As they approach three years old each, Chingu and Mandu don't sleep together like they used too. They'll groom each other once in a while, but it's more rare to see pictures of them together.
Their personalities are bright, of course -- Mandu in front is just chilling. Chingu in back is plotting his next act of civil disobedience.
I'm worried about Alex Garland. After creating some of my favorite movies of all time (28 Days Later, Ex Machina, Annihilation, hell, I'll say it -- Men) he seems to have gone into some weird military fascination phase. Civil War was a very terrible film that attempted to drain politics from an inherently political topic. Now, with Warfare, we go micro instead of macro and see a highly forensic examination of a single battle during the U.S. occupation of Ramadi in Iraq. Are my words too biased? Because a squad of U.S. troops literally goes into an Iraqi home to take it over for a few hours to gather intelligence. (The civilians are kept in a bedroom, including children.)
It almost works as an attempt at a "neutral" examination of combat -- the stress, the suffering, the unknown.
Garland blows this all up (ahem) in the credits, where the actual soldiers involved are brought in for cheery, jock-y, fist-bump-y photos. This actually happened, man!
A lone Iraqi woman, the mother of the children who had been taken hostage, gets to say "Why? Why?" but doesn't really get to speak, because she's the enemy of course, just one who got really lucky. An expendable NPC in the true world of American military exceptionalism.
Hard to believe, but this is worse than Civil War. Is this some kind of mid-life crisis for Garland?
"But letterforms are not only objects of science. They also belong to the realm of art, and they participate in its history. They have changed over time just as music, painting and architecture have changed, and the same historical terms -- Renaissance, Baroque, Neoclassical, Romantic, and so on -- are useful in each of these fields.
This approach to the classification of letterforms has another important advantage. Typography never occurs in isolation. Good typography demands not only a knowledge of type itself, but an understanding of the relationship between letterforms and the other things that humans make and do. Typographical history is just that: the study of the relationships between type designs and the rest of human activity -- politics, philosophy, the arts, and the history of ideas. It is a lifelong pursuit, but one that is informative and rewarding from the beginning."
-- Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style
This highly depressing article about a father dying in an expensive nursing home is necessary, and difficult, to read in full:
"This indifferent care belied the promises of the establishment’s website, which portrayed a warm and engaging environment where caregivers chatted with residents and offered companionship and comfort: 'Your care team is always on hand to help – as little or as much as you need.'”
Instead, Cindy had to visit for hours every day to help Dad, trying to prod administrators and overworked staff to give him more of the promised care for which we were paying dearly, but without making so much fuss that they’d evict him. She was stressed, and we were all heartbroken that aside from family visits, Dad was spending his last days lonely, helpless and bored, at the mercy of a company that seemed to be doing more warehousing than care."
There's nothing easy about taking care of an elderly loved one. Throw dementia into the mix, and you're eternally dealing with options ranging from bad to not-quite-as-bad.
We eventually moved my dad out of a nursing home and into a house with me. We had private nurses coming in during the day, but then the issue was helping him in the middle of the night. His internal clock regarding day and night was just gone.
I thought I'd have more to say about the whole experience but just documenting different stories like this one seems like the best path forward.
To reiterate, our family had resources in no small part due to my dad having worked (very hard!) for the Federal Government for over 30 years. It was still a bruising experience for all of us before he passed at 93.
Things are good. Spring is here, and I've spent the day working on the (very small) yard. My two cats are healthy and shedding like crazy. The new job is really going well, and I might have an update on that later this spring. And hey, I just bought my first electric car -- a Hyundai Kona. I'm loving it so far.
Longer term, I'll be going to the Outer Banks with my sister and her family in July. It's been a while since I've had a real beach-y vacation, so I'm stoked.
"'Let's talk about mythology, Lobey. Or let's you listen. We've had quite a time assuming the rationale of the world. The irrational presents just as much of a problem. You remember the legend of the Beatles? You remember the Beatle Ringo left his Maureen love even though she treated him tender. He was the one Beatle who did not sing, so the earliest forms of the legend go. After a hard day's night he and the rest of the Beatles were torn apart by screaming girls, and he and the other Beatles returned, finally at one, with the great rock and the great roll.' I put my head in La Dire's lap. She went on. 'Well, that myth is a version of a much older story that is not so well known. There are no 45's or 33's from the time of this older story. There are only a few written versions, and reading is rapidly losing its interest for the young. In the older story Ringo was called Orpheus. He too was torn apart by screaming girls. But the details are different. He lost his love -- in this version Eurydice -- and she went straight to the great rock and the great roll, where Orpheus had to go to get her back. He went singing, for in this version Orpheus was the greatest singer, instead of the silent one. In myths things always turn into their opposites as one version supersedes the next.'"
-- Samuel Delany, The Einstein Intersection
"The old man is still. On his old thatch hat with its round crown there is a stain where in earlier days he had worn some sort of band, but the collar of his khaki shirt is clean. In the low sun of late afternoon, the silver hair over his ears dissolves in filaments of light against the sparkle of the water, and the ear lobes seem illumined from within, as if his skin had gone transparent.
From the companionway behind comes the faint sweet smell of manure. The green turtles lie belly up, each with a neat turd pile by its tail. One breathes its hollow gasp, and Buddy sinks beside it, on his knees.
You watchin us? Dat what Athens say. He say dat you watchin us die.
The turtle watches him, unblinking.
Dark noddies cross the swift colors of the coral bank, toward the cays. The cays astern disintegrate in the sun's mist."
-- Peter Matthiessen, Far Tortuga
