Ken came by but an hour later than usual, and didn't bring any food so after getting my check and settling in for our BS session I got up and cut up vegetables, thawed some beef, etc and made myself a bowl of beef noodles and ate that.
I got a bunch of mail too, a thing from Temple Emanu-El detailing my contributions for 2004 (a fair amount, too, since those two plaques had been $750 each), a bank statement, and appeals for money from NPR and "The Democrats" which went into the trash.
I raved to Ken how glad I was to see it dry outside when I got up yesterday, and was able to send things off, most particularly that big oscilloscope.
Ken took off around 1, and I'd eaten so that's good, and I just relaxed and eventually went to bed, telling myself I could sleep all I want.
The end result is I woke up at noon, then went back to bed until about 2:30. It's still raining out there.
Thinking about things in the news (the University Of Hawaii will no longer use "affirmative action" which in the past was used to keep "haoles" out of things, now the lack of it will be used to keep "haoles" out of things even more restrictively no doubt) I reflected a bit and realized I'm kind of like these folks: https://www.seattletimes.com/entertainment/books/the-forsaken-betrayed-by-two-countries-during-stalins-great-terror/
An excerpt:
“The Forsaken” tells the unknown story of the thousands of Americans who left the United States to start over in the Soviet Union. It is a wrenching and at times appalling tale of shattered dreams, betrayal, the cruel logic of realpolitik and breathtaking naiveté.
In 1931, the USSR was in the midst of the First Five-Year Plan, Stalin’s audacious attempt to industrialize the country practically overnight. Many Americans migrated to the Soviet Union out of an ideological commitment to socialism; others for more prosaic reasons. Regardless, most were swept away by an euphoric rush — they were to be the builders of a future, more perfect society. Some were so overcome with excitement, they threw their American passports overboard on the sea crossing.
At first it seemed to most that they had been right to leave. The new arrivals were given jobs and housing and accepted by their new homeland. They set up schools, started newspapers and even organized a baseball league with teams like the Gorky City Autoworkers."
Of course I didn't move anywhere in my early 20s but it's pretty obvious I should have been preparing myself to leave the US. Learning another language and French would have been a good bet, since Israel was really not on the horizon for me in my early 20s.
It's hard to do the right things though when everyone's telling you the wrong things are the right things. Like the college scam. College isn't a scam in most countries but it really is in the US. Even buying a house is a scam given our wildly gyrating economy, designed to boom and crash so the rich can rake off their take.
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