I opened up the wordpress dashboard today to write a post and noticed I had a post pending from June. So, uh… here’s that post so I can get it out of the draft section:

It’s June, so I should probably write something, but it feels like my life has been a whole lot of The Same™ for the past few months (and years), so I’m not sure how much interesting there is to write about.

Well, I guess there are two things.

The first is that we attended a wedding (Lea and David’s) for the first time in something like three years, and it was simultaneously amazing to do something that felt almost normal and terrifying because COVID is still a thing and numbers are going up again at the moment. I guess we’ll know later this week if we got out unscathed.

As far as weddings could have gone though, I think this was the most low-risk it could have been. It was local (so no travel required), they required at-home tests the day of (a few hours before) from all attendees, the venue was largely outdoors, and the indoor portions were in a room where one side was almost entirely open to the outside (with good air circulation).

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The second is that my mom came to visit for a week last month, on her way to DC to see my uncle, who hadn’t visited the US since the pandemic began. Unfortunately, I couldn’t make the trip with her (work obligations and also a bit of fear of travelling, still), but it was amazing to see her again. I think the 2.5 years was the longest I’ve gone without seeing her in real life, although we have been sporadically Facetiming.

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In any case, in terms of December updates, I guess there’s a few things?

In the world of TV, we finished Deep Space Nine and started The Original Series, and I’ve also started watching my way through Community with small interludes into a small SciFi show called Dark Matter and an attempt at a series called Under The Dome, along with finishing a series called Second Chance. Let’s tackle these in a fairly random order?

DS9 as a whole was much, much better than I was expecting. I think, of all the Star Trek series, it has by far the most coherent overall narrative, best character development and growth, and the general feel of realness that none of the other series really have. I think they did just about everything right within the context of the series and, except for a few really bad episodes (why does everyone like “Move Along Home” and “Take Me Out To The Holosuite” so much?!), has outstanding episodes that deal with difficult issues (like war) in depth.

Unfortunately, that’s also a lot of why I think Voyager is still my all-time favorite series? As a whole, I would say I watch TV (and entertainment) to ignore the realities of life and the world at large. There are a few exceptions (Crazy Ex-Girlfriend arguably being one of them, but it’s a show I have no urge to return to at the moment despite my love for it, so maybe that just reinforces the point), but there’s something about being able to jump into Enterprise or TNG or Voyager provides an escapism that DS9 just doesn’t, even though it’s obviously not contemporary.

This leads to maybe why Dark Matter and Under The Dome just didn’t click for me, and maybe some of that is thanks to the depressing state of the world at the moment. Dark Matter is a well-done SciFi series that strikes me a lot like Firefly or BSG (closer to the former than the latter). Under The Dome is a town sealed off from the world where people start fighting amonst themselves and, uh… yeah, too close to home for the pandemic-laden world. I didn’t watch beyond the first few episodes of either series. Maybe I’ll come back to them later.

Not much to say about The Original Series of Star Trek. It’s about as bad as I expected it to be, so far. I guess I can understand how it was groundbreaking at the time, but yeah… in today’s world, it’s sexist and strangely acted and has honestly irritating sound effects. We’ll watch it just because I feel like we have to, but we’ll see how that continues to go.

Second Chance is a decent show. It was apparently billed as “a modern take on Frankenstein” and, uh… I guess you could call it that? It’s really just an investigative-themed show (like White Collar or kiinnndddda like Psych) that has techy elements around it. Not a huge fan of how the series ended, but it was an enjoyable enough watch through.

Community though… is a gem. Its first season was great, its second season is better, and even its special features (with a deadpanning Dan Harmon interviewing cast members) are hilarious. It’s exactly the kind of light-hearted escapism that still tackles serious issues that I need right now in the screwed-up pandemic-laden world. I’m looking forward to bingeing through the remaining seasons.

Speaking of the pandemic-laden world, I feel like that’s all I ever write about anymore, but everything seems like it’s going backward. No one masks up anymore, anywhere, even though there are new and still more contagious variants spreading. Everyone’s living their lives as if the world is normal now, and it’s really, really not. It’s both infuriating and depressing at the same time.

I haven’t flown since February 2020. I’ve eaten in exactly one restaurant in the past three years. I can count the number of non-home indoor places I’ve been maskless in on two hands (in-laws’ house, dentist, hair salon, the one restaurant once, one friend’s house to play with his cat while he was not home, and “Lea/David wedding venue even though that was basically outdoors”). Even my friends who I consider to be careful people have stopped masking when we stop in places to grab takeout. It makes me feel like I’m one of very, very few sane people left in the world who actually consider covid a threat.

Blah.

Anyway, life goes.