- The main thing? Very bad dream from my stupid horrible goblin brain last night. The crux of it: My father was still alive, but something went wrong with his heart (?) and the only thing that might prevent/delay death long enough for the paramedics to get there and stabilize him was putting a bag of ice cubes on his chest, and I was scrabbling, trying to get together enough ice cubes to make a bag while my mother sat with him. And as these dreams always go for me: my hands stopped working. Or I dropped the ice cubes. Or I couldn't find enough. And the upshot was, I was failing, and my dad was going to die, and it would be (in my mind at least) MY FAULT because I was failing.
Very, very commonly my bad dreams take a form like that - that I have to do something and because of things beyond my control (the ice cubes not being there, or my hands suddenly stopping working), I am going to fail, and everything is going to be ruined because I failed.
I wish I could, for once, just have a simple bad dream about a monster chasing me or something. My bad dreams are never "simple 1950s horror movie," they are always more "complicated, psychological 1990s art-house horror movies"
- I have decided to use the "life changing magic of half-*ssing it" to make it through the additional grading this week. I don't have time, the students won't have time to rewrite, so a quick and fairly uncritical read and a check to make sure they included the parts I wanted them to include will be enough. (I wish I could stop feeling slightly guilty about this, though).
- One of the things that came out of the news of the recent horrible fires in Australia was the statement that "Koalas are now functionally extinct" and I haven't had the time or the energy to investigate the veracity of that or how likely some kind of captive-breeding program (surely lots of zoos have koalas?) might increase the population and maintain some sort of genetic diversity (or if there is even habitat for them to return to) but of all the things 2019 has taken from us? This is one I didn't expect. I fully expected among "bears and bear analogs" that the giant panda or the grizzly would go out before koalas.
I hope the headline is overblown. I don't know that I've ever seen a koala "in person" but somehow it's more when it's a distinct species like that than when it's some small freshwater fish or dragonfly or fern going extinct...
- I have seen giant pandas "in person." One of my very earliest memories (1972 or 1973) was of going to Washington, DC, with my parents (my dad had meetings; often when my brother and I were kids, family "vacations" were somewhere my dad had a conference to go to). I remember waiting in a VERY long line at the National Zoo to see what would have been the first pandas there...the whole Nixon Opening China thing that led to the loan of them. I remember seeing the pandas, probably because it was sold as a really big deal to me. But also because I just liked animals.
I also remember going to a store (my mother told me it was a Lord and Taylor's, I think) to get a wind-up music-box animal (there used to be stuffed animals that had music boxes in them, wound with a key that stuck out). I had had a squirrel but the music box in it broke. The replacement was a tiger, which played "Hold that Tiger." (I actually still have it, and it still works - it is on a shelf in "my" bedroom at my mom's house). I don't think the squirrel broke while I was there; i think it had been broken for a while but my parents knew the store sold the animals and wanted to get me a replacement then....my mom removed the broken music box from the squirrel and sewed a little felt patch over the hole where the key had been. (The things you remember. I don't think that squirrel still exists; I think it was in a box in the basement that got ruined in a flood).
The only other thing I remember from that trip was being on a ferry on the Potomac in the rain, and also being on top of a hill somewhere, and my mom pointing to something, and saying "That's Watergate, that's a dirty word to your father" and me being confused because I thought she meant a literal gate that held back water.
- This was posted by Elizabeth Pich & Jonathan Kunz on Twitter. Apparently it's a comic the New Yorker rejected. But I could do a whole TED talk about how this is kind of real:
I once bitterly noted that when I was a kid, I was always told (at things like church potlucks) to "hold back and let the adults go first" and now that I'm an adult, times have changed, and it's "oh, let the kids go through first!" and I don't know but the change in how things are done mean I still don't get any devilled eggs....
(And in a broader sense: being told as a child that I was supposed to respect my elders, and that when adults were talking I should wait until someone spoke to me to talk, and all those rules seem to have been upended now and I do admit at times my students treat me with a familiarity/lack of respect I would have been embarrassed to think about when I was a student).
And yeah, I'm getting old: "OK, Boomer." (I could have been a Boomer, if my parents had started reproducing right after they married - I could have been born in 1960 rather than 1969, which is a weird thought to me. But in some ways, as a kid of Silent Gen parents, maybe I do have a few of the more-benign Boomer attitudes. Oh, I never went through the "don't trust anyone over 30" rebellious phase, but....)
But I do think that adult life is harder and more serious and less fun than I expected it would be when I was a kid. And it would be nice to have more of an escape now and then.
Added: I remember reading somewhere that apparently the more "heavy drinking" you see in older movies (where people come home and have martinis, etc.) was one way adults had of relaxing in the past that's maybe frowned on a little bit now (at least, once you pass college age; it seems heavy-drinking is still somewhat accepted among people in their 20s). Perhaps as MJ becomes increasingly legal people will sub that but really? I want neither. (And I'd be concerned about the long term effects of heavy consumption of either. And this is not a request for someone to dump studies in my comment box but I do think we'll find there are some unintended consequences of long term pot use we weren't predicting...) I want neither. I would prefer just some nice simple fun...getting to run around outside, or play, or, I don't know what...
- I was thinking also about something the guy who writes the Muppet History twitter feed said, about how he used to be mocked for liking the Muppets, but now he's found a lot of people who love them, and it makes me think two things:
1: lots of people talk about how awful social media can be, and a lot of people do treat other people like garbage on it. But at the same time? it gives weirdos who like non-mainstream things a chance to find each other. I doubt I'd be as avid a knitter without the Internet, without other knitters to talk to. I doubt I'd have got as deep into Pony fandom (actually: not very deep, but whatever) without it. It's a tool, as I've said too many times before: it's up to us to use it appropriately. Building other people up, finding connections, helping people: that's an appropriate use.
2: I realize now how much my perceptions have been warped by the fact that I got laughed at for stuff I liked when I was younger. (I tended to like "media" that was aimed at kids a few years younger than I was - or perhaps my peers were pushing the envelope and their parents were more permissive; I remember kids talking about seeing R movies* when I was in fifth grade).
(*Also very likely they were lying about seeing them, and hadn't actually, but thought it made them cooler)
But yeah. My immediate reaction when someone says they dislike or "don't understand why people like" something that I like is not for me to defend the thing, it's for me to shut up about it and remind myself "never talk about this again." Because I'm afraid? I'm afraid if I express a liking for an unpopular thing, people will either ridicule me or will simply drop me as a friend, as in "Well, we don't have THAT thing in common, so...." And yes, that's unfair to the more-mature people who are my friends now, but old patterns die hard and I remember the laughter in my fifth grade class when I said "The Muppet Movie was the best movie I'd seen in the past year and they were all talking about having seen "The Jerk."
I don't like feeling excluded. And I have, much of my life.
Twice, from different sources, I've heard the saying "Why would you want to fit in when you were born to stand out" and I just look at that with horror, because to me "fitting in" means you're part of the community, part of the whole, and "standing out" means explicitly that you DON'T fit in, and my experience with that is - then people mock and exclude you. And it's awfully cold being outside of the little circles and little groups that form.
And yes, yes, I know: Cliques Are Bad, and in fact, some in-groups are VERY bad (groups that discriminate against people on the basis of skin color or religion or whatever) but it's also just....nice....to be part of a NICE group, to feel like you belong. For me, the idea of "standing out" seems to imply "not belonging," and I've felt that too much of my life...
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