Syllabus #67

 It's pretty much the twenty four seven cat show up in here these days.  Baby kitty has wormed her way into all of our hearts.  Emphasis on wormed.  She's fine now, everyone's fine, it's just, she had to be dewormed at the vet last week and we contemplated just moving again rather than cleaning the bathroom where her litter box is.  

OMG two cats, one chair

Hadley is still a skeptic, but Lola is slowly wearing her down with her charms.  THEY ARE TOUCHING.  We haven't even had Lola for two weeks and they're already rounding second base.  Not that they're ever gonna, you know, bang, but like, in the platonic cat friend version of sexual baseball, they're really giving it a go.  

Was that a weird metaphor?  Did it even make sense?  I'm so tired, you guys.  Just so so tired.  Back to school, virtual style, is substantially more draining than regular-back-to-school in a lot of ways.  At least with regular-back-to-school, the kids bring their unbridled enthusiasm and pent-up summer energy, and say/do hilarious things that make you forget how tired you are during the school day.  Now I just talk to grownups who don't understand how to use their children's laptops, which is emotionally draining on another level.  The other day, this mom put her kid on the phone so he could follow my troubleshooting instructions and it was the most fun 10 minutes of my entire week.

Here's some stuff I read this past week.  Look, there's a little bit more this time!  I'm slowly reclaiming my time.

Yep, get on my level.  If you weren't awkward before, you're gonna be now.  The upshot for me is that I've been so starved of non-Andy human interaction that I'm delighted to talk to strangers when the need arises.  We'll see how long that lasts.

This is an interesting take on the role of race in Seinfeld and other sitcoms.  As a kid watching Seinfeld, I didn't have the critical faculties to realize what terrible people they actually were, but wow, looking back, they were the whitiest white people behaving so so badly.  In some ways that makes it even funnier in retrospect.  

Did you DNC this past week?  The stakes are so high.  Literal lives depend on making sure Biden wins.  

It's interesting how even the fringiest primary candidates have had an impact on the current messaging of the Democratic party.

Talk about a winter of our discontent.  If we don't have a vaccine or herd immunity by winter, things are going to get so much worse on so many levels.  

Let's end on a high note - have you heard of the Food Timeline? Just an amazing digital distillation of cultural and human history created by a New Jersey reference librarian.  If you love food and research and unpaid labor, they are looking for someone to take over the project, as its creator died a few years ago.  I love the first two but not so much the third, or I'd be all over that like white on rice.

Analog Reading:

Finished Kiese Laymon's Heavy (I think I finished it this week...I'm too lazy to look at last week's post.). It was moving and sad and funny and I respect his honesty.

Read Samantha Irby's mini-ebook from a few years ago, New Year, Same Trash.  It was hilarious, as usual.  Again, I can't remember if I read it this past week or the week before, but does that even matter?

About halfway through Rick Steves' For the Love of Europe.  I just fucking love Rick.  He's a scholar of the world, an open-minded celebrator of all the ways to be a human.  He appreciates the good things in life without being a hedonist or a snob.  If we can't go on vacation ever again for the foreseeable future, at least there's this book.