Syllabus #34

The ALDI parking lot, where the carts are a quarter but the sunsets are free.  

Do you realize that there are 10 days until Christmas, and a mere 16 days remaining in this decade?  I realize it's an arbitrary demarcation of time and doesn't materially affect our lives, but it feels significant.  I feel like we started the decade with Obama at the helm, on an upswing from the recession and full of hope.  Now I just feel fatigued and numb from the constant shit slurry being forced through our collective feeding tube.  It makes me nostalgic for Y2K, which, if you're doing the math, was TWENTY YEARS AGO.  It was a simpler time with our dial-up modems or DSL if you were fancy, and sometimes I wonder if we wouldn't all be better off if the internet really had self destructed like we all feared it would as the ball dropped and Dick Clark ushered us into the potential maelstrom of the new millennium. 

That really took a dark turn, so here's some mildly interesting stuff I sifted out of the toxic debris pile that is the internet this past week.

Mazel tov, Tiffany.  One more reason for me to wish I was Jewish.  I have a little FOMO for the chosen people. 


Thank you, Sanna Marin, 34 year old Prime Minister of Finland, for wrecking the curve on adulting.  I was just starting to be proud of myself for not living in personal squalor and feeling relatively competent managing a roomful of children and there you go running an entire country, and a country towards which I feel great admiration and affinity, no less.


Where do you stand on the concept of emotional labor?  Do you think the qualifier 'emotional' elides the fact that it is actual labor?  I disagree.  I think the emotional component is an additional layer of the labor.  Around the holidays, it's not just the purchasing and wrapping of gifts, for example, but the emotional work of remembering to start the gift-buying process in a timely manner, establishing a budget for all the people on your gift list, keeping mental notes throughout the year of things they might want or need, humbling yourself to ask people what they'd like if you are stumped, keeping track of all the orders, comparison shopping and timing your purchases to get the best prices so you stay within your budget, etc. 

In daily quotidian existence, it's not just the labor of doing the grocery shopping, it's planning the meals, planning how to use up ingredients to avoid food waste, remembering your family's food preferences of the moment, noticing what is running low,  making the lists, clipping the coupons, trying to stay within a budget, and so on.  It's the never ending, unseen mental labor that accompanies the actual labor that is so often taken for granted by the person in the relationship who doesn't participate in those tasks.  Even if they are more than willing to say, scrub the toilet when asked, it would be preferable if that person would independently recognize that the toilet is becoming a petri dish for the next undiscovered pandemic and clean it without having to be asked.


 This is horrifying.  I'm so glad I grew up ugly before social media.  If I went through my teen years in the Age of Instagram Face I'd probably just have to wear a bag over my head at all times.

Seinfeld WAS way better than Friends.  I'm just glad that guy has the courage of his convictions to speak out about it.


Are you a philistine or do you make reading a habit?  Just kidding, it breaks my tender little librarian heart to say it, but I accept that not everyone loves to read (...YET...because they just haven't connected with the right book).


Do you have a morning routine?  Is your head far enough up your ass to call it a morning ritual?  Unless you're sacrificing a goat or sticking pins a in a voodoo doll of your boss, whatever you're doing in the morning is a routine.  I wake up at 5, which is probably a little bit earlier than necessary, but I have to walk Charlie, I like do yoga for a few minutes, and it's a real treat to be able to sit at a table and eat a decent breakfast like a civilized human.  There's no guarantee that my sad desk lunch won't be interrupted 67 times, so I take my moment of zen where I can get it.  Plus, if I wanted to sacrifice a goat, I would have to get up at at least 4:30.


Analog Reading:

The Odd Woman and the City by Vivian Gornick

Quichotte by Salman Rushdie

The Trip to Echo Spring:  On writers and drinking by Olivia Laing


I'm planning to do a year in review of all the books I read in 2019.  Mostly because I'm insufferable and want to virtue signal about all of my varied and impressive reading selections.  I'm up to 53 books on the year as of this writing!  I know none of the Russian or Ukrainian bots that inexplicably frequent my internet home give a good goddamn, but maybe my mom will find it interesting.  Hi, Mom.