the ocean

Yesterday I went with my sister's family to the pool and the batting cage. And also to Chili's, but for once this isn't a post about Chili's. (The skillet queso remains my passion.) It was a hot day and nice to be in the water but apparently a lot of people felt that way so there wasn't an empty lounge chair anywhere in sight. And my spray-on sunscreen had some weird reaction with the water and ended up curling up into sticky little balls all over my skin, which seemed less than ideal. I've sort of realized that pools aren't really that much fun as an adult without alcohol, which to be fair can be said about a lot of things.

The batting cage was actually fairly great, despite the creeping realization that I had no idea who else had worn that batting helmet or what might have been going on with their hair. At first I was absolute shit out there, even at the "slow baseball" setting, but I slowly got into the swing of things, pun 100% intended. By the time we left I had successfully socked a few dingers, which made me feel good about myself. My niece had an existential crisis about her future in tee ball, but I think we managed to work through that with promises of Chili's. (Damn, I guess maybe this IS a post about Chili's.)

Today I had a brunch with some friends and am now puttering about the house. Yes, puttering. I'm very concerned about our plants in this heat wave. 

After nearly a decade of refusing to watch Summer House, Ian and I finally broke down and have now completed season one. And, God help me, it's kind of amazing.

My initial resistance was based largely on an aversion to Kyle, who I though was a douchebag and not actually all that attractive. But when he appeared on The Traitors, I realized that he was a douchebag and not that attractive, but also kind of ridiculous and pathetic. So I figured I could live with him. I was also against the Wirkus twins, as in general I find it suspicious for people to resemble one another and moreover, I did sort of feel they looked like the white chicks from White Chicks. That also hasn't changed, but we really needed something light and ridiculous for a summer watch and, well, this checked those boxes.

Like many Bravo shows, Summer House is a meticulous examination of the toxic behavior of attractive straight men and the delusional self-sabotage of the women who surround them. Kyle spends the entire first season telling Amanda (to whom we know is he now married) that he wants to be single and indeed catalogues to her a roster of his (relatively unimpressive) summer conquests, but she doubles down on the relationship. Carl essentially wears a T-shirt that says "I'm not that interested in you, Lauren" and, in response, Lauren decides it is Cristina's fault that things "cooled off" with him and screams at her before getting back in bed with him. Lindsay engages in weekly screaming matches with a man who flees the house to sleep in a bed with five other people and then decides to move in with him. This is all a horrific mirror on society and yet unbelievably watchable.

Cristina herself is an incredibly distinctive character in that, despite being generally in the right about everything in the house, she is still somehow really unlikable. I don't even know why. Maybe its the incredibly lousy job she does of trying to act like a casual, chill girl when she's obviously drowning in insecurities. Maybe it's her truly inartful pot stirring. Or maybe it's just her face. But when everyone turned on her for essentially no reason and she left the house early, all I could think about was how lame her exit speech was. You're burning these bridges and you can't even articulate any of the at least three dozen insults for your fellow cast members that I've come up with in my head? Please.

Anyway, this is happening. Or, rather, it happened in 2017. But we're in it now. Be afraid.

A podcast Ian listens to gave him the idea that we should give a watch to the 2007 Bravo series "Hey Paula," which, according to IMDb, "follows the personal and professional lives of Paula Abdul." (It also gives it a rating of 3.5 stars out of 10.) I was skeptical, but given that it was only seven twenty-two minute episodes, I figured there was little risk involved. Needless to say, it ended up being a rich emotional journey. 

First and foremost, the series makes it appear that Paula is deeply unwell. I don't know her in real life and it would be unfair of me to speculate, but I will note that she says more than once on the show that she doesn't take "recreational" drugs, which seems to me to be an interesting choice of modifier. Regardless, pretty much every episode features Paula saying that she is hungry and/or exhausted while jetting back and forth from, say, being honored as the Las Vegas Ballet's Woman of the Year (note that it is not all of Nevada or even all of ballet involved) and promoting her jewelry collection on QVC while women with questionable accents call in to tell her she inspires them. Invariably, though, Paula decides to forego sleeping to, like, stop at a Starbucks in the dead of night and sign autographs for people who did not request them. A lot of this is very stressful. For me, I mean.

Then there are the professional travails that seem to plague Paula. There is an ugly incident where we learn Paula has designed costumes for a Bratz movie that I am surprised to learn actually came out, but the producers have informed her those "looks" will not be seeing the light of day. (This may be the occasion that causes here to say she is "tired of not being treated like the gift that she is," although it is hard to keep track.) There is another crisis when her QVC jewelry partner fails to hold back product for her to give away to the "Idol kids" (her term) as she had requested, and Paula must go out of pocket for the jewelry (as opposed to just forgetting about it altogether, as I am confident everyone else already had). Also, Paula does a series of loopy TV interviews and is accused by of being drunk by a magazine your aunt Cheryl reads. I guess I had just kind of assumed that was her brand, but apparently she does not care for it.

Oh, and the rental house drama. Paula decides to remodel her house and rents a house to live in while that happens. She then hires a designer to furnish it for her, but never meets or even speaks to that person, instead sending her hairdresser (natch) who tosses out a lot of word salad centered on Paula's "femininity" and calls it a day. Then, once the entire house has been furnished and she's supposed to move in, Paula decides she hates the design (which does admittedly contain an antique birdcage) and screams at the designer on the phone as her hairdresser attempts to recede into the nearest wall. At the end of the day, Paula changes her mind about remodeling.

Did I mention that one episode is just a "clip show" that consists of footage for plotlines they apparently decided weren't interesting enough to include in the other six episodes? Including a surprise party thrown for Paula by a boyfriend we didn't even know she had from the rest of the series? It's all very much worth a look; the perfect televised companion for our nation's gradual descent into madness.

As I'm sure I've mentioned in the past, most years Ian and I make an effort to see all of the best picture nominees before the Oscars. Note that I say "most years," because sometimes there are nominees I know are not going to work for me, a la Avatar: The Way of Water, and I drop any pretensions of running the table. (I get a headache just thinking about the Avatar movies, and not from the 3D, just from the dialogue.) This year, we did attempt the sweep, but were two movies short by the time the ceremony rolled around; blame our incredibly rich social lives. But now we have caught up, and the results are not that impressive!

From the eight we saw in a timely fashion, Nickel Boys was my top choice, though I knew it had absolutely no chance of winning. Conclave looked prestigious as hell but was fairly ridiculous. Dune Two was way too tan and grainy, and The Substance was gross as hell. Emilia Perez we're supposed to pretend never happened now because reasons. Wicked was actually a really good movie and I don't even particularly love the source material, but probably not "serious" enough to win anything. Anora was fine but kind of won by default I think? Anyway, that was then and this is now.

A few weeks ago we finally blocked out the three and a half hours to see The Brutalist. It was really beautiful to look at and I like the score a lot, but good lord was it long and frankly pretty random in places. Also, I'm not sure if I was supposed to hate the main character? I mean, I get not wanting to make artistic compromises, but also maybe you don't want to subject your entire family to grinding poverty for your principles? And I do sort of hate that brutalism seems to be having a moment again. I refuse to accept that giant slabs of concrete are any sort of aesthetic at all.

And last week we saw A Complete Unknown, and wow. They just made a bunch of shit up about Bob Dylan, huh? Like, some of it seemed weird and then I was reading about it online afterwards and the director was just like, oh, it's not really a biopic, and I didn't want to have "fealty" to the facts. OK, then. Be on the lookout for my movie about Queen Elizabeth where she wins a hot dog eating contest and travels across the Pacific Northwest ingesting mushrooms. I mean, it was well acted and an interesting recreation of a period (I think, obviously I was not alive then) but maybe don't have Dylan bone Joan Baez during the Cuban Missile Crisis if they didn't actually meet until like a year after that? 

Whatever, I'm getting cheese fries.

We are dog people. Growing up, my family always had beagles, all of whom were slightly insane. They tended to be incredibly sweet until food showed up, at which point they would rip your throat out for a shot at a Lean Cuisine. They were also not necessarily the smartest, although they could devise elaborate schemes to trick you into walking away from a hot dog for long enough to disappear it. And Ian and I have continued this trend into adulthood with the incomparable Aubrey, who can pull off a novelty dog t-shirt like nobody's business, but will strictly cut off cuddle time at the ten minutes per night she has allocated to it in her brain. 

So we have been looking to add to our beagle mafia, which has turned out to be harder than one might expect. We had to requalify for our rescue organization, which involved an interview and a home visit. We passed with only minor notes about the relative accessibility of our trash cans (fair), but still kept missing out on adoption candidates because we were unable to drop everything and drive to pick them up in other states on a weekday. So when Dolly showed up on the website, Ian agreed to make a trip to Michigan on a Tuesday afternoon, and I only partially suspect that he was motivated by a hope of passing a Hardee's on the way.

Regardless, our lives have been forever changed. She's adorable and very, very sweet and cuddly. She is also, unfortunately, quite vocal, and the advice to "just ignore it so you don't end up rewarding the behavior" gets pretty hard to follow after a good ten minutes or so of rapid fire barking. Also, the first three nights or so she simply would not sleep. She wanted to roam the house endlessly, no doubt to plan a complex, Oceans-style heist. We then got her to sleep, but only by taking turns sleeping next to her on the floor. (I ended up buying a camping mattress specific to this purpose.) But as of late last week, we are successfully back in the bed! She wakes up and demands breakfast at 6:30 every morning, but it is progress. And really, when you've got a face like hers, you can get by with anything. Just ask early-zeros Mischa Barton.

I spent the week traveling for work, and was reminded how kind of awful that is even under the best of circumstances. I started with the first flight out to New York City on Monday morning, as in get up at 3:30 AM and arrive at O'Hare before the Auntie Anne's Pretzels has even opened. I did end up falling asleep over my Stroopwafel, despite my best efforts to work on the trip there. It took me an hour to get from LaGuardia to my office, my hotel was $750 a night, and it was cold and rainy pretty much the entire time I was there. On the plus side, my firm's offices are in Rockefeller Center, which took me back to my days as an unpaid child guide regurgitating facts I'd memorized about art deco at Quincy's architecture museum (RIP). Also, the hotel had some pretty high quality moisturizer on offer, so there's that.

The past three days were then dedicated to Kansas City, where I did in fact eat barbeque. I was there for a work event encouraging the best and brightest young legal minds (not mine, to be clear), which is kind of hard to argue with, although I will admit that I do sometimes find excellence kind of exhausting. I mean, can't we all just sit back and binge old episodes of Castle while housing fun-sized bags of Doritos every now and then? But I kept any such sentiments to myself, even as the Pinor Noir flowed, and mentored as hard as I possibly could. So if these kids don't all end up becoming supreme court justices, that is absolutely not on me.

 In my non-internet life, I occasionally perform. Here's a clip from the show I wrote last April:

Obviously I am the king of all media.

Yesterday we went to Medieval Times with my sister and her kids. Incredibly, I had never been. I did attend a similar equestrian-themed attraction in the Dixie Stampede when I was in high school, but that was somewhat different in that it involved relitigating the Civil War. (The North did win the night we were there, which was a great relief to a good 85% of us.) 

This was a well-oiled machine from beginning to end. They had three shows back-to-back, such that people were leaving the show before us as we arrived and arriving for the show after us as we were leaving. They got us seated in a quick and orderly fashion and missed no opportunity to try to sell us something. Honestly, the frozen head of Walt Disney would admire their enterprise.

For those keeping score, we were seated in the Green section, which (spoiler alert) ended up winning the afternoon's contests. The Red knight did a bit of a heel turn but was ultimately defeated, unlike in real life. The King and Queen were not married to one another but parts of different factions that had entered into an alliance of some kind, insofar as I understood it. There were some Sid Meier's Civilization vibes to it all, to be honest.

The food was better than expected, though eating a chicken with my bare hands (lack of silverware is part of their shtick) did not sit especially well. This was not bougieness, though -- I was just fine with drinking the "dragon's blood soup" directly from the bowl. I was slightly scandalized to be allocated only two Diet Pepsis for the duration of the performance, however.

Most importantly, the kids had a great time. I don't think they're going to change their career goals to include vassaldom, but I'm a firm believer that Olden Times are a key component of any grade school curriculum.

Ian has been traveling this past week, which has left me with sole custody of the dog. This has caused me to realize that I am perhaps not the best and naturally thinking of the needs of others, although I do wish to stress that the dog is alive and fine. But I was late on doggie dinnertime more than once and did not have the most supportive reaction to the bathroom surprise I found on the dining room rug. (Luckily, it is a washable rug, so we can throw it in the washer and never speak of it again.) Also, I had to give her the bi-monthly shot that Ian usually handles and nearly gave myself an aneurism instead. Plus she keeps looking at me like I'm an idiot, which I am. Nothing like the judgment of an 11-year-old rescue.

I also hosted my niece overnight on Friday. I think my performance there was better. I gamely ordered Domino's pizza for her despite my views of their politics and similarities to cardboard, and agreed to watch Moana 2 for the second time even though the songs don't slap nearly as hard as in the first movie. I also laid awake half the night worrying that she was going to get scared and need me, which did not actually accomplish anything, but certainly felt like some sort of contribution. Oh, and I helped her make a shoebox diorama for St. Patrick's Day, which I take as vindication of my many shoe purchases as socially useful.

So yeah, I'm exhausted from all of my vital and selfless labors. I should probably buy myself something nice.