![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
- adhd,
- alexander solzhenitsyn,
- alexandre dumas: adaptations,
- books,
- coronavirus,
- david attenborough,
- dracula: adaptations,
- family,
- frankenstein: adaptations,
- games,
- guillermo del toro,
- kazuhiro soda,
- movies,
- parkrun,
- robert harris: adaptations,
- sherlock holmes: adaptations,
- week in review,
- wheels,
- wicked
Week in review: Week to 7 June
I've been experimenting with my journal entries in the last week or two, trying to find a method or format that I can do consistently even on mornings where I lack the time or the mental energy for a rambling chronological account of more or less everything that happened the previous day. The trouble is, whatever format I start out trying, by the end of the entry it's always back to being rambling and chronological. It's all very well telling myself just to note down the things that I want to remember or that might be useful later, but running through the day chronologically is the best way I know to keep it straight and reduce the risk of forgetting something - and since I'm doing that anyway, why not write everything down? Digital space is cheap, and who knows what will be important later, and anyway I like being able to wrap words around things I've been thinking about, and keep track of what is and isn't working when it comes to things like getting the washing up done in a timely manner, and record fun little moments from the day even if I'm not going to tell anybody else about them later.
I'm pretty much resigned now to the rambling. It seems to be how my brain works, and it's not that I don't enjoy it - I just wish it didn't take so long. (Of course, there's no guarantee that writing less would actually take less time: some of my experiments have reminded me of Pascal's letter in which he famously said, "I have made this letter longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter.")
We had a family get-together for the public holiday, in a park with a large body of water in the middle that I'm not sure what the technical term for it is. (It might be a pond, but I associate that word with smaller bodies of water that fit inside peoples' back yards.) I managed to organise my share of the things that needed to be brought so that it was all packages and bottles that could be carried in a backpack, and rode my bike there and back. At one point, I saw something large and white and oddly-shaped flap up into one of the trees by the water, and when I went over for a closer look it turned out to be a white ibis (with a black neck and head, which had been invisible against the background when I saw it from a distance).
The board game club had another of their long public holiday sessions that start at noon and feature big long games, but I missed the first game to be at the family get-together. After I got there, we played a game of Fury of Dracula. The player who took the role of Dracula led us a merry chase across Europe but we eventually pinned him down in Brussels, by which point he was in a bad way (partly from combat, but mostly from taking crossing-running-water damage to get away from us), and he died in the first round of the final battle, before any of us had laid a finger on him, by trying to bite someone who turned out to be wearing a crucifix.
I had a doctor's appointment this week: a routine thing, not because anything was wrong with me. While I was there, I also got my booster shots for the flu and the covid, one in each arm. This turned out to have an unanticipated side-effect of disrupted sleep for the next few nights, in the form of I'm not comfortable sleeping on my back and prefer sleeping on my side, which becomes challenging with painful spots on both arms.
I don't think I've mentioned in one of these posts that I've started reading Solzhenitsyn: I've had a second-hand copy of The First Circle lurking on my to-read shelf for years, and it's become one of my selections for the Random Book reading challenge. I read a bit this week that described how a group of scientists and technicians had been put to work devising a phone scrambler for Stalin's ministry of defence, and the Minister (who didn't understand the technical challenges) made wildly unrealistic promises to Stalin about when it would be ready, and all the middle managers were either equally ignorant or too afraid to contradict him, so now the people on the project are stuck trying to do a job in a month that would take years to do properly, even if they had up-to-date and well-maintained equipment which of course they don't. A familiar experience for people working on tech projects, I found myself thinking, except for the bit where they'll literally all be shot if the client's unreasonable expectations aren't met.
The local cinema has a programme where one screening per week, on a consistent day at a consistent time, is given over to a film that wouldn't draw enough audience to justify scheduling for a full multi-screening run. Some people get season tickets and come every week, regardless of what's on, which is surely broadening and I admire it although not enough to emulate it. Sometimes it's documentaries - this week I went to see David Attenborough's new documentary Ocean, and last time I went it was The Cats of Gokogu Shrine - and sometimes it's dramas that don't have broad appeal - a while ago, it was Conclave, and next week I'll be back to see the new French version of The Count of Monte Cristo.
Speaking of movies, it feels like this week was a busy one when it came to trailers for things I'll probably want to see: I've seen trailers for the next Benoit Blanc movie, the second half of Wicked, and Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein. The latter had the tagline "Only monsters play god", which is staking out a position in the "'Frankenstein' is not the name of the monster" discourse that I respect.
I finished playing through The Beekeeper's Picnic. There are some options for replayability - sidequests I think I missed and alternate solutions to puzzles to explore - but I've seen the opening scenes enough times now (between various promos and the time something happened to my save file and I had to start over from the beginning) that I'm going to put it aside for a while until I can come at it fresh.
I got to Parkrun only slightly late this week: after the starting signal had been given, but before the tail end of the pack had disappeared around the first bend. It wasn't oversleeping that did it, but my old enemy, waking up early enough that I have time to get distracted after I've gotten ready.
I've had several experiences this week where I was reading someone's description of their experiences with ADHD and thinking that it sounded worryingly familiar. (The first one, and one of the most striking, was about being roped into things, or left out of things, because questions like "Do you want to do this?" have a long mental ping time and by the time the question gets from the ears to the brain and the answer gets from the brain to the lips, it's too late to express a preference.) It got to the point where I started looking up what would be involved in getting formally assessed for ADHD; then I looked at the results, said "In this economy?", and left it as a problem for another time.
I was yesterday years old when I learned that "Womble" is an actual real surname that actual people really have. (Apparently, it's derived from the Yorkshire town of Wombwell.) The context was somebody mentioning a law firm called Womble Bond Dickinson; the relevant founding partner was apparently called B. S. Womble, which is one of the most made-up-sounding real names I've encountered in recent memory. (His full name was "Bunyan Snipes Womble", which sounds like a law firm all by itself.)
I'm pretty much resigned now to the rambling. It seems to be how my brain works, and it's not that I don't enjoy it - I just wish it didn't take so long. (Of course, there's no guarantee that writing less would actually take less time: some of my experiments have reminded me of Pascal's letter in which he famously said, "I have made this letter longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter.")
We had a family get-together for the public holiday, in a park with a large body of water in the middle that I'm not sure what the technical term for it is. (It might be a pond, but I associate that word with smaller bodies of water that fit inside peoples' back yards.) I managed to organise my share of the things that needed to be brought so that it was all packages and bottles that could be carried in a backpack, and rode my bike there and back. At one point, I saw something large and white and oddly-shaped flap up into one of the trees by the water, and when I went over for a closer look it turned out to be a white ibis (with a black neck and head, which had been invisible against the background when I saw it from a distance).
The board game club had another of their long public holiday sessions that start at noon and feature big long games, but I missed the first game to be at the family get-together. After I got there, we played a game of Fury of Dracula. The player who took the role of Dracula led us a merry chase across Europe but we eventually pinned him down in Brussels, by which point he was in a bad way (partly from combat, but mostly from taking crossing-running-water damage to get away from us), and he died in the first round of the final battle, before any of us had laid a finger on him, by trying to bite someone who turned out to be wearing a crucifix.
I had a doctor's appointment this week: a routine thing, not because anything was wrong with me. While I was there, I also got my booster shots for the flu and the covid, one in each arm. This turned out to have an unanticipated side-effect of disrupted sleep for the next few nights, in the form of I'm not comfortable sleeping on my back and prefer sleeping on my side, which becomes challenging with painful spots on both arms.
I don't think I've mentioned in one of these posts that I've started reading Solzhenitsyn: I've had a second-hand copy of The First Circle lurking on my to-read shelf for years, and it's become one of my selections for the Random Book reading challenge. I read a bit this week that described how a group of scientists and technicians had been put to work devising a phone scrambler for Stalin's ministry of defence, and the Minister (who didn't understand the technical challenges) made wildly unrealistic promises to Stalin about when it would be ready, and all the middle managers were either equally ignorant or too afraid to contradict him, so now the people on the project are stuck trying to do a job in a month that would take years to do properly, even if they had up-to-date and well-maintained equipment which of course they don't. A familiar experience for people working on tech projects, I found myself thinking, except for the bit where they'll literally all be shot if the client's unreasonable expectations aren't met.
The local cinema has a programme where one screening per week, on a consistent day at a consistent time, is given over to a film that wouldn't draw enough audience to justify scheduling for a full multi-screening run. Some people get season tickets and come every week, regardless of what's on, which is surely broadening and I admire it although not enough to emulate it. Sometimes it's documentaries - this week I went to see David Attenborough's new documentary Ocean, and last time I went it was The Cats of Gokogu Shrine - and sometimes it's dramas that don't have broad appeal - a while ago, it was Conclave, and next week I'll be back to see the new French version of The Count of Monte Cristo.
Speaking of movies, it feels like this week was a busy one when it came to trailers for things I'll probably want to see: I've seen trailers for the next Benoit Blanc movie, the second half of Wicked, and Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein. The latter had the tagline "Only monsters play god", which is staking out a position in the "'Frankenstein' is not the name of the monster" discourse that I respect.
I finished playing through The Beekeeper's Picnic. There are some options for replayability - sidequests I think I missed and alternate solutions to puzzles to explore - but I've seen the opening scenes enough times now (between various promos and the time something happened to my save file and I had to start over from the beginning) that I'm going to put it aside for a while until I can come at it fresh.
I got to Parkrun only slightly late this week: after the starting signal had been given, but before the tail end of the pack had disappeared around the first bend. It wasn't oversleeping that did it, but my old enemy, waking up early enough that I have time to get distracted after I've gotten ready.
I've had several experiences this week where I was reading someone's description of their experiences with ADHD and thinking that it sounded worryingly familiar. (The first one, and one of the most striking, was about being roped into things, or left out of things, because questions like "Do you want to do this?" have a long mental ping time and by the time the question gets from the ears to the brain and the answer gets from the brain to the lips, it's too late to express a preference.) It got to the point where I started looking up what would be involved in getting formally assessed for ADHD; then I looked at the results, said "In this economy?", and left it as a problem for another time.
I was yesterday years old when I learned that "Womble" is an actual real surname that actual people really have. (Apparently, it's derived from the Yorkshire town of Wombwell.) The context was somebody mentioning a law firm called Womble Bond Dickinson; the relevant founding partner was apparently called B. S. Womble, which is one of the most made-up-sounding real names I've encountered in recent memory. (His full name was "Bunyan Snipes Womble", which sounds like a law firm all by itself.)
no subject
no subject
no subject
http://osm.org/go/euu4AOuX?m
I heard good things about the new French "Monte Cristo", largely as a result of attempting to watch the somewhat impenetrable (to me) Soviet version :-)
My suspicion is that reading descriptions of ADHD is akin to reading about almost *any* ailment (see the famous "housemaid's knee" passage on reading medical encyclopaedias in "Three Men in a Boat") -- since most observable symptoms, especially of mental illness, are experiences that routinely occur to almost everybody some of the time, they are likely to match up to the reader's experience in a disconcerting way. A bit like the potential side-effects of medicines when you read the small print...
no subject