A sampling of grievances
I have to break up with my mattress.
It pains me to say it, but after about 24 nights on my mattress, I've realized it just isn't working out for me with it. The first few days that my shoulders hurt, I attributed it to having bad shoulders. You see, I am the type of person who used to have egregious shoulder problems.
In the past, I dislocated my shoulder doing activities as mundane brushing my teeth, taking off a sweater, eating ice cream, and sleeping.
Waking up with shoulder pain is not something I am terribly unfamiliar with. It is, as they say, "old hat" (fascinating history behind that phrase which is much more vulgar than you would expect). And still, waking up with these pains I couldn't help but wonder... is my new Direct-to-Consumer mattress that was delivered to me in a small(ish) box at the root of all these problems?
After a few hours of mid-night researching (another hint that your mattress isn't ideal is that you can't stay asleep), I discovered that this mattress is notoriously firm.
I was warned about it being a hot mattress.
It being a firm mattress? No one told me.
Clearly, this was a user error. The mattress has good reviews (the best, by some metrics), so I am not blaming the mattress for these problems.
No, this is a Sam problem, and by extension a Leen, and Eliot problem. When Sam doesn't sleep well, I wake up grumpy, and no one wants to be around a grumpy Sam. This is another clue that the mattress isn't working as intended. I won't call myself a morning person, but I will call myself a relatively cheerful waker, and the past few days, I have been anything but.
I have reached out to customer service, and Cameron told me that due to COVID, they're processing returns at like 4-6 weeks (about couch delivery time). He can send me a new one but then I'll be trapped with two mattresses until they can come to pick up the other one.
I suggested we stack the new one on top of the old one but Leen did not like this idea. Apparently, it would make the bed "too tall."
So we're at an impasse.
All I know is that I slept on the couch for about two hours this morning.
Pictured: Mattress in question at move in. We have since added pillows and sheets, neither of which make it any more sleepable.
In other news, Leen and I decided after two weeks of staring at the large box in our living room, it was time to build what was inside. Last night, we cracked it open and promptly realized that we were no longer in a world where men from Kerala put our furniture together.
The moral to the story is that what was supposed to be a tv stand with a shelf for our console/ DVD player (lol) and two doors eventually became something a little less a blueprint replica.
We snapped some dowels off in the wrong places making the second shelf unusable. The doors seemed unnecessary; just one more thing to babyproof. Additionally, it was very hot and our air conditioner routinely trips the fuse for the whole front of the house and we don't have a light fixture in the living room. We called it quits when the table worked well enough to store things on.
Not pictured: Extra shelf, doors, or a back.
We've nearly ensured that removing the shelf didn't cause any structural weakness, and eventually, we will buy a tv. Turns out, TVs, like couches, were severely impacted by COVID supply chain issues. Maybe we can have one in a few weeks.
In the meantime, it acts as a good storage space for these boxes my parents brought me and a handy spot to keep all the John Grisham novels I plan to leave in the little libraries around S Minneapolis.
Did you know that they won't let you buy a house in America without a job? All this apartment living has got us on the house hunt pretty hard. But it's not going great.
We've grown accustomed to not having neighbors. Or more specifically, we've grown accustomed to having neighbors you can't hear. The walls in Qatar were, I guess, thicker.
This obviously cuts both ways.
I am sure it is not ideal for anyone to be awoken by an upset baby at 4:30 or 5 am (see above for details about grumpy Sam). Our neighbors get their revenge by leaving their laundry in the washer for days, stomping about on their clearly non-carpeted floors, and telling us a party is going to be a short luncheon when it's actually an afternoon rager.
But because of the recession, lenders won't let me buy a house.
Used to be, if you had money and job history, that was good enough. Now though, you need a job and an income.
They don't care about the money in the past. They only care about the money in the future.
GIVE ME A HOUSE YOU COWARDS.
Sure, I don't have a job (still waiting on that principal to get back to me...) but, I am always just one step away from having a job.
This hasn't stopped us from looking at houses. We take walks daily and I stop and point at houses and say: That one looks nice. Or: Get a look at that shithole. Sometimes, we even convince realtors to take us in them! (thanks Clark!).
I am pretty torn about the whole thing at the moment. Despite COVID going the way, it's going, I do not get the vibe that schools are going to make the right decisions around these parts. I just think they're going to try to open. There are certainly a lot of reasons why officials think this is necessary. Also, I think there's a large part of it that stems from the fact that parents are not that pumped about home-school for another semester.
Is education really where I want to be right now? That remains to be seen.
Granted, all of this is moot.
Me turning down school at the moment is a bit like not getting a date to the dance and then saying: Fuck your dance. Dances are for losers. I wasn't going to go anyway.
When I get an offer (note the use of when!), then we can talk about where my head is at. Until then: fuck your dance.
All of this is a long way of saying: I guess we'll be stuck in this apartment with Stompy Mcwetlaundryson until I am gainfully employed. Until then... I’ll just keep looking and pointing.
This one is nice. And I could afford a nice chunk of the down payment. Come on. Help me move out.
I'm going to get you out of here with three pieces of information I read or consumed in the last few weeks, and I hope you find any of it a fraction as cool as I did.
But first:
Look how happy he is.
This dude loves being outside.
“ There were the several times that he found himself hopelessly lost in his own caves for hours and had to leave blasting wire on the walls, shaped like arrows, to avoid retracing his own steps as he searched for a way out. And then there was the time in Granger Cave that he dove into a sump—a water-filled passage—carrying an oxygen tank in one arm, got tangled up in his dive line, lost his weight belt, cracked his head against the cave ceiling”
A few years back, my brother, father, and I explored our roots in the Upper Peninsula. Though my 23andMe doesn't report how good of a coal miner I would have been, based on my times in caves around the world, we can assume I wouldn't have lasted long.
When I came across this story (sent in by my friend Andrew), I got to thinking about how much dying in a cave would be a terrible way to go out. Buried alive ranks pretty high in my "worst ways to die" list (right after "falling to the bottom of the ocean when all the water disappears because the ocean is scary").
Suffering injury hundreds of feet below ground, left to suffer alone and eventually expire, while the world spins on above without anyone really taking any note of your passing is not on my vision board of going out outcomes.
This story is about a man in Minnesota named Ackerman who has spent millions securing land access rights to mines around Minnesota, and then, exploring the mines. Sometimes he finds fossils, other times he finds freshwater sources.
Mostly he is just into exploration. As he puts it, "You can't protect what you don't know exists."
“Federici has seen 9,000 young people, close to a third of them from Romania. Tracking his patients across the decades, he has found that 25 percent require round-the-clock care, another 55 percent have “significant” challenges that can be managed with adult-support services, and about 20 percent are able to live independently.”
I do not have much to add to this story other than I thought it was interesting as I was reading it on my couch this morning at 4 am. It's a long-read about the situation of the thousands of Romanian children left in government-controlled orphanages in the 80s and 90s.
The main story is told through the eyes of one such orphan, now living in Denver managing a fast-food chain, and trying to make his way in the world.
The story doesn't make a direct link, though it hints at pretty effectively that you ought to consider this story through the lens of what is happening to children at the border, trapped in cages and left to fend for themselves.
If you're unsure about how we should be treating children, regardless of where they are from, read this story. Specifically read the parts about abandonment, coping with stress, understanding affection, and developing life skills. Then ask yourself if you think what's going on is a net positive or net negative for the world?
An aside: I went to Romania once. It was New Years' Eve, and on the way there, we saw a train on fire. When we arrived at the Hotel Arizona, there were men shooting shotguns into the air to celebrate. We tried to crash a wedding but the Romanians were not too keen on that idea. I dislocated my shoulder taking off my sweater that night.
We ate meat in the square the next morning and then left.
For a different look at Romania, read here: Romanian Orphans
“His tic of saying “huzzah” at the beginning or end of any thought starts out sounding like a catchphrase. But Hoult’s so good at those huzzahs. He can turn them into questions or declarations or threats at will, and what could so easily be a totally obnoxious running joke instead becomes something like a perfect distillation of Peter’s character.”
After that downer, let's stay in the east and talk about television.
I know that it can be hard to stay up to date with everything so sometimes it's a better option to just watch re-runs, or The Floor is Lava.
I spent considerable time watching Amazon's ZeroZeroZero but mostly felt like it was an unnecessary time suck that was interesting but not... worthwhile.
This is not a recommendation for that show.
This is a recommendation for Hulu's show "The Great*".
* An occasional true story.
If you're into sometimes true stories about Catherine the Great of Russia, namely how she comes to power, then look no further than this show.
It is a vulgar show, a lot like The Favorite was a vulgar film, but a lot of the comedy sits in that sweet spot of "Oh wow, they did that!"
Nicholas Hoult plays Czar of Russia, Peter, and is easily the highlight of the show. This reviewer suggests that the show runs a little long and I guess it's hard to argue with that, but it also met that requirement of OH NO! It's over? Now what?
Watch season 1, so we can talk about the creation of the Moscow mule and the pros and cons of having a pet bear heading into season 2.
Not sure? Read a review here. The Great is great
Enjoy your weekend.
All the best,
Sam
