Have Another Drink

From the archives: Halifax Beverage, May 2016

I got Apple TV free for a year with the iPad Bruce got me for Christmas. Watching some of the shows, it's hard not to notice all the booze. 

The overrated "Morning Show", the under-appreciated "For all Mankind" and the slow-to-build but ultimately satisfying "Fosse/Verdon" all use alcohol consumption as a prop, a plot device, a character note and a mise-en-scene.

In "For All Mankind", which is set in an imagined past where Russia gets to the moon first and women become part of the space program 'way sooner than they did in real life, people drink so much they should have their children taken away. In one scene, the lone astronaut on the moon gets some bad news and downs a 40 ounce bottle of Chivas Regal "Leaving Las Vegas"-style, except he's alone and he's on the moon.  

Because this is fiction, there are no consequences arising from all this alcohol consumption. Everyone is trim and has lovely skin. No one gets drunk unless the plot requires they get into a fight or say something they wouldn't say sober. Hangovers, if they happen at all, are dispelled with a shot of Alka Seltzer.

People in these shows drink in celebration, in sorrow or just constantly, all while sustaining on-point conversations, demanding careers and high-powered jobs. Only Bob Fosse dies for his dissipation, because that's how he really did die.

I'm not quite sure what to make of this. When Jennifer Aniston has a wine glass in her hand in every scene where she's not at work, when the astronauts stop drinking four finger shots of iceless whiskey only when they are in space (and sometimes not even then), when Gwen and Bob drink and smoke enough between them to shorten the lives of a small town, I have to wonder what the show creators are up to. 

"For All Mankind" takes so much care with the details of its fictional world: the clothes, home decor, cars, hairstyles, even eyeglasses and tableware, not to mention the moon -- I have to wonder why, in the midst of all this attention to creating an authentic alternative version of reality, someone decided unrealistic drinking was vital to the show. 

I don't have an answer for this. But I think I need a drink.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

Before: Guest bathroom

  

Before: ensuite bathroom

Purged

In 1864 Robert Browning wrote a poem in the voice of a character from a Shakespeare play and 115 years after that, I handed in this image for an assignment in my Victorian Poetry class. I kept this in storage until yesterday. Then I took a picture of it and threw it away.

It's a time honoured retirement tradition to surrender to landfill or the recycle bin the stuff you were too brain-damaged by work to get rid of before. 

Since I retired, I have purged the contents of the "office" on the second floor, the contents of the condo corporate files older than seven years and, most recently, the contents of the crawl space over our kitchen.

I have bent over files for hours, lifted heavy boxes, emptied binders of dusty corporate records, filled half a dozen garbage bags and hit my head on the low ceiling of the crawl space just enough times to make me really, really angry. 

In the crawl space, among the paint tins and Christmas decorations was a collapsed, dirty old artist's portfolio I've been dragging around since at least 1980. 

Normally, I am an inveterate thrower-outer. In 1983, I disposed of every essay I wrote in undergrad and grad school. In 1994, I sent everything from law school down the garbage chute. 

The portfolio was where I kept the few things I did not throw away, mainly pieces of artwork I had drawn for art classes. But I hadn't looked in the portfolio since I put it in the crawl space the day we moved in.

The years have not been kind to the contents. Acids in the paper and glue, and solvents in the pigments ruined many of the pieces. Unkinder than oxidization was my realization of how awful many of the pieces were. Already grumpy about my banged head and sore back, I had to confront that what I had once considered to be my best work was pretty bad. 

'Way back in 1979, I sat in my prof's office to discuss the grade she'd given me on my assignment (the one in the picture above). She was an English prof, not an art teacher, so she didn't note the many errors in the execution of the image. She did ask me about my interest in art, and I told her going to art school was my other choice for my post secondary education. She said, "you made the right decision." I believe she meant I was a very good English student, and not a crappy artist. 

But, she would have been right.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen  

Eight years ago I predicted
the fate of this tree. I was off 
by about seven years.

Six Saturdays and a Sunday

The quote from George Satayana "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it" is itself sometimes misremembered as "Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it." This placard from the Scottish National Portrait Gallery seems on point ... 

It's strange to start a new year, and my role as person whose time is entirely her own, with the world closer to ending its most recent version of confident bourgeois civilization.

The events of my life pale in comparison to what some people are going through right now. 

But, that is always true. You never have to look too far on planet Earth to find someone having a worse day than you.

Closer to home, then, this past week, I have

• assessed the damage arising from an ill-considered upgrade to the new Apple operating system Catalina (Pro Tip: do a back up first or you might be the one who loses five years of e-mail)
• after some harrowing episodes, helped Bruce talk his way through the implications of moving his dad to "the second floor" at New Horizons Tower where Ken will get the help he needs 
• bit the bullet and ordered up about 60K worth of bathroom renovations
• fought off the last lingering shreds of a flu bug that I think I picked up on the 21st and then shared with Bruce's dad - precipitating the harrowing events mentioned above.   

The best thing about being retired is that all of the above would have happened anyway, but I would have had to go to work, too.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

The Future

The march of the fifty-storey towers: 
the third tower at Dundas and Jarvis is just about done. 
Also almost done is the foundation for the next fifty storey tower 
under construction just east of these three.

Over the holidays, one of the readers of this blog asked me, more than once, what I would blog about now that my richest source of material has dried up. 

I'll think about that next week. Right now, I have one last work-place-based story.

Among the last conversations I had at the ministry was with one of the youngsters who looked aghast at me when I mentioned I'd been thinking about climate change since 1984.

He came to my office to ask me pretty good questions about how to stay in the fight, stay positive and cling to hope. He told me his friends had an ongoing earnest discussion about whether they should have children, knowing that their kids would not have as good a standard of living as they themselves enjoy.

I thought, what a weird way to describe the problem. 

Let's be really clear, here. We (those of us in the Americas, Europe, large parts of Asia and even Africa) already enjoy a higher standard of living than we know what to do with.

We throw away a third of our food, have more stuff than we need, outlive our quality of life and bring about immeasurable harm to other Earthlings by our ravening of the planet so our kids can have a better life than us.

It also irritates me when people ask how they're going to explain all this to their grandkids. Do people need to wait two generations before they try to put into words mistakes they are making now?

While Australia burns, Venice floods, and the leader of the free world murders foreigners in order to turn the media away from his serial crimes in progress, we could simply embrace the fact that the good life is killing us. 

Rather than fretting about how we might not be able to make things better, we could just settle in on finding a few ways every day -- in how we shop, what we eat, and what kinds of leaders we elect -- to stop making things worse.

Thanks for reading.

Have a great week!

Karen