1* I went out on the solstice to pick black raspberries and see the fireflies. After a year of serious disability it felt good to take joy in the season in ways that I used to. I miss sharing it with my family, but that doesn't reduce the pleasure I take in it on my own.
2* I am wondering if I'm becoming the neighborhood cryptid though. I'm limping, doing a variety of Silly Walks as part of my physical therapy, foraging along the way, frequently after sunset or at 5am, with my hair and boobs doing whatever they're gonna do. If I'm not lurking in the shadows or wearing a weird hat, I'm squinting at the ground like I've never seen the sun before and disapprove. One night I walked to Stewart's and stopped at a live band afterwards while wearing an eggplant shirt, covered in burrs; I did not fit in with the other Delmartians.
3* I was thrilled by Mamdani's win in the NYC mayoral primary, both because Democrats need more progressive leaders and because Cuomo needed a comeuppance. It was also another confirmation that polls are useless. My career was built on survey research, but over the past ten years it's become basically impossible to affordably conduct a decent survey with a representative sample. Attempting to determine whether a respondent is an actual human providing true answers is futile, plus marketing bombardment reduces everyone's willingness to participate. This makes phone and internet polls virtually meaningless, and there are big obstacles to mail and in-person surveys too. Even if the government wasn't gutting all science funding, valid opinion and experience data is no longer a thing, and that's a big loss. In my work we're often switching to focus groups to get a general vibe instead.
4* I waited too long to get someone to switch out a storm window for a screen in my office. I tried a few times to pull down some grapevines taking over the window but robins WIGGED OUT on me, so while I couldn't see a nest I figured there must be one. It'll be a few weeks before they fledge so my climate control system is down for now.
5* Speaking of climate control, last year I bought a used U-shaped Midea air conditioner because their purported quietness might improve my sleep. It turned out it wouldn't fit in my bedroom window so I figured I'd install it somewhere downstairs, though the installation process is even more unpleasant than that of typical window A/Cs so I wasn't excited about it. But then the manufacturer recalled it and refunded me $200 more than I paid for it! And someone from a Buy Nothing group was happy to take it off my hands and repair it, so I didn't feel bad about the waste. Everybody won (except for Midea)!
6* Unfortunately this has been a bad week. I twisted my ankle which is setting back my physical therapy, I've been miserably sick with a horrific cough which keeps me from getting any sleep, and on the same afternoon I learned that I need a breast biopsy and that my dog has a serious heart murmur as well as an unclear-how-to-resolve jaw issue. The timing especially sucks because I have fun stuff coming up and I won't recover on time to fully participate in it, and I'm missing several going-away parties of colleagues who are fleeing for greener pastures.
7* I am still excited about the fun stuff though! There's a polycule trip to Vermont over the Fourth; my foot and ankle will keep me from being able to get to the nude beach, but I'll still enjoy the pool, the hot tub, and general hanging out. And then there's my birthday party in the Adirondacks. I plan to stay the week after that to enjoy a change of scenery, though I don't know if it will be depressing to not be able to do the outdoor stuff I usually do up there. I'll have a lot of books in any case.
8* Speaking of books, I tried reading two books by authors I'd been unimpressed by as a teenager, figuring that different books and a different life stage might help. I started out really appreciating the fantastic writing of Philip Roth's American Pastoral. And when we learn the (self-insert?) narrator is impotent following prostate cancer I thought, "Yay, that means much less opportunity for being as gross as Portnoy's Complaint!" Alas, it was not to be. It's not fair for me to give a review because I stopped 100 pages in after a weird incest thing pops up out of nowhere. It appears that the characters are going to view it as an honest mistake, and this combined with the narrator's self-absorption and several other distasteful sexual references means I'm out. (And I'm normally happy to read about sex, for the record! Just not the way Roth apparently likes it.)
And Sinclair Lewis's Main Street is quite funny; maybe Babbitt was too and I just didn't get it at the time. The writing is brilliant at the sentence level; however, it is also a LOT of words and description with very little happening. I was listening to the audiobook and would not have gotten through it otherwise. Also, it mocks both small town attitudes AND the woman who wants something better, which (along with the bleakness of the ending) I find a frustrating sort of cynicism.
So while I liked both books better than the ones I read as a teenager, and have much more appreciation for their writing quality, I didn't enjoy either at all. Back to authors writing in this century.
9* This link talks about how it's not doing the left any favors when we pretend personal responsibility isn't important. I don't agree with all of it but it makes some useful suggestions.
10* The URL tells much of the story of penischocken, but the writeup and video are quite fun.
11* Mad Max Fury Road was rated the 11th best movie of the past 25 years, and it's one of the dumbest things I've ever watched, so I am skeptical of ALL movies now.
