I have now locked down the prep for one half of one of my classes. Unless I am forgetting something, every concept will be less than 50 years old and almost every example will be from the 21st century. It is this commitment to topicality for which I am known.
Doing this part of the work was fairly easy, owing to the class already being in place and some of the work I’ve already done to set up today’s effort. Easy enough that, maybe I should just go ahead and finish the thing right now.
Naaaaaaah.
OK, fine. You’ve convinced me. Be right back.
[…]
[Some two hours elapse]
I did it. I blame you, and appreciate the nudge, because of which my org comm class’ structural prep is now complete. Now I must simply refine the lectures which I’ll do as we move through the term, staying eight days ahead of the class, if I am lucky.
But that nudge, that guilt-tripping nudge, that rolling-your-eyes glare, has done the hardest thing to do this time of year: build momentum.
Now I must complete the work for two other courses. One of them has a To Do list with seven items (some of them still require some thought and decision-making on my part). But there’s always tomorrow, this weekend, and next week. The other class has one item on the To List. It reads: Everything. Tomorrow, this weekend, next week.
This morning I made the mistake of looking out a window. I was prepared, as I had prepared myself in sliding out of bed, readying myself to meet the day, and going downstairs, to look out of one of the kitchen windows to admire yesterday’s handiwork. Weeding was done. Two hours, much sweat, and still sore hands, but the weeding was done. And so I looked and realized that, in the patch directly below this window, I’d only concentrated on the truly obnoxious stuff. Where I should see a big patch of deep and rich browns and blacks, there are still some offending sprinkles of green undesirables.
Well, Saturday. Maybe Friday. Those two days we’ll only get up to about 87 degrees, if the forecast is anything which can be believed anymore. (Some days are more questionable than others, thanks to rank policy changes that will in no way impact us on a daily basis.) I will go back out there, do the shuffle-bend-and-squat, and pull up some more stuff. Also, I will deploy the weed eater to work around some of the features of the yard. We purchased a battery-powered trimmer last year. The guy said the battery would run about 45 minutes. I figured that, given a few experiments, I could figure out a way to get all of my trimming done in under 45 minutes. And, if not, that’s just a sign to go inside and rest charge up the battery anyway. If there’s one thing we all know about weeds, they are patiently persistent. No second expensive battery needed.
I figured I’d use it twice a year, but you know what? I’ve enjoyed breaking out the trimmer this year. Also, I have found it necessary. It is efficient, it works fast, and it helps.
I will also deploy the hedge trimmer. There’s one shrub in particular that has gotten out of control. I might also need to haul the ladder into the mix for this task. There’s nothing as safe as using electric-powered dual-action shearing blades while leaning well out from a six-foot rung on a ladder.
Guaranteed, doing that will take less time than the set up and tear down.
Trimming hedges is an oddly satisfying chore, perhaps because I’ve never hurt myself on the thing. Bringing something into a desired shape is fun. Removing the cuttings are less so. For may years I have used the tarp-as-drop-cloth technique, where you tried to land most of the branches and leaves on the tarp and then pour them into a yard bag. Earlier this year I tried landing them into an oversized plastic bin. That worked somewhat. The cleanup depends on the type of shrub, and that should absolutely figure into your next shrubbery purchase: How much of a problem is this going to be next year? Species, I’ve got thoughts on all of ’em.
We watched Thunderbolts last night. Did it the old fashioned way, turned out all the lights and peered into a TV screen that doesn’t show blacks very well and wondered why so many movies have dark scenes. (I’m pretty sure it is a budget-saving, drama-heightening concept.) This was a deliberately unbalanced movie. Delightful in places. Halting and evocative of “What Dreams May Come” in other places. All of that fits in with the overarching theme. It suffers, however, in the antagonist area. Any action movie that needs an abstraction as an antagonist is going to have a struggle.
The fifth lowest-grossing MCU film worldwide, after The Marvels (2023), The Incredible Hulk (2008), Captain America: The First Avenger (2011), and Black Widow (2021). These are the only five MCU films to gross under $400 million worldwide.
The web tells me today, because I looked it up, that a sequel is in the works. The Marvels is an overlooked film. (Iman Vellani is brilliant.) Of course, you can’t have much of what follows (this was the 32nd movie in the MCU) without a long bet on the supposedly underperforming Captain America. The movie business is a weird business like that.
Then again, they’re just following the music business, which is even more demanding with its bottom line repercussions. This is not a new realization, of course, but you can be reminded of it with literally any followup album or musician’s story. And, as luck would have it, we watched the first installment of the two-part Billy Joel documentary this evening.
Imagine having a guy under contract that had produced The Piano Man and not being certain, for six more years, that you had a hit maker on your hands. That’s the record business. Seems obvious in retrospect, but the first half of this documentary has been “I do stupid stuff a lot, my childhood, my early career … and finally we all realized I was a star.”
So we saw the first 15 years of the five-album overnight success in part one. We’ll meet Christie Brinkley in part two, I’m sure.
Two years ago we saw Joel’s 101st concert at Madison Square Garden. (She was there, too.) The year prior he announced that he would end that historic run on his 104th show. And so my thought was that this was an important opportunity to see an event, one of the last few remaining. It was a happening that broke out into a pretty great show.
We sat way up high, well off to the side, and had a great time watching him mug for the camera.
Appreciating longevity is the gift of the moment. No one listening to “You May Be Right” and “It’s Still Rock And Roll To Me” in 1980 would have counted on concluding an MSG run 45 years later. (They’d only just discovered nostalgia in 1972, after all.) We’ve all been a part of a different kind of topical commitment, really.
