see you on a dark night
MY DAY OFF
I have a nice vacation day bank because I no longer have to take an entire day off to go to the dentist and such. You know, the efficiency and advantages of fully remote work that the collective wisdom of our sage CEOs have decided to end (in late Q3). Smart! It’s good when people in charge make logical decisions that improve everyone’s lives.
Anyway, some of my vacation days are use-or-lose in 2026, so I am taking the random day off here and there to stay home and microdose retirement. Sometimes I will do My Activities, sometimes I do nothing much. Today I went to snack on some prunes and it was the first of a new container, plastic on the outside and a safety seal within, so I sang a few bars of the Go-Go’s iconic hit “Our Prunes Are Sealed.” Then I went for a very long walk, circuitous on purpose, where I saw a heron, a blue jay, and an American redstart, and ended up at my gym for hulking out.
On the walk I thought about the following things
- The time I was being a drunk asshole and got some girl to agree that she loved the novels of Richard Scarry (“didn’t he win the Booker a few years ago”?)
- How my TV defaults to some 24/7 Attenborough channel when you turn it on, which is how I overheard the phrase that is now stuck in my head:
[Attenborough accent]: He can comfortably eat half an iguana a day.
- Oh the vowels on “half” and “iguana.” To quote Rachel Zoe: I die.
- The other time, much longer ago, when I turned on the Attenborough channel and saw this absolute snack of an eel scientist, a bald guy with glasses and a V-neck sweater, slightly too tight maybe but he had the body for it, sexily standing there in a lab handling a wet-specimen dead eel, and I was like HOLY THIRST TRAP EEL SCIENTIST. Never have been able to find out who that was. If you work with a sexy eel scientist, tell him he looked good on TV.
- Maybe not sexy, but alluring: I was eating a burger at a bar and the couple near me seemed to be on a first (or at least early) date. The woman was talking about how she had uncovered a copy of the complete plays of Aristophanes in Italian translation at a flea market and had to buy it. “I don’t read Italian or really care about Aristophanes or any Greek drama but it totally seemed worth owning for five dollars.” GIRL I AGREE. LET’S HANG OUT.
- The best Ludacris lyric of all time, which is “Yeek yeek woop woop! Why you all in my ear?!” I once responded to a colleague’s Slack hail with “yeek yeek woop woop” but my colleague had not completed, nay even started, his degree in Ludacris Studies because he did not get it. (I left off the second part; could be seen as rude.)
THEN I WENT HOME
I ate some chicken. I took a shower. I got on the couch with the cats. Then I watched the new episode of Euphoria, a show I have always been very conflicted about, because it was stylish as hell but only about a third of its emotion was in any way earned. I always thought of it as a series of one-act plays. Here is a dance number, here is a genuinely moving scene (with Zendaya, sometimes Sweeney, never anyone else), here is a thumping club track and wet streets and bisexual lighting that is nice to look at, here is us wasting two entire episodes on Lexi’s stupid play. I’ve never been a FAN, but was I coming back every week or so? Yes.
This season is an entirely different show. I have never seen such an abrupt tonal shift. Someone who works on the show spent the entire time off watching Breaking Bad (the border-wall snafu was totally something that would happen to Walter and Jesse) and Fargo and said, “I want to make that, but with my characters, and let’s keep everyone totally flat and one-dimensional and wildly out of character from their previous seasons.” The photography is different, the soundtrack is different, the many odd humorous moments—since when was Euphoria ever, ever intentionally funny? I have a conspiracy theory that Elordi and Sweeney were not even in the same room during their first scene together; the wooden dialogue and the shooting around to avoid showing them together sure makes it seem that way. The weirdnesses abound. I could make a 40-minute YouTube about it but I’m sure someone already has.
CUE DINOSAUR JR’S “THIS IS ALL I CAME TO DO”
Because it’s No-Delete Thursday and I’m almost out of words.
—mimi smartypants must imagine Sisyphus behind the wheel of a large automobile.