Good morning. Hello. How are you? #1082
A favor in manhattan needed, a low-level midlife crisis, a terror of a PT office admin, May December, the Golden Globes monologue, Chopin is playing the Arts Club
Good morning. Hello. How are you? Mid week. We can do this. Jane’s school is starting two hours late today because of the storm last night. No terrible damage here, we emerged unscathed, but apparently the roads did not. She had a rough bedtime, so Emma promised she’d wake up with her. We all had breakfast together. A rarity! Emma is doing her hair in a cute do while I write these words before I take her to school. A wrinkle in the routine. I can handle absolute chaotic explosions, tossing the routine into the void, but I am not particularly good with minor wrinkles.
So I have made a really stupid mistake and I am hoping one of you can help me. Can anyone pick up a large-ish box for me from the West Side of Manhattan? You would almost certainly need a car or an Uber or something. Box is 16 x 20 x 19 and weighs about 40 pounds. I stupidly bought it off eBay without noticing it was local pickup. But I do need it and I have already paid for it.
Or maybe you know of a service that will pick this up for me and ship it to me?
It is a total pain, I know, but I will compensate! Pretty please!
I am listening to the new(ish) Sufjan Stevens album for the second time. Listened to it back in October. It is beautiful and delicate. I have never been a huge fan and now I am wondering why. Also the Cranes are playing a show in Leeds. Wanna go to Leeds? A band named Deary is opening. They also opened for Slowdive, this email from Cranes informs me. I have now added them to my “To Investigate” playlist in Spotify. There are 48 hours, 41 minutes between this Sufjan album and that Deary EP. I have listened to it all at least once, it is all getting the second chance every piece of music deserves. Trying to clear out 2023’s old bands. This playlist had 59 hours in it on Monday. Making progress.
Oh also, look! Important gig alert. I assume this must be part of the Arts Club’s “From the Grave” series:
So I watched that dude’s Golden Globes monologue. It was… fine. Kinda funny, even? I did not watch the whole Golden Globes, so I missed some of his supposedly worse jokes like the one about Taylor Swift, but these jokes were all so milquetoast and inoffensive. And the dude knew they weren’t all good. His running commentary about the quality of the jokes and the people who wrote them was almost certainly improvised, and it was brilliant. This is not a discourse I actively follow so for it to have gotten to me, boy, the brouhaha must have been giant. Tempest in a teapot, I say. A tempest! In a teapot!
Man this Sufjan album is pretty.
Watched May December last night and it was brilliant and slow and disturbing and very good and I enjoyed it very much and the main guy in the movie is from Juneau, Alaska, so that is cool always good to see Alaskans doing shit. I deeply appreciate slow cinema, but man is it hard to watch in the year 2024 in your own home. Its nothing like watching it in a theater, where it really consumes you. But I find that I can appreciate it even as I am struggling to not pick up the phone I put down thirty seconds earlier, when I thought to myself “put the phone down and enjoy this film” before I thought to myself “was that dude in an episode of Future Man?” (No, he was not). Phones, man. I am not a screen time scold or paranoiac but Apple helpfully informed me that my screen time was getting out of control and, you know, I think they might have a point. It’s winter, I am not doing as many chores, and god, I feel it. Which leads us to….
I think I might be having a new form of mid-life crisis this week, let’s call it wave 3. It’s a pretty mild wave. An aftershock maybe. Recognition that you can only plan your life in years, maybe 5-year increments now. There is no “someday.” My body still aches from the log splitting this weekend. My god, I am in so much pain still and it’s Wednesday. Usually the pain from the weekend’s chores is gone by Wednesday. This is no good at all.
I’ve also been thinking I might kick this Cymbalta that I have been taking for neck pain. Sorry, Duloxetine. It’s hilarious. At the pain clinic, they take pains to call it Duloxetine and not Cymbalta, I guess cuz they don’t want to imply anyone there — at the chronic pain clinic — might be, you know, depressed.
Anyway, it’s weird. Like I am fine with this mid-life crisis because I think this Cymbalta has been leveling out my emotions for a year or so now. It’s interesting and in a lot of ways I appreciate it, but I also think that maybe I need to A/B test this a bit more, both from an emotional POV and a pain POV. Because I don’t think it’s doing anything for the pain anymore and I never really needed my emotions leveled in the first place. Or shit maybe it is and my pain will be even worse, I don’t know.
Also I feel like I haven’t gotten my neck needles in quite a while. Also I need to go to the eye doctor. Also I missed a PT appointment on Monday accidentally and I feel terrible about it and that mean woman at the front desk of the PT office is going to have a field day with me. She is mean in exactly that perfectly-polite Southern Belle way that is just the worst. She already hates me because I — very poilitely, in the southern way — called BS on her saying she absolutely had to have an original, paper copy of my insurance card. She could not look at the digital version stored in my MyChart, like the entire rest of the UNC system. She would not even think to look at the scan of the card that I had on my phone. And no, it would not do to bring in a paper print out printed off of the Aetna website. It absolutely had to be the original card, it’s not her fault, that’s just how the system makes her do it.
“Well that sure is a pickle,” I say, “since the system is a UNC-wide system and I know exactly what buttons you could press to see my insurance card inside of it. Would you like help?”
Nope nope nope.
Woah. Tangent. Anyway, that woman terrifies me.
It’s an odd thing having a bit of a mid-life crisis when there is nothing to be really done about it, because even if your life is not 100% the way you want it, it’s like 95% and you’re on a clear path to accomplish the other 5%. So why does your brain have to point out to you how old you are and how you’re not 20 years younger still and you have a balding spot and women don’t fall in love with you out of the blue anymore and you’re probably never gonna meet another pop star even though you don’t want that anyway and you still look pretty good for your age when you aren’t wearing sweats and a Care Bear sweater and maybe you should start dressing like an adult but doesn’t that really just mean dressing like a boomer and what does that even mean? Wearing polos? Patagonia? “High-tech fabrics” as a friend of mine once brilliantly said?
What is there possibly to even do about this supposed mid-life crisis. It’s not like I’m gonna buy a Hurrácan Serrato. I mean, how can I explain my near obsession with the off-road Lamborghini Hurracán Serrato? Where the fuck did that come from? Is it in the water or something? C’mon man.
But god, that thing is so cool.
Also I slammed my shin on the edge of one of the beds and the pain is still there an hour or so later so that is not promising at all.
All right well I’m gonna go. I wanted to tell you about my amazing new capitalism-dopamine purchase today but it’s gonna have to wait till tomorrow because I do not have it set up yet, this whole Jane school schedule jigger is throwing everything off.
Emma is annoyed I am showing you older pictures of Jane this month. As you may recall, I have sorted my photos for the year, and there were about 30 great photos of Jane that I had not yet shown you. So I am keeping those in reserve. Emma says she looks so young in these old ones but I don’t think they’re that old. From, like, March of last year and such. But I will try and mix it up. I’ll give you a more recent one tomorrow. But not today.
So I know I said I was done with playlists, but a) really I just meant I was done with making one every day, and b) the force of habit finds me still making them, or adding songs to them as I feel fit. So it seems that today’s Media of the Day is another playlist, the 51st volume of the shoegaze series. Mostly new, but a few oldies. I bought all the Lush reissues for the records I didn’t have, so here is a Lush song. Love the new Drop Nineteens, of course, the new Warlocks rules when did they get so etherial? And I love love love the new Fauns. Really a great mix. Enjoy.
Y’all stay safe out there okay?