Monday

 

Writing: Forgot!  Today’s my day in Living Faith. 

Watching: Ricky Gervais’ After Life season 2 dropped on Netflix on Friday, so I watched it. I should say, “wasted three hours of my life.”  My thoughts on the first seasons are here, and if anything, I’d drill down on those observations.

There’s no reason for this season to exist, given the storyline of these six episodes. It basically repeats the trajectory of the first season – jerk fellow is devastated over the death of his wife, tries to be nice, fails, keeps watching old videos of his wife, toys with suicide, steps away, mostly because of the dog. Again.

There are a few good lines and a very few decent moments. “I miss doing nothing with Lisa” is about the best summation of loss  – and true companionship – that one could come up with. The best character, besides Ashley Jensen’s nursing home caregiver, is the older widow Gervais regularly meets up with at the cemetery. And she has a satisfying, if predictable resolution. I also appreciate Gervais not backing down from his critiques of trans-cultism here as his reporter character incredulously interviews a man who “identifies as” an 8-year old girl.

But the problem (besides the vulgarity, which is tiresome and gross) is the just terrible secondary plotlines and cartoonish characters. I mean…awful.  We have this very real grief and loss story happening, which is rooted in a realistic understanding of what that feels like, but it’s surrounded mostly by cartoons – for example – a male therapist who is over-the-top weird, repulsive misogynist and would not exist in real life, in the form he’s presented, even at your most extreme Men’s Rights Sweat Lodge Weekend. Multiply that by about five, and you’ve got the filler: silly, off-putting and a waste.

It’s too bad. I am not a huge Gervais fan, but there’s a lot about his work and approach I like – and as I said, I appreciate his outspokenness about the current repressive social and cultural climate. But this second season of After Life just strikes me as lazy.

But it’s also interesting to me that the famed, proud atheist Gervais has offered the world a caution against idolatry. Grief and loss is real and the natural fruit of authentic love, but in a way, this works an odd little warning to not put all your hopes for ultimate meaning and purpose into what (or who) will ultimately pass away.

OH! And Better Call Saul! I just realized I never finished writing that post. Will do, today. First thing. After a trip to the pharmacy (scroll down for why) and some Latin/Odyssey/Isaiah work.

Reading: Got an issue of The New Yorker through Prime. It was mostly here-we-are-in-the-quarantine and here-I-am-in-the-quarantine, so I was mostly bored. There is a piece on Dorothy Day which I need to get back to and read. 

Next up – that book on 17th century nuns heading to Chile. Got to get that done.

Cooking: Brown butter banana bread. Beef stew, because we’ve hit a cool snap.

And, after a year or so of not making any – restocking with chicken stock.

That was kind of a revelation, a year ago. For years, I’ve been making my own chicken stock. (Never beef – never wanted to crack and roast beef knuckles or whatever you have to do for that). I don’t own a pressure cooker or crockpot, so it’s all stovetop. It was kind of a point of pride. I’m not full-in natural foods gourmet, but I do try to avoid many processed food and I’m fairly frugal, so purchasing chicken stock was a violation of all of that carefully constructed self-image. Plus, it does taste better. No contest. That is true. 

And then one day, I was standing there, looking at a pot filled with bones and vegetables, thinking about how much I hate straining and packing the stock up, when I thought. I don’t have to do this. I’m not going to do this. Ever again. This is the last pot of stock I’m ever going to boil up. Screw this. 

What a delightful feeling!

Fast forward to yesterday – cleaning out my freezer. Noted the roast chicken carcasses I’ve been tossing in there just out of habit. Noticed a bunch of aging celery and carrots. Eh, might as well make some stock. 

And so I did.

The last pot of stock I’ll ever boil up. 

Visiting: The hospital.

So…..someone (not me) had a biking accident late yesterday afternoon. Nothing broken, but a serious and gross looking-enough elbow gouge to prompt me to say, “Yeah, I can’t trust myself to clean this properly. Let the medical people do it. ”

Because no one is going to the ER, it was a (relative) breeze. A bit of a blip because at first they didn’t want to let me in to accompany him. No visitors. What? I’m not a visitor. I’m his mother. And he’s a minor. 

X-rays taken, wound was cleaned, and then an orthopedist brought in to perform what they call a joint challenge. You can read about it here – the purpose is to make sure there’s been no injury to the join that would lead to foreign material/infection getting deep inside. It was a…process, but everything was all clear. Wound packed with anti-bacterial stuff, wrapped up, and a couple of stitches applied. We’ll go back in a couple of days for a checkup and to take that stuff out and hopefully all will be well.

As always, a minor incident can, we hope, be a lesson that will perhaps prevent something more serious in the future, right? As in – when something like this happens to me, I try to say to myself, “Well, I don’t like this. This isn’t great. But maybe the wake-up call to me will help me avoid something that could be worse. Maybe I did need to be paying more attention. Maybe I do need to start addressing problems instead of avoiding them. Maybe I’ve been getting a bit careless.”

In this case, two words: elbow pads.