Tag: Native Americans

Turn the Beat Around

Tuesday morning, came with no warning, of what was to beeeeeeeeeeeeee…

Heh, heh, couldn’t resist riffing on “Monday Monday”; I personally prefer Mondays to Tuesdays, always, quite frankly. Although as far as Mondays go, yesterday wasn’t a bad one. We had our usual flash flood warning/severe weather watch yesterday afternoon; and it did pour for a while, but by the time I got off work and drove home it was all over. Paul was working on a grant last night so i sat in my chair with the cat purring in my lap while I …didn’t really do much of anything. I cleaned the kitchen when I got home, wrote in my journal for a while, and watched some stuff on Youtube before we watched Hulu’s new show about life on an Oklahoma Native American reservation, Reservation Dogs, which was interesting. I wasn’t quite sure about the tone they were going for–it seemed like it was a comedy but perhaps a bit of a dark one? We’ll watch some more–the young Native actors were all appealing, and it’s an America I certainly have never seen before, or know much about (much to my own shame), but it was also nice to see a show about Natives written and produced and starring Natives–something pretty far overdue in American culture, to say the least.

College football looms, with all of its stadium super-spreader potential (sadly), and I am curious to see how this LSU team is going to do this year. Texas and Oklahoma have officially joined the SEC, effective 2025–so we have four years left of the SEC in its current iteration. I understand why the expansions have happened and why they feel they are necessary, but (and with no offense intended whatsoever to any of these schools) but it’s still hard for me to wrap my mind around Arkansas, Missouri, Texas A&M, and South Carolina as SEC schools, let alone this latest addition of Texas and Oklahoma. Who knows what college football is going to look like in 2025? it will be interesting….if I live that long.

But I only have two more days of my work week left after today–yay for the long weekend they gave us–and next week will also be a shorter week. As my birthday is looming on the horizon, I am trying to slowly treat myself to things as little birthday gifts for myself; I scheduled an indulgence for myself this Friday–and I am also planning on getting phô at long last this Friday as well–and I think Friday might just be my Greg does nothing day this weekend. I have errands to run; Vietnamese noodles to get; and of course my indulgence. I may wind up spending the rest of that day just reading and kicking back around the house, saving the writing for the rest of the weekend. I have to get serious work on #shedeservedit at least underway that weekend, hoping to finish during the Bouchercon vacation week I now have (it’s so weird, I have all this time off from work around my birthday, but the birthday itself remains a work day–but taking the day off from work seemed a bit extreme given how much other time off I have this month, and Labor Day is also looming on the horizon) because I had promised to have it finished by the end of the month. It’s definitely do-able, don’t get me wrong–it’s just going to be a lot of work along the way.

Which is fine. Right now it seems intimidating, but every project seems intimidating before you start on it.

I don’t even want to think about how many projects I have in some form of development at the moment. Seriously. If it weren’t for the fact that ADHD medication wires you–which could affect my sleep–I’d seriously consider going on some. There’s another couple of them, in fact, that were sort of in suspended animation for awhile that are also going to be kicking into gear this fall….which could change my planned writing schedule for the rest of the year, so I am going to have to take a long hard look at everything and reconfigure and plan and so forth. Heavy heaving sigh. But this is a good thing, and it means that there will also be lots of writing and so forth to get done next year as well.

Running out of ideas and projects is never going to be an issue for me.

I am hoping to make it to the gym tonight for the first official Leg Day in a long time; I’m not going to overdue it (I do need to be able to walk tomorrow and climb stairs, etc.) but introducing new exercises is never an issue as long as it is done properly, and I think it’ll be easier to squeeze in a Leg Day in the evenings than it is to do upper body; everyone is always doing upper body (which explains their legs, LOL–YES I WILL ALWAYS SHAME PEOPLE WHO SKIP LEG DAY) it seems, which is part of the reason I decided to break the workout in two to begin with. By the end of the year I am hoping to have it to the point where each workout is specific: arms and shoulders; legs; chest and back, and that’s when the real changes to my shape will actually start to develop.

Of course, I could also start eating healthier…..HA HA HA HA. It had to be said, in fairness.

And on that note, I am going to dive headfirst into my Tuesday. Have a great day, Constant Reader, and I will check in with you again tomorrow.

Love is a Catastrophe

Friday morning and I am home from work.

I got sent home yesterday; I started feeling bad on Tuesday afternoon, took a vacation day on Wednesday and got up yesterday morning to go to work. I felt terrible; dehydrated, exhausted, and some stomach issues I’d really rather not explain. I didn’t see how I was going to make it through the entire day, but of course, once I got to work they recognized that some of what I was experiencing could be COVID-19; so I was sent to get tested and then sent home to wait for the results to come back. This morning I am not as exhausted; I slept really well last night, but going up and down the stairs makes my leg muscles ache, and my joints are all achy, so today I am going to continue to try to take in as many fluids as I can–still dehydrated this morning–and rest.

Since I was so tired I decided to just sit in my easy chair yesterday and watch movies–the streaming services to the rescue! I watched the film version of Mary Stewart’s The Moon-spinners on Disney; they adapted it as a starring vehicle for a teenaged Hayley Mills, and thus had to make changes to the plot and story that didn’t really work as well as the original plot, plus having her be a teenager took away one of the main strengths of every Stewart story; the agency of the heroine. She was still pretty capable, but it came across as a watered down version of the kick-ass heroine I remembered from the book. But Crete looked absolutely beautiful.

I then moved on to a rewatch of Cabaret, which holds up really well. It’s a really chilling film, and visually it’s stunning; but the more times I watch the film the more I appreciate Michael York and Joel Grey, and the less impressed I am with Liza. Don’t get me wrong–she’s fantastic, and the musical numbers showcase what a powerful performer she is, but I don’t think she really brings as much depth and sadness to the character as is warranted; but she certainly has star power. I think that Sally is actually a rather sad character, and while Minnelli beautifully captures the vulnerability, the sadness isn’t really there…and I found myself not wondering, at the movie’s end, what happened to her from there on; which isn’t usually a good sign. But she probably didn’t wind up happily married with a brood of children, did she, and who wants to think about that?

From there I moved on to a rewatch of How the West Was Won, one of those sprawling epic pictures from the time when that was what the Hollywood studios churned out to compete with television. Even small parts have stars in it, and I remember watching this movie when I was a kid and being impressed by its sprawl and sweep. I decided to watch it again, partly because of the recent discussion about Gone with the Wind and its problematic depictions of the slave owning South, the Civil War, and its aftermath; so I wanted to rewatch this picture through a modern lens and as an adult. I remembered in the second half of the film there was a scene where a US Army officer, who negotiated with the natives (Indians, of course, in the film) being angry because the railroads kept breaking their promises–which was pretty progressive for the early 1960’s, and to see how that could be viewed through the modern lens. The movie doesn’t really hold up, plot-wise; it’s very cheesy and corny, but there are some good performances–particularly Debbie Reynolds–and Spencer Tracy’s narration is quite excellent. The scene I remembered was there, and plays very well through a modern lens; George Peppard in all his youthful beauty plays the officer. Just the title itself is problematic though; but this, you must remember, was how the white settlement of the western part of the continent was viewed: the west was won by white people. I suppose How the West Was Conquered doesn’t have the same ring, but “won” is essentially the same thing. Anyway, the story hinges on the Prescott family–Karl Malden, Agnes Moorhead, Carroll Baker, and Debbie Reynolds–setting out for the west and encountering the problems of the frontier as they go; mostly white people who prey on those moving west. The parents are drowned when their boat encounters rapids; Carroll Baker has fallen for James Stewart, playing a mountain trapper, and they decide to settle on the land where the parents are buried while Debbie Reynolds keeps going west, winding up in St. Louis, where she becomes an entertainer and eventually winds up in San Francisco. As an older, bankrupt widow she moves to a ranch she owns in Arizona, and invites her nephew (the George Peppard character) and his family to join her there…and so on. I think it was nominated for a lot of Oscars, primarily for its high production values and it was a big hit at the time…but yes, definitely doesn’t hold up.

Paul came home shortly thereafter, and we watched the finale of 13 Reasons Why, and the less said about that the better. The cast is appealing and talented, but the finale was so manipulative emotionally–it does work, by the way, because of the cast; I was teary–as was the entire season that it’s hard not to be angry. Plus there was some serious misinformation included…maybe I will post about it, but it needs its own entry.

And now I am going to go lie back down again because I am not feeling so hot again.

Happy Friday, everyone!