Senator Mike Gravel passed away.
I had lunch with him in 2007 at McCormick & Schmick’s on K Street. I heard out his bizzaro communications strategy for his quixotic presidential run (and I was in the mix as a veteran of such a campaign), and took a pass.
I liked the guy.
The pandemic is “ending,” on a slew of bittersweet notes for me.
(And of course, it isn’t really over yet for so many around the world, including small children here.)
After a long year, I'm seeing the cracks
“I’m breaking a little," (or words very close to that) was a sentiment shared with me recently. Me too. Throughout the peak of the pandemic, my anxiety was managed just fine. Now, with things getting back to “normal”, I can feel it slipping out of control. Make sense? 😕 — Dan Cederholm (@simplebits) June 21, 2021 …And not just us. (Not to say that this other person’s experience is about anxiety, but both what I infer or imagine about theirs and what Dan Cederholm shared resonates with me.
Lab leak hypothesizing
I’m a college dropout. Not a scientist. Let alone a biologist or epidemiologist or whatever other ologist I would like to include in a fantasy panel to help me reconcile my interpretations of the news with what their expertise, regardless of their preferences, might inform. I’ve been aware of the credible strains of the “Lab Leak Hypothesis” from near the beginning, which now have fairly widespread recognition. (And all the words mean something, right?
A crime against humanity
Given my apparent “sensitivity.” I am working on consuming more “positive” media (and boxing in my media consumption), but I can’t live disconnected from the world. Yesterday’s heading was “criminal negligence,” but this is a Crime Against Humanity: How Families, Separated At The Border By Trump Policies, Are Coping. Listen to it. I don’t trust the “quote sites” to neccessarily attribute a quote well, but while I am taking care of myself, I also recognize the value of this observation, attributed to Jiddu Krishnamurti:
Criminal negligence
I can’t filter it out, and it still cuts. Every story about the horrible things the systems we make hurt children. Every dehumanizing experience with authority that children are directly subjected to, and every exhausted, desperate parent because they’re underpaid, dehumanized, sick, tormented… every one of those things is a crime. Pretty much that and the climate crisis should be things we reconcile ahead of just about anything else.
I am writing again
I got some hours in front of a couple of different text editors this weekend. Two pages about what were maybe the local epicenters of trauma shared between my parents and I. It is not what I expected to come out, but it did. I rushed off the first draft of these spare pages to a good friend. Tears came out too. A couple of guttural cries even. Yesterday I banged out some useless Swift code to solve notional tutorial problems.
Anytime there’s news of a child dying, and most especially by the hands of their own parent or caregiver, my heart breaks for days.