mousme | Entries tagged with television: valet parking for the mind

I really do not like being the SitRep writer at work. It's so much more work than just doing my regular job, and none of it can be done on "autopilot" the way a lot of my regular work can. I have one more day left of this role, and next week I can go back to my little routine and be left alone. Thank goodness.

I could complain more about moving, but I won't. :P

I am not usually a True Crime Girlie, as the youths call it these days, but last year I fell down a very specific rabbit hole in the form of the Karen Read murder case. It's being covered on YouTube by (well, by a million people approximately) a lawyer from Alberta that I started following for a completely unrelated reason, and the whole case is absolutely wild. Like, if it was written as a novel or as an episode of a police procedural you would dismiss it as being too unrealistic. I've had the videos on in the background rather like a podcast, and it has very much helped speed the days along lately. I have reached the end of the videos for now, but the trial is still going on, so I assume there will be more videos. I like the YouTuber I follow for several reasons, but most of all I love the name he picked for himself: Runkle of the Bailey. His actual name is Ian Runkle, and of course it's a nod to Rumpole of the Bailey, which was a favourite of mine when I was growing up. I think he leans far more conservative than I do, but I appreciate his legal analysis and breakdown of what's been going on in the trial.

It is weird to be following a "true crime" case. I was more interested in these things when I was in my late teens and early twenties, but I have grown to mostly find consuming these stories to be distasteful and weirdly prurient. I think it's because this case isn't so much about the horrible thing that happened to the victim, but rather the elaborate "conspiracy" and the extraordinary incompetence and corruption of the police force(s) involved in the case. We are likely never going to know what happened, because the facts have been so thoroughly obfuscated, but on that basis alone it seems to me that the accused, Karen Read, should be acquitted simply due to lack of proof beyond a reasonable doubt. I have my own idea of what may have plausibly happened, but I am watching from Canada and the incident took place in Massachusetts in 2022, so my idea is basically fiction carefully woven around what few "facts" I have picked up from watching YouTube videos, so it is worth precisely nothing. I just like making up stories to help the world make sense, and I have no illusion that I have any great insight into what "really" happened. The only thing I know for sure is that it is a tragedy that has left two kids twice orphaned, and has ruined the life of a young woman who is already struggling with several chronic health conditions. Everything about this case is terrible.

So, yeah, that's been my mental escape for the past few days. I will have to find something else to keep me distracted until new videos get uploaded.

As of tomorrow after work I will be on my own for the foreseeable future, since KK will be going to pick up H at the airport, and I assume they'll be going directly to H's hotel after that, leaving me alone with the dogs. I am planning to take advantage of her absence to get as much shit done as I can. I actually find it difficult to get chores done when KK is home, because I always feel as though I'm bothering her or in her way or both. With her gone I will hopefully be able to get a bunch more packing done, and I might also bring the dogs to the dog park after work so they can get some of the crazies out.

If I buckle down hard I might be able to get my bedroom completely packed except for the stuff I immediately need for the next two-ish weeks, which will free me up to pack up the basement and the cat room over the weekend. I have rented another U-Haul van (I wanted to rent a pick-up truck, but apparently they don't have those anymore in Ottawa) so that I can take a bunch of stuff to the local dump on Saturday. KK had agreed to help me with this, but I get the feeling she won't be early enough on Saturday to really help with anything. Still, it will be good to get all this garbage out of the house. I have reserved the van for six hours starting at 07:00, and I think that should be plenty of time to get everything loaded up and brought to the dump. That will clear out enough space for me to keep packing without tripping over even more stuff.

In other news, it looks like I may run out of feed for the quail before we move, which is really unfortunate. I really didn't want to have to schlep a large quantity of feed with me the whole way when we finally do move. It's very heavy and therefore very inconvenient. Alas.

Okay. Time for bed.

Current Mood: calm

I am at work all day for 12 hours, and I can do absolutely nothing about the packing or the bank or the sellers' inability to provide documentation in a timely manner. So, rather than angst about it, I am distracting myself during the down times at work by watching The Handmaid's Tale.

I started watching it when it first aired in 2017, because I read the book well over 20 years ago (sometime in 2003, if memory serves), and while at the time I hadn't developed as many critical thinking skills and also lacked a lot of the historical knowledge of the real-life atrocities that informed Atwood when she wrote it, I still remember thinking how eerily plausible it all was.

Anyway, I'm just starting Season 3, and I think the narrative is trying to make me feel sorry for Serena, because she's just as trapped as the other women, or something like that. Certainly June/Offred seems to vacillate between hatred and sympathy, including a heavy-handed moment of symbolism in which she literally extends a hand to pull Serena out of a house fire.

I'm having trouble agreeing with the narrative on this. Serena is not just getting her face eaten by leopards after voting them in. She literally helped to create the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party. She was one of the architects of the movement. She wanted this for everyone else, she actively campaigned for all women to be oppressed, and thought she would somehow be magically immune. We're given a bit of backstory on Serena, about her inability to have children (brought on because she was publicly campaigning to end women's rights), her work with her husband, and that's meant to humanize her. It does, to an extent, but my sympathy for her is still very limited.

I don't know that she's deserving of our sympathy for suffering the consequences of her actions. However, since the show appears to be setting her up for a redemption arc, I am intrigued to see how they are going to proceed with it. I think that a redemption arc could be really interesting if it's handled with delicacy and acknowledges all the harm she's caused. I don't think Serena can be redeemed without her deliberately undertaking to repair the harm she's caused, while being cognizant that there are some harms that simply cannot be repaired or ever properly atoned for.

I also have lots of thoughts on June/Offred, and they basically boil down to her being a complicated, often unlikable character. She's a really interesting protagonist who makes shitty choices for often questionable reasons. She bucks against the system but still uses her limited privileges within it. She's quick to use other people for her own gains, doesn't necessarily think about the consequences of her actions for others, but she's also brave and willing to fight for other people when she sees the need for it. She can be empathetic and insightful when she's not being oblivious.

What I find most interesting about her is that her past is a cautionary tale. She exemplifies most of us (and by "us" I mean cis white women like me), living her little life and paying so little attention to what's going on around her that the new laws that take away her freedoms catch her unawares. (Why the show portrays Moira the same way perplexes me--perhaps there just weren't any WOC writers in the room.)

June lived blinded by privilege, including ignoring many of her 2nd generation feminist mother's warnings. Her mother is problematic in her own way (see: 2nd generation feminist), but makes many valid points about June ignoring or throwing away the work of previous women, and the inherent danger of that. Most of this is implied in their dialogue, rather than explicit, but it's still there. June leaves it all behind because she resents her mother for "abandoning" her in favour of her "work." To be fair, her mother is very much lacking in the nurturing department, so it's not unnatural for June to mistakenly equate being a feminist with being a bad mother. Where June goes wrong is never bothering once in her life to stop and question her deeply held beliefs (honestly, girl, therapy would have helped!). Her knee-jerk reaction to pull away from everything associated with her mother leads her to ignore what's going on in politics, and it costs her everything.

I'm not saying she could have stopped what happened, but she might have been less blindsided had she been paying even a little bit of attention. Of course, that would have made a much less dramatic narrative for the TV show. I suppose I am thinking about this more deeply right now than I ever would have in the past, because the parallels with what is happening today are stark and pretty obvious. This is not reality imitating fiction, of course. This is reality repeating reality that was portrayed in fiction to make a point. Margaret Atwood is a towering literary figure for a reason, and her depictions of dystopias are always chillingly on point.

There are lots of themes and through lines that are worth exploring that I haven't fully thought through yet. There's the ritualized subjugation and infantilization of women, learned and acquired helplessness. There are themes of collaboration, what is means to be complicit in your own oppression (complying in advance, complying after the fact in order to survive, and exploiting the system for one's own gain on both small and large scales). There are themes of secrecy and lies, betrayal and loyalty, and what they all mean when living under an oppressive regime. There's also a lot to examine about the rules of society--who is allowed to break them and who isn't.

I do really like the writing when it comes to the characters and the plot taking place in the present time of the show. If I had unlimited time and brain bandwidth I'd want to do deeper dives into many of the characters, mostly the women but also some of the men: Serena, June/Offred, Emily/Ofglenn, Janine/Ofwarren, Fred Waterford, Joseph Lawrence, Aunt Lydia, and plenty of others.

Where I start having trouble is the world building. Atwood's novel is written in the epistolary style, strictly from the point of view of Offred, who is given no other name in the book, and encapsulates a very limited moment in time--the duration of her stay with the Waterfords (I don't remember if that's what they're called in the book). There is an metafictional epilogue which reveals the whole novel into a conceit that we are observing historical documents, a primary source no less, of a historical period that has come and gone. Gilead has been gone for 200 years, we are told, and very few records remain of its existence.

The show necessarily has to deviate from that after the first season, which follows the novel reasonably closely if my memory serves (which, honestly, it does not serve well these days, so I could be mistaken). The show therefore has to start doing its own world building, and honestly Gilead doesn't hold up particularly well under too close scrutiny. Here's a list of my issues, in no particular order:

- The economy. How the fuck does anything work if suddenly 55% of the working population doesn't work anymore? At higher levels, the loss of institutional knowledge would be pretty devastating, and at lower levels the loss of personnel would be even worse. Women have always been part of the workforce, even when inequality was at its worst. They've been labourers, factory workers, secretaries, assistants, and with increasing equality they have occupied every single rank and position in society. You can't declare all of that illegal overnight and not create a huge, chaotic vacuum. That's never addressed in the show.

- The rules governing women. We are apparently meant to believe that society transitioned pretty quickly and smoothly into one in which women are not allowed to work, not allowed to have their own money or bank accounts, aren't allowed to read, and are rounded up and put into re-education centres according to whichever "class" they've been assigned to (Wife, Handmaid, Martha, Aunt, Econowife). We see some protests initially which are violently put down (armed men gunning down protesters with automatic weapons), and then we just never see anything else from that time period. There is no mention of how these centres were initially set up, nor whose buy-in was required for that. The Aunts run the centres, we are given to understand, but who trained them in the first place? To get a system that regimented takes a lot of time and a lot of practice, and getting all of the centres across Gilead to adhere to the same SOPs must be an administrative nightmare.

- Societal structures and systems. At one point in Season 2 Commander Waterford yells at his wife to call 9-1-1, and that made me wonder who the fuck is still staffing all these institutions, and how they're still running apparently smoothly after removing half the workforce. See my first point about the economy. I worked as a dispatcher and telecomms operator for nearly two decades, and more than half my coworkers were women. We were already short-staffed and stretched thin, and finding qualified candidates to work was time-consuming and incredibly lengthy. Multiply this across every police force across a nation, every other 24-hour centre you don't even know exists. The people in charge of Gilead have completely upended the order of things, have done away with most modern technology, but we're meant to believe that 911 still works? It stretches credulity, at the very least.

- Then there's the costuming. It was established in the book and preserved in the show, and visually it's extremely striking. However it makes no sense from any perspective other than "it looks really cool." Coordinating identical outfits for literally millions of women across an entire country? Come on. If it were local to one city I might be more inclined to believe it, but nation-wide? No. For one thing, there would have to be an extremely long transition period while they get all of the outfits designed and then produced. Also, who is physically making these outfits? We're meant to believe that Gilead has protectionist policies, so they're not outsourcing to another country like China, but in the former USA/now Gilead, the vast, vast majority of sewists would have been women, who are now not allowed to work. Are you telling me that they somehow trained up a bunch of willing men to do "women's work?" Or are we meant to believe that people in each household are expected to sew their own outfits? If so, why do they all look mass produced and not like some terrible homemade hodge-podge?

- The costuming has a secondary problem, which is that it provides the women with too much anonymity. This is demonstrated over and over and over in the show. June/Offred routinely is able to run around and disguise her movements simply by donning the uniform of a different class of woman: either a Wife or a Martha. Each uniform grants her a layer of protection, either through privilege or invisibility. And as June herself says toward the end of Season 1: "They should have never given us uniforms if they didn't want us to be an army." I am reasonably sure that at least one or two of the organizers of the movement would have thought of this.

- Last but not least, a pet peeve of mine: everyone is constantly miserable. The thing is, this is absolutely contrary to human nature. Yes, under oppressive regimes there is always an undercurrent of fear and constant paranoia about who might be about to report you to the State. But humans aren't built to be somber 24/7: they will take every opportunity for celebrations, small and large. They make food and they hang out over cups of tea or get together for illicit parties. There is so little joy in The Handmaid's Tale, and the vast majority of group encounters are weirdly manufactured and ritualized. Like, where is the secret underground dance party like in Titanic? Why doesn't Offred ever sit and gossip over a cup of tea with Rita after so many months of living under the same roof, even if it's surface-level nonsense?

:::ETA:::

I am back with more thoughts that I forgot about.

- What about the future? Particularly the future Handmaids. In the present, Handmaids are picked specifically because they successfully bore a living child in the past. What is the plan for the next generation of women? There's no telling which little girl will be able to bear children successfully, so what is the plan for them? Only two classes of women can potentially have children (unless you count some of the Jezebels), the Handmaids and the Econowives, should the latter be lucky enough to be fertile, and the Handmaids' babies are of course given to the Wives. Who in the next generation will be picked to be a Wife, a Handmaid, or a Martha? Or any class of woman, for that matter? The whole system falls apart within a generation, because what Wife would allow her daughter to become a Handmaid? Even a Martha would be an unthinkable fall in station. So that leaves only the children of the Econowives who'd have to be divvied up, and that seems unsustainable to me.

Anyway, thank you for putting up with all my Handmaid's Tale thinky thoughts. Maybe one day I'll get back to the other characters I mentioned, or some of the more interesting themes. We shall see.

Catch you on the flip side, friends!

Current Mood: contemplative

Work has been kind of wild tonight. I'm working the AVSEC desk and I've had weird breaches and a case of arson and one airport employee meeting a Tindr date next to one of the departure gates. I'd blame the full moon, except that that was several days ago (and that was also a bit of a wild weekend!). I guess someone just spiked the water with something tonight.

I decided to take a relaxing break from watching Law & Order: SVU by watching The Purge movies. I am partway through the second one. I watched them once before, many years ago (the most recent one is from 2016), and I'd forgotten how much the premise makes so very little sense. I think it's because whoever conceptualized and wrote it didn't really think it all the way through. I have been trying to figure out how it could work, and honestly it just doesn't. The writer put a lot of emphasis on the fact that every crime is allowed during this 12-hour period, including murder, as if murder and violence is what most people aspire to. The Purge announcement over TV/radio/etc. also makes a big deal out of how murder is allowed, and therein lies the central weakness of the narrative.

The idea, of course, is that the poor and marginalized, the "undesirables" will either kill each other off, or be killed off by wealthier people with better access to weapons and hired mercenaries or whatever. And yeah, sure, there might be some of that in reality, but I don't think it holds true of most marginalized people. If anything, they are the ones most likely to engage in mutual aid and take part in a more unofficial economy. Also, while I'm sure there are wealthy people who'd take advantage of things, I rather think they'd be too concerned about preserving their property to really get into that much trouble themselves.

Also, straight-up murder is just so unimaginative, and humanity can get super creative with their crimes. Why go outside and run the risk of physical injury when you can hack into a bank, or government systems? You could transfer a bunch of money into your accounts, or cancel your student loans (or everyone's student loans!) Why wouldn't every organized crime group arrange to move vast amounts of drugs during that night with no repercussions?

What would stop the powerful people at the helm of institutions from committing collapse-inducing crimes? A bank CEO just cleaning out his entire bank, or a government official selling every single national security secret available to foreign powers. It's not treason during Purge Night! If even a few dozen people committed large-scale crimes, it could absolutely collapse the nation in short order.

And then there's the issue of the emergency services. According to the premise, they are unavailable during the twelve hours of Purge Night, which makes a certain amount of sense: people would target any first responders getting in the way of their crimes. If you're murdering someone, you want them dead. That all holds up until you get to the fire department. The movies don't (to my knowledge, I could be misremembering) show any kind of arson, and you cannot convince me that there wouldn't be pyromaniacs and overexcited teenagers setting fire to shit all over the place. You know what fire does? It spreads. So why aren't entire neighbourhoods wiped out by fire on Purge Night, since there are no firefighters to keep the blazes under control?

Another thing that bugs me about the movies is that they focus exclusively on urban settings. It definitely works better for the plot, but a lot of the USA is either rural or at least from small towns. Does the Purge even happen there? Would people attack farms? You could set fire to all of the USA's food supply and, again, cause some pretty significant societal damage.

In short, the writer did not think this through, and just created a hyper-violent but ultimately unimaginative premise that doesn't really prompt the audience to think about the broader societal issues underpinning the story. It just boils down to "murder and violence bad," as if we didn't know that already.

Okay, thank you for bearing with my rambling thoughts about The Purge franchise. ;) Catch you on the flip side, friends!

Current Mood: cranky

Covid still sucks. I am marginally better than I was yesterday, which is something, at least. My sinuses are doing a funny thing where, if I scrunch up my eyes, they make a squeaking sound due to the lingering congestion. It's funny but also kind of annoying and uncomfortable. I am, however, less congested than yesterday, so I am hopeful that this signals the beginning of the end of this ridiculous illness. Today marks two weeks since I started symptoms, so I am eager for this to be over. I haven't had an illness drag on this long since I had recurring bouts of bronchitis as a kid, and I am very over it.

Yes, I know, I am very lucky and privileged to have not experienced illness that lasted more than a few days before this, but I reserve the right to complain about this anyway. At least this bout of illness isn't as crazy-inducing as the several months of cervical radiculopathy I endured back in 2022, because that kept me from sleeping due to the pain, and Covid at least hasn't affected my sleep too badly. I've been a little short on deep sleep, but I've been getting a good 6 to 8 hours a night for the most part, and my CPAP provider just sent me an email earlier today telling me how great I've been doing with the therapy.

In unrelated news, I've been having a really fascinating conversation with a few people in a group on Facebook. We started out discussing a series of videos about the tradlife/wellness/crunchy granola-to-fascism pipeline, and now we've moved on to discussing copaganda. We started today with a series of clips from the original Dragnet television series, in which Joe Friday has to kill a perpetrator firing at him. I have had to dust off a lot of my analytical skills from my university days studying literature, and it's been a lot of fun, even if the subject matter is super depressing.

I've also been reminded of spending my teenaged and young adult years watching various cop shows like Law & Order, NYPD Blue, and most importantly for me, Due South (from which this icon is taken). Now, I'm under no illusion about what these shows are about and the role they play in whitewashing the police and rehabilitating their image, but I will wholeheartedly confess to really enjoying crime fiction of many kinds, from cozy mystery novels all the way to hard-boiled noir detective fiction. I like television procedurals like CSI and Criminal Minds, and spent my childhood reading Sherlock Holmes and watching all the various BBC mystery shows in which murderers are brought to justice. It's a really nice fantasy, in which cops aren't tools of the state and a mechanism of systemic oppression, and I enjoy consuming fiction about it. In reality, I am a prison abolitionist and think we should be heavily defunding police departments and investing that money into more robust social safety nets, but that doesn't mean I won't binge watch Law & Order when I'm sick. ;)

In news that is even further unrelated, India and Pakistan appear to be on the verge of nuclear war/mutually assured destruction. A couple of weeks ago there was an attack on tourists in India-administered Kashmir, and India has decided that Pakistan is responsible. So now India has "retaliated" with a series of air strikes in Pakistan-administered Kashmir and Pakistan itself. Pakistan has now declared the attacks "unprovoked" and has promised to retaliate in kind. The thing, of course, is that Pakistan has far less military power than India, and so the odds of them resorting to their nuclear arsenal is reasonably high if things get out of hand. Then India would likely respond in kind, and the next thing we know there's an all-out nuclear disaster in that part of the world, and the rest of us get plunged into nuclear winter.

A lot of people that I respect and who are far more intelligent and knowledgeable than me are freaking out about this, and I will confess that I can't bring myself to freak out at this point. This falls firmly into the category of "I can do absolutely fuck-all about this," and since I have no control over what happens, I don't know what to do about it. There isn't much I can do about nuclear winter, either, except starve to death along with everyone else in the Northern hemisphere. In theory I could stock up on iodine to counteract some radiation exposure, but honestly, if all of our crops and livestock get irradiated or die of cold or starvation, the iodine is a little moot. *throws up hands*

So I'm refusing to actively worry about it. Is it terrifying and worrisome? Absolutely. Will my worrying about it help the situation? Absolutely not. So, here we are. I am going to focus on what I can control, and leave it at that.

I do need to be more pro-active about contacting my federal and provincial MPs to encourage them to be more pro-active about, well, everything. I have been letting my lack of energy govern everything I do, and I need to do better on that front. I don't know how I'll manage it when I can't even pack up my own house or keep it clean, but I am not doing nearly enough to try to improve the state of the country and the world.

All righty. Work has been really busy all evening, so I'd better get back to it. Catch you on the flip side, friends!

Current Mood: thoughtful

Another very short post tonight. I am improving steadily, which is nice. Mostly I have some lingering congestion and a whole lot of fatigue. KK and I spent the day watching bad TV and bad movies, even by my standards. KK has some honestly appalling taste in television, so I retreated to listening to stuff on my phone while she watched Judge Judy, and then she inflicted National Treasure on me, which I managed to avoid for the past 20 years and which finally caught up with me today. KK keeps inflicting terrible Nicholas Cage movies on me for some reason (last year it was Face/Off).

The rest of the time I spent watching the law commentary YouTube channel Runkle of the Bailey (which I love for the name), who is covering a real life trial which I got weirdly invested in last summer. I am not normally a True Crime Girlie, but this whole case has been so wild that it has caught my attention and I am really hoping to see a not guilty verdict, because if there's anything I hate, it's police incompetence, misconduct, and corruption, and this case is rife with it. (It's the Karen Read trial in Massachussetts, if you're wondering.) Honestly, this whole thing is so far outside my normal sphere of interest that I barely recognize myself, and yet here I am. *shrugs* I got nothing.

Tomorrow I have Ministry & Counsel, and I am hoping to be able to get through that time without completely losing my voice.

On that note, it's time for bed. Catch you on the flip side, friends!

Current Mood: lethargic

I promise not every post will be about my CPAP adventures from here on out. No, really. But for now you will have to bear with me. :)

The first night with the CPAP was a success, I think. I didn't find the mask difficult to wear at all, despite all the dire warnings I had received ahead of time that lots of people struggle with wearing it and that it's the top reason for noncompliance with CPAP therapy. I think the fact that it's a nose pillow and not a full face mask probably really helped with that, because I barely felt it while I was sleeping. I actually woke up briefly around 2am worried that the machine had turned off because I couldn't feel the air blowing, but it turns out I only feel the air if my head is tilted back, so if it tilts forward at all (which it does during the night as I move around), then I don't feel it at all.

The machine also provides me with a helpful readout/summary of my sleep before I turn it off. It told me I used it for eight hours, and that I had 2.5 events per hour. I'm not entirely sure if that means I only had 2.5 events per hour, or if it only detected 2.5 events, or if I had 2.5 events per hour that the machine felt it need to push extra air or something. Since I was averaging 65 events per hour during my sleep study, whatever this is, I assume it's good no matter what. I did some googling, and the internet agrees that I should be aiming for a readout of under 5 events per hour, and this is definitely under 5, so I'm considering it a win.

My Fitbit readings were also different today. It's actually super bad at detecting my oxygen variation, so I don't pay attention to that, but today it did tell me that I spent a whole extra hour in REM sleep, which jives with the aforementioned reading I've been doing. Studies have shown 50% increases and more in REM sleep the first night of CPAP usage compared to the baseline. It's all pretty cool, really, if you're a nerd who's interested in brainwaves. Interestingly, for the first time in a long time I didn't remember my dreams at all upon waking, and I'm not sure what that means.

Today was a work from home day, and for once I wasn't tapped to do the morning briefing (this is a task for the people who work from home, since we don't have the same operational requirements as the people who are in the office), and I also wasn't given a project to work on, so I kind of twiddled my thumbs for most of the day. I can't complain too hard, because it's a pretty chill way to spend the day, but I'm expected to be at my computer and available to work at a moment's notice, so I can't really go anywhere or get into anything else too much in depth in case I get pulled away. I ended up doing a bit of busywork and watching The Librarians, which I've been re-watching for the past week or so. I actually got to the series finale today, which made me a tiny bit wistful. I had watched the three precursor movies as well, and it's just such a delightful premise and show: the world being saved by ultra-knowledgeable librarians. The series is fun and filled with whimsy, and it's from a time that doesn't seem all that long ago but in fact started over a decade ago (2014) and reflects the optimism of the Obama years, when it felt like knowledgeable geeks might be the ones to show us a better future: math and arts and science and magic, all rolled into one fantastical package.

I made chicken quesadillas for dinner, and it turns out KK has a lot of opinions about quesadillas. Mostly her opinion is that everything in the quesadilla is pointless except for the tortilla and the cheese, and any extra meat, vegetables, or spices are just contaminating the cheese. XD I was making them because I accidentally thawed too much ground chicken and I need to use it up before it goes bad, so she had to put up with some extra contamination of her favourite dairy product, which she did. I was very kind and didn't put in any extra vegetables for her, at least. ;)

Work from home days always feel like I'm in Limbo. I'm often not working on anything in particular, but I don't want to work on my personal stuff on company time, so to speak. I suppose I should try to get past those scruples if I want to get packing done on work from home days, but I think that might actually be a moot point since after this week I only have two day shifts left and the rest will all be evening, nights, and weekends, and none of those are work from home shifts.

All righty. Time for bed. I'm trying to get back into better bedtime habits (I fell off the wagon a couple of weeks ago after several good months of getting to bed between 8:30 and 9:30pm and being asleep between 10:00 and 10:30pm), especially now that I have the CPAP. I want to give it as much opportunity as possible to do its thing of giving my brain oxygen when it needs it.

Current Mood: calm

It's the first night shift of the week, so I haven't yet descended into the usual madness of trying to revamp my entire life and making plans to become a whole new person by next Monday morning. Night shifts do that to me every time without fail, but usually the urge to create new calendars and to-do lists and coloured charts doesn't strike until a few nights in. We'll see how long I last this time. I might go a little longer this time because I have the professional organizer coming starting next Tuesday, so that might already serve to scratch the itch since re-organizing my whole kitchen does kind of have a similar feeling to re-organizing my whole life.

I really hope that we can get the kitchen into a properly functional state. Trying to cook in there is making my soul shrivel these days. All of my cupboards are topsy-turvy, I have almost no floor space, no counter space, and I can't stand directly in front of the stove because of the storage rack thing I put in because I couldn't figure out how to use the space well enough to store all of my kitchen equipment. So, yeah, we have four days of four hours each to get the kitchen whipped into shape. I would love to be able to just open my cupboards and grab what I need without things constantly falling over or on top of my head. Part of it is an organization problem, but mostly it's a clutter problem, and that is why I am paying the professional organizer the big bucks. Although to be fair, for almost an entire week of work she won't exactly be making a killing after taxes. I think her hourly wage comes to more than mine, but I don't know that I'd be chomping at the bit to do her job.

I've got two hours or so until I can go home. Today is the only day before Friday when I'll be able to get a decent amount of sleep. Tomorrow I have an appointment (virtual, thank goodness) with the dietitian from the bariatric clinic at 8:30am, and then I got roped into a separate meeting with two members of Ministry & Counsel at 14:30, which means I'm going to get about two hours of sleep at best between those two meetings. I might be able to get away with going back to bed after that, but I'm not super optimistic. Then on Thursday I have a follow-up appointment with the naturopath (also virtual, thank goodness), so that means I won't get much sleep then either. I hate scheduling things during my night shifts, but in all these cases I had very little say about the timing. Blargh.

And, of course, somewhere in all that I have to get over my weird psychological block and get my seeds started for the garden this year. I'm reluctant to sacrifice my sleep today, but maybe if I leave KK to fend for herself for dinner I can sleep late and then start the seeds between the time I wake up and the time I need to leave.

In unrelated news, I've been watching Chicago Med in my spare time, partly because I do like medical dramas (I was an early adopter when ER came on the air in the 90s and have never looked back), and it's not exactly good, but I can't seem to stop watching it because it's like a train wreck. There isn't a single character in this show with an ounce of moral fibre, and they all seem to spend their time making terrible, selfish, impulsive decisions based on their whims, often at the expense of their patients. All of these people are walking disasters who need multiple years of therapy and have no idea how to communicate. Chicago Med differs from most medical dramas that I've watched by having a pretty strong emphasis on emergency psychiatry, and one of the main characters is Dr. Daniel Charles, head of the psych department.

Now, I honestly don't know many heads of psychiatry who routinely hang out in the emergency room (Dr. Charles lurks around corners and observes patients), but apparently for the purposes of the show he does just that. That, and conduct wildly unethical "experiments" on patients and colleagues alike (giving out placebos to patients to "test" whether their problems are medical, lying to coworkers about the status of patients, egregiously violating his daughter's explicitly set boundaries, etc..). He's a weirdly likable character, mostly because Oliver Platt is a gem and plays him as an affable, cardigan-wearing father type with a penchant for collecting autistic-coded young women to be his protégées. I do understand that the show has to come up with drama because real life medicine doesn't make for good television, but if this were real life none of these people would still have their medical licenses.

Anyway, I think that's enough talking about television. It's just this weird little micro-obsession with a TV show. Definitely not enough to want to join the fandom or anything, but enough that I want to keep watching, apparently, in spite of the fact that the show is ridiculous in the extreme.

Okay. Time to wrap this up. Catch you on the flip side, friends!

Current Mood: thoughtful

Today has mostly been a wash. KK left to get her nails done, and I ended up buried under dogs on the sofa. It was very cozy and very difficult not to let the "siesta rays" as Dylan and Sarah call them lull me into a much-desired nap. Instead I finished an audiobook of the murder mystery series I stumbled into back in January, the D.C. Smith series by Peter Grainger (I am almost caught up!) and then started the audiobook of Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, which has been on my reading list for quite some time. I am going to listen to it a bit more slowly than the fiction books I've been listening to so far, in order to give it the attention it's due.

I've been really enjoying the D.C. Smith series: it has all the hallmarks of police procedural novels that I really enjoy, and the writing is a lot of fun to listen to. The author does have one quirk of syntax that I pick up on more because of the audiobook format, but it's not enough to deter me from listening to the stories. He has a nice gift for creating memorable characters, including D.C. himself, who is about a decade older than me but is written as though he's in his seventies, based on how useless he is with technology and how old-fashioned some of his ideas are. I actually think that the author has deliberately given D.C. some views he himself doesn't agree with, but obviously that's just a feeling as I have not read Grainger's personal opinions on anything. It's just something about the way he writes those opinions that gives me that impression. It's kind of fun, because back when I was writing I sometimes gave my characters opinions and tastes that were deliberately different than my own because it amused me to do so, so I'm often on the lookout for when other authors might be doing the same thing.

Right now I'm catching up on Saint-Pierre, a new TV series which is yet another police procedural (I really am predictable, aren't I?) based in the French territory of Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon, an archipelago off the coast of New Brunswick. It's also quite enjoyable, and occasionally guest stars James Purefoy, whom I really enjoy watching. He is really great at chewing the scenery.

I probably won't be back at my computer before tomorrow again, apart from a Zoom call with my parents. The last time I visited them I set up a Zoom account for my mother, and my father already has one, and I have sent them a link to a permanent Zoom meeting, so I'm hoping we can transition away from Skype relatively seamlessly and that my mother won't have too much trouble adapting to the new-to-her technology.

Otherwise, I am definitely feeling my night of very little sleep right now, which makes me hopeful that I will be able to sleep during tonight's sleep study. I am a tiny bit concerned that I will hurt my lower back if the hospital mattress is too soft, since I won't be able to bring my wedge pillow with me that I usually sleep with to keep my back muscles from rebelling. I suppose I could bring it, but I don't want to be too annoyingly high maintenance. I already have so much paraphernalia to keep me comfortable when I sleep (a mouth guard, wrist splints, an eye mask for when I have to sleep during the day, and my wedge pillow) that I kind of feel like a very spoiled, pampered lapdog. The funny thing is that I don't need any of those things to actually *sleep*. I can sleep almost anywhere, anytime, under any conditions. I need all of that so that when I wake up I'm not twisted up in an excruciating pretzel of pain. Isn't getting older fun?

So, yeah, once I've stopped debating how much paraphernalia to bring, it should be fine. I should probably go pack up so that I'm not scrambling later.

Catch you on the flip side, friends!

Current Mood: lethargic

Southern California and Los Angeles are on fire, and tens of thousands of people are being forced to evacuate. It's something to do with the atmospheric rivers bringing so much rainfall to the area last year, which was a good and bad thing. Good, because the area had been suffering from a terrible drought. Bad, because it resulted in lots of new vegetation, which then dried up when the drought resumed, and is what is burning now. At least, that's how it's been explained to me by people who know what they're talking about.

On New Year's Day 14 people were killed and dozens more were injured after a driver intentionally drove a truck into a crowd before dying in a shootout with local police.

All around me people are getting sick, with Covid or with a "mystery virus" (hint: it's Covid), or with complications from Covid, or with Long Covid. People are getting sick all the time, year-round, and very few people are questioning any of it. It's just "the new normal," and they're just shrugging and accepting that now we just have to live with a disease that scars your lungs and damages your heart and ruins your brain.

In the midst of all this, I'm still puttering along. The world is collapsing all around but I apparently still have to pay rent and buy overpriced groceries. I'm trying to do what little I can and still maintain my sanity.

I started rewatching Person of Interest (because escapist TV is my jam), and the early seasons are still so good. It's funny to think of the world in which this came out, in which terrorists seemed like the worst threat and we dreamed of an AI that was omniscient and quasi-omnipotent instead of a glorified plagiarism machine designed to make us doubt our reality. It's too bad Jim Caviezel went off the deep end--it makes it harder to enjoy his work when I know the loony toons conspiracy theories he not only espouses but also proselytizes about.

Tomorrow I'm going back to the office. I'm the only one who masks there, of course, and it's weird being surrounded by people who are constantly perplexed about why they keep getting Covid. They're all so impressed that I've never had it (to my knowledge, I may have had asymptomatic cases, after all), and it never seems to stick when I remind them that I wear masks everywhere I go in public. It's honestly a little depressing.

On that note, time for bed.

I watched Shadow and Bone last week and really enjoyed it! I am going to look up the books now, even though as I understand it the show actually combines two different series. I am intrigued to see how they differ! I enjoyed the lovely diverse representation (lots of BIPOC and queer representation!), the actors are wonderful, and the visuals are truly beautiful. Lots of attention to detail. I especially fell in love with all of the characters, including the antagonists. Every character has depth and complex motivations, which is something I definitely appreciate in a narrative.

I started Ghost Wars, too, and of COURSE the villain is named Daphne. *rolls eyes* My poor name is used for exactly three types of characters in movies/TV: airheads, villains, and snooty poodles. Oh well.

I am enjoying the series so far. I wasn't expecting quite as much body horror (ack), but it's tightly paced and the characters are compelling. The story doesn't have as much depth as Shadow and Bone, but I don't think it's based on books. It lacks the in-depth world-building of the other series (despite them being different genres), and the representation isn't quite as good. Still, I do enjoy a good horror story, and so far it's delivering. It's vaguely reminiscent of Lost, in that I am not sure how much the writers have actually figured out ahead of time what is actually going on in their world. They're too focused on keeping all the characters and the audience in the dark, which in my experience only lasts so long before it gets tedious. Still, it's early days yet, so maybe it will surprise me. I'm definitely going to watch to the end.

Anyway, nothing else exciting to report. This weekend was just me hanging out with Peggy and watching Netflix and taking the occasional nap, broken up only by going to see KK yesterday.

( Just whining about not getting a vaccine appointment yet. )

Current Mood: discontent
Crossposts: https://mousme.livejournal.com/1268907.html

I got sucked into a new TV show, The Irregulars. It is very enjoyable! I am a sucker for all things Sherlock Holmes, and this is no exception. It's not really a Sherlock Holmes story, mind you. It's more like a an alternate universe Sherlock Holmes in which supernatural shenanigans are happening, told from the point of view of original characters. Said original characters are a group of street kids in their late teens, who get roped into investigating mysteries for the very shady Dr. Watson and his mysterious roommate Sherlock Holmes.

There are only 8 episodes and I am about halfway into the fourth. It's well-written, features a diverse cast with lots of characters of colour, and has some really great set design. I am intrigued to see how it works out!

Unfortunately, getting sucked into this show has resulted in it being 11:34, and I was NOT planning to go to bed late tonight. Oops.

Current Mood: tired
Crossposts: https://mousme.livejournal.com/1262953.html

I got in a load of laundry and made tomato sauce, so today wasn't a total loss. I also scrubbed down the doors of the kitchen cabinets.

I awoke at the "normal" time of 6:45, but after not all that long it was obvious that my FitBit was lying to me when it said that I had had a good night's sleep. For one thing, I remember waking a few times, and my eyes burned like I'd spent hours in front of a screen. I ended up going back to bed for a couple more hours a bit later, and that helped a lot more.

I did miss Quaker Meeting, but the extra sleep was nice. I could theoretically have attended because I was awake just in time, but I wasn't especially ready, and having the Zoom Meeting "on" while I do things like wrangle the dog and brush my teeth is pretty counterproductive.

Anyway, I got a few things done, but DST messed with me even more than I thought it would, and I ended up chilling with Peggy and the cats most of the day. I watched some Prime Suspect, and decided I didn't want to watch the final chapter of it, because they decided it would be a good idea to turn Tennyson into an alcoholic, and just... no. I can understand wanting to take the character in a different direction, but what I loved about the series was that she was a complicated hard-ass who had to work three times as hard and be twice as brilliant to get ahead in her field, and I'm just not ready to watch them tear her down to give her a "proper retirement" or whatever. I'm not saying it's inherently a bad choice, it's just not something I'm interested in watching at this time.

I started The Good Doctor today, and I am not sure how I feel about it. It doesn't seem like a particularly accurate portrayal of autism or even savant syndrome, and they kill a rabbit in the first episode for emotional effect, I guess? Also there is a LOT of second-hand embarrassment, and I never do well with that.

Now it's time for dinner and then bed.

Current Mood: sleepy

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Page generated Jul. 25th, 2025 12:20 pm

Corner of Bourbon & Division

Her Words of Wisdom Scratched Into The Door

Entries tagged with television: valet parking for the mind

SitReps and True Crime and Stuff

Distraction Time!

Musings about The Purge, mostly

Bodies are stupid, with bonus copaganda and possible nuclear winter

Incremental Improvement

A Limbo-ish kind of day

First Night Shift Thoughts

Much as I suspected...

What a year, and it's only been 8 days

All the Netflix!

Oh dear, how did it get this late?

Not as productive, but not a total loss