Monday musings on a cold winter day

-
Hi there, Constant Reader. It’s 4:21 p.m. on a chilly Monday afternoon in the Sunshine State. As I write this, it’s 66 degrees Fahrenheit under partly sunny skies. Though it’s not as cold as it was earlier today, the temperature is low enough for it to be a hot-chocolate-with-warm donuts day, at least for me! I’ve lived in (or visited) several cities (Bogota, New York City, and Seville) where it gets awfully cold, and chilly weather tends to make me want to bundle up in bed with a good book.

I was going to write a movie review earlier today, but my eyeglasses broke; I’m nearsighted, and although I can see most of what’s on the big television screen, my eyes get awfully tired without my glasses. Worse, if I want to read the “news ticker” at the bottom of the screen when perusing CNN or the local news channels, I have to mosey up close to the TV to see the lettering. My spectacles are irreparably damaged and I need new ones, so my mission of the day has been to try and call Visionworks to set up an appointment with an optometrist.

Well, I was able to talk to someone on the we’ll-sell-you-the-glasses side of Visionworks, but the optometrists’ office that is listed in the make-an-appointment-for-an-eye-exam department doesn’t pick up the phone. Very frustrating! And it’s not like I called during their lunch hour. I’ve tried to get a hold of the optometrist three times, and…no one picks up the phone!  

 In the meantime, I’ve decided to not spend too much time thinking about my half-sister. I have made my peace with the notion that there’s no way to repair the relationship. She is a narcissist, always has been and always will be. She’s never going to admit she has any mental health issues, much less seek help. Like many narcissists, she’ll continue to play the role of being a “good person” while backstabbing those that she professes to love.

Now, for the record, I tried what I call “peaceful coexistence” with her while Mom was alive, and I even hoped she’d mellow out as she grew older. After Mom died in 2015, though, I realized that reconciling with a capricious and vindictive person is a fool’s errand, so I have broken off all relations with her.

After all, if she’s never going to change, then it’s better to part ways and move on without her. I need peace of mind – and I think I’ve earned it.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How many movies have been made based on Stephen King's 'It'?

-
Image
How many movies have been made based on Stephen King's It ? It  has been adapted twice for filmed audio-visual media. The first filmed version of  It was a TV limited series; the second was a duology of theatrically-released movies.  The first adaptation of Stephen King’s 1986 doorstop of a novel was a 1990 adaptation made as a two-part ABC miniseries for television. Among the cast members: Tim Reid, Harry Anderson, Annette O’Toole, John Ritter, and Richard Thomas. The miniseries also featured Tim Curry as the evil Pennywise the Clown. Adapted for television by director Tommy Lee Wallace and Lawrence D. Cohen (who also adapted King’s  Carrie  for director Brian De Palma in 1976),  It  was okay but a watered-down take on the scary novel about a group of friends who must face off against a monstrous entity known as “It” twice. Once as kids in 1960, then again as adults in 1990. (Like  11,22.63,  the TV version of It avoids the year ...
Read more

Talking About 'Band of Brothers' (HBO Miniseries): Why were there no black soldiers in the Band of Brothers TV miniseries?

-
Image
Band of Brothers,  sadly, reflects one of the sad realities of American society in the 1940s - racial segregation in the armed forces. Although there  were  a few all-Negro (as blacks were referred to in those days) units in the U.S. Army and the Army Air Forces that served with distinction in the European Theater of Operations, most black servicemen were assigned to non-combat units in Supply of Services and other support forces. Most of these soldiers were truck drivers, anti-aircraft gunners, barrage balloon handlers, engineers, stevedores, clerks, cooks, corpsmen, and so on. Only late in the war (fall of 1944 and winter/spring 1945) did large numbers of black infantrymen see combat against German forces, and even then they served in all-black units commanded by white officers. © 2001 Home Box Office, Dreamworks SKG, and Play-Tone Pictures The 101st Airborne Division was an all-American unit made up of individuals from many different groups - Easy Company’...
Read more

'The Boy in Striped Pajamas' movie review

-
Image
(C) 2008 Miramax, Heyday Films, BBC Films Writer-director Mark Herman’s 2008 film “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” is a faithful but (necessarily) condensed adaptation of John Boyne’s 2007 novel about a German boy, Bruno (Asa Butterfield), who befriends Shmuel (Jack Scanlon), an eight-year-old inmate in a Nazi concentration camp during World War II.  Like Boyne’s novel, the film is not a definitive history of the Holocaust. It’s not as graphic or historically accurate as Steven Spielberg’s 1993 classic “Schindler’s List,” nor was it intended to be. (Indeed, Herman says in the behind-the-scenes featurette “Friendship Beyond the Fence” that he doesn’t consider “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” to be a “Holocaust film.”) Set in the early 1940s at the height of Nazi Germany’s power, the film follows Bruno on a journey that takes him and his family from Berlin to German-occupied Poland. His father Ralf (David Thewlis) is a newly-promoted SS officer with a new posting: commandant...
Read more