Reflections on films, politics, and everything else.

I should state up front that I am a white woman, and compared to many in this country I would be considered privileged. There have certainly been times in my life that I didn’t fully grasp that and said and did things that make me cringe now, wondering how I could have been so unaware, but I never had the power mixed with that cluelessness to affect the lives of so many people in such drastic ways. The U.S. Supreme Court does have that power, and appears to have a majority of clueless wonders that are about to do just that. Depending on what poll you look at, anywhere from half the country to three-quarters support the right of a woman to control what happens to her body (i.e. get an abortion), yet it looks very much like that long-held civil right will be taken away by what, I view, is absolute cluelessness of the world we live in, and with five of those justices being white, it really is impossible to not proclaim it white privilege after hearing their comments...

  It seems like no matter what I search for (sweaters, shoes, kitchen items), I begin feeling like I’m being stalked later on by those products, while looking at other websites. After browsing sweaters on Talbots’ site, I suddenly see the same sweaters appear on the side of a Washington Post article about impeachment. I keep wishing some clever coder could come up with an algorithm to stalk members of the GOP with non-stop videos of “real people” suffering due to these politicians’ inaction and stupidity. My hope is that seeing what has happened to citizens in this country, through no fault of their own, would somehow open the eyes of these politicians, and shame them into doing something to help them. Our country is so utterly broken, and I feel accountability should force these politicians to have to fix what they broke. Of course, I know that is unlikely to happen. Right now Mitch McConnell thinks Biden’s economic recovery plan “missed the mark,” while ...

    Perhaps the upside to a year of a pandemic is that there were less New Year’s resolution articles. Normally there would be tons of tips on how to choose and how best to keep your resolutions. There have been a few, but they are far gentler in their approach. After all, just surviving this year is accomplishment enough. Beating yourself up for not writing every day or losing more weight (or even keeping the weight off) just feels cruel right now.       Maybe these thoughts were what caused me to become so annoyed listening to a recent podcast where a writer talked about how important a particular teacher had been in her life. This is a common story – the teacher who saw in you what you couldn’t see, gave you the necessary tools, and then sent you forth to live your dream life. Mostly, I don’t think it’s true, but I am a pessimist.      For me it’s always the most negative comment or abusive teacher who stays in my mind, not the kind o...

  Even before RBG passed away, I had great worries about Trump stealing yet another election. So, once again, I began researching emigration possibilities. Of course the ludicrousness of doing something like this during a pandemic, when no country I want to live in will let me enter due to the botch up of how our country has handled the virus, somehow did not deter me. Perhaps I needed a distraction to give me some hope for the future. I remembered an American who was arrested for potentially being a spy a few years ago and had multiple legal passports because of family ancestry, which made me wonder if through some miracle I could gain one. I recalled my mother mentioning a Danish connection when I was a teenager, but, being the typical teenager, I had not asked many questions or made copies of the pages she’d received from her adopted mother. With my parents both dead, and me estranged from my family, I wondered if I’d ever be able to find anything out. Sti...

For a good chunk of this presidential race I really wanted Hillary to just go away. As the Democratic establishment began worrying that their choice – Biden – wasn’t going to win, I started receiving countless emails asking me if I thought Hillary should get into the race. Sadly they didn’t give me a box to fully articulate just how much I did not want her to run again. Clicking on ‘No’ just didn’t suffice, and yet I’d voted for her in 2016. It’s that complicated history that still follows her around. Currently there’s both a fictional novel imaging Hillary not marrying Bill Clinton and a four-part documentary that gained quite a bit of air-time earlier this year because of one comment she made about no one in the Senate liking Bernie Sanders. Initially I wasn’t interested in either piece. What more does anyone need to find out about Hillary by now? I’m still not interested in reading the novel, feeling that I’ve wasted too much of my own brain energy over ...

What a difference a week makes, and not in a good way. Everything going on feels like déjà vu. The most important question is: will anything come of the unrest this time, or will we all just quietly go back to our old lives? When Trump became president, I mentioned to my husband that I thought he’d send us into a new civil war, and it looks like that could be happening. I, obviously, wasn’t the only one with that thought; there were plenty in the far left media who were bringing up what a divider on every level this man is, and not just on race. It’s been anxiety-producing living close to downtown and hearing police choppers fly overhead, then seeing the barricades and boarded up windows of shops and restaurants already hurt by the pandemic. Experiencing a militarized police is scary enough right now. The thought of Agent Orange sending in the military to bring about what he considers law and order, even though he had no trouble with white protesters carrying semi-automat...

If COVID-19 is producing the stages of grief for most of us, then there should be a sixth stage by now – aggravation. I certainly don’t support the small, but loud, group of protestors, as I think states and cities have reopened too soon. We’ve already lost 100,000 people and surely won’t have a vaccine any time soon, regardless of what Agent Orange claims. For me it’s just the daily annoyances of what the new reality is that’s beginning to drive me crazy. While many of my fellow citizens are choosing to chuck their masks, I’m still holding firm. But now that it’s feeling like summer in the Midwest, even walking around in a mask is fairly unpleasant during much of the day. Yesterday, on a trip to the pharmacy I went through the drive-thru, and luckily noticed before leaving that there was an error. It seemed to make sense to me at the time to actually go inside, but that, I found out, required not just the mask, which I was already wearing, but also I’d ne...