fond of a mountainous situation
PENCIL POUCH
Happy first day of school to all who celebrate! My very adult child moved back for his last college year (I know) a week ago, although classes start for him today. The early arrival was partly because he is a living-space fussbudget who needs time to set up his apartment perfectly or there will be angst (no shade, because same) and partly because when you are 21 you need to be where the fun is and right now the fun is not at home. The fun is at college with your friends.
I do not have the extreme boo-hoos about this fall semester the way I did for the first one; that has lessened each time. But I am still doing a little moping. The loss of my gym buddy is also problematic. I still go but I will do exactly what I like to do (treadmill run, kettlebell swings, a few perfunctory lifts, lying on a gym mat and “stretching”) instead of being pushed out of my comfort zone by a fit young person.
BESIDES THE GYM
Here are my attempts to keep relatively busy:
Reading (always). I’m in a bit of an “eh, that was okay” slump with the fiction right now. I can recommend I Cheerfully Refuse by Leif Enger, although not without reservations. This review is pretty spot-on; it was a book that could have been so much better in about a thousand ways. I still enjoyed it though.
Half-heartedly and very slowly watching Game of Thrones, one of the few “big-ass HBO series” that I had not seen. I am not sure my brain is wired for fantasy. I see armor and castles and I unconsciously try to narrow down a time period and then I see dragons and I think OH RIGHT NEVER MIND. I also see boobs. I see so, so many boobs.
Singing songs about Murphy the cat.
Clutching my crystals for continued good fortune for my aforementioned muscular adult son because GUESS! WHAT! His internship made him an offer for a full-time job after graduation. That is right, a senior year with no LinkedIn, no job fairs, no Zoom interviews. He loved the internship so after a tense (for him) round of Baby’s First Salary Negotiation,* he has happily accepted. He may miss out on crucial poverty finance skillz, but I have never believed that hardship builds character. And how nice to know exactly how much you can spend on rent, instead of moving somewhere and building a precarious stack of Jenga jobs while you look.
*He got half the increase he asked for and some more bonus. Insert Wolf of Wall Street gif here.
OTHER POUCH
The latest thing I do to annoy LT (although I suspect he is used to it) is to pretend I run a life-coaching business with some sort of scrotum-related ideology. It’s called Scroactive Scrofessionals and I put on a boomer-dad kind of voice and say things like “Allow me to in-SCRO-duce myself” and “Son, you need to get with the SCRO-gram.”
C-SPANNER IN THE WORKS; IN WHICH, I AM UNCHARACTERISTICALLY TIMELY AND SINCERE
You can hardly spit on the internet without landing on a whole bunch of performative joy and positivity about this next election. I hope everyone is correct, truly, and I am ready to usher in Obama Part 2: The Kamala-ing. (That has nothing to do with skin color, just a comment on what I suspect will be a very similar vibey presidency: publicized optics and photo-ops and unpublicized drone warfare.) The best lawn sign I have seen was homemade and said HARRIS/WALZ: OBVIOUSLY and that kind of sums up how I feel about it. I am not mad but I don’t care about the office of the President beyond making sure there is not an absolute lunatic sitting in it.
I do mildly wish my lovely loud and lefty friends would stop giving Kamala money, because I suspect her campaign does not really need it (at least not in these personal-donor amounts), and instead focus on flipping some other races because holy SHIT there are a lot of bigots and book-burners who want to hold public office. Civil War notwithstanding, there are many times when I think this whole states’-rights experiment has gone a bit far. Why do transgender citizens have to consider which states they can live in safely? Why can’t every pregnant person feel equally confident in their medical care?
Speaking of states, I had a vivid dream about a program to “repatriate” Indiana. I do not remember exactly why this was even a thing in the dream-world, but there was some kind of Birthright-style program where people who could prove a tie to Indiana would get a free trip to Indiana, and then the program leaders would try and convince them to buy property there.
REALLY.
Yesterday was Sunday and LT and I took our empty-nest selves to eat tacos for brunch and look at old shit at a vintage show. Lots of clothes but not enough books, other printed material, or medicine packaging for my vintage tastes. On the way home we were I guess what you’d call “mildly” rear-ended at a red light; enough to make the seatbelt snap at least. When LT got out to look at the car (it was fine), the driver said, “Was that me? Was that me who hit you?” WOW GET THE DETECTIVES ON THIS CASE. So be aware there is a woman out there driving a red Honda and she has very poor braking and critical-thinking skills. I suggest caution.
—mimi smartypants occupied a crucial diplomatic post during the Napoleonic era.