the fact that the initial headline doesn’t seem to indicate that there was any #TRYHARDing in the sense of applying to a gozillion schools, we seem to have it anyway:

At 12 years old, he received over 20 college acceptance letters from institutions such as Miles College, Shaw University, Tennessee State University, and Jackson State University. He is dual-enrolled at Augusta Technical College, completing 27 credit hours with a 3.88 GPA.

All things considered, we have here a tremendous front-runner in this year’s #TRYHARDs considering his age, number of acceptances and current courseload, but we’re not getting any seven-figure cumulative tuitions.  The names of schools aren’t necessarily known for their moneybags, but this is where we say come on, kid’s 13.  If he were 18 and maintained his current trajectory, he’d probably be on Moon University in Outer Space.

However, there is one red-flag in my opinion when it comes to his motivations:

At just 4 years old, he learned about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. attending Morehouse College at 15 and decided he wanted to surpass that milestone. Now, at 13, he has done just that.

To me, there’s an air of wanting to better MLK’s age record for the sake of bettering MLK, and not necessarily because he wants become and starting impacting civil rights as early as humanly possible, and if that’s his motivation for wanting to do such, then there’s something a little ego-centric beyond what MLK’s actual objectives were in comparison.

Either way, the kid is just 13-years old; once he grows up and matures a little bit, and maintains this kind of academic development, the sky and beyond is still the limit, even if it draws the criticism of being a mega #TRYHARD from some randos on the internet.