Blue-Footed Musings

2024 was not a good year. I wrote the preceding sentence and immediately thought to myself, “Have any of the recent years been good?” I doubt I’d describe them as such. But last year was a real doozy in terms of what was happening in the world. Also, it was a hard year for me personally because I was suffering from intense sleep deprivation. Here’s a post (originally written in April of last year) about what it was like.

I don’t sleep well or for long enough. I almost always go to bed later than I ought, because I’m a night owl by nature. It takes me about a half an hour to fall asleep. Staying asleep is a problem, too. Whether it’s because I’m too hot, too cold, something hurts, there’s the slightest noise, my mind won’t shut up, I’m thirsty, gotta pee, or all of the above, I rarely sleep all the way through morning.

Last night I turned off the light at 11:00, then woke up at about 4:40 and was still trying to fall back asleep at 5:40, considered getting up but decided it was better to at least rest, and was drifting in a half-conscious state when the alarm jarred me out of it at 6:20. So, I got about 5.25 hours of sleep plus maybe 40 minutes of semi-sleep, but I need at least 8 hours of actual sleep to feel human.

I hate being this tired. Words stop sounding like words and begin to lose meaning. I have no patience and become irrationally angry at the least provocation. My short-term memory doesn’t function. I’m so distractable that I even get distracted from my distractions. Driving is a nightmarish experience of having to be hypervigilant to compensate for the lack of natural alertness. I try to work, but my brain will not engage. If my mental sharpness were to be described in terms of a tack, it would be the tack that has somehow been completely flattened and is of no use to anyone anymore.

I will spend my evening watching TV, either something I’ve already seen or something so simplistic that it requires not the least bit of thought from me, because that’s all I can handle. I will fritter away hours because I’m incapable of harnessing them for anything useful. The only thing I do well when I’m tired is to dredge up words that I rarely use–a necessity when exhaustion-induced aphasia steals away the ones I’d typically use.

The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry: I am a sucker for book- and book-shop-based stories, and the film’s title naturally caught my interest. Netflix didn’t provide a trailer, so I didn’t entirely know what I was getting into. On the plus side, the movie had some well-portrayed, likeable characters (a book-shop owner living on an out-of-the-way island and a traveling salesperson for a book publisher). But it was also a manipulative tearjerker that left me questioning, at the end, what even is the point of life. I would have skipped the movie if I’d known more of what it was about.

Dune: Part Two : Among the pros are the evocative setting, special effects, riveting faces, and costuming. That is to say, it’s a good-looking film with good-looking actors. Among the cons are poor pacing, bad guys struggling so hard to be menacing that they seem silly instead, and a portrayal of religion that entirely spoils any magic and mysticism that’s in the story. My least favorite thing was the heavy-handed framing of the Fremen as Arabs. Science fiction is all about metaphor. Half the point of reading and/or viewing it is to discover the metaphors for oneself. The other half is enjoying a respite from reality. So, to hang a lantern on the metaphors is both to destroy any intellectual enjoyment one might find in the tale while also turning one’s mind back to real life, where real people fight long and bloody wars over things like oil, which is just depressing. TLDR: I didn’t like the movie. I’m in the minority there, but what else is new?

I’ve always loved disaster films and dystopian films. As a kid, I was fascinated by movies such as Damnation Alley, Earthquake, and Planet of the Apes. In Damnation Alley there were hordes of cockroaches that ate everything, including people, chewing their victims down to bare bone (eek!). In Earthquake, people were trapped in various deadly situations, including a burning skyscraper (classic!). And pretty much everything about Planet of the Apes is awesome, especially the big reveal at the end–the ultimate disaster! As an adult, I’ve added movies such as 2012, Starship Troopers, Independence Day, San Andreas, and Armageddon to my list of movies to watch when the disaster-film mood strikes.

The best disaster films draw out the tension at the beginning. We, the audience, know that danger is brewing, but the main characters don’t know it yet, except perhaps a handful of scientists who, for one reason or another, can’t warn anyone. The characters go about their daily business blissfully unaware, witnessing dire developments but often passing them off as mere inconveniences or simply items of interest. Meanwhile, we the audience are on the edges of our seats with every new sign of impending doom.

There’s so much material available for making disaster movies. Anything can be made scary, even things that exist only in fantasy. But I think that the most effective disaster movies are those that focus on reality-based threats (i.e., earthquakes, nuclear war, asteroids, etc.), because viewers can more easily imagine themselves in the story.

For example, a disaster film about bird flu would hit really close to home. I can imagine exactly how it would go. It would open with a montage. First there would be footage from a few decades ago, when scientists first started speculating about the risk of a bird flu pandemic. Next would come images of articles about die-offs in wild bird populations, followed by pictures of sea lion corpses on a beach (a pivotal moment, because it shows that bird flu has moved into mammals, with devastating results).

Things are moving more rapidly now. We get quick blasts of images and narration about bird flu in cows, people fighting for their right to drink raw milk and screaming over the cost of eggs, and scenes of hazmat crews culling birds at poultry farms around the world.

The visuals now shift to specific people. A teenager in one country has a close call with the virus. A man in another country dies from it. Health officials declare that there’s nothing to be concerned about but quietly ask hospitals to expedite testing of patients who have the flu. To cap off the montage, we get scenes of government leaders making terrible decisions.

We, the audience, would cringe at the last, wondering how anyone could be that stupid. Then we’d remember that real-life leaders make bad decisions all the time. And indeed, some major government blundering would be needed for this movie’s plot to move forward. It’s so much harder to have an all-out disaster if the people in charge are doing things right.

So there you have it: a tense and riveting opening for a disaster film about bird flu. I can hardly imagine anything more terrifying. I’m on the edge of my seat just thinking about it. The script almost writes itself, and I won’t be surprised if you see a full-blown show on the very same theme coming soon to a theater near you.

Marshall’s Page

10/2/2016: I am Marshall. I am in 2nd grade, and I am seven years old. My favorite TV shows are “Odd Squad,” “Nature Cat,” and “Ready Jet Go!” My favorite activity is playing my tablet. My favorite games are “Angry Birds Transformers,” “Singing Monsters,” “Bad Piggies,” and “Pac-Man.” I like to laugh.

10/9/2016: I like Mommy the most in the world. I like Daddy, too. I like TV a lot more than everything else except my tablet. Yesterday Mommy took me to the library. It was very fun. I played with the kitchen toys. I played Pumpkin Tick-Tack-Toe and put together a puzzle. I colored in a pumpkin and I hung it up at the desk.

Livia’s Page

10/9/2016: My name is Livia. I’m 5-and-a-half years old. My favorite shows are “Odd Squad,” “Nature Cat,” and “Power Puff Girls.” I like Barbie movies so much. I have a favorite Barbie movie. It is “Barbie in the Twelve Dancing Princesses.” I have a Barbie movie I didn’t watch. Seriously, I do (my mother said, “What?”). And I like to be happy. My favorite cat is Peeps, because she meows with me and I feel nice with her. And I want to name her for her last name, Peeps Love. My favorite thing to do is play my tablet. And I laugh a lot. I like ladybugs. I like bees. My favorite parents are Mommy and Daddy. I have a brother named Marshall. And I have my very own art class. It’s an art class where you make art and I put checks and exes if I like it or not. I like grasshoppers. And since my mom let me do this, I’m happy. And my mom and me are good friends, even though I fart on her <toot!>. And my favorite daddy is my daddy. I like that he lets me watch his video game. He’s very huggable. He’s very nice. And I just love my whole family. And Marshall is mean to me sometimes. I don’t feel happy when Marshall is being mean to me. My brother and I have walkie-talkies. Daddy bought those. And I feel so happy! I found out how they work and my daddy is very funny. My mom is very nice and I love her.

• I struggle more with language now than I did when I was younger. It’s part of why I blog so much less frequently these days–I’m too tired for battle. But, difficulty in using language is a sign of mental decline, and the only way to stave off mental decline is to go to battle, doing the things that are hard, no matter how tired you are. <sigh> Why does life have to be like this?
• Speaking of mental decline . . . last week, while proofreading something I’d typed weeks before, I found that I’d substituted “becomes” with “because.” I see things like that and wonder if I’m really losing it. I have to remind myself that I’ve always made typing errors involving like-sounding words and that though “becomes” and “because” are a little farther apart in sound than the usual culprits, it’s still the same kind of mistake. Nothing to fret over.
• Now more than ever, it’s imperative that I keep myself busy. I didn’t keep myself busy enough yesterday, and the results weren’t pretty. I’ll do better today. Today I will be busy, busy, busy. And detached. Cool as a cucumber. Unflappable even.