Category — Uncategorized

Last week, we were driving home from a work trip and realized we were on a road close to the ocean. We pulled off at the first town I recognized by name and parked at the end of the boardwalk in the public lot, intending to have a quick walk near the water before heading home.

As we were walking to the beach, we noticed a group of young adults leaning against a nearby car applying zombie makeup. What fun! They had decided to mark Halloween a few weeks early.

We got up to the boardwalk and noticed a shambling family, all splattered with fake blood. Interesting. So it seems like more people had the idea to celebrate Halloween in early October.

We took a few steps through an open-air indoor mall to continue on the boardwalk and emerged into a crowd of over 1,000 people, ALL DRESSED AS ZOMBIES. There were multiple zombie Santas, four zombie Marilyn Monroes, and a whole crew of zombie construction workers. There were also four random people holding signs and shouting that everyone was going to hell, plus a steampunk man riding a penny farthing with a bubble machine on the back. People were staring at us and our lack of costumes.

We had inadvertently stumbled into a yearly zombie walk, and it was just through strange luck that we showed up on the early end of things and were able to grab parking. By the time we left, we had to inch our way through the traffic out of town.

A very strange outing.

On the topic of sudden restaurant closures, I remembered a Facebook post I bookmarked a few weeks ago because I found it touching.

The restaurant posted about a celebration of life held in the space for a restaurant regular. I never thought about being a regular from the opposite side: that restaurant employees (or bookstores or salons or wherever you are a regular) miss us as much as we miss them. That they not only notice the regulars and greet them when they come in, but they mourn them when they’re gone. Community flows both ways.

And I never thought about that before.

We were recently saying goodbye to our friends after a gathering at their home, and we were talking about a popular vegan falafel place. We all loved it, and we decided that we’d get dinner there together (thank you, outdoor seating!) when they were back from work travel in a few weeks.

In the meantime, said popular restaurant closed.

No warning. One day open. The next day, they posted an announcement that they were closed forever. No explanation of what happened.

It was a complete bummer. There are other falafel restaurants, and we can make falafel at home. But this was the only vegan option in the area, so we knew for certain there was no cross-contamination from meat options on the menu.

Sometimes a closure needs to happen suddenly, of course. But in this case, I have a sense that they didn’t wake up that morning and think, “Everything is going so well. Let’s close this very busy restaurant that only opened a few years ago.” They likely knew, so it’s a bummer that they didn’t let the rest of us know so we could go for one final falafel.

My dad sent me an article about a robotic tool used in IVF called Aura. It can choose the best sperm and aid fertilization. It automates 205 steps, from retrieval to freezing.

Sounds amazing, right?

Though there is this: “None of the studies — which include a first-of-its-kind trial in 2023 by Overture and a 2024 study by Conceivable — has demonstrated that AI-enabled machines are markedly outperforming conventional IVF, though researchers have found that the software can excel at key parts of the process, such as picking healthy sperm.”

So not better. Just different.

I stopped reading the article at some point because it made me sad. On one hand, if the technology gets better and it’s able to shave time and money off the process, I would probably opt to use it. Cycles are brutal. Who wants to add time or cost to the situation?

And at the same time, I felt so removed from the process when I was lying on the table. Surgery is not natural, so it follows that we may have fewer emotional reservations about robotic surgery. Creating a child is natural, so it follows that we may have many feelings around needing assistance. It was one thing to have another human (or many other humans) involved. It’s another to have a robot — something completely unnatural — being a team member. It really turns it into a clinical process, more than it is with humans involved.

I didn’t know how to feel about it. Was it a loss? A gain? Something that is both a loss and a gain? It needs its own word.

I mentioned a few months ago that I was rewatching The Good Place, but I had a very different reaction to the ending this time around. If you haven’t watched the show and don’t want the ending ruined, click away now.

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Okay, you were warned. I had to speed through the final three episodes because the show was leaving Netflix, so I watched them back to back one night while I was home alone.

The first time I saw it, I felt weepy, but I was watching it at the beginning of the pandemic with all of the unknowns in front of me. Like Chidi and Eleanor, I just wanted time with the people I loved.

In fact, that’s exactly how they describe paradise: “This is what we’ve been looking for since the day we met. Time. Yep. That’s what the good place really is. Not even a place, really. It’s just having enough time with the people you love.”

Once you feel you’ve had enough time, you can walk through the final door and become a particle in the universe. So first, Jason decides to leave. He is leaving someone (not a girl) behind, but she doesn’t process emotions in the same way as a human, so when he leaves, she just returns to still being with him because she is experiencing every moment of time, all at once. Tahani becomes an architect (so is still accessible), and Michael becomes human (so not as accessible but still out there).

And then Chidi tells Eleanor he is ready to walk through the door. She is not, and she tries to get him to stay, but then decides to support him because she says it is selfish to try to get him to stay because she isn’t ready. And I didn’t feel awwwwwwww about it this time around. I actually felt angry at Chidi.

Look at that quote above that he said. The good place is about having enough time with the people you love. So he knew the point of the good place, but he didn’t give Eleanor enough time. He gave her a limited amount of time while he took enough time. She wasn’t full, but he took the plate away because he was done.

And I was angry because when they entered into a relationship, they entered into a social contract. To be there for the other person for as long as possible. It will never be enough, and time together with another person is out of our control. But in this case, it was entirely within Chidi’s control. And Chidi decided to leave early, even though Eleanor hadn’t reached enough. And she positioned it as “selfish” to ask him to stick to that social contract, when it is anything but to ask someone to do what they said they would do.

Clearly, I’m getting worked up just thinking about it again!

But the point is that I was enormously disappointed in Chidi for not staying and doing the hard work of getting to an endpoint together. Eleanor is presented at peace, albeit sad, with his decision, and there was only so much Michael Schur could cover in 37 minutes. So I’m realistic in that it was probably the better storytelling decision. But it made the series end on such a sad note for me this time around.

It will be interesting to see if my feelings change if I watch it a third time in the future.