Weeknotes 104

Happy new year! This again.

I weighed myself when I got home and, yes, it was bad and I feel crap. I’m hopeful I can fix this problem as quickly as it appeared if I make a proper effort. Er, starting tomorrow.

As well as opportunities for self-improvement, the new year brings many temptations because it’s such an obvious time to cleanly break a streak.

Before bed last night I seriously entertained the possibility of not doing any stretching — I would be free of this chore! — but chickened out at the last moment when I accepted that freedom from desk-induced muscle pain is good actually. Likewise it would’ve been a good mic drop to just not write any weeknotes today and never say any more about it, but oh look, here I am once more, and for another whole bloody year, presumably.

To milk the final permissible drop of meta-weeknoting: it feels unfair that I have to write weeknotes today despite having churned out some yearnotes only two days ago.

The situation was better (in fact, I now realise, the best it’ll ever be) in 2020 when they were due three days apart. Because 365 and 1 are congruent modulo 7 and neither 2022 nor 2023 are divisible by 4, they’ll be due on consecutive days this year and then, horrifyingly, the same day next year. Unacceptable.

Anyway, I wanted in principle for my 2021 yearnotes to be insightful and contemplative, but because I left the job of writing them until the evening of New Year’s Eve I had to bash them out in a hurry to get it over with and didn’t have time to actually think about anything that had happened. Ideally this December I’ll give myself a chance to collect my thoughts in advance.

I’ll shut up about weeknotes now.

We finished season two of The Witcher. The last couple of episodes were surprisingly violent but pretty enjoyable even though I still don’t really understand who anyone is or why anything is happening. It’s tempting to believe I’m not clever enough to follow this show but I suspect it’s not trying to do anything complicated, it’s just a bit too messy and generic for my brain to latch onto the details. It’s fun enough.

A few films showed up on the streaming services, so we watched them, thus sticking it to the man.

Firstly Don’t Look Up, in which Jennifer Lawrence wears a series of good jumpers while a two-hour-long SNL sketch outstays its welcome around her. Obviously the climate crisis is an important topic but as a satire this film is heavy-handed, only intermittently funny and just sort of dull-witted overall. But a lot of people seem to like it and if it helps bring a serious problem to a wider audience then it’s a successful piece of activism even if I’ll never sit through it again.

(At the risk of being reductive or snobby or whatever, maybe American and British people have legitimately different cultural ideas of what constitutes satire? I don’t have any evidence for that, except thinking “Armando Iannucci would’ve done a much better job of this” all the way through.)

Then Swan Song, a luxury cross between Ex Machina, Black Mirror and a feature-length adaptation of that Douglas Adams anecdote about biscuits. Spoilers: it has a remarkable amount of setup for a twist which never comes, but it’s still enjoyable and coherent and very slick. As usual I was happy to see Awkwafina, and Naomie Harris is good in it too. The lovely Radiohead covers were a nice surprise.

Also ’Twas the Fight Before Christmas, a documentary about a selfish, vindictive man with the voice of Michael Scott and the face of Lee Mack who thinks he can use religion as an excuse to be unpleasant to everyone around him. It was infuriating but well-made and ultimately satisfying.

And Ron’s Gone Wrong, which was fine, and Klaus, which was basically perfect.

It was 30 years ago this week that Richard Dawkins delivered the brilliant lectures which properly ignited my interest in science. I already had tons of curiosity but seeing these on TV as a kid led me to read The Selfish Gene & The Blind Watchmaker which blew my mind and opened my eyes to science’s beautiful explanatory power. I’m simultaneously grateful for this life-changing gift and sad that he’s since become an angry bigot whom I’m embarrassed to even mention.

I’ll be back at work on Tuesday. Per tradition, this feels too soon and I’m not ready for it.

I wish I could predict when Phil was going to read out my weeknotes to Mary so that I could intentionally put something in as a way of tricking him into saying it. “Duh, look at me, I’m Phil”, I’d have him say. Imagine his face! One day. 🎭