It’s a breath of fresh air to see my fur daughters sit this close to each other in peace. This is not the norm. I’m sure one of them threw hands after I left the room, but even they know when to take a time out, which was definitely a lesson for me.
Since last time, I’ve had my week’s staycation, the highlight of which was making enough food and freezing it for my work lunch for the next two weeks. I’m not being sarcastic, it seriously brought me joy to do that. Good thing too, because when I got back to work there was a LOT to do. If I was running on fumes the Friday before my staycation, I was at most one tick above Empty by 5 o’clock the Friday after. Still, knowing when to rest and when to throw hands definitely helped, and it applies to the stuff I have to write about today, too.
WATCHING:
I seriously can’t get enough of PROFILAGE, aka THE PARIS MURDERS on PBS. (GDI, I hate that title.) I’ve only seen the 4th and 5th seasons so far, which TPM shows as seasons 1 and 2, and I gotta say I love how they resolve season finale cliffhangers so far!
Sure it’s like a compressed version of CRIMINAL MINDS (with the whole BAU wrapped up in one character), but it’s a palette cleanser–even an antidote of sorts–after watching FIT FOR TV: THE REALITY OF THE BIGGEST LOSER. TBL just wasn’t something I had the time to be into in its heyday. I’d heard only vaguely of some of the scandal, but got’damn I had no idea how perverse the whole enterprise was!
READING:
Before I went back to work, I picked up a couple of anthologies from a local publishing house: SHIFT by Daniluk, Hunt, Shaffer, Strebenk, Thompson, & Young which seemed like my thing looking at the cover, and WHIMSY: A LITERARY DOOM & GLOOM ANTIDOTE ed. by Naomi Daniluk which, by looking at the cover and the theme… well… did not. But I’ve read the first couple stories and have no regrets!
I’m not all grimdark, all the time and I probably needed a literary antidote anyway since I’m halfway through SOME PEOPLE NEED KILLING, Patricia Evangelista’s memoir of her time reporting on the extrajudicial killings of the Duterte regime in the Philippines. I’ve also been meaning to get back to Lidia Yuknavitch’s THE BOOK OF JOAN, but why don’t I get through the Evangelista book first, otherwise I might end up needing a lot more antidote.
LISTENING:
I slept on the release of Lake Street Dive’s latest, GOOD TOGETHER. I’m definitely glad to hear more horns on this one!
What was this the antidote to? Well, for some odd reason I kept coming back to the song, the classic “A Remark You Made” by Weather Report. I dunno, I just kept coming back to the image of a band playing its last song of the evening during last call, laying a vibe that somehow makes you feel more intoxicated as you hum in while stumbling back home.
I’ve always been a sucker for these kinds of tunes, probably ever since I heard what I still consider to be the closing song of all closing songs, SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE’S “Waltz in A”.