sunvalleylaw
Yep.
Let’s say the movie, “Don’t Look Up” was not super helpful to my psyche.
Mental health check-in
- Thread starter Flamencology
- Start date
Brian Krashpad
T1N2bM0
I've been avoiding watching it for that very reason.
We finally got to visit both my folks (in NC, I'm in FL) and my in-laws (in ATL) over the Christmas/New Year holidays. I'd had to cancel planned trips to my folks place twice previously because of the damn pandemic (I have an idiot sister whose family refuses to get vaxxed, except for her husband whose work forced him to). We last saw the inlaws over Thanksgiving, for a holiday on Cape San Blas in the Panhandle, the one we had usually done in summer, but called off for a couple years, due first to a hurricane having damaged the area, and then a second year due to the pandemic. Went back up to ATL for mother-in-law's 83rd birthday over MLK weekend, so the inlaws have now been well-visited, I will try to get up to NC to visit my folks again this Spring.
Fortunately, I've worked from home since 2013 so it's pretty easy for me to essentially self-quarantine and keep my exposure to a minimum. (Between having had a lot of lymph nodes removed via cancer surgery years ago, and some of the drugs I'm still on, to combat osteoradionecrosis, that are immunosuppressant, I'm at greater risk, and being almost 64 doesn't help.) Missus works in an office, but one with very little foot traffic so she's pretty safe, and they all mask.
My kids, though, I worry about. Both work in hospitals. My daughter is an invasive cardiovascular technologist, and they get emergency heart patients who come in unvaxxed with no symptoms, with no time to test them and/or get into full PPE, so she keeps getting exposed by these fools. She hasn't seen her grandparents literally in years, because she won't endanger them after having been exposed to these idiot patients, which has happened multiple times right before a planned visit. My son is a tech in a trauma ward, but they don't get emergency patients coming in off the street, so he's a bit safer, at least. Still, a hospital is not a place I'd prefer they work right now.
Physical health-wise I'm pretty OK, but have had swallowing issues recur (from multiple neck/throat surgeries, and radiation damage). I'm supposed to be going into hospital for visits to work on that, but have been so flooded with work I haven't had time to (the drive to the hospital "in town" is about 45 minutes one way, so even if the visit is just an hour, that pretty much shoots half a work day), plus I don't want to be anywhere near a damn hospital for at least a few more weeks.
Work wise, over the last quarter of 2021 I had FOUR appeals pending in four different appellate courts (Tallahassee, Lakeland, West Palm, and Miami) and am still pretty stressed out from dealing with all that shite all at once. The Miami one is over (abandoned at the last minute by my client), the Lakeland one almost is (BUT there's a new (5th) companion appeal to that'un, that will stretch out over the rest of 2022), the West Palm is done, and I'm trying to get the initial brief finalized this week for the Tallahassee one, but that firm is the biggest bunch of fuckups with which I've ever had to deal (and besides, the appeal is both procedurally and substantively ridiculously problematic) so it won't be until the fuckups get the fecking thing filed (it's due the 31st) before I'll get at least a momentary respite.
And don't get me started on politics, I can't even go there. I cannot believe what this country's become and how traitors and insurrectionists have been normalized.
I'ma have a damn beer now. Did I mention we're about to have major renovations done to Casa Krashpad? That fucking too.
I haven't wanted to subject myself to that.
Tig
Fucktangular
I watched some of it, but it failed to grab me. It tried too hard.
Per recommendations, I viewed the last 5 minutes. That was fun.
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sunvalleylaw
Yep.
Glad to hear that your health is relatively ok. And mojo for all the BS. Cold winter’s night so I had a lightly poured Jameson’s hot toddy with some lemon and honey tonight. Just one, and lightly poured, and played my guitars a lot tonight. So that felt good.
sunvalleylaw
Yep.
May as well not. I really like Jennifer Lawrence, but this movie was not enlightening nor helpful to us in this thread.
Peen Simmons
Let’s Get Obtuse!
Regarding Don’t Look Up and mental health, I recommend that you keep it in perspective. It’s a darkly comic farce, not a parable. The butt of the joke—like those of The Big Short and Vice—is human greed, venality, and stupidity. It’s nearly medieval in its glee in depicting how awful people are and how amusing that awfulness is. It’s not really a message film so much as it is a poke in the eye coupled with a momento mori. It’s a wide lens look at Poe’s imp of the perverse.
If you all want something a little less “big neon arrow pointing at our ridiculousness and helplessness,” maybe give Camus’ The Plague a whirl. It also addresses similar ideas about human vanity and the meaninglessness of apocalypses great and small, but it’s a work a bit more oriented to instilling hope.
I stumbled across the notion of our world being transapocalyptic and it rang true. The general notion is that a bunch of bad things are intersecting NOW and not in the future.
https://alexsteffen.substack.com/p/the-transapocalyptic-now
“First of all, failure does not mean the End of the World. One of the problems of believing in binary climate futures — we either seize the chance to take climate actions that will supposedly restore continuity, or we plunge headlong into extinction — is that it facilitates well-off people ignoring the realities of poor people by turning their very real and particular catastrophes into mere b-roll examples of End of Everything. It takes actual people’s challenges and makes them only an illustration of the horrible fate stealing over us all. They can’t be helped, and we are powerless in the face of the collapse — which is privileged crap. Indeed, it takes a lot of unquestioned privilege to feast oneself on the luxury of despair, while turning others’ lives into anecdotes of doom to be told at dinner parties.
Even if we continue to really frack up climate and ecological action in the short run, massive action is now inevitable. Our great-grandkids are not going to be hunting alligators through Arctic swamps. It is not too late for us, or for them, and the odds are running more and more strongly against the very worst outcomes we once imagined. The scope of possible impacts is vast, and the scale of risk is difficult to comprehend, but there is a very, very, very long distance between the kinds of disasters we know we’ve already set in motion, and humanity being scoured from the face of the Earth.”
I recently had to take a work trip which means I saw some cable news. (I normally don’t watch it.). And on all sides people are being fed a trivial and terrifying story of WAKE UP SHEEPLE. Nothing helpful or illuminating. Just a fear and smugness slurry. I’d reckon abandoning that would be more helpful than avoiding Don’t Look Up.
I think the comet in the film is less climate change than our own inevitable individual mortality. And if the film has a message beyond “everybody is silly with dire consequences” it might be “Um, life is short and shit and maybe don’t waste it on bullshit dreamed up by the morons in power who don’t know what they’re doing.” It’s a film which argues that small pleasures, human connection, and making out in the parking lot behind the Gas N Sip is the way to make peace with the comet, after all.
If you all want something a little less “big neon arrow pointing at our ridiculousness and helplessness,” maybe give Camus’ The Plague a whirl. It also addresses similar ideas about human vanity and the meaninglessness of apocalypses great and small, but it’s a work a bit more oriented to instilling hope.
I stumbled across the notion of our world being transapocalyptic and it rang true. The general notion is that a bunch of bad things are intersecting NOW and not in the future.
https://alexsteffen.substack.com/p/the-transapocalyptic-now
“First of all, failure does not mean the End of the World. One of the problems of believing in binary climate futures — we either seize the chance to take climate actions that will supposedly restore continuity, or we plunge headlong into extinction — is that it facilitates well-off people ignoring the realities of poor people by turning their very real and particular catastrophes into mere b-roll examples of End of Everything. It takes actual people’s challenges and makes them only an illustration of the horrible fate stealing over us all. They can’t be helped, and we are powerless in the face of the collapse — which is privileged crap. Indeed, it takes a lot of unquestioned privilege to feast oneself on the luxury of despair, while turning others’ lives into anecdotes of doom to be told at dinner parties.
Even if we continue to really frack up climate and ecological action in the short run, massive action is now inevitable. Our great-grandkids are not going to be hunting alligators through Arctic swamps. It is not too late for us, or for them, and the odds are running more and more strongly against the very worst outcomes we once imagined. The scope of possible impacts is vast, and the scale of risk is difficult to comprehend, but there is a very, very, very long distance between the kinds of disasters we know we’ve already set in motion, and humanity being scoured from the face of the Earth.”
I recently had to take a work trip which means I saw some cable news. (I normally don’t watch it.). And on all sides people are being fed a trivial and terrifying story of WAKE UP SHEEPLE. Nothing helpful or illuminating. Just a fear and smugness slurry. I’d reckon abandoning that would be more helpful than avoiding Don’t Look Up.
I think the comet in the film is less climate change than our own inevitable individual mortality. And if the film has a message beyond “everybody is silly with dire consequences” it might be “Um, life is short and shit and maybe don’t waste it on bullshit dreamed up by the morons in power who don’t know what they’re doing.” It’s a film which argues that small pleasures, human connection, and making out in the parking lot behind the Gas N Sip is the way to make peace with the comet, after all.
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sunvalleylaw
Yep.
Earnest/somewhat literal boy struggles with all this. Particularly that first paragraph, and often I miss the joke. But duly noted.
Hoping to find something of a wryness that is somewhere between full Earnestness and “Linus” sincerity and full fatalism/nihilism/denethor. Or maybe there is some 3D manner of considering that rather than a 2D linear scale.
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Flamencology
You don't deserve koa.
15 months of chemo is really taking its toll physically, and I guess I feel like shit. And I’m getting tired of it.
Brian Krashpad
T1N2bM0
Flamencology
You don't deserve koa.
Thanks. I hope you’re (relatively) well.
frunobulax
Gak Pernah Cukup!
sunvalleylaw
Yep.
Mojo to you.
Flamencology
You don't deserve koa.
Things are stable. No point in keeping it up, otherwise. When the tumour begins to grow again, we’ll have to reassess.
Mojo flamencology.
I've been getting up really early and getting Lola a nice long peaceful walk in the park before anyone is around this week.
It's been really nice and already made me feel better going into the day so I'm planning on keeping it up.
Crisp winter morning v wild wet blustery one tomorrow is threatening to be will be a litmus test!
I've been getting up really early and getting Lola a nice long peaceful walk in the park before anyone is around this week.
It's been really nice and already made me feel better going into the day so I'm planning on keeping it up.
Crisp winter morning v wild wet blustery one tomorrow is threatening to be will be a litmus test!
sunvalleylaw
Yep.
My 98 year old mother had a heart attack a month ago, and I'm basically living with her now in the house that I grew up in. She's OK, BTW.
I always thought I had a relatively happy childhood. Certainly not perfect, but who's is? But after living in the house for a while and walking around the neighborhood every day, I get a sense of melancholy that I didn't expect. I get a distinct feeling that I was unhappy and more so alienated as a child than what I remember.
This also means that I have to pretty much isolate myself as much as possible. No restaurants, no bars, no concerts, no jamming.
I always thought I had a relatively happy childhood. Certainly not perfect, but who's is? But after living in the house for a while and walking around the neighborhood every day, I get a sense of melancholy that I didn't expect. I get a distinct feeling that I was unhappy and more so alienated as a child than what I remember.
This also means that I have to pretty much isolate myself as much as possible. No restaurants, no bars, no concerts, no jamming.
Not to project but it might just be the testing circumstances you're back there in.
As an adult I'm much more aware of how impoverished the scheme I grew up in was especially now I work in a largely middle class environment.
Same with school. My friends and I generally had a great time in school but when we look back at old photos it was a complete shitheap and a really violent place a lot of the time.
I still had a great childhood and time at school despite all of that. If you have good memories, it's maybe just being back that's triggered these thoughts.
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