Good morning. Hello. How are you? #614
Oscars angst, podcast, box room cleaning, installing drip irrigation, diet progress, a theory about bedtime angst
Well hello there. Good morning. How are you? Have a good weekend? I suppose let’s just get this out of the way up front: How ‘bout them Oscars? Yuh-Jung Youn is just so awesome and adorable and she was the absolute best. And that speech by the Troy Kostur was amazing and when he mentioned his dad being paralyzed from the neck down it made me cry. I had this amazing weekend and got a ton done and is in one of those euphoric moods from having been super productive and it was just great and then Will Smith totally buzzkilled that. Like weirdly, irrationally so. I was really upset! I still kind of am. I am upset for lots of reasons, and I suppose the fact that my good friend Andy who passed during the pandemic had Alopecia is probably wrapped up in it. Andy had a morbid sense of humor and made a lot of jokes, including about his Alopecia, so it’s hard to unpack that because in my world alopecia is not that huge of a deal and joking about it is not a mortal sin. Normalize alopecia! I just… Also I don’t like violence? I don’t like it at all and I think it is bad to hit people no matter what words come out of their mouth. I don’t like people saying they are using violence to “protect” the people they “love,” yeah I don’t like that one bit. I got serious abuser vibes from the whole thing and people who say “oh like he’s just finished up writing a book about his dad abusing his wife,” well, to me that does not excuse it; that furthers my discomfort at the possibility of abuse. Not into it at all, not one little bit no siree. Yes the joke was mean but it would not have ranked in the 100 most mean jokes at the Oscars, it would not have been remembered next year or even next month.
Twitter discourse on this one was very upsetting to me. It is real disconcerting that suddenly it is okay to hit people because of words they say. And god knows what kind of people this will inspire in comedy clubs.
Hrm oh interesting I had a nice dream about the Texan band Lift to Experience and they just came on random on my playlist. That is nice. In my dream this song had a six minute free-noise outro and it was so good. I was watching them live at Red Eye Fly. Is that place still around? That is where I first saw Naked Raygun.
OKAY. Anyway, let’s talk about my awesome productive weekend. Oh my god, I was so productive. First, I got my podcast done. It was swell. It really laid into Paul Collier’s The Future of Capitalism, let me tell you. That weird thing centrists do where they happen to be politically in the center at one point, then the entire spectrum moves around them and… they’re still centrist. They did not move along the spectrum with the tide — because they have actual political views and would like to keep them, so if the tide moves, those political views they have mean they’re moving too. No, they just somehow magically stay in the center even if suddenly that means a totally different set of beliefs. Kinda weird. Here is a link and list of the other topics this week:
Then I went and cleaned out the box room, aka the utility room. We had gotten those Powerwalls installed, and it necessitated moving a bunch of shit, and then I had to leave the stuff moved and all in a giant mess for like two weeks while we were waiting for the inspection. And the room was a giant mess before all of this. So it needed a good spring cleaning. I got a ton of shit moved out, a bunch going to my storage unit, a bunch getting tossed in the recycling. I got everything into bins and labeled. It is super swell now I am very proud. In the evening I went in there and sort of stood around and just felt the rosy glow of an organizational job well done.
And then I spent the bulk of the rest of the weekend working on the garden, specifically my drip irrigation system. And I got it done! I mean, not completely done, but essentially done. All the hard parts, the main backbone of the system. I drilled a tunnel underneath a concrete sidewalk! Emma and I dug a trench and buried ten feet of the irrigation tubing! All seven of the raised beds now have drip irrigation installed, and I have a main backbone line running down the entirety of the hoop house, and it is all controlled from an Eve Water timer, hooked up to my phone and HomeKit. It is amazing. I thought it was going to take me, like, three weekends to get this done, and we got it all done in one weekend! I even made a quick trip to Lowe’s to buy more 1/2” drip tubing to finish the job this weekend.
Here is the video. Plus Jane makes many appearances, so does Emma as she digs a trench, and there’s some really nice slow-motion giant bubbles at the end.
Hit two new low weights this week here on week 12 or so of the diet. I am down 31 pounds. I looked at my life-long weight chart graph I have in Google Sheets and I need to lose another twelve pounds just to get back to my pre-pandemic weight. Isnt’t that insane? That is insane! I gained forty-three pounds during this pandemic. That is insanity! 2020 was a very hard year! I’m deeply glad for the 2021-2022 winter I managed to keep exercising all winter. We kept up our walks and I got a treadmill and used it most every day. Still, though, man. Nuts. I am a weight magnet. I’m so big, so wide, so thick. It’s absurd.
My old friend and coworker Jen wrote me last week and said that she experienced the same cycle of sadness and then more peace through the years and it wasn’t during the pandemic and she attributes it to the age of the kids. Like when they’re young they’re so delicate and helpless and it is overwhelming and as they graduate from toddlerhood they become (a little) more self-sufficient and you don’t have to worry about them every second and how that is such a relief and I think she’s right, I think that is a big part of it. She says that it comes back in their teenage years when they’re learning to become adults and god, that is going to be so stressful let’s just not think about that for another nine years, mmmkay? Anyway it was a good insight. I am thankful for it.
Today’s mix is justa mix. It has “Maybe it’s Time” from the A Star is Born soundtrack, because it was running through my head all weekend, but I think perhaps it is lyrically relevant to the weekend’s events:
Maybe it's time to let the old ways die
It takes a lot to change a man
Hell, it takes a lot to try
Maybe it's time to let the old ways die
Also, speaking of A Star is Born if you are looking for a healthy manner to protect people, look to Lady Gaga helping out Liza Minelli when they were presenting together.
“Rainbird” from Love and Rockets was going through my head all weekend as well. I just love that line “slogging for a pittance in a boot and shoe yard / that’s when you wanted what you now give away.” Please don’t tell me I got the lyrics wrong because these are the ones I’ve known since 1988 or so.
Okay let’s get a bunch of work stuff done I have been procrastinating too long! Ler us apply the verve and vigor with which we accomplished tasks this weekend to the weekdays. Jane’s at Grammy’s this morning so I can hopefully plow through some stuff. Talk soon!