Good morning. Hello. How are you? #992
Doctor visit, Hawaii, Twitter 'n' Threads, stove epiphany, Three Thousand Years of Longing shouldn't have been a bomb
Good morning. Hello. How are you? Happy Friday. Happy insurance exam day. Happy structural engineer is coming by the guest house day. Happy Walmart day. Alas, I am sorry you probably will not hear about the Walmart trip this week, since I won’t be getting to it until about eleven and then I will have forgotten about it by Monday when I wrote to you again. Unless it is amazing. One never knows.
I would like to reassure readers that there was no connection whatsoever between my 10th wedding anniversary yesterday and the fact that I posted a “most depressing” playlist. Just luck of the song counts. My marriage is not depressing at all and is one of the best things about my life.
Went to the doctor yesterday (guess what he told me guess what he told me ) except my doctor is a woman and she told me to go to a hand doctor so I made an appointment with the hand doctor who is always a woman Chapel Hill rules so many woman doctors around these parts you can go your whole life without seeing a male doctor. Anyway, I have set in motion what I expect to be a long journey to getting my hands to not hurt anymore. At least I am on the path. The first step is the hardest when it comes to interfacing with the medical community. Really is a nightmare. Everyone was wearing masks at the clinic again because the Triangle is going through a bit of a Covid renaissance right now.
And I assume I got it because I had lunch with a coworker who happened to be in town. The lunch was awesome and the place wasn’t very crowded but, you know. Fate.
Good to see him, though.
I haven’t written about Hawaii and I am starting to feel… confused about it. Horrible tragedy. It’s hard for me to write about some things like this because… what am I going to say that no one else has said? It’s also occurred to me that some tragedies are in this middle spot of horror, so to speak, that are too big to think of the human misery without getting overwhelmed, and too small to look at it as some sort of macro thing from which I can feel detached and try to act on a larger scale. I mean, yes, these wildfires very much seem a circumstance of global warming but… Oof. But thank you, Emily Taylor, for bringing home the scale of the tragedy yesterday, in words better than I can, so I will just amplify them:
Over a thousand people are still missing in Lahaina, Maui. 109 people have been confirmed deceased, and that number will continue to rise as forensic teams search more of the area for human remains. The number of the missing only includes people who were being looked for. There were a great number of unhoused people living in Lahaina who may not have anyone looking for them.
Additional to this loss of life is the loss of livelihood and property. Some of the structures in Lahaina were over 100yrs old. Some property had been passed down through many generations. Records and deeds may have been destroyed, or may have never even existed in the first place. The first loss is life, the second is livelihood, the third will be property.
These people are well and truly devasted.
As every, I expect the best places to help are direct and on the ground and I am no expert here but here is a good place to start.
Well never any good transition away from that so here is the first song Sinead O’connor ever recorded:
Watched Three Thousand Years of Longing the other day. It was great. It was the film George Miller decided he needed to make instead of Furiosa, the sequel to Mad Max Fury Road, on which he is working now. It completely bombed. Had a very wide opening — over 2,000 screens in the US. Grossed just over $2 million. Worldwide it has grossed $20 million on a $60 million budget. Absolute flop. I can’t understand it. Poor marketing, Covid slump, no marketing. Probably turned a profit in America cuz MGM only spent $6 million on distribution rights. Bankable stars in Idris Elba and Tilda Swinton, both of whom were great. It’s beautiful, too. Just gorgeous. Taylor Swift should use the cinematographer her great weakness as a director is she under-appreciates the art of cinematography. Only one of her videos has good cinematograpy - “Wildest Dreams.” She’s a brunette in “Wildest Dreams.” She looks good as a brunette she should do it more often.
Anyway I recommend Three Thousand Years of Longing. It really takes you somewhere. And is unique, you don’t get that a lot these days in films.
So here was my (deceptively simple) epiphany about the stove: clean it every day. I’m so bad about cleaning the stove and, per our nuptial division of labor, the kitchen is my domain to clean. And I’m really good about it! I clean it every day. Do I deep clean every day? No. But, you know, if CPS came in or something they would not look at the kitchen and think we are terrible parents. That is a terrible example I don’t know why I said that. But it usually looks good. But the stove, man. It gets so dirty. Probably because you can’t actually see the grime from anywhere besides standing right over it. It was on my to-do list for, like, a month to clean the stove. And I finally did it last weekend. And I realized — it hit me like a thunderbolt — you don’t have to live this way. Just clean the thing every day. It’ll take two seconds. And it does! It’s so quick. And now I have a clean stove all the time. And now I can replace the thing with an electric range because gas stoves are terrible, and it will still look nice. This has been more live-improving than I expected. I feel a little thrill of satisfaction every day, every time I cook a meal now. It really is… well, not nothing.
So I deleted all my Tweets, I told you about that. Now I am working on unfollowing, oh, 2,000 or so, hopefully more, Twitter accounts. I started by trying to unfollow every account where I am now following on Threads, or to unfollow an account on Twitter that is now on Threads, like news accounts, etc. But then I decided I just didn’t need to follow whole swaths of account types and am just deleting them one by one. I’ve unfollowed over a thousand now. God, I was following something like 4,000 Twitter accounts, so insane. Most of them never Tweet. The goal in the end is to only have things that really matter to me, no current events, no news, no politics except activism. People and orgs who if they Tweet I genuinely want to know about it and I wouldn’t be able to get anywhere else. It’ll be interesting to see what happens. I suspect my timeline will have 1-2 new Tweets a day from about a thousand accounts. I barely spend any time up there anymore, never post, but there are still all these orgs that don’t post anywhere else. They all make me so frustrated. Get it together, Sarah Nixey of Black Box Recorder and the Chapel Hill Public Library!
Speaking of Threads, I’ve noticed a few things: 1) My daily posting of the GMHHAY link yields waay more subscriptions to this newsletter than it every did on Twitter. I mean, it’s not a million or anything but I get 1-2 a week which for me is an onslaught. And 2) I am getting waaay more “follower spam” on Instagram, weirdly, ever since Threads launched. I don’t know why that is. Very mysterious.
Decent bedtime with Jane. Strong resistance to teeth brushing but eventually I got her to do it. She really hates it. It is hard. I don’t know what to do about it. It is exhausting to spend that much time kindly cajoling every night. I tried to teach her about the power of habit and she seemed interested, but it’s not really clicking for her with her teeth. She just hates it. I don’t really know why, after asking a million times. I need to try something new. We are in a rut.
And she seemed a little bored by DDJP last night. But we had Emma with us, that was nice. And Emma and I put her to bed together, since it was our anniversary. Family. And the kitties came in. So we were all in Jane’s bedroom together and that was very cute and a nice way to wrap up a very long day.
Oh hey I just passed my HVAC inspection. Woo!
Progress.
Moody and quiet playlist for you today. New Andrew Bird, new Grandaddy, new Ariel Pink, new Current 93, oh shit two Grandaddy songs, whoops let’s fix that. OK cool. Anyway. New Oxbow. Best titled song ever: “My Incantations, Herbs & Art Have Abandoned Me.” Got some Skating Club, Sinead and Neubauten as recent re-visits. And Drop Nineteens cuz they’re getting back together which is just crazy. I hope I can see them and say hi. Bought tickets for Boston no idea if I will manage to go.
Okay enjoy your weekend cha cha cha.
i also started cleaning my stovetop every night after dinner and it’s life changing. i actually do a full wipe down of the countertops and sweep the floors too. it’s like i’m running a tiny restaurant and each night i “close the restaurant”. framed that way it’s so much more satisfying than cleaning up after dinner 😁
https://gimletmedia.com/shows/chompers
Have you tried Chompers? It transformed traumatic
bedtime teeth regime for our grandson.