There are 24 Hours in a Day

• Brush and floss your teeth in the morning and the evening
• Wash your face and apply age-relevant creams twice daily
• Make your bed
• Drink half your body weight in ounces of water
• Track and fulfill your ideal macros
• Walk 10,000 steps
• Lift weights to support your cardio
• Meditate and find mental calmness (practice gratitude)
• Get fresh air and vitamin D
• Learn or study something new
• Hold a meaningful career
• Read a book
• Have a hobby
• Plan for your future
• Touch grass
• Shop local
• Engage with your community
• Cultivate relationships
• Keep a tidy home
• Limit screen time
• Get 8 hours of sleep
• Stick to a routine

Simple little list of best practices for you all. 

Just Watch It

Rotten Tomatoes, MetaCritic, IMDb, Reddit, coworkers, friends, baristas, randos in your Instagram Explore page. It's easy to analyze something death before you've even experienced it and I think it's skewing our enjoyment levels. 

Don't get me wrong, a quick glance at a review site to see if it's a total bomb may be worthwhile; but reading multiple articles that dissect the plot, rate the costuming, and point out personal hangups, is dangerous. What if they misinterpreted the plot? What if they're an expert in 18th century lower-class English textiles and the "horrendous error" they're calling out is something the layman would never notice? Then your view of this movie has been skewed by someone else's eyes.

I recently watched All of Us Strangers (2 years after its release). I knew vaguely that it was a love story, but genuinely nothing else. As the credits rolled, I blubbered for a solid 10 minutes, dried my eyes and sat for another 10 minutes thinking about the final few scenes. I won't post any spoilers but there was one scene which I felt was up for interpretation. I took to Reddit for some answers and what I came across was vehement declarations of love and hate for that scene: "it ruined the movie for me and made everything that came before it unimportant." Or, "that scene so perfectly encapsulated his journey; it was a perfect ending." 

I clicked out of there pretty quickly and decided my opinion was all that mattered in this moment. This movie is about the human condition, and its story (I believe) is strengthened by the individual lenses of the unique viewers. Perhaps the Reddit folks were looking to engage in discussion rather than declarative statements, but the responses were not answering the call. I'd love to hear people's opinions on a few moments, but I don't want someone declaring the movie good or bad because of how they viewed a specific scene.  

Additionally recommended viewing material: My Dinner with Andre. Two distant friends have an extended conversation on life's idiosyncrasies, from romance, to art, to technology, both share and point/counterpoint each other's observations. No man is right or wrong as it's only through our individual experiences that we have an opinion at all. 

It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World (Pt. 1)

Progress is forward movement for the betterment of society; generally intended to alleviate work, stress, and worry. In 2025, technology has become the measure of progress and I'm here to say that we have lost the forest for the trees.

I went to see the doctor the other day. I filled out my forms online, in advance, like a good little patient... and then again in-office with paper and a pen. At one time a peak annoyance, this now expected inconvenience pales in comparison to what came at the end of my appointment:

The doctor sees me, tells me how to fix what ails me, and walks me out to the check-out counter. There are two lovely human women sitting in front of my face, working on computers. One of them looks up at me and says, "Ellen will check you out." But instead of gesturing to the woman next to her, she points to an iPad on a stand, attached to the check out desk. I turn in confusion to see a woman's face spring into view on the iPad. She asks for my date of birth. I looked up at the human women in front of me unsure of what I was experiencing. She assured me: "Ellen is a real person, not AI, you just talk to her and she'll get you checked out." 

What in tarnation is happening to me right now? The only action needing to be performed right now is for me to hand over my credit card, pay the $75 deductible, and be on my way. Instead, "Ellen" is asking me to scan the QR code taped to the iPad, enter my credit card number on the (secure) website that pops up, and confirm my identity with a 2-factor authentication link that requires my facial recognition and the creation of a temporary PIN "conveniently emailed to the account on file with my doctor's office. I'm fairly certain I was in a mild state of shock throughout this process. It took 8 minutes and 24 seconds to complete this journey when Ellen then tells me, "you can pick your receipt up from the printer on the checkout desk." That's right, the receipt is generated in person, the humans activated the iPad for me, the QR code was in-office physically taped to the iPad, and my credit card I were in office. What the hell just happened?

You'd think that was where this nightmare ended, but nope, there was one more jump scare waiting for me: one of the eleven buttons I was prompted to press throughout this process included a tip button! A tip button! Amidst this horror, they had the gaul to ask me for an additional 15%, 20% or 25% for this torture. What kind of masochistic bullshit is this?! At this point, I was most certainly in shock and in need of a different type of doctor all together. 

Ladies and gentlemen, I have never been so confused and so mad, simultaneously. The two human women in front of my face continued working on their computers like this was as normal as a morning cup of coffee, yet here I was feeling like I had just been Punked because there is no way in the world that what I just experienced was real! 

Tell me how this moved society forward? Tell me what problem this solved? Tell me how this helps the customer? How it helps the doctor's office? Tell me the reason this process was 'invented'. I'm willing to bet it has something to do with releasing liability from various parties and harvesting my customer data. 

Get off my lawn.

I Wonder...

...what the budget line for nightgowns looked like on The Golden Girls? 

iconic

 

Musings on the Modern Novel

I am a reader. Not a voracious one, but I am a reader of maybe ten novels a year. I tend to alternate cycles between podcasts and books to whatever balance my schedule allows. I'm currently on the reading cycle and boy do I have some thoughts. 

I just finished two books: The Sun Also Rises, by Earnest Hemingway, and The Women, by Kristin Hannah. Perhaps two more disparate books there were not. Maybe that's what brought me here today to exercise my thoughts. 

The Sun Also Rises was my first foray into Hemingway. All I knew of him was Paris, The Lost Generation, and masculinity; I was going in near blind to his actual writing style. What I discovered on his pages was emotion, vulnerability (even in a characters inability to be vulnerable), consideration, fear, love, worry, self-preservation, exploration, comfort, and some version of friendship. The story was real, even when the characters were being fake. The story was honest, even when the characters were not, and as much was said between the lines as in them.  I was with Jake on all his travels and I believed in all his decisions and actions. 

The Women was my third Kristin Hannah novel. I enjoyed The Nightingale, The Four Winds was ok, I loathed The Women. The Women is billed as the untold story of the women serving in Vietnam who did so much for our country but who got no credit, respect, or status upon return home after their tours, and who are still, in 2025, not often discussed or featured in Vietnam War stories. I don't know too much about the war - pretty much what film and TV has shown me - so I thought this would be a great place to jump in.

Wow. This book was awful. It was a romance novel disguised as a real novel. Hannah spent 3 pages describing the emotions her main character felt when a man touched the small of her back, and one measly paragraph on the eight hours of triage medical aid the character provided after a mass casualty event at one of the wars bloodiest bases. 

This whole book felt like Hannah read some Wikipedia pages and turned it into a book. Nothing was explored in depth, nothing felt like it had real stakes, nothing felt earned. Every problem this character had was solved in the following chapter and then a new one started up that was solved in the chapter after that. 

For this book to be celebrated as a feminist account of the strength of women in the Vietnam War is bollocks. The main character in this book didn't make a single decision of her own - every fulcrum point decision in this woman's life was made by a man (except the very last one to move to Montana). 

In just 250ish pages, Hemingway took me to Paris and Spain in the 1920s and showed me the mood, the tension, the sensibilities, the culture, the weather and the people of the locales he visited. In 480+ pages, Hannah merely told me some headline going-ons of the Vietnam War and its fallout, but managed to smother me with relentless description of 20 year old romance.

I'll be sticking to the classics for a little bit...or maybe hoping back over to Podcast land.