sick days are for watching tv
i feel a little better today than i did yesterday, aside from the headache. thermometer says i don't have a fever, roommate's pulse oximeter says my ox is normal. so i sat on my bed and watched a lot of netflix today. :D
finished this is a robbery convinced no one will ever find the art missing from the gardner museum. it's been thirty years, for one thing, and almost everyone that law enforcement thought might be involved in the robbery is dead now. (at the time they figured either the irish mob or the italian mob did it, and if it was the irish mob in 1990, they'd be stealing art to fund the ira. the documentarians talked to a guy from belfast who was part of the ira back in the day, and he pointed out that they were really well funded at the time, and what would they need with a bunch of stolen art? which the fbi must have agreed with, because they turned to the mafia, and they'd come up with a good suspect only to discover that he'd been, say, decapitated and stuffed in the trunk of his car. or was dead of a drug overdose. or already in jail.)
then i watched inventing anna, about the fake german heiress anna delvey, and while i didn't love it, i kept watching because i needed to know how it ended. i liked almost none of the characters - they were either careless rich people living in their little bubbles of wealth, or people coldly taking advantage of each other. and the show never really explained why people were so taken with anna delvey. she was a bitch who liked spending other people's money and never paid her bills. unless they were just attracted to her wealth, or at least what she said was her wealth. most of the characters, i didn't care that anna was pobably scamming them, but i also didn't care if she got away with it or went to jail. and i guess she believed her own lies? who knows. it made a few stabs at the fact that men and women are treated differently for the same behavior, that society is really sexist, and maybe there was supposed to be some kind of commentary on how people can get away with all kinds of shit when vast sums of money are involved, but i dunno, you got to see what anna did but didn't get much of an idea why so many people seemed so enamored of her, and whether or not she really was scamming or just all kinds of delusional about how money and business work. some of the clothes were nice, tho, and the actress who played anna had a completely bonkers accent that was apparently fairly accurate.
tomorrow it's back to work, more or less, so i won't be able to binge more tv. which is fine. my brain might need a rest.
The windshield’s dirty, the squirter stuff’s all gone, so
we drive on together into a sun-gray pane of grime
and dust. My son
puts the passenger seat back as far as it will go, closes
his eyes. I crack my window open for a bit
of fresher air. It’s so
incredibly fresh out there.
Rain, over.
Puddles left
in ditches. Black mirrors with our passing
reflected in them, I suppose, but I’d
have to pull over and kneel down at the side
of the road to know.
The day ahead-
for this, the radio
doesn’t need to be played.
The house we used to live in
still exists
in a snapshot, in which
it yellows in another family’s scrapbook.
And a man on a bicycle
rides beside us
for a long time, very swiftly, until finally
he can’t keep up-
but before he slips
behind us, he salutes us
with his left hand-
a reminder:
that every single second-
that every prisoner on death row-
that every name on every tombstone-
that everywhere we go-
that every day, like this one, will
be like every other, having never been, never
ending. So
thank you. And, oh-
I almost forgot to say it: amen.
--"Prayer", Laura Kasischke
finished this is a robbery convinced no one will ever find the art missing from the gardner museum. it's been thirty years, for one thing, and almost everyone that law enforcement thought might be involved in the robbery is dead now. (at the time they figured either the irish mob or the italian mob did it, and if it was the irish mob in 1990, they'd be stealing art to fund the ira. the documentarians talked to a guy from belfast who was part of the ira back in the day, and he pointed out that they were really well funded at the time, and what would they need with a bunch of stolen art? which the fbi must have agreed with, because they turned to the mafia, and they'd come up with a good suspect only to discover that he'd been, say, decapitated and stuffed in the trunk of his car. or was dead of a drug overdose. or already in jail.)
then i watched inventing anna, about the fake german heiress anna delvey, and while i didn't love it, i kept watching because i needed to know how it ended. i liked almost none of the characters - they were either careless rich people living in their little bubbles of wealth, or people coldly taking advantage of each other. and the show never really explained why people were so taken with anna delvey. she was a bitch who liked spending other people's money and never paid her bills. unless they were just attracted to her wealth, or at least what she said was her wealth. most of the characters, i didn't care that anna was pobably scamming them, but i also didn't care if she got away with it or went to jail. and i guess she believed her own lies? who knows. it made a few stabs at the fact that men and women are treated differently for the same behavior, that society is really sexist, and maybe there was supposed to be some kind of commentary on how people can get away with all kinds of shit when vast sums of money are involved, but i dunno, you got to see what anna did but didn't get much of an idea why so many people seemed so enamored of her, and whether or not she really was scamming or just all kinds of delusional about how money and business work. some of the clothes were nice, tho, and the actress who played anna had a completely bonkers accent that was apparently fairly accurate.
tomorrow it's back to work, more or less, so i won't be able to binge more tv. which is fine. my brain might need a rest.
The windshield’s dirty, the squirter stuff’s all gone, so
we drive on together into a sun-gray pane of grime
and dust. My son
puts the passenger seat back as far as it will go, closes
his eyes. I crack my window open for a bit
of fresher air. It’s so
incredibly fresh out there.
Rain, over.
Puddles left
in ditches. Black mirrors with our passing
reflected in them, I suppose, but I’d
have to pull over and kneel down at the side
of the road to know.
The day ahead-
for this, the radio
doesn’t need to be played.
The house we used to live in
still exists
in a snapshot, in which
it yellows in another family’s scrapbook.
And a man on a bicycle
rides beside us
for a long time, very swiftly, until finally
he can’t keep up-
but before he slips
behind us, he salutes us
with his left hand-
a reminder:
that every single second-
that every prisoner on death row-
that every name on every tombstone-
that everywhere we go-
that every day, like this one, will
be like every other, having never been, never
ending. So
thank you. And, oh-
I almost forgot to say it: amen.
--"Prayer", Laura Kasischke