Good morning. Hello. How are you? #798
McCarthy schadenfreude, Slow Horses, trash compactors, country memorization forgetfulness, trying to keep this fig cutting alive
Good morning! Hello! How are you? I am good! Day 14 of the rebound and I am negative at last. Negative on last night’s test, negative this morning. Had a couple false negatives on days 11 and 12, but two in a row now, finally. Finally. Which brings us to the gloriously vague guidelines by the CDC of “two negative tests 48 hours apart, which I have technicaly had, even though there was a positive in between. Who knows. Who knows. We will continue to be careful but I think I am getting out of my quarantine cave soon, that is exciting. I will get to hug my daughter, albeit masked. Still. A hug is a hug and I will take it.
And we can finally have Christmas soon. That will be exciting.
I will not deny that I spent several hours yesterday watching on CSPAN the entirety of every. single. vote. that Kevin McCarthy lost. Wow that was deeply satisfying, I am not going to lie. I can’t wait to see what happens today. I know this will end eventually but I am fairly optimistic at this point it will end without Kevin McCarthy as majority leader, and that will be good enough for me. After watching several hours of roll call votes on CSPAN, I doubled down and watched some commentary on MSNBC. You know, to really bask in it. And lots of predictions about what will happen today, but the one that stuck with me was the former Republican congressman, whose name I forget, telling a story about a previous time they were in this pickle, and how the way they solved it was they went down the list of Republican leadership in the house until they got to someone who was unobjectionable to both sides. That was the sixth-ranked congressmen in the Republican leadership, Dennis Hastert. Who, you know, turned out to be a child molester, but that part is not super relevant to our story. But if that were to happen this time, it would be Patrick McHenry or Drew Ferguson. So they are my predictions. That seems more likely than, you know, a “Sorkin scenario,” which we would all love, where moderate Republicans make cause with moderate Democrats. Not gonna happen.
Finished Slow Horses last night, and it is funny. I wrote about the first episode and how the writing was kinda bad but I do like watching Gary Oldman, and at that point I was going to stop. And then my friend Meghan commented that she agreed the writing was kinda bad but she watched every single episode. And then after, you know, ten days of movies I was kind of in a rut. Movies are hard. Every one of them you have to completely reset your emotions and prepare for anything, and sometimes you just want to sit in front of the TV and enter into a world where you are, at least, already mildly oriented. So I put Slow Horses back on a couple days ago, and watched six episodes straight. The writing got a leeeeeetle better, but the acting and characters and suspense were enough to keep me into it. I am a sucker for Gary Oldman disapearred into a role.
All through this quarantine I have been trying to keep this fig tree cutting alive, and it does not seem to be working. I have it in a good pot, good, moist soil, good fertilizer, good light. I turn on the grow lamps every morning and turn them off every evening, I rotate the plant so different sides of get the natural sunlight each day. It is showing no signs of reviving. I am very sad. I suppose I should have, you know, googled “how to grow a fig from a cutting” instead of just listening to that old farmer lady’s advice. I would very much like to save this cutting of a Bodhi fig tree descended from the Bo-tree planted at the ruined city of Anuradhapura, near Kandy, in Ceylon in the year 288 B.C. by way of the Duke university Bodhi fig. If anyone has any advice, I welcome it. Maybe I should have grown the cutting in water? Like a pice of basil? But I’ve never done that with anything as substantial as a tree.
I did my map flashcards — online games where I one-by-one identify the countries of Europe, Africa, Asia, Central America, the Caribbean and South America — Yesterday after a length vacation and wow. That knowledge goes fast. I mean, I didn’t really get any wrong, or at least not more than usual, but I was so much slower. Really had to think about it after a week away. Also another thing I’ve noticed about the map game is that even after all these months, it is still not really working in reverse. A couple weeks ago — during my first quarantine — I met someone in a Zoom meeting that was the child of refugees from Eritrea. Now, mind you, every morning, a game asks me to click on Eritrea on a map, and I click on it with no problem. But when I learned this person was from Eritrea, I really had to stop and think about where it was, what continent it was even on. Eventually I remembered properly, but, wow. This is not the first time I’ve had that problem either. Couple weeks ago I got a phone call from North Macedonia and I had to stop and think about where it was, even though I know exactly where it was and it’s even one of the countries for which I have a quickie heuristic. This is a somewhat disheartening realization, because I am not playing the map game every day to… win the map game. I’m playing to easily, quickly know where every country in the world is. Maybe a different approach is needed.
Watched White Noise last Friday and it was fine, not really my thing. I read the book ages ago but all I remember is the Airborne Toxic Event, probably mainly because of the band and their brilliant song “Sometime Around Midnight” that is very much part of my personal past nostalgia canon. Oh and I remembered that it took place on a campus and had a bit of a send up of academia but that’s about it. The entire second half of the film was completely unfamiliar to me. And I don’t love films like that because I feel like when you have a film of endless surreal scenes in a row it is hard to find a place to stop because there’s no real plot wrap up. There were, like ten places where that film could have stopped and it would have made just as much sense to the story, so they end up feeling to long, even if they’re not.
But anyway, that’s not what I’m here to tell you. I’m here to tell you that the scene mentioning the trash compactor and then Adam Driver going to the garage and finding those very specifically sized trash compactor bags: that scene really took me back. Trash compactors. We had one in my house when I was a teenager. Shiny, pale yellow face on it, using those selfsame very specifically sized trash compactor basgs with the roll top. I hadn’t thought about those in years. That’s an appliance that really died off. No one has trash compactors anymore. Great 80’s touch, I really appreciated that.
Finally, I would just like to tell someone that yesterday morning I got a software 2FA six-digit code out of my authenticator app that was 000 001 and it was very, very creepy.
Justa mix for today. Mostly new stuff. Starts off heavy on the guitar stuff and then slowly migrates into new more synth-based stuff, electronic stuff and then ends with a banger of a classic goth tune.. Classic tunes, first and last, mostly new stuff in between, that’s today’s format.
All right, well, good talk. It’s nice to return to our standard format after a break and a few special new year’s editions. See you tomorrow!
hallelujah!
hooray for the light at the end of the tunnel! i was starting to feel extra bad for you—especially since i've been testing negative since sunday (which was my day 5 post test). i'm back int he office, even!