Shout out to the unhoused woman asking for money at the intersection of Spring and Main Streets yesterday. When life hands you a shit sandwich and you still have a sense of humor, I respect that. She had a cardboard sign that said on one side "My boyfriend broke up with me." The reverse said, "But he said we could still be cousins."
Juicy Seafood. As advertised.
Saturday night we tried a new-to-us restaurant, Juicy Seafood. If you haven't been dining in a manner that combines the vibes of "taking a goldfish home from the county fair" and "medieval torture practice," you haven't been living right. Basically, you pick out your desired protein from an array of shellfish, crustaceans, or sausage, and they bring it to you in a knotted plastic bag filled with boiling hot oil and Cajun spices, potatoes, and corn on the cob. You tie on a plastic bib and, if you're dainty (I am dainty), you put on plastic gloves, and go to town.
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This Idaho murder case is wild on so many levels, and this forensic genealogy business is one reason I will never submit my DNA to an ancestry website. I would rather not be implicated when some derelict I am distantly or not-so-distantly related to does something heinous. It's bad enough to read about it on the news, don't link me to that mess in some FBI database.
Where is home? That's a hard question for a lot of reasons, not least among them the fact that I have moved perhaps 13 times since college ended 16 years ago? I have more to say on the topic but it would require a full-length essay.
Andy and I were just talking about how I take too many pictures of the cats, but I feel validated by this article. 'Tis better to photograph than to give in to the apparent impulse to squeeze or eat which photography is, mercifully, replacing.
"A prevailing theory is that the brain tries to counteract positive emotion with negative impulse. This feeling of frustration may go some way to describing why every time I experience a wave of love for my cat, I reach for my phone. Short of absorbing her entirely, the only response left to me is to relentlessly capture her image."
Leave it to the Finns and their superior, fantasy-land education system to gracefully and thoroughly do the thing that we all, but especially librarians, should be doing in this country. That is to say, educating everyone, young and old, to spot online misinformation.
"Ms. Uusitalo said her goal was to teach students methods they could use to distinguish between truth and fiction. “I can’t make them think just like me,” she said. “I just have to give them the tools to make up their own opinions.”"
Speaking of Why Education Is Important - this B dropped of 9th grade to get married and look at her now! This story has it all! Adult bullying! Faking a death! Online impersonation!
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Analog Reading:
Finally finished Rachel Kushner's essay collection, The Hard Crowd. Like I said before, the cultural criticism essays didn't all resonate with me, but the autobiographical ones were rather interesting.
Also finished Aubrey Gordon's What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat. It was illuminating. Acknowledging my thin-person privilege, I never really considered how difficult it is to navigate certain parts of daily existence when you live in a very large body.
Now reading Cormac McCarthy's other new novel, Stella Maris, the follow-up to The Passenger. It is told entirely via transcripts of the sister's therapy sessions at the mental hospital. There's a little too much inside-baseball discussion of mathematical theories and quantum physics, but this format is preferable to the passages in The Passenger that took place during her hallucinations. It's at least more coherent. It also reminds of the time when the Robin Williams joint, Patch Adams, came out, and I was so sure that voluntarily committing yourself to a mental institution would be a Very Fun Thing To Do upon reaching adulthood. What the what? I mean, ahhhhviously, mental illness is not some kind of game, but it just seemed so charming in the movie!
In closing and unrelated to anything, this ad was promoted to me on Facebook, which makes me both terrified and proud. Terrified because I haven't really given the FB algorithm much to work with in the past several years yet it knows me SO well. Proud because clearly I've managed to establish what a friggin' weirdo I am:
Whew, finally. I'd say that's a brutally honest panhandle or a social experiment.
ReplyDeleteYour bag of vittles in the bowl looks like they're on to something!
Leave it to us Finns. And that being said we know what's in our DNA.