(no subject)

[randomdreams]

I'm still coughing but I no longer sound like I have tuberculosis, so there's that.
Today I got up and drove through a blizzard to get a cracked filling replaced by a crown. My dentist is extremely quiet unless I start talking about cars, and then he lights right up.
I now have a very delicate temporary crown.

Work is the same as it has been. Once my profit sharing bonus is actually deposited in my bank account, in two weeks, I'm going to start actively looking for another job. I love my coworkers. There have been times where I enjoyed my job itself. But I'm really frustrated with my manager. Our division manager just got rid of the other objectionable manager, and it's possible if I waited long enough he'd do the same here.

My old car is going away as soon as I call a donation place, during work hours, with the title in front of me, a concatenation of events that I have not yet managed to coordinate. Tomorrow morning!

I was looking at Obama's book list and seeing a bunch of very interesting-looking books, so: "Why Liberalism Failed" by Patrick Deenan.
I have to start out with some explanation. He feels that there were three major political experiments of the 1800s and 1900's: liberalism, fascism, and socialism. He also feels the latter two definitively failed, and he feels the first one is now failing. So when he says liberalism, think representative democracy with an emphasis on personal freedom.
And, really, I think he has a love/hate relationship with personal freedom. He seems to be very big on tradition and values and thinks that a culture where people can just, well, decide what gender they find attractive or what gender they are, is Way Too Free and the doorway to ruin. I don't feel that he acknowledges that the traditions and values he thinks are so amazing, are arbitrary constructs that he likes, and a lot of the stuff that makes him feel our society is falling apart aren't actually decisions but realizations.
Some of his critique of late-stage capitalism is good, and relevant. But it's hard to dig out when it's so deeply embedded in a rejection of anything other than nostalgia for a time when everyone was a white anglo saxon protestant, or at least everyone worth mentioning.

So, onto something a lot more fun: "the curious incident of the dog in the night time" by mark haddon. (The original is all in lower case too.)
This was somewhat wrenching to read. It's excellent. The conceit of the innocent kid, who in telling a simple story, conveys a vastly more complex story to the reader, is an old one. This has more than a touch of To Kill A Mockingbird. But it's sophisticated and hard-edged, with no hint of sentimentality. I felt just terrible for every person in the entire book and what they went through.

Comments

[ranunculus]

We saw "the curious incident" as a stage play. I thought it was great.

[elusis]

Likewise. It was exceptionally well-done.

[randomdreams]

I can maybe see it being a good play. That's hard to imagine, because so much of it is in his head.

[ranunculus]

They did an amazing job of making you feel like you were in the boy's head. Most of the "scenery" was lighting or projections. Very cleverly put together to show the boundaries that existed in the mind. There was nothing walling him in except for the perception he was walled in.... Or not. They also did a fantastic job of getting the audience to perceive what it was like to panic and freak out within that brain and how much control it took to overcome such an episode. Four of us went, two old, very jaded, critical stagehands (JC and I) Donald and M. All four of us thought it was a great show.

[amaebi]

I'm so very glad that you seem to be solidly getting-better!

Does Deenan define what he means by socialism?

And is failure evaluated against an implicit standard in which the standard guarantees "good results" regardless what humans operating within it do, which seems to be the usual thing?

[randomdreams]

He doesn't particularly. If you like, I could bring the book over. It's interesting, amidst being frustrating.

[amaebi]

I would say Sure, thanks, but it would take me a million years to get to reading it.

Say, I've been wondering-- if I ever succeed in scoring a meeting with Cory Gardner, might you be interested in coming?

[randomdreams]

If you managed that, I would vastly prefer altamira16 went, because she would have far better, more pointed, more relevant questions, and besides the two of you should meet.

[amaebi]

Noted. And if you don't feel like it I understand. But there' no reason you couldn't both go, in the unlikely event I swing it, and I intend to ask others as well. altamira16 said she'd be glad to go YAY!

[malterre]

Good luck with the job search!
And donating an old car can be surprisingly hard!

[randomdreams]

I'm poor at tasks where the project is presented as trivial, and every time I attempt it, another complication requiring more information or more effort shows up. After about four cycles of that, I start losing enthusiasm for the whole project.

[secretagentmoof]

TCIotDitNT's protagonist was very, very familiar, almost certainly somewhere in sperg-to-medium-level-functioning-autism territory. One of the things that struck me the most was what the protag responded to emotionally (and how), and to what/how his friends and family responded - not the same at all; it was nice to see that portrayed.

[randomdreams]

Trying to tell a story about other people, through his conceptual lens, was interesting.

[myka]

I enjoyed that book (the curious incident, not why liberalism failed!)

[zyzyly]

I remember reading "the curious incident..." years ago, and recall how difficult it was to read, for a number of reasons.

[ivy]

Hopefully the temp crown stays put as long as it needs to and is nondramatic. Sympathies on the job search; I hope you find a good one!

Re: liberalism, one of the brain-benders for me in reading the foreign policy book that I just finished is that Soviet Russia flipped/still flips the political spectrum from the way we have it. So their conservatives are their left, in their internal reckoning, and their liberals are on the right.

I am rushing through "Beautiful Country, Burn Again" to try to get it read before 2/1, so that I don't have to put it on hold for a whole month while I read Irish. But I heard the author interviewed on NPR, and essentially, his thesis is that we are in America's third societal revolution, as eptiomized by 2016. You might enjoy it, I'll have a better take in two days.