I’m really into this idea of pilot episodes of tv shows being this weird, liminal space where the reality of the show isn’t quite stable like in the office there are characters we see in that episode that we never see again and in gilmore girls the actor who plays kirk played another character in the second episode and luke’s diner isn’t called luke’s diner yet
Ever since the election, I periodically go through moods where I feel like I need to disconnect from the news/politics just to maintain a semblance of mental health. I delete my news and twitter apps and avoid the evening news and Sunday morning talk shows. Increasingly, I’ve become deeply distressed by everything going on in the world. It’s not just the minute-to-minute updates of the special elections, the growing tensions with North Korea, Bill O’Reilly’s sexual harassment or Trump defending him via Twitter, or the continued assault on Planned Parenthood and immigrants, or the cloud of smoke that is the Russia investigation, or the unwavering support Trump still gets from his base, or Marine Le Pen’s growing influence in France. But it’s also the more structural issues of increasing polarization because of gerrymandering, the ideological silos we live in and continually reinforce, the ever-growing amount of money that is funneled into presidential campaigns, the revolving door between corporate America and government. It’s everything else, too—climate change, economic inequality, racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia. And it is exhausting and isolating. And maybe part of this hopelessness is because I just finished S-Town and John B. McLemore’s brand of nihilism and untiring pessimism is rubbing off on me.
There’s a psychological tendency we have to get further entrenched in our own views in debates. I know based on my own experience that I swing between pretty liberal and pretty moderate depending on my state of mind and what I’m reacting to. We don’t need more debates, more reiterations of the same tired arguments. We need, as cliché as it sounds, a re-education in patience, empathy, and compassion. We need to relearn how to meet in the middle in a very basic, communicative way. I’m ordinarily skeptical of politicians who advocate “governing from the middle” or unity for the sake of unity since this usually means maintaining the status quo and comes with the assumption that conservative and liberal viewpoints are equally valid and fair in the interminable “war of ideas.” But, in a non-ideological sense, we need to get better at not pushing each other to more and more extreme views.
So I’m currently in Hazleton, PA. The dog shelter my mom volunteers at partners with a shelter in Tennessee and every two weeks the two shelters meet halfway to exchange dogs and we volunteered to do it this time. Around 3am we’ll move 10 dogs into our van (one of whom was just abandoned by his family and is really upset about it) and start driving home.
We made it back around 9am and all the dogs are doing great. Homemade pizza coming up!
So I’m currently in Hazleton, PA. The dog shelter my mom volunteers at partners with a shelter in Tennessee and every two weeks the two shelters meet halfway to exchange dogs and we volunteered to do it this time. Around 3am we’ll move 10 dogs into our van (one of whom was just abandoned by his family and is really upset about it) and start driving home.
if there was a button that would make all humans vanish in an instant without anyone being the wiser, I would press that button without hesitation or remorse. think of a world without humanity. what paradise that would be.
I think of this quite often. Perhaps not as an intentional decision carried out by myself, but more along the lines of an extreme environmental event; such as an unforeseen comet/asteroid/meteor impact, supervolcano eruption, massive methane release into the atmosphere, a runaway extinction, crippling mass ejection of solar plasma, or some other as yet unimagined event triggered by our own ignorance.
It’s funny, I’ve had the same thought. Like if the world were to end (nuclear disaster, hit by an asteroid, or some other major world disaster), I’d be completely fine with that.
I can divide my past friendships into two groups: those that slowly fractured and were always meant to be temporary, and those that still feel unfinished inside me, ghostlike and patient, always with a kind hand outstretched.
