Good morning. Hello. How are you? #376
Surviving the side effects, surviving the frost, Earth day and Dramarama, dream alarm clocks, Civ VI tournament, Wings of Desire, Solveig Dommartin, Apple ATT
Good morning! Hello. How are you? I am doing good. Man, yesterday was hard. After I wrote to you guys, my side effects got worse and worse, and by 11 AM or so I decided “yeah, okay, screw this,” and went to bed. That helped. Got up and spent the rest of the day on the couch with insanely aching joints, and exhaustion. It wasn’t SO bad. But it was enough to make me completely useless. I was out of breath going up and down the stairs. Unable to properly process information, just overwhelmed with everything. It was rough.
I’m glad it didn’t get *really* bad till eleven-ish, though. Wednesday mornings are so stressful, so much going on. Get up at 6:30, take the recycling to the collection center, go get groceries, come home, do these words, Jane wakes up, go get Jane, bring her downstairs, my mom is up and Claire her PT are over doing her PT in the living room while I feed Jane. Now the trick is to get through breakfast and Jane downstairs to my office in a timely manner, without a fit, before my 10 AM meeting starts. God, the eggshells you walk on when you need to avoid a fit. Like day-to-day, there is moderate eggshell-walking and fear of a fit, but also you’re not that worried. You can deal. But if you know that a fit right now is going to mess up your whole day, if you know you just don’t have time for a fit right this second, it’s so painful. Additionally, Emma yesterday was sneaking out during breakfast to go to the doctor, so hopefully Jane doesn’t see her and get distracted. Or distracted by mom and Claire. Or by, you know, whatever. Oh and I had to move Claire’s car for Jane and man, getting into other people’s cars feels so invasive.
In the end, we actually made it and I made it to my meeting, but Jane decided to throw a giant fit 30 minutes later, regardless, when Grammy came over. By then I was starting to feel pretty rough and overwhelmed. But I got through the meeting! Heroic!
After dinner Emma and I had to go put plastic over a bunch of the plants since it was going to get down to 34 degress, which is uncomfortably close to frost, and too cold for basil. So I brought all the basils inside and covered the peppers and tomatoes and cucumbers. I left the brassicas and early spring crops to their fate. Gonna go out there after these words and check on em. Seems like it’s only supposed to be a one night cold spell. So hopefully we made it through unscathed.
Putting those covers on the plants was exhausting. God. That shot really made me a weakling. But it was worth it! And I haven’t taken a sick day in ages. I mean, not like decades, but I can’t think of one since the pandemic started? But of course as soon as I take one all this stuff happens at work, and people are all like “I have news from that meeting but you’re sick I’ll tell you later,” and that’s just absolutely untenable for me. I can’t NOT know some bit of work information for TWO DAYS. So then I make ‘em tell me anyway, so I can “not worry about it,” but sometimes, of course, they just told you something that’s going to make you worry while you’re sick. It is an impossible position. Luckily the news was good.
Also, the first potting bench, which I ordered a month ago and it never showed up and it has now been refunded has shown up after all, showed up after all: the day after the second potting bench showed up. So now I have two potting benches. I am okay with this.
I said “two days” up above because I am off today because my mom and I are off to her last two doctor’s appointments before she heads home. It is very exciting. I don’t think a ticket’s bought yet (Val and mom are doing that) or an exact date has been chosen (ditto) but things are in the works. I’ve written up all of mom’s health information into a long, extensive document, gotten my sister hooked up with all of her patient portals and new emails. We’re gonna need to get all the prescriptions refilled before she goes, so she has a buffer period while she’s up there to get them re-done there. But really, she’s looking good. Her progress has been remarkable. I am very, very happy that, in the end, none of her various afflictions were fatal. This could have been a lot worse.
Today is Earth Day, April 22. This is very confusing because of the Dramarama song “What are We Going to Do,” which I should have written about yesterday, because the first lyrics to the song are “It’s April twenty-first, and everybody knows today is Earth Day…” But Earth Day is not April 21, it’s April 22. We’ve been writing these for a very long time now, because I remember one year ago in a GMHHAY edition we extensively explored this topic, wondering why Dramarama got it wrong, and the consensus answer seems to be because they were playing the first big Earth Day concert festival in San Francisco, and they were playing on the first day of the two-day festival, which was April 21st. If I were a different sort of one-man media empire, I would go track down John Easdale and interview him about this, but I am satisfied with my explanation.
Also, late period Dramarama is really good. There’s a 2005 album and “they” (I think it’s just Easdale at this point) but out a pandemic album last year. Also, big Dramarama news: Anything, Anything is finally on Spotify. All their albums are.
I would like an alarm clock that lets you play, upon going off, a specific song for every day of the year. Like you program it to say “on April 21st, please play What are We Gonna Do by Dramarama, on April 22nd, please play Never Turn Your Back on Mother Earth by Martin Gore,” etc. For every day of the year. I feel like I would enjoy that very much. I’ve been trying to think of a way to do it with, like, Spotify or something, but I can’t think of a simple way. A half-assed Google search yields no results, so I can only assume such a thing totally doesn’t exist because nothing is real if it doesn’t show up in a half-assed Google search. But wouldn’t that be great? I think it would be really wonderful. It’s kind of sad how hard it even is to wake up to music these days. I used to do that all the time. I wonder if I could bring it back somehow.
In other big Spotify news, my favorite song by Loamlands, that I was just talking about yesterday, is back on Spotify. It was gone for only a few weeks, so I assume it was a mistake, but I was really sad about it. But it’s back, and it’s just lovely:
While sitting on the couch yesterday I watched a second five-hour livestream of Game two of the Club E-Sports Civ VI invitational tournament. I had watched The Saxy Gamer’s stream of it over several days but yesterday I just sat and watched the entirety of the Game Mechanic’s stream. He lost. Got decimated by Sir Ducks Lancelot, because he likes to build actual civilizations and go for science victories and whatnot and Sir Ducks just pummelled him to the ground because Sir Ducks was a warmonger. Except, once again, The Game Mechanic extracted a toll, and just like the previous week, Sir Ducks’ war did not pay off, (war, huh, good god y’all, what is it good for, absolutely nothing) and The Saxy Gamer won the game by not being a warmonger and, unlike TGM, spawning nowhere near a warmonger, so he could be left to build up his civilization in peace. Wakanda forever. Actually, he was the Nubians.
If I didn’t have a real job, one of the things that I think would be fun to do would to be a Civ VI streamer with a reality-based commentary, historical and political. Ramble on about George Kennen or Wisselbank and what they were in the real world, and only play the game with the real-world in mind. I can win on Diety, the hardest level, but I don’t win nearly as often as the streamers, because I insist on playing the game like it’s reality. I feel the loss of every citizen. I get really sad when a volcano kills them. That’s a fantasy of mine: Civ VI as a history lesson on YouTube.
After that I decided to watch Wings of Desire because I was pretty out of it, and that movie is sort of like a hallucination anyway, plus I’d seen it enough it was okay if I spaced out, and I was also texting my friend Kelly and my limited brain couldn’t handle doing both. I actually hadn’t seen it in a good long while. Emma joined me about halfway through and I was explaining to her how this dour black-and-white film had a sequel that was mostly in color and kind of a comedic heist movie and how incongruous that seemed, but actually for the first time I noticed there are a fair amount of comedic beats in Wings of Desire that I had never noticed back in my goth days, or willfully overlooked, or forgave. But they’re pretty funny. The look on the coffee vendor’s face when Peter Falk is talking to himself. The whole hat choosing scene. The scene with the kids in the mid wondering if that’s Colombo but he’s too grubby. I guess Wim Wender’s comedic leanings were always there and he was not the dour, goth hero I was hoping he was at the tender age of twenty.
I was very sad to learn that Solveig Dommartin passed away in 2007 at the age of 45 of a heart attack, though. I had no idea? I feel like I should have known this. What a shame.
Forty-five, man. Oof. Best not to think about that. Every time I’m even slightly out of breath I assume I’m going to die of a heart attack.
Apple has announced that it will begin enforcement of its new ATT opt-in mechanism on Monday. So here we go. Let’s see how much damage a large, monopolistic corporation will do to a bunch of small companies, while no one in government cares, even as they are pretending to investigate Apple for monopolistic practices. There was a congressional hearing this week about Apple and monopolistic practices, and this didn’t even come up. Jason Kint, whom I admire as a stalwart fighter against Facebook’s dominance, believes that Apple is about to deal a “kneecap” to Facebook with these changes. I don’t believe that for a moment — this will hurt Facebook’s off-app ad network, but that is a drop in the bucket of their revenue. It will do nothing to their main revenue streams. And even so, Apple kneecapping Facebook at the expense of a bunch of small publishers is… maybe not awesome? Here I made a diagram to help explain it:
WHAT FUN.
Today’s mix is a mix of covers. About time for one of these. In like a lamb, out like a lion. Sort of. Not really. Last one’s a banger, though. Were you like me and Joan Jett’s version of Crimson and Clover was the first one you heard? Were you completely enraptured by it the first time you heard it as a nine year-old? Did those breathy vocals at the beginning blow your mind? God, what a song. I almost put two songs from the Crazy Rich Asians soundtrack on here but i managed to keep it to one. What a great movie, what a great soundtrack. Also I love Demi’s cover of Mad World, because she’s covering a cover version of the song, which is a thing I love. Like all the people who add Jeff Buckley’s extra verse to Hallelujah that does not exist in the original Cohen version.
Okay have a lovely day!
Oops forgot the Spotify URL: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3zZVxIRNY4AcGWJBsXIKZ3?si=-Gjxc4iGSuKtiih5kWp7vQ
I had no idea about Solveig Dommartin either, that's awful!