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Showing posts from July, 2021

Bad care to foster independence

My mother's parenting style is to give me bad care so that I want to be independent. I do that with my daughter and it feels so wrong. She actually works really hard for me, so that's a kind of slander, but it is a kind of parenting style that I wanted to put out into the mesosphere.  It's America's strategy too. Medicare is crappy, so you want to get a good job so you get good insurance so you can be better taken care of. I guess the alternative is to give good care, and then the person is healthy and walks away a whole person when they are ready for it. 

Altered Carbon

I'm trying to figure out why I like the show Altered Carbon so much, the first season, and why I don't like the second season.  The show shows great contrasts. Great poverty, great wealth, great beauty and disgusting violence, close friendships and horrible enemies. Technology, nude women, and cynicism. Kovach is willing to die any second but he's also perhaps immortal. The mindful samurai cast into the future, is on a mystery where we only see interlocking pieces and foreshadowing. The only thing extraneous are all the nude bodies. The rich visual details present a world of temptation and disease. Ortega is hispanic heart, but is also a bad ass warrior, played by Martha Elba Guadalupe Higareda Cervantes. At least the women are small breasted in the future. I read the book and it was a rare book that wasn't better than the show. I can count on my hand those exceptions and it means the story tellers really used the medium, better than the printed language medium, which
 

Unvaccinated America

It's like when you child keeps doing something you know isn't going to end well, but you can't do anything because people have to make their own mistakes sometimes. Or do you step in and help people to another way? How for is the government like maternalism or paternalism? We have seat belt laws now. We curb guns in cities. How long do you let children have their muddled ideas that harm themselves? Why is clarity and thinking so difficult to come by? I spent hours in the park talking to multiple people about their reasons not to get vaccinated. Not health reasons, not even the political stupidity, they just had hazy notions and a firm belief in their hazy rejection of statistics, information and objective knowledge. Then I read this. Same thing. Woman says, "I never get sick." Exact same thing a guy in the park said to me yesterday. Do like it that polio and tuberculosis is largely gone? Quote from the article again: Yet despite their ordeals, none of them change
The Humans by Matt Haig made me think interesting thoughts in addition to following the plot. Each chapter somehow felt intense, I couldn’t read it like a page turner. I was constantly examining whether I thought it was realistic in its imagination.
 

workin' moms

I didn't want to like it, but I just watched the first season and I'm obviously going to keep watching it.  Catherine Reitman is wonderful, all the characters are so well done. I love reading Wikipedia, I learned that her brother directed Juno, a favorite movie of mine. I did not know that her husband in the show is her husband in real life. I love Canadian shows. Of course it's overly dramatic, but I've come to realize to make a TV show "slow burn" isn't always the way. I didn't have Netflix for a year and I honestly don't feel like I missed much. I watched season 4 of Atypical. But I guess I'm back on the Netflix train.  Christ I just realized it's Sex In The City, except with Children. I like that show too. It's like Friends after they all get married, and separate off into their own domestic worlds. I want to say it's like Thirtysomething, a show I didn't really watch much, but it's a middle age with children sitcom. I&

humbling

This one hit hard because that's the book I'm writing;  I Would Very Much Like to Have Sex With Someone Who Does Not Want to Have Sex With Me, Causing Me, a Character Who Is a Middle-Aged Writer, to Think About Other Reasons I am Unhappy by Men I don't want to have sex with someone who doesn't want to, but at 54 my looks have significantly faded. I used to get looks from women, and now I don't. It might be more than age. The title is from a provocative article in Jezzebel . It points out that women are mostly the readers of books, and jokingly say men have only written 6 books, one of which is the above title. There's an article that about dating when you're older, and it has the following quote: "Wishful and magical thinking create the need to meet an emotional virgin, which does not exist, unless the date is beamed here frozen, in hibernation from age 10, or younger, from another planet." I don't think that is true, I do find people's h

Concluding the Wayfarer Series

I read the 4th Becky Chambers Wayfarer series, the concluding novel. I'm half repulsed at the programmatic wokeness, half impressed and hopeful. You can see the quotes below that echo the same ambivalence.  I googled "books that make you more intellectually flexible." I didn't see these books listed on them. You don't have to like the empathy, the gently encouraging self monologues, the teamwork, the communication, but every once in a while I wasn't bored.  Chambers a lesbian author and she wants a world where all kinds of attraction and coupling is explored. Not quite the L Word in space. Even in this future galactic consciousness, there are prohibitions against interspecies flinky, so you can still make people uncomfortable. You mean squares are universal? The square community is going to hate these books. Someone messaged me to give a spoiler to the first one, some crusader from the square community, but I read Romeo and Juliet even though Shakespeare spoi

Walden

So I lost interest after reading about Fuller, Emerson and Douglas in the Transcendental 2021 group . I got the Jones Very biography and poems, but just didn't read them. I ended up reading Dante , and Rosewater by Tade Thompson . Went off into Dickinson instead of The Hermaphrodite . I read This is Shakespeare . And The Possibility of an Island . It's so hard for me because there is a part of me that wants to read it all. I still want to go off on the Romantics and Dickenson. But it's time for a reread of Walden. I got down to Willow Pond quite often, went down today and fantasize that I'm Thoreau. Even though Thoreau is depicted as a bit disingenuous about being independent in the TV show Dickinson , I don't think that show is historically accurate even if it's maybe emotionally accurate on some level.  Below is my old copy I read in college, that's I'm going to inch my way through. I hate Signet classics, but it seems I have a few. From his journal:

Dickinson