Syllabus #51

Hey hi here's some mildly interesting stuff from on and off the internet in the recent past.

Y'all take Cigna?

Don't ask me how I'm doing.  Ever.  But especially not now.  The article suggests, "How are you coping?" as an alternative to the trite, "How are you?"  I would like to submit some alternatives of my own.  "Have you screamed into a pillow yet today?" or "Is now a good time to interrupt your binge drinking?"

This made me feel things

Nannies for the rich spill the tea about working during coronavirus.  Most of it is exactly as horrendous as you would imagine.

Now let's consider the racial and socioeconomic factors at play when people urge for reopening the economy perhaps prematurely.  There's no good answer, but what's the least bad one that will cause the least amount of collateral damage and take into account the medically, economically, and socially vulnerable people?

Now is the time for an intellectual, emotionally probing deep dive into 1991 sitcom Dinosaurs 

There's an idea!  Andy loves when a restaurant has a really great outdoor space (running joke).  Maybe we all need to get on board.

Hey, here's a thing, I dunno if maybe...have we ever thought about doing this in the United States?  Asking for a friend.


Other stuff:

New York Times Spelling Bee App is stroking my fragile ego and letting me live my dork dreams on a daily basis.  It's also super gratifying to spell dirty words, even when the app doesn't accept them as valid answers.

Midnight Gospel on Netflix.  I don't even know how to describe it.  I've never done acid, but this show is now lingering in my spinal fluid and brewing up a flashback as we speak.

Analog Reading:

Nothing to See Here by Kevin Wilson.  This was delightfully weird and funny.  Better still,  the protagonist was a real kindred spirit for me - endearingly cynical and surly.  Set in nearby Franklin, Tennessee, it centers on two children with a mysterious medical/paranormal "condition" that causes their politician father to keep them completely isolated from the rest of the world, under the care of a strange and desperate young woman.  It was refreshing to read a book about people experiencing something not unlike our current state of social isolation for such an utterly bizarre reason.

Cantoras by Carolina de Robertis.  I'm reading it for my book club.  The prose is a little more florid and adjective-filled than I normally prefer, but I'm into the story and the unfolding of the characters.  It's about 5 more-or-less closeted lesbians who form a complicated friend group under the military dictatorship in Uruguay in the late 1970s.