Weekly Journal 7.27.26
Reading
My regularly scheduled reading was thrown off by a contact from an old friend, emailing me for the first time in fifteen years to share that he's written a novel. I downloaded the electronic copy to my Kindle and am just a little way into it. It's quite good, with a lot of sass and clever wordplay that reminds me of hanging out with my friend. He plans to self-publish it as soon as he's done with editing, which seems to be never, as he sent me an updated copy 24 hours after sending the first one. I know how that feels.
Watching
I've been unwillingly exposed to The Emoji Movie, nine years after it was released. My son loves it. I hated every second I watched, so much so that I'm about to deliver a needless rant on it.
There can't possibly be anything compelling about the fictional lives and struggles of tiny, pixelated pictograms. We have jumped the shark when it comes to personifying objects in cartoon form. This movie's main character is the "meh" emoji, which would describe how I feel about the plot if it didn't actively upset me. The conflict with "meh" is that he can't stick to his programming by maintaining a straight face, and I guess he eventually learns that it's okay to be different. I didn't watch most of the middle part of the movie. I saw enough to know that his journey of self discovery takes him through a boring cyberworld where he interacts with a slate of other emojis and animated representations of bugs, viruses, spam, and hackers, all of which are introduced with expository dialogue by James Corden's hand character (don't ask). It feels like the filmmakers are forcing their creations down our throats until we say, with gritted teeth, "Haha! How clever! You truly have a sharp take on our modern, smartphone-oriented world."
The runner-up for most egregious scene is when the characters need to play a 3-D version of Candy Crush to get out of a jam sometime in the second act. I'm surprised my kid didn't ask us to download Candy Crush for his iPad after watching that. The worst scene is the resolution of the plot for the main human character, a teenage boy who owns the smartphone on which all the emojis jockey for inclusion in his text messages. He's been trying to decide how to respond to a text from the girl he likes, but when his phone appears to malfunction thanks to the misbehavior of the "meh" emoji, he initiates a factory reset. The device is about to shut down when "meh" transforms himself into a new face that expresses a mixture of emotions all at once, and forces himself into a message from the boy to the girl—who is, by the way, standing ten feet away from the boy. A single character transmitted between their phones is the thing that finally, miraculously gets them to connect, and it's treated as a heartwarming triumph.
Dystopian. Awful.
Cooking
We're in full harvest mode for carrots, green beans, and basil from the garden. Tomatoes are coming soon. Tender ears of corn are forming on their stalks.
There is more basil than I know what to do with. I've already made a bunch of hazelnut pesto and run out of hazelnuts. (Maybe walnut pesto is next.) I used some basil leaves to add flavor to a blueberry simple syrup, and now I have enough blueberry-basil syrup to make 50 gin cocktails.
Doing
About 25 years ago I came within earshot of Cake while they played at a club in Sacramento, but only from the sidewalk because I couldn't get a ticket to the show. I'd brought one of their CDs in hopes that I'd get the booklet autographed. My dad somehow slipped the CD to a bouncer, who passed it to somebody inside the club, who got a few of the band members to sign it.
Last weekend I finally got to actually see Cake in concert. Aside from getting the time mixed up and missing almost half of their set, it was a perfect show. I jumped and squeed like a kid at Christmas when they trotted out "The Distance" for a final encore.
Listening
Cake was playing this other classic as we trudged across the dusty parking lot to the amphitheater.