friday random elevenish: “emotionally and physically drained” edition
Hasn’t been the best week, honestly.
I’m mostly past the latest cold/flu/definitely not Covid-19 bug, but this one feels like it’s going to…linger. Taking off work Monday to play dead kinda helped, though playing catch-up always sucks, especially with a sore throat and gnomes hammering in the sinuses behind my eyes.
Work has been a flurry of bad news/confirmation of worst-case scenarios all week. This, too, sucks, but at least the questions are answered. Not looking forward to the efforts to fix it all, however, but that’s what they pay me the middling bucks for. I’m also, understandably, less than thrilled with the results of Super Tuesday, as my chosen candidate didn’t do as well as I would have liked, and I’m working on coming to terms with that. While, as I write this on Thursday, she hasn’t yet made a decision on the way forward, I think the writing is on the wall, and I expect it’ll be coming to an end soon (update: It has). She’ll likely have some leverage to get some of her plans incorporated into the party platform depending on who she eventually decides who to throw her lot in with in the end; I won’t make any predictions at this point; I can see benefits to backing either Biden of Sanders, or neither. Anyway, I’m not sorry I cast my vote for her, and I’m very appreciative of what she brought to the campaign, in terms of ideas, intelligence, energy, and attitude (killing Bloomberg’s vanity campaign is all on her, and it was beautiful); she elevated the discourse, and in the end, that’ll make the eventual nominee better prepared.
Most campaigns I get emotionally and personally invested in (2004 with Dean comes specifically to mind), I end up hitting this point of mourning. It’s frustrating, as I really do think she’s the most prepared to do the job, and she really is the smartest damned person in the room with a strategy to get the job done. If you looked at solely at my social media feed last week, Senator Warren should have been winning this thing in a walk. Of course, my social circle isn’t representative of the Democratic coalition as a whole, and, given my status as a (relatively) highly educated white person, and my social circle being, on the whole, demographically similar to myself, we’re all right in the Warren campaign’s sweet spot. Problem is, our particular demographic niche is a relatively small part of the coalition as a whole. As this excellent and insightful piece describes, “People like me love Elizabeth Warren”, but…
The reality is that there aren’t that many people like us — and there’s a valuable lesson in that, not just about the Warren campaign specifically but about some of the larger dynamics in American politics.
I highly recommend reading the whole piece; it puts a lot of things, least of all, the privilege that my particular demographic enjoys, into perspective. But, even if I understand it, it’s still a disappointment personally, and combined with the perfect storm of other crap in my life in the last week, it all adds up to a very emotionally and physically tumultuous couple of days.
It hasn’t been all bad, however. Even if I was kinda wrung out, my eldest absolutely KILLED it as the lead in the spring musical at school last weekend, Fountain of You, and it seems like it was a good experience for her, especially getting to work with the writer and composer of the show, which had it’s world premiere on the stage at SBC.
This weekend, being the beginning of March, is the beginning of serious Irish dance season; Friday afternoon I have to go set up sound for the weekend’s Feis, and since dance dad owns the P.A., dance dad runs sound. It’s sure to be exhausting, but it’s always fun.
That’s kind of the story. Emotional roller coaster. But, let’s talk tunes. This week’s spotify dump is absolutely chock full of indie spanning the 90s to today, with a nice riot grrl flavor (which gets even spicier after I stopped logging them), which feels vaguely appropriate. Persist:
- “The Best Ever Death Metal Band Out of Denton” – Laura Jane Grace
- “Zombie” – Langhorne Slim
- “Here Comes My Baby” – Yo La Tengo
- “Ladder to the Sun” – Saintseneca
- “Air Mattress” – Connor Oberst
- “Just Like A Ringing Bell” – Titus Andronicus
- “Seether” – Veruca Salt
- “Going to Marrakesh” – The Extra Glenns
- “Be My Lover” – Alice Cooper
- “Hey Jealousy” – The Ergs
- “A Little More Time” – The Drew Thomson Foundation
- “Section 12 (Hold Me Now)” – The Polyphonic Spree
- “The High Road” – The Feelies
