Hundred-dollar evening

Green-sauce enchiladas, spanish rice, refritos, and avocado. Traditional Thanksgiving fare.

Greetings, Internetizens. I hope everyone had a nice Thanksgiving holiday; mine was largely unremarkable. It's been a while since I had a regular Thanksgiving hang, what with people dying, marrying into other holiday groups, kicking me to the curb, or moving out of state—most of my pre-pandemic Thanksgivings going back a couple decades at least have involved being with those specific folks. This year I treated it like most any other average day, except I did cook a whole lot of food. Mexican, though, not the traditional sort of things, as turkey's been off my menu for 37 years. (Incidentally, I had a weird dream last night/this morning that I had been very hungry and ate one and a half hamburgers before realizing that I hadn't eaten a hamburger in nearly 40 years. I was disturbed by the realization and quite upset but still finished the second hamburger since at that point I had already contributed to the cow's death and throwing it in the trash would benefit nothing. It was a strange nightmare.) There will be leftovers and I will see folks over the weekend.

But Thanksgiving Eve was notable. Wednesday night I went to a speed dating event in Fremont. I'd done a couple of similar events before, but this one was by a different outfit and was a less organized, differently-structured format. I won't be trying this outfit's events again.

I met, I think, six different women, most of whom didn't register much. I mean, nice enough ladies, but I'm not prompted to try to see them again. But two were exceptions. One was someone I may or may not have umpired last summer, she is on a softball team I may have drawn on my Sunday afternoon schedule once or twice but I'm not often at the park her team plays at. But we did know people in common and our "date" consisted mostly of talking about people and experiences with the league. She evidently knows several people on my favorite team to ump, The Leftovers, so Neal, if you have any scoop on Anna from Line Drive Capital, feel free to let me know. She was fun to talk to.

The other one I haven't been able to get out of my head, and not for any good reasons.

I don't recall her actual name, but let's call her "Olive," since olives are among the most repulsive of the edible plantfoods. Olive started our mini-date asking blunt questions, which I liked, and quickly noting which of my answers were red flags, which I didn't like but found interesting. My never having been married was a red flag. My interest in science-fiction was a red flag. OK. When I told her one of my "red flags" was voting behavior or lack thereof, she revealed that she was a Trumper.

She did so in a kind of exaggerated fashion, too, going on about how the Democrats suck and Kamala Harris was useless. In the moment, I was, frankly, dumbfounded. I of course know these people exist—we're going to be very shortly living in a world that 70 million such folks willed into being with cruelty and ignorance—and that I'd inescapably encounter them in the wild, but I hadn't expected to run into one—a female one, no less—in "The People's Republic of Fremont, Center of the Universe." Clearly she traveled in for the event from somewhere else, but still.

I was so stunned that I thought she might be doing a bit, some sort of comedic performance art wherein she plays a character, Colbert Report-style, of some sort of cross between Victoria Jackson and Ron Swanson. So I interrupted her and asked, "are you doing a bit?" She was somewhat offended and said no, she was deadly serious, and had I ever seen Robert F. Kennedy Jr. speak? which just reinforced my impression that she must be doing a bit. Sadly, she was not.

I was so gobsmacked that this outwardly attractive middle-aged woman was on the inside either a mean-spirited hateful racist or a cognitively deficient rube (or both) that when she challenged me to explain why I or anyone would ever vote for Kamala Harris I hesitated for what felt like many seconds before diving in to policy matters. She then said how Harris was "horrible on the border," without answering my reply of "in what way did she do anything negative regarding the border since that wasn't really in her portfolio as VP," and went on to explain how vaccines are dangerous and that the worst thing Kamala Harris ever did was visit a Planned Parenthood office, which I assume refers to a campaign stop but might have been some sort of right-wing propaganda I missed that said she'd had abortions or something. I didn't ask.

"Are you sure you're not doing a bit? Because you've been hitting all the satire points pretty hard." She just told me that I was "obviously quite ignorant" and I laughed. Hopefully in a fashion that was clearly I'm laughing at you, not at your sense of humor since you are not doing a bit. She returned the conversation to RFK Jr. and her strong belief in "informed consent" and started talking about how parents shouldn't have to vaccinate their children because not everyone exposed to a virus will get sick. I asked if she saw any irony in believing in informed consent when she was so steadfastly opposed to being informed and she told me I would see she was right when Trump fixes health care. I laughed again. She said she was a doctor and knew what she was talking about and I laughed harder and said I'd never before met a "doctor" that was pro-polio. Then our phones beeped with the text notification that it was time to move on to the next speed date. I said, "All right, Olive, good luck," and moved on, she replied "good luck to you too," and I suspect each of us was not talking about speed dating. I know I meant "good luck getting through your life being a ripe mark for con artists and it'll serve you right if you become destitute and find yourself in the middle of a measles outbreak in the coming hellscape." She might have meant something similar.

After the event I left the bar and walked back to my car to find I'd inadvertently parked in a restricted-by-residential-permit zone and had a ticket on my windshield. What a capper.

So factoring in the ticket, an eleven-dollar mocktail, and the fee for the event, my evening cost me more than $100. Can't say it was money well spent.

If I do more of these speed dating things they will not be with this company, which claims to have a special algorithm to match you to "compatible dates" but clearly just says that for marketing purposes and has no such selectivity involved. Better to go back to the other outfit that makes no bones about it being random, you meet whoever signs up. (The events put on by the other folks also feed you as part of the fee rather than saddle you with a minimum bar purchase, so there's that.)

At least talking with Anna was pleasant. If nothing else, I may see her on the field next year.

Tagged Politics, Holidays   |   Posted on November 29, 2024 at 2:08am   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Humbug!

Happy Xmas, denizens of the Internet. Or, you know, a tolerable one, anyway.

I had started to write a post about how Christmas is a drag for a lot of us fifth-wheel types in this society, and it's true that for me and plenty of others Christmas is less a time to anticipate and celebrate than a time to endure and get through. It's the loneliest time of year, sometimes especially when surrounded by other people unwittingly flaunting their relative happiness.

But that post was starting to get not just dour and depressing but hostile and resentful, and that's not where I want to be. So I'll just say to everyone out there, enjoy whatever you're doing tomorrow and whomever you spend it with. Myself, I will spend tomorrow cooking Mexican food and watching movies and punting my real holiday to Wednesday, when the people I want to be with are free of their relatives. That's just how it is, and I'm good with that as the alternatives are worse or to ignore the holiday altogether.

Meanwhile, some notes of positivity to lighten things up some...

• The new Captain America comics are outstanding. By J. Michael Straczynski and Jesús Saiz, the new series follows Cap mostly in his plain-clothes Steve Rogers state as he opts to buy his former apartment building from the slumlord that was going to demolish it and instead renovate it and keep its residents from being tossed out. A very Steve Rogers thing to do. While doing this we see Steve flash back to his childhood memories related to the building, which of course were in the 1930s as World War II was ramping up. Those events will tie into a current threat, of course, but it's a nice little parallel to see presentations of scrawny pre-super-soldier-serum Steve and his neighbors clash with the very real American Nazis of the 1930s and witness them describe their nefarious plans for Germany and the US in language that is reflected menacingly by modern-day Republicans in the real non-comic-book world. Straczynski's idea was to explore a Captain America backstory that hasn't been tapped yet:

  The years young Steve was on his own were the same years during which the American Bund – for all intents and purposes the Nazi Party in America – was growing very powerful in real world New York, blocks from where he lived. They held public marches and rallies, harassed people, and spread hate, all part of an effort to get America on the side of the Nazis, a campaign that came to a head with the biggest Nazi rally on American soil in history, as tens of thousands of people, Nazis and Nazi sympathizers, crammed into Madison Square Garden to celebrate their dream of a thousand-year Reich. We are going to put young Steve right into the middle of that real-life vortex, where despite terrible odds he will make a crucial difference at an even more crucial moment. For a young Peter Parker, the murder of his uncle Ben was a transformational event putting him on the path to becoming Spider-Man. This story will be equally transformational, putting a young Steve Rogers on the path to being the hero he eventually becomes.

  Anyway, it's great, I recommend it.
• Speaking of fascist movements in America, Miles Taylor's new book Blowback is essential reading for anyone who hasn't been paying attention to American politics for the last, oh, ten years or so. Taylor was "Anonymous," the author of the unsigned New York Times Op-Ed that explained that he was among the grown-ups reining in the worst abuses of the Trump Administration; this book not only delves into what that meant, but how as Trump learned how the government worked—which is to say, as he figured out where the laws and officials that prevented him from doing the various un-American and illegal things he wanted to do were situated—he began to worm his way around obstacles via legal loopholes and things like "acting" appointments of toadies that needn't be approved by anyone. Which meant that the adults in the room were no longer effective at reining him in and were largely forced to depart. Each chapter starts with details on Taylor's experiences and ends with the logical extension of how the next authoritarian to reach office will behave. It's an excellent book and a chilling read, so not exactly uplifting and fun, but tremendously worthwhile nonetheless.
• For all Mankind is back with its fourth season on AppleTV+, and it's great as always. The only characters still around from the beginning are Ed Baldwin, Dani Poole, and Margo Madison, but the whole group is terrific. The show starts off in July of 1969, whereupon history diverges from what we know when the Soviets land on the moon first. Over the course of the series, the divergent history gets farther and farther away from what we know from the "real world," and in the current season we're in the early 2000s establishing a more permanent presence on Mars, or at least trying to. I miss executive producer Ronald D. Moore's more hands-on influence and past characters, especially Jodi Balfour's Ellen Waverly/Wilson, but I still eagerly await each new episode.

2024 is just around the corner. Buckle up, folks, it's going to be a wild one.

Tagged The Black Hole, Holidays   |   Posted on December 24, 2023 at 7:40pm   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Time Flies When You're Having No Fun at All

Gravity is winning of late

I have not been enjoying life of late. Firstly, this asshat has been making trouble again, and getting the rage and frustration over all that out of my head has been difficult to impossible. More rudimentary frustrations over computer failure, cold viruses, and cash flow happening concurrently don't help, but by themselves would be a lot more manageable. Anyway, for these reasons or none at all—it's tough to tell sometimes—the number of lost days I've been racking up has been troubling.

Holiday season is likely a contributor. Holidays are not the fun time they used to be once upon a time; I may not have really enjoyed a Christmas since the '80s. Hard to say, depends, I guess, on how generous you want to be with your terms.

Plus, it just sneaked up on me. The weeks in between the World Series and December seem to have passed in a blink, suddenly we're in the middle of all these Christmasy trappings and people are holiday overscheduled and oh crap, I should hurry up and make a Christmas list before there are no more shopping days, and you know what frak Christmas anyway. I'm feeling a bit like the gang in the recent Thanksgiving episode of "The Flash."

 

 

Anyway, I thought I'd post a little grumpiness as a way of giving myself a kick in the butt to put some extra oomph into the struggle to gain orbital altitude on The Black Hole. And to get back to having days with activity besides internal-monologue-screaming-matches-with-someone-I'll-never-speak-to-again more than four times a week.

Grumble. Humbug.

Tagged The Black Hole, Holidays, The Flash   |   Posted on December 11, 2018 at 3:15am   |   Permalink   |     |  

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