December 31, 2021

My husband's parents have a hot tub, and it's snowed here in Gig Harbor. So hot tubbing feels like some kind of winter alpine resort. And the tub has little roving rainbow lights under the water that light up the bubbles in blue, green, and turquoise. What a nice time. 

I remembered that I wanted to talk about how we went to a Christmas Eve service at my husband's parents' church. It's one of those big-ish churches, used to be Presbyterian but split from that denomination because it felt that the Presbyterians had gotten too liberal. Toooooo liberal. It has gotten rid of a choir in favor of a worship band. With LED spotlights of changeable colors.  Middle-aged musicians singing with their hands raised. It's Christmas, though, and I was excited about the various bangers: O! Holy Night!, Silent Night, the Hallelujah Chorus, Oh Little Town of Bethlehem.  We've been drinking all week, so we all had beers before we went. I had a weed gummy. The congregation was packed. Barely anyone had masks on. I sang my face off and enjoyed the whole thing thoroughly. Although, I expect the fact that church no longer rankles me the way it used to is a sign of me being further from that culture, not closer. I don't feel so threatened anymore by what they expect from people inside of Christianity. Instead, it feels like I get to be a tourist in an eccentric environment. One where you get to sing badly and around other people -- delightful. Where people talk about a fantasy land where you go after you die. Of a creator who's got great plans for your life but suffers from some kind of communication problem when it comes to relaying those plans. Mysterious. Where they teach that men need to run households, but half the congregation is definitely run by women, and no one bats an eye. Where you can get drunk and high and end up looking passionate and pious, singing mangled contemporized versions of classic Christmas songs that -- being perfect -- have lasted hundreds of years and will last hundreds of years more, no matter how silly we've rendered them in 2021. 

December 30, 2021

The other night, my husband and I went over to our friends Jay and Bella's house. He works at a cabinet factory that employs mainly ex-cons, and she's a professional pianist. She talked about how, when they first moved to Gig Harbor from Minnesota, she was so desperate to make friends that she looked up the pianists she could find in the area. Professors at Universities and things like that. She cold emailed them, introducing herself and asking if they wanted to be friends. Four out of four coffee dates went well. One of the people is now like her best friend, and the other three all got her jobs. She also went into a board game store on the day it was going out of business. She exchanged phone numbers with the owner of the store and told him she and her husband would be down on any given game night. A couple of weeks later, the owner's wife texted her back and invited them. Now they all four hang out all the time. 

Yesterday, my husband, sister-in-law, and her husband all drove around trying to find a covid test. Annie, who I'm spending new years eve with, wanted me to get tested first. A reasonable request. However, places are like out of tests. No walk-ups available. Only by appointment. No appointments available. Also it's snowed here, and it almost never snows here. So places are shut because of the snow as well. We drove all over town looking for a place. We finally went to a med clinic that gave out take-home tests. (Similar to a pregnancy test.) We all four took our tests in the car. I'm not sure we fully appreciated the gravity and lack of privacy of the situation. What if someone's came back positive? But they all came back negative. Only a solitary blue line. We all burst into cheers and song as we revealed our results together. Bumping the car up and down with our dancing. Weird. 

Blog Time! 

**SPOLERS**

Keefe, Patrick Radden – EMPIRE OF PAIN

Published: 2021

Read: 12/2021

This was a family history of the Sackler family, the owners of the private company Purdue Pharma who made and marketed Oxycontin. Unlike other wealthy business families (Ford, JP Morgan, etc.), the Sacklers have always gone out of their way to distance the family name from the family business. They use the business – an aggressive marketing campaign convincing doctors of the safety and necessity of OxyContin – as a cash cow, and then donate lots of money to art galleries and universities, insisting on various naming rights. When Purdue Pharma eventually caught some public flack for their part in the opioid epidemic, the Sacklers put three non-Sacklers forward to plead guilty. The sentences were lessened based on the family’s connections at the FDA and the justice department.  By the end of the book (and pretty close to present day), Purdue Pharma had filed for bankruptcy and found themselves a sympathetic judge. The family has taken billions of dollars out of the company, and it looks like they’re going to be able to keep it all. Activitists, including photographer Nan Goldin, have been on the forefront of exposing the Sackler name. Getting museums and universities to stop taking money from them. To, where they can, remove the Sackler name from their walls. It seems like the Sacklers will leave the situation with their money in tact, but they will lose their good name. 

I wasn’t totally in the zone for this book. It was well reported and written, and it’s about a scandal of way bigger proportion than the college admissions scandal. But I didn’t feel all the way in it. A lot of distractions going on in the couple of weeks I was listening to the audio book. (Patrick Radden Keefe himself reads it, which is nice.) It’s odd to be learning about a societal/historical trend that has personally impacted people I know. Two of my cousins got hooked on opioids because of OxyContin. (At least one of them still is.) My cousin Ben had it prescribed after an elbow surgery he got as a college-level pitcher. I think/hope he’s doing better now, but there was a time when my aunt said, “We’re preparing ourselves for the call that says he’s wound up dead. We just can’t assume that’s not going to happen.” He was stealing money from my grandpa to buy… I’m not sure – pills? Heroin? The whole shebang. My other cousin won’t play sports anymore because he can’t afford the injury, and the pain killers, that might come along with that. Both cousins are basically super athletes. Sports have more or less defined their whole lives. 

I talked to my mom about the book, and she rattled off a whole list of people in her community who are hooked to opioids. People who’ve had multiple back surgeries or experience chronic pain. It’s terrifying. It seems like quicksand in the boardgame of life. Like in the real boardgame there are all these potential highs and lows you can role – and there are a lot a lot of possible lows. This company, Purdue Pharma – this family, the Sacklers, -- plopped a big sink of quicksand right in the middle of the board. Close to: injury, loneliness, pain. And a shit ton of people fell into it. Are still falling into it. Will fall into it in the future. 

Rating: ★★★

 

December 26, 2021

Trying to get back into writing a little post everyday. This next year I'm going to need to up/maintain my writing game. Let's make this a career, baby! Today, I have a MLog. 

**SPOILERS**

THE MATRIX RESURRECTIONS
2021
Directed by: Lana Wachowski
Written by: Lana Wachowski, David Mitchell, Aleksander Hemon
Watched: 12/23/21
Matrix Resurrections came out almost twenty years after the original Matrix trilogy. Neo and Trinity are back in the Matrix, contained in special pods. Neo – Thomas Anderson – is a game writer/developer for “The Matrix.” Agent Smith (now played by Jonathan Groff) is Neo’s business partner. We find out that Morpheus (now played by Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) was originally an agent who can appear in the real world by using a swarm of nanobots. Trinity’s got a husband and children. Her name in this new Matrix is Tiffany. Neo and Trinity see each other in a coffee shop they both frequent. They’re drawn to each other, but Tiffany’s life – her husband and sons – get in the way. (Although honestly not that much.) Zion is gone, but the humans have established a new home with the help of sentients called Io. They’ve been growing real strawberries by reverse engineering the Matrix to create actual DNA. Niobe, the leader, doesn’t want the team rescuing Trinity (after they’ve gotten Neo out) because she doesn’t want to risk Io, to risk her strawberries. They go anyway, and they get Trinity out. Smith comes to help them, for some reason. And Trinity picks the blue pill. Together, Neo and Trinity can fly – whereas Neo couldn’t on his own. The One is really the Two. 
I liked early on in the film, when the game designers of The Matrix were discussing what was needed for “The Matrix 4.” There were also all these sequences that were layered over the previous three movies, either by cutting back to previous footage or, at one point, projecting the footage from the previous movies over the action taking place by the current actors. As soon as the actual storyline kicked in – them having to save Trinity – it got less interesting. That part felt perfunctory, like somebody had said – well, we need an actual story here somewhere. But the story wasn’t very good, and the analyst – the big bad – didn’t really do anything bad that I can remember, and Smith switches sides for no discernable reason. There’s a quote I liked: “The key to it all? You and her. Quietly yearning for what you don’t have…while dreading losing what you do.” The analyst is explaining, there, how he’s kept Neo and Trinity contained (stuck) in the Matrix. I thought it was a good description of how I feel a lot of the time. An equally powerful yearning and fear, creating a deadlock. 
There’s a good article about it in the Hidustan Times: “In a fabulous scene (the film’s best scenes revolve around ideas and dialogue; the action is lacklustre), the Analyst tells Neo how in the latest matrix, the machines deliberately trigger human minds to keep them in a perpetual loop of fear and desire so as to make them produce more energy.” Social media. Here it is again, “He says that “zero resistance” is the best part and that for 99% of humanity, the definition of reality is “quietly yearning for what you don't have, while dreading losing what you do”. And a little bit more (I really like this article ) “The Analyst is talking about our continuous desire to escape power structures (capitalism, patriarchy, caste system, so on) while benefitting from the same structures.” 
The interesting parts were interesting! The parts that were trying to make it a big sci-fi blockbuster like people want and expect fell flat. Giving it a score in the middle. 
 Rating: ★★★