It's been a glorious Sunday here in Middle Tennessee, blue skies and t-shirt temperatures. I took advantage and went for a nice, long run. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy this weather and the sun has me all "seasonal affective disorder, who?" but it's also terrifying. It shouldn't be this warm right now, this is winter, dudes. I think we should stop relying on the groundhog as a predictor of seasonal shifts. The honey badger would probably give us a more accurate forecast, which is to say, he does not give a shit, so the weather is going to a hot, unpredictable mess from here on out.
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| This cat performs emotional labor for NO ONE. She'll steal the dog's bone just to remind him that she calls the shots around here. |
Speaking of ways the earth is a swirling vortex of entropy hurtling through space, I've been not even low-key obsessed with corona virus this week. I'm not about calling it Covid-19, that sounds like a low-dose birth control pill and I already have one of those and have a hard enough time remembering its name when I go to pick up my refill. I don't need that confusion in my life right now.
It's not so much that I am afraid of getting sick. I'm not worried about myself, but I am a little concerned about older family members. Mostly, it feels like we're watching the opening scenes of a pandemic horror movie. It's unfolding in slow motion, but we're trapped in cushy movie theater seats and we can't fast forward to the end to see who lives and who dies and what parts of society have utterly collapsed. Also, the floors are sticky, there's a teenage couple pawing at each other two rows ahead of us, and a guy behind us is just blatantly having a phone conversation. All this is why I never go to the movies, and yet here we are and it's very stressful.
There could be worse places to be quarantined than the top of a mountain in rural Italy.
You could be quarantined on a cruise ship, which is a very compelling reason to never go on a cruise.
Of all the settings for a quarantine, though, a quarantine with children to entertain sounds like the absolute worst punishment.
As for me, I would embrace an extended school closure with arms wide open, Creed style, without a hint of irony. I'm so ready. I have a stack of books I'm ready to plow through. Yesterday, I went out and stocked up on maybe an extra week's worth of yuppy survival provisions at Trader Joe's, ironically right as news broke that Trade Joe himself had died. RIP, guy, and thanks for all the fish. Seriously, your canned smoked herring is off the chain.
But it wasn't all doom and gloom and pandemics over here this week.
David Sedaris' new essay in The New Yorker did not disappoint. We're going to see him when he comes to Nashville in April. You know, if we aren't all dead by then.
Samin Nosrat's profile in The New Yorker just endeared her to me even more. I can't wait to see what shape her next project takes.
How do you view the relationship between ride-share apps and your own alcohol consumption? I'm a cheapskate and a lightweight, so the ability to binge drink without consequence has always been a myth, and one that has nothing to do with transportation. The correlation between the two is thought-provoking, though. Helping people avoid drunk driving is great, but what are the unintended consequences of enabling people to drink more without concern for a DUI? I wonder how the drinking behavior of people in cities where walking or public transit have always been options compares to the drinking of people in more car-dependent places before and after the rise of ride-share apps?
Speaking of things that make more sense when you're drunk, let's talk about the Phillie Phanatic. It's weird, right? That's the point, and part of the charm, but still. It grabbed my ass once and maybe I'm still not over that. Also, while we're here, let's talk about how odd it is that Philly sports teams have so many completely conceptual, intangible team names and mascots not based on specific animals or historical figures or groups of people. The Eagles are alone in their specificity. What the hell is a 76er, really? I mean, 1776, Declaration of Independence, I get it. But as a sports team identity? And the Flyers? What is flying? The puck? The skaters? The goalie's teeth? And how, exactly, does Gritty factor into all this? He appears to be the exact opposite of aerodynamic, the thing least likely to fly, except in the sense of being high as a kite. He looks precisely as terrifying as I imagine a bad acid trip to be.
I know I've talked, perhaps ranted, about the inequitable division of emotional labor in heterosexual relationships. I don't want to beat a dead horse, so we'll just leave this here for anyone who needs to read it. After all, as the primary executor of emotional labor, I'd probably be too busy making burial arrangements for the horse to waste time beating it. I'd be the one who already knew what kind of flowers the horse preferred and if it wanted to be cremated or shipped to the glue factory, and that "Old Town Road" was its favorite song and should be played on a loop throughout the entire open casket viewing for all its horse friends. This is a weird metaphor, but I'm glad we all went on this journey together. I know how precious your time is, and how you probably now feel guilty that you spent time reading this inane drivel instead of making grocery lists and scheduling dentist appointments and remembering birthdays and matching up all the socks straight out of the dryer.
While we're at it, let's ruin a couple beloved children's books.
Analog Reading:
Read Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener. I enjoyed it, but after a while it started to feel like a very long "it's not you, it's me" breakup letter to the tech industry. It was a fascinating look into a world that seems so remote from my lived experience, and one from which she felt alienated even as she was living it. The one thing that was kind of annoying was the avoidance of naming the names tech companies and well-known executives. Maybe it was for legal reasons, but it seemed a little silly to bend over backwards to use the epithet "the social network everyone hates" when it was so painfully obvious she was referring to Farmer's Only.
Finished American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins. Whoa, everybody. Whoa. I'm not proud of how quickly I finished this book. I will give the author credit for writing a page-turner. After reading the book and the author's note, and digesting a lot of the criticism lobbed against Cummins, I think this was a failure of marketing. Based on the seven figure advance and blurbs referring to it as "the Grapes of Wrath of our era" it would seem that the book that was promised and the book that was delivered were two very different books. The author probably genuinely cares about the myraid struggles migrants face, but she could have brought those issues to light with more realism and sensitivity if she had written a non-fiction book and gave people who actually lived the experience a platform to tell their own stories.
Inventing a scenario in which unrequited love motivates a misunderstood, tortured-intellectual drug lord to murder a woman's journalist husband and 15 other members of her family trivializes the very real, not-at-all implausible horrors that people face because of gangs and cartel activity in their cities. Giving this middle-class woman with considerable financial resources a super-human Rain Man 8-year old son also glosses over the extreme difficulties that must come from trying to complete that dangerous and grueling journey with a child. I have interacted with hundreds of 8-year olds during my time in education, and I can't picture a single damn one of them behaving with even half of Luca's emotional maturity. Most of them can't even tie their shoes yet.
At best, American Dirt is a deeply upsetting beach read that will make you grateful the worst problems you have in that moment are seagulls tryna steal your hoagie and a kid kicking sand on your towel every time he runs by. Which will make you even angrier when you notice the kid is probably Luca's age and yet he won't even make it across the hot sand back to the car without whining.
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