the kids are all right

My daughter wandered solo through a large swath of Europe, came home for a festival over Labor Day, headed back to her apartment and partners in Buffalo, and found a job within a week. It's not a great job- she's a receptionist at an optometrist office, making just above minimum wage with no benefits- but it does not involve waking up at 3am and working weekends like her last two bakery jobs. (I'm hoping she keeps on looking for something better but know it's really hard to motivate oneself to do that while working.)

It is a delight to see her navigate life so well. She's not doing things the way I would but she is figuring things out and doing cool stuff despite a high baseline level of anxiety, a horrifying political landscape, a disastrous entry level economy, and less socially robust culture than we had pre-cell phones. 

books!

 * Ode to the Half-Broken by Suzanne Palmer: One of the Horserobots of the Apocalypse and a dog-robot go on a hero's journey in a purple VW bus. There are a lot of recent stories which present artificial intelligences as benevolent towards humans (this one, Murderbot, CatNet); is that our wishful thinking or our self-centeredness?

* The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler and Devil of the Deep by Falencia Jean-Francois both use mysteries in the ocean to explore humans' relationship with nature, colonialism, and climate change. I recommend the first on paper because it includes visuals of the octopus language, and the second on audio because the narrator does a good job.

* And I coincidentally listened to two books taking place on islands near Seattle. Folly by Laurie King was marketed as a thriller but it's really about strategies for surviving grief and PTSD. Whidbey by T. Kira Madden is about the fallout after a pedophile dies, told from the perspectives of his mother and two of his victims. I found both of them moving, and the authors did a good job of getting inside the heads of the (sometimes unreliable) characters. Both also however failed to stick the landing. The last 10% of Folly turned into the thriller that was promised but it felt tacked on out of now. The last quarter of Whidbey introduced new first person perspectives and a detailed explanation of the death, which would have been more powerful if left open-ended.

SINCE ALL MY RESEARCH FUNDING WAS CUT I HAVE TO BE A SUBJECT NOW

A few years back I was part of a longitudinal study of HIV; I think they were excited to recruit a slutty woman my age at the time. This year they expanded it into a social network study. Curiously, they defined "social network" as "the people you have had sex with or used drugs or alcohol with in the past year." We went through a list of names and relationships, and at the end, the data collector asked me to connect which of them had had sex with each other. In past years this would have been a complicated diagram, but as far as I knew, NONE of them had. It was a somewhat sad realization, but we've all gotten older. (Though here is a post about 50+ sex parties, with a "very Gen X-friendly start time of 3 p.m.") 

I also completed the study to treat dry eye, which meant a painful weekend with an amniotic membrane covering one eye and then four sessions of IPL, which involves sticking metal shields in the eye and zapping the skin with a hot bright instrument. So far, minimal benefits. Which sucks because it would be nice if my eyes didn't hurt all the time, but at least I didn't have to spend $2500 to learn that IPL is not helpful to me.

or maybe I just resent him because of Dispatches from Elsewhere

I started to watch Shrinking but it was so corny and cloying and I hated everything about the main character so much that I gave up after three episodes. But the rest of the world seems to love it! Am I broken?

at least there was a dog

Then in the morning we watched Supergirl. It was fun enough but had a lot of wasted potential due to poor writing. The character arc was sloppy, the messages about revenge were incoherent, and the ending had a potentially unique character give in to do the expected boring thing. Also, I know the standards for comic book worldbuilding are low, but these were unnecessarily hand-wavey. And I'm frankly tired of gender-based violence being used as a lazy plot device. 

Are they supposed to be the Blues Brothers?

I had never seen Pulp Fiction and Partner A decided to remedy this while we were high. I found myself wanting someone there who was Extremely Nerdily Into the movie to tell me about all the other movie references contained within. (The plot, I have no recollection of now, but I enjoyed it at the time?)

worth what I paid

Free concerts: 

-A duo with drums and an electric cello, singing about the eruption of Mount Tambora.

-A 70s style gospel choir. I introduced Partner A to my strategy of interpreting all Jesus songs as horny or romantic. (Heck, maybe they are, for the same reasons a lot of artists were stuck with religious themes whether they liked it or not?) Anyway, we learned that Jesus was always punctual and "able;" I'd swipe right.

-A traditional jazz trio. I learned I have negative interest in just sitting and listening to a jazz trio; it's great background music, but not to be focused on.

procrastination works

I have small retirement accounts semi-abandoned across several companies due to job changes. I want to consolidate them but not enough to actually figure out the logistics. Helpfully, one of them just consolidated itself: a former employer moved all its legacy accounts to a company where I already have an account! 

remember to be ugly

 How social media can flatten us, because the stories we tell shape who we are.

(The article doesn't get into the ways we curate our own histories to ourselves to give them good narrative arcs, but I found myself doing that a lot more through my early 30s than after I started using social media more. Maybe it's a factor of age- or disability- related nihilism, but I don't expect my feelings and experiences to logically follow from prior events anymore. Stuff just happens! When it does I'll deal with it, but how I go about that won't necessarily have anything to do with or be consistent with what I've done before.)

I live another life

My dreams that take place at "home" are always in my parents' house, even if my kids or ex-husband were in the dream and even though I've lived in my current house longer than I lived there. But I just had one taking place in my actual house! Will it be a trend? (Ironically it was a dream that would have made more sense at my parents', because I was looking to borrow an old computer of my dad's to bring with me to Star Trek camp. There was another camp being held at the same location but they knew where to direct me because I was carrying a large computer.)