1. Bee Mug!
My first morning drinking coffee out of my beautiful new bee and ginkos mug by Sandy Miller. (I did, however, already eat raisin bran out of it last night---a 14 ouncer is ample for many edibles.)
I'm happy about a couple other things too.
2. Reprieve
I got a reprieve from job hunting.
Whew.
I'd been afraid the job coach I saw yesterday would be all Type-A Go-Go-Go-Getter, let's spiff you up and get you plugged into a fantastic full-time professional career.
Instead Leah, the job coach, said, "There's no money, until July 1, in any of the re-tooling programs you'll qualify for [like "Platinum", for old people!], so fill out these forms when you get home, and then you have time to think, and we can talk between now and the new fiscal year about what you might want to do..."
And then we talked for the rest of the time about Stalin!
It made me so happy.
Leah has an accent--I'd guessed Eastern European. Talking about movies, I said the only good one I've seen lately is Death of Stalin, and she practically leapt out of her chair,
"Isn't that GREAT?! And it's all true..."
(Russia banned it.)
Death of Stalin is great--it's by Armando Iannucci, the director who did VEEP, which I love, and In the Loop.
It's billed as a comedy, but it's comic the way Trump is comic--disturbingly. In fact, it's a perfect movie for the times, which is why I suppose Iannucci made it* (even though it was made in 2016, before the election):
it's about the buffoonery of paranoid narcissistic dictatorial rule.
"The humor makes the scenes of the arbitrary knock-on-the-door-in-the-middle-of-the-night all the more terrifying," I said to Leah.
"That happened to my grandfather," Leah said.
And she spent the rest of the time telling me––with my encouragement––the story of how her 7-month pregnant grandmother survived after Stalin's police arrested her husband as an "Enemy of the People":
She sold whatever she could, took her 4 children to the train station, and got tickets to as far away as she could––which turned out to be Siberia. By a miracle of luck (beshert, Leah said), a man she'd never met helped the family get false papers.
Leah's grandfather, meanwhile, was sent to a gulag and did not survive two years.
So. Not to trivialize terror––Stalin stories are not happy––but I told Leah her story helped me by putting job hunting in perspective:
comparatively, it's nothing.
Very unusual job coach tactic... weirdly suited to me.
*Ah--yes--here, that IS why Iannucci, made it, via Variety:
3. DOLL CLOTHES
Also happy making, I bought a downloadable PDF pattern for clothes (skirt, dress, pants, & shorts) for dolls the size of the Orphan Reds. $7.79 here.
I could have found equivalent patterns free online, but I was happy to support the work of Sonia Singh of Tasmania, and her Tree Change Dolls (Tumblr and on Etsy)---she buys used fashion dolls and re-paints and restyles them into realistic little girls.
My first morning drinking coffee out of my beautiful new bee and ginkos mug by Sandy Miller. (I did, however, already eat raisin bran out of it last night---a 14 ouncer is ample for many edibles.)
I'm happy about a couple other things too.
2. Reprieve
I got a reprieve from job hunting.
Whew.
I'd been afraid the job coach I saw yesterday would be all Type-A Go-Go-Go-Getter, let's spiff you up and get you plugged into a fantastic full-time professional career.
Instead Leah, the job coach, said, "There's no money, until July 1, in any of the re-tooling programs you'll qualify for [like "Platinum", for old people!], so fill out these forms when you get home, and then you have time to think, and we can talk between now and the new fiscal year about what you might want to do..."
And then we talked for the rest of the time about Stalin!
It made me so happy.
Leah has an accent--I'd guessed Eastern European. Talking about movies, I said the only good one I've seen lately is Death of Stalin, and she practically leapt out of her chair,
"Isn't that GREAT?! And it's all true..."
(Russia banned it.)
Death of Stalin is great--it's by Armando Iannucci, the director who did VEEP, which I love, and In the Loop.
It's billed as a comedy, but it's comic the way Trump is comic--disturbingly. In fact, it's a perfect movie for the times, which is why I suppose Iannucci made it* (even though it was made in 2016, before the election):
it's about the buffoonery of paranoid narcissistic dictatorial rule.
"The humor makes the scenes of the arbitrary knock-on-the-door-in-the-middle-of-the-night all the more terrifying," I said to Leah.
"That happened to my grandfather," Leah said.
And she spent the rest of the time telling me––with my encouragement––the story of how her 7-month pregnant grandmother survived after Stalin's police arrested her husband as an "Enemy of the People":
She sold whatever she could, took her 4 children to the train station, and got tickets to as far away as she could––which turned out to be Siberia. By a miracle of luck (beshert, Leah said), a man she'd never met helped the family get false papers.
Leah's grandfather, meanwhile, was sent to a gulag and did not survive two years.
So. Not to trivialize terror––Stalin stories are not happy––but I told Leah her story helped me by putting job hunting in perspective:
comparatively, it's nothing.
Very unusual job coach tactic... weirdly suited to me.
*Ah--yes--here, that IS why Iannucci, made it, via Variety:
“I had a kind of inner feeling that something strange was happening in democracy anyway,” he says. “We think that because we have democracy, we are perfect and it is permanent, and it’s not. Strange things have been happening all across the world with authority figures, nationalist movements, right-wing movements, populist movements, electorates deciding to become unpredictable. So actually that is the reason I wanted to make the film.”
3. DOLL CLOTHES
Also happy making, I bought a downloadable PDF pattern for clothes (skirt, dress, pants, & shorts) for dolls the size of the Orphan Reds. $7.79 here.
I could have found equivalent patterns free online, but I was happy to support the work of Sonia Singh of Tasmania, and her Tree Change Dolls (Tumblr and on Etsy)---she buys used fashion dolls and re-paints and restyles them into realistic little girls.
Hurray for Sonia and her Tree Change dolls!
ReplyDeleteCROW: Hurray!!!
ReplyDelete