Good morning. Hello. How are you? #1023
Isreal & Palestine, chores, greenhouse, Taylor Lorenz's "Extremely Online," luffas, programming garage doors my god it is such a hassle.
Good morning. Hello. How are you? All well? Nice weekend? I do hope so. Mine was lovely. Jane is done having a fever and I just dropped her off at school. Let’s see if she can manage a full five days of school. And I won’t be here. Headed to New York in an hour or so. Which reminds me: no GMHHAY the next three days. I have an On-Site with work. we’re actually all going to see each other for the first time in, oh, three years. Going to be intense. Lots to get done.
Israel. Hamas. What is there to say? That is some bad shit. Is there any other political topic that so transcends the American political spectrum? I can’t think of another topic where two friends, both solidly in the Republican or Democratic party, tread carefully when discussing, because they have no real idea the political position of the other person. Even talking about it in a meta way, like this, is fraught. It is utterly unpredictable. I suppose there is probably a statistical correlation of being a Jewish American that has an increased likelihood of support for Israel, but I take nothing for granted and have plenty of Palestine-supporting Jewish friends. And of course there are plenty of deep red, arch-conservative, fundamentalist christian American supporters of Israel. Anyway the whole situation is terrible, a new level of terrible to a situation that has been terrible for sixty years, terrible for a hundred years, terrible for a thousand years. This is not to belittle it.
Also at least 800 people died in a series of earthquakes on Saturday.
Hard to write about that stuff. I think about it constantly. I think about how our minds work, the emphasis we place on some deaths over others, the emphasis we place on some people over others, even when we try not to, even when we battle against our cognitive biases, against the media landscape, our own personal history. Sometimes in these situations I try to look at raw numbers, but of course raw numbers have a timeline, and choosing the scale of the timeline is, essentially, a political act (witness this chart in the Times laying out the number of casualties in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict that goes back… to 2008). I try so hard to put my personal biases aside. But… then what? What does that accomplish? I am not going to get an “accurate” picture of this conflict. I am not in it, I do not understand it, I could spend my life examining it, apportioning blame, moving the needle a percent here, a percent there.
We are not judges. We are witnesses.
Cheery. Anyway. moving on.
Good chore time this weekend. I took a bunch of padded moving blankets and taped them up to be the size of different-sized Birdies Beds raised planters and laid them out in the greenhouse to make a floor plan. Like the McDonald bros and Ray Kroc, yo. At first crammed the thing full of them, but then I realized I have succeeded: the greenhouse is big enough. It is going to grow so much. And even with growing so much I have room for a potting bench and maybe a couple of chairs, along with my seed starting shelf. Very exciting.
In this photo it doesn’t look like much, but that is a lot of planting space. Those beds are three feet deep. That is nearly a hundred square feet of gardening space. And I will have more outside, this is just for stuff that the squirrels eat.
It is going to be so great. We are, hopefully, going to start building the greenhouse this weekend.
I also finally got the garage door openers sorted, we have four different Liftmaster products across the two houses, and every single one of them uses a different wireless protocol, so I had to buy these special four-button Liftmaster universal remotes, and I had to teach each one of them each of the four openers, one by one, using a different secret button-click combination (one-click for yellow, two clicks for purple, three clicks for green) to program them. This took, um, like three weeks? I also got the gate and a single garage door hooked up to the internet, the other two can’t be hooked up without investing in some additional specialized hardware, I am not particularly a fan of that.
Also… I harvested the luffa! Oh my god, there are so many luffas. I forgot to take a picture of them, I will take one when I get back they are drying in the sun at the other house. So many luffa. It is going to take forever to get all the seeds out of them. But I am excited. Luffa sponges for everyone!
Also organized the bins on the new concrete pad outside the garage at the other house, and got these giant yardwork bags that hold like 50 gallons of yard material, be it mulch or leaves or whatever, and I poured three bins worth of mulch I made into them. I still have a ton of leaves to shred, but we are making progress.
Emma started on the path between the two houses, and we sort of mapped out where it’s gonna go. There is a lot of work to be done. I need to figure out a lighting situation – motion-activated solar lights with a relatively long cable to the solar panel is what I’m thinking. I don’t know if they make such a thing. We can only hope.
Started Taylor Lorenz’s Extremely Online and it is a good time. The first part is a lived experience — she mentions, god, like 20 friends and six different people who worked for me at various jobs. I could nitpick her history of the internet creator ecosystem, but she is telling a very specific story of creator-celebrity, which I think is distinct from internet creators as a whole. She skips over Makeout Club, Livejournal and, interestingly, Nerve. The whole book seems to skip the sexual side of the creator community, which is fine, like I said, she is telling a specific story. She also seems to be skipping over the written side of the creator community — fanfic, LJ Drama, etc. do not make appearances.
I also think that she simplifies the internet’s domination over print media and tells the story primarily from a creator and attention standpoint when personally I think it is more of an economic tale and the primary two diver’s of the internet’s domination over print were Craigslist and Google. But that’s a different book and someone else should write that one (ahem).
What she is telling is the story of the rise of the content creator who can make a living off of it. And that is a rollicking story. As the book continues, it parts ways from my lived experience into the world of Vine and Snapchat and Tiktok celebrities, about which I know absolutely nothing, except for the executives at those platforms.
Not done yet, however, so we’ll see where it goes. But it has been a great read, I find myself struggling to put it down to go to bed.
Jane was a bit of a pain last night but we got through it and there were moments of joy in our bedtime routine, after a thirty minute… anxiety attack? K hole? I don’t know what to call it when she gets locked into one thing and can’t get out of it, has to retrace her steps exactly, can’t handle it if that is no longer possible, can think of nothing else, and you can’t convince her to move on. Last night I started to wonder if this had some adult analog, was a precursor to something we see in adults. Maybe something on the spectrum, or maybe something like anxiety or… I don’t know. It really does seem uniquely weird. I don’t know if other kids get this way, they probably do. It is probably completely normal.
Anyway after about a half our of that we made a checklist of all the things we wanted to do in the evening — potty, LEGO, dance party, teeth, jammies, snuggle, bed — and that seemed to give her a lot of joy as we worked our way through it. But then bedtime itself was more messy than usual. Go figure.
But luckily this morning went well, it is silly hat day at school and she’s wearing a Hello Kitty sort of furry hat and a pink hoodie and she is so cute and I will miss her these next… four days that is sad. And I will miss my wife.
Travel, man. A blessing and a curse.
Covers playlist for you today. Lotta 80’s and 90’s alt covers. “No Surprises” from Radiohead is 25 years old wtf what happened to time. The original singer of “Harper Valley PTA” Jeannie C Riley makes a cameo at the end of this cover of it by Lisa Brokop. I don’t know who she is, but good on ya, Lisa Brokop, for getting Jeannie C Riley out of retirement. Only now learning about the Hated, the punk band that featured Dan, later of Ida. I am pretty into them at the moment how did I miss them “back in the day?”
Thank you for your time and consideration in this matter and I will see you on Thursday.