Year 2 - Day 201

[shadowkat]

Had a long talk with Wales today.

Wales: I'm experiencing anxiety.
Me: Completely get that - no wait, how are you experiencing anxiety?
Wales: About being alone, living alone, my dad (her mom's Dead), work, my life not going anywhere...and I am anxious about visiting you and Greenwood Cemetery - it seems so far away and hard to get to.
ME: No, I totally get it. I'm experiencing anxiety too. About mostly the same things. It's the Sunday Scaries. I also have troubles getting myself to go anywhere. I want to - but I can't get myself to do it. I'm envious of my brother and his wife who made it into the city this weekend to see exhibits at museums.
Wales: There's all these exhibits at museums I want to see too, and shows, and concerts, and I can't get myself to do any of it.
Me: I really want to see West Side Story - the new movie coming out. But the idea of going to a movie theater...although would you see that? I know you don't like musicals -
Wales: No, I like West Side Story. I love the music in that one.
Me: Because you don't like the Rogers and Hammerstein or -
Wales: That's true - I hate South Pacific. Ugh. And I've no interest in seeing Hamilton, doesn't appeal to me at all. Maybe we can see West Side Story next weekend?
ME: It's not out yet, it's not coming out until November or December. Besides I'm not ready.
Wales: Oh, sorry, I jumped the gun.
Me: How about we try Prospect Park. [We make plans for Prospect Park next Saturday.]
Wales: It's really hard to visit people and do things - I can see why you don't meet up with your brother when he comes into the city. Everything takes so long to get to.
Me: Well considering we're not doing a great job of seeing each other - and we only live 20-30 minutes away by subway.
Wales: True. Do you think we have ...I don't know PTSD?
ME: Oh we definitely have PTSD. No doubt about it. We're both sensitive, and last year and this year traumatized us. My brother was in the country, upstate, he barely saw the pandemic, and barely has had to wear a mask. I've had to wear one constantly. Also, we were among the last to go under lockdown. Going through a pandemic, alone, isolated with no one to rely on or help you, in a major city...is traumatizing.
Wales: Maybe we should get therapy or something?
ME: Eh, I already tried that...I'm going the meditation route, although meditation is weird - some people do it on a subject. I just want to turn off my thoughts.
Wales: Why would anyone want to sit and mediate on painful topics?
Me: I know, right. They end up sobbing. And I'm thinking, well, duh. I've gotten better at it, now I stare into space and think about nothing, but hey pretty tree, and nice light.

***

So I didn't do much this weekend or today. I sent the robot vacuum around the apartment, and did a little dusting. The sinuses are driving me nuts again - hello, fall. Also too much rain = mold. And I've cockroaches about - and I'm allergic to their shells. I'd love to trade the dust, mold and cockroaches for cats, but it doesn't work like that.

Did manage to write about nine pages of new book - it's forty-nine pages now. And it's moving along. Very rough. I've decided to play with it a bit, get a rough draft out, then revise later. I actually love revising.
So not a problem, and I tend to revise as I write.

Also spent way too much time discussing soap opera characters, storylines, and arcs on a FB fan board. It's a lot of fun actually - because soap operas have wackadoodle plots - like for example an evil guy running a lab that potentially had a human incubator, along with memory swapping, and implanted embryos. Along with brain control. Also we have a plot about a fashion editor finding a gangster with no memory of who he is, deciding to lie to him and his entire family about his survival, falling for him, and almost getting burned alive in a fire set by a guy working with the one who owned the laboratory. The other plus side of these things? It's been on 58 years, and has over 583 episodes and counting. So there's a ton of unlimited content to debate, discuss, and play around with. It's the gift that keeps on giving. The problem with most fandoms - is there's just enough content. (Although Star Trek and Star Wars no longer have that particular problem, nor for that matter does Doctor Who.)

I do this when I get PTSD. The last time I went nutty on a fanboard was in 2002, when I was suffering from PTSD over 9/11 and evil library company's antics. This round I'm suffering from PTSD over the Pandemic and crazy org's antics.

I think I need a vacation from my PTSD.

**

I did try to watch various television shows. Foundation Episode 2 - I went to sleep during again. This does not bode well for this series. It's the second episode that put me to sleep. I think the problem is that I don't buy the premise - which is math is the language that explains the deepest and most important concepts, and how everything is mathematically based. I don't think mathematically - in fact math tends to bore me. My immediate family is tragically bored to tears by math. So, an entire science fiction series that focuses almost entirely on math, and has long speeches about it - is guaranteed to put me to sleep. This explains why I couldn't get into the books.

This episode? I stuck with it until they had this long speech about how the Foundation had to agree on a counting system and there were several counting systems available such as base 10, and base 12, and base 27. And if we couldn't agree on how to count, how could we agree on anything else. And I thought, I don't understand counting systems, and suck at counting...and my brain just wants to sleep for a bit, bye now. I woke up at the end of the episode.

I may give it another chance, I don't know yet.

The Morning Show - is kind of triggering this year. It takes place the three months before COVID happened in NYC. And watching these people kiss, lick each others faces, be in mob scenes, knowing full well they filmed this thing this year, is kind of...disturbing. I made it through the first episode, but spent most of it, cringing at various points.

The Squid Game - well the English dubbing is atrocious, and the subtitles don't fit the dubbing. Also I can't stand the protagonist - he's a pathetic gambling addict. I feel sorry for anyone who cares about him. Gambling addictions I don't understand - I'm not a gambler and I don't like to play games, so I struggle watching things about folks who are, without getting irritated. So there's that. Also it's very violent - but in a frustrating way - in that you are watching the protagonist get beaten up and tortured in a horrendous fashion constantly.

This is the number 1 show on Netflix. And two of my co-workers love it.

I do wonder about folks sometimes.

What If? I did finish streaming this finally. It's not that good. I was kind of annoyed during it. And frustrated. They do a lot of really dark episodes in a row, only the first two are positive. Also the animation is pretty, but kind of clunky motion wise. The characters don't move smoothly or naturally, you can feel the mechanics behind it.

So far the best Marvel Streaming Series were WandaVision and The Falcon and Winter Solider.

(Loki is admittedly forever tainted by my brother telling me about the assholery of the lead actor in it towards a close friend of his. My brother keeps having odd run-ins with famous folks and telling me about them. I dislike Jared Kushner, Lena Durham, Jennifer Warren (Alias), the star of Madam Secretary, Tim Burton, Scean Young, Luke Wilson and Paul Wesley Anderson, Oliver Stone, Karen Black, Steven Spielberg, and now Tom Hiddleston because of my brother.)

Finished Gentleman Jim by Mimi Mathews - it was okay. Did most of it by audio-book. I liked the narrator better than the book. It would have been better if there was a bit more of the highway man and more action, and less "oh I love you, but I can't give up my land and estate..." nonsense. Also, I found it frustrating. Far too much time was spent on irritating villains. It's important to establish interesting villains.
Or interesting obstacles. But the male lead - I rather liked, quite a bit.
So there's that.

Still listening to the Cooking Gene by Michael A Twitty read by the author - but it's kind of boring. He's not the best narrator. It's hard to narrate these things by the way. You really need a voice actor to do it, otherwise it sounds like a monotone at times. Also, he's doing content about genealogy in detail. I don't find genealogy all that interesting. It tends to bore me. But, I'm also not an immigrant or African-American. I'm Northern European, and my ancestors all hailed from the British Isles and Scandinavia, Germany and Belgium - which is rather boring. African-Americans are into genealogy because they want to reclaim their heritage. He does a very good job of explaining that, why they need to do it, and all the resources they can use to do so and how it is done.
After I listened to him for a bit, I understood why MD was so obsessed with it.

**

Random picture of the day..

Comments

[atpo_onm]

Ooo, another cool pic! If you can remember in future, note what/when/where, very briefly is fine. Not on the plant pix, of course, just location shots like this one. Thanks!

Question(s) only if you wish to answer, I don't want to get too personal, but curious.

When/how did you first meet Wales?

-and-

I am always amazed how you seem to be able to write down these often lengthy conversations you have with various people-- do you have some manner of spoken word photographic memory, if that makes sense? That's impressive, if so. If that was me, I'd have to be heavily paraphrasing.

*******

There are math people, and non-math people, and of course all in between. I fall probably slightly above in between, in that I'm competent in it on a practical basis (or used to be, anyway), but one of my best friends when I was a kid-into-teens was a total math-head, he was simply fascinated by it, played around with it regularly. We fell out of touch after high school, but it certainly wouldn't surprise me if he went on into engineering. I remember he was into robotics too, although this would be the early 70's, so pretty primitive science back then.

[shadowkat]

1. Picture - Costa Rica, 2017

2. Met Wales in College in 1985, Freshman Dorm

3. All the conversations are paraphrased, I don't remember the dialogue exactly - I just don't care that it's paraphrased and not exact. (It doesn't have to be exact. Also exact dialogue is kind of boring, people tend to say "uhm", "like", "don't know", "right", etc a lot. Which as listeners we tend to skip over. I did transcriptions of dialogue in college, I'd tape it and transcribe it for a folklore course where I collected ghost stories.) And I've an ear for dialogue, I love writing dialogue. Frustrated screenwriter/playwright apparently. ;-)

***

True. I work with mostly math-heads. And a good portion of my extended family are math heads. Approximately 60% are either engineers or big math folks. The rest of us are artists. So family of engineers and artists. LOL!

I can do math, but I have to work at it or do a lot of bluffing. It's never come naturally. However I see patterns in things - and that I use a lot to figure out maths. I do a lot of mathmatical analysis in my job for example.

Sounds like your friend would have been a huge Asimov fan. The hard sci-fi really appeals to math heads.

[cactuswatcher]

I reread some of the first Foundation book last year. It was very dated, seeing everything from the perspective of the late 1940s. The authoritarian government in the early part was certainly understandable. But the belief that statistics were going to accurately predict the future for thousands of years, really belonged to those long ago days of the late 40s when sci-fi thought science was going to solve everything (or ruin everything). In the story things do eventually 'go off the rails' for which I have to credit Asimov.

The fact that you don't understand engineers and don't like dealing with them, means it's probably not a story for you, however they've updated it. In fact I wouldn't think you'd enjoy any of the many highly mechanistic sci-fi stories written in that era. The math (mostly mumbo-jumbo in the background in the Foundation books) is just a symptom of the times it was written.

[shadowkat]

I wouldn't say I don't enjoy or understand engineers - I've been working with them, fairly closely in fact for fourteen years. They just get on my nerves at times. Also a good percentage of my extended family are engineers. Also everyone I work with is finance.

We just like to complain about each other, often in snarky fun. It's not really serious.

But, alas, hard mechanical sci-fi tends to bore me after a bit. I get too much of it in my job, and I want a break. But even back then - I was more of Dune fan than an Foundation fan. I also liked Star Wars better than Star Trek. The mechanization or how the universe worked interested me less than why the characters did what they did, and their emotional arcs. I'm a frustrated psychology/philosophy major, not a frustrated astrophycisist/bio-engineer. So that may be the problem?

Good points on it being dated in ways that I'm not certain they can update. The style of the series is very 1950s/1940s art deco, including the costume design. And the philosophy and reliance on statistical result is also very 20th Century. Technology has taught us not to trust statistical analysis quite that much.

I think the fear of authoritarian regime, however, is still relevant today.

[yourlibrarian]

Looks like the photo link broke. I'm glad I didn't hang on to the Disney+ subscription just to see What If. I'll watch it eventually when I renew.

[shadowkat]

Facebook is down - so the photo links are down too. It is what it is.

I just can't figure out a workable alternative without joining another service, which I do not want to do.

[trepkos]

Do you think your brother could be messing with you about all these people?

[atpo_onm]

And I've an ear for dialogue, I love writing dialogue. Frustrated screenwriter/playwright apparently.

Well, you are good at it. The whole reason I asked about these long conversations you post is that they sound so real. I like dialog myself when I write, and I think I'm also pretty decent at "stage setting" if that's a reasonable term.

Sounds like your friend would have been a huge Asimov fan. The hard sci-fi really appeals to math heads.

Yes, he was, and I'm pretty sure he introduced me to the man, along with a number of other writers he was fond of. He was the friend that got me into "serious" science fiction. Up to then, my familiarity with the genre was nearly limited to movies and TV, which in the 60's were usually pretty lame. Luckily for a junior high student with little cash to spend, there was this bookstore downtown that sold used paperbacks, many of which were SF.

We'd go down to this shop, and he'd point out what he thought were worthy titles. The books were maybe 25 or 50 cents each? After I read a number of them, I got my own sense of what I liked, and could pick my own fairly confidently.

Like you, I preferred the ones that were less hard-science heavy and more character and world building types, although I could still enjoy the hard science ones. Asimov's robot stories were particularly enjoyable. for example. Pretty sure I can still recall the The Three Laws Of Robotics from memory! ;-)

[atpo_onm]

I think the fear of authoritarian regime, however, is still relevant today.

Sadly, more than ever, IMO, and even scarier, right here in our own country. Just read an article the other day in ProPublica where down in Texas, some radical Trumpers are working to remove from office a woman who is a well-regarded election official-- and a Republican herself-- who they feel is not sufficiently Trump-loyal in that she refuses to go along with Trump's big lie.

The Texas county she oversees voted 81% for Trump in the last election.

Yeah, uh-huh.

[shadowkat]

No, he was upset. I can tell when he's messing with me - he gets a mischevious glint in his eye. No, people can be assholes. (shrugs) Particularly famous folks. They didn't all harrass folks, it was a wide variety of things...and reasons he didn't like them.

[trepkos]

What Mike Nesmith calls "Celebrity Psychosis" ...

[shadowkat]

Yep. People though, can be assholes regardless...

[avrelia]

I keep reading the recaps of What IF episodes, and cannot make myself actually watch any of it. Wanda Vision was the only one I really found moving and interesting to think about.

[shadowkat]

I wouldn't highly recommend the What IF? - I was kind of bored. The only two that were positive were the first two episodes, all the others lead to nihilistic futures or dystopian ones. They are basically based on the premise - what if our heroes lost? What if they didn't become heroes?

And I don't find that an interesting premise, nor one I find entertaining right now.