Bubble Drivers: P

I'm now too lazy to come up with good subtitles.

My mom’s new roommate in the nursing home is being really obnoxious. I try to go over and visit Mom three times a week, which I’ve found best balances me being able to visit her, my various jobs, and this project (although I still call her every day I don’t come in). Because my mom has mostly lost her vision and doesn’t want cataract surgery, I’ve been reading to her from her favorite books daily for the past months. She used to primarily read murder mysteries, sci-fi, and fantasy, and I’ve been going through the Rita Mae Brown/Sneaky Pie Brown mysteries for her. They’re amiable enough although I’ve personally lost a lot of my interest in fiction over the years and am almost entirely reading nonfiction books now, but I suppose reading these to her gives me a little more variety. Anyway, my mom’s roommate has been getting really pissed that I’ve been reading to her and she’s tried to make me shut up the past two days I came in. She even told me, “You are dismissed” yesterday because I guess she just wanted to me to leave. I don’t think I was speaking too loudly. I don’t know whether I even have the strength to, and I can barely hear myself talking over her, insisting to have the television on almost all hours of the day really loudly (and louder than her previous roommate Susan had it). After she got all pissy with me for reading to my mother, I snapped back with, “I’m just as annoyed by all your TV shows about ‘ancient astronaut theorists.’”

I’m still trying to get her out and I’ve just finished filling out the form to apply for a ramp to be constructed, although I was told they might not be able to do it until the spring, which really pisses me off since nobody told me months ago that a ramp would need to be installed and if I’d known that, I could have and would have already done it by now. I still need to provide documentation like copies of bank statements and stuff, but the main thing now holding this up is one of the nurses or doctors at the nursing home is going to have to write a description of her current physical condition and why she needs a ramp and who knows when that’ll happen.

After finishing Robert Putnam’s The Upswing, I decided to start reading Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s abundance. This could be an utter disaster because I know a lot of the people I respect and enjoy reading despise Klein and Vox Media in general, but I wanted to give this a shot mainly because I really admire Thompson’s writings about loneliness. There have certainly been a number of acclaimed nonfiction books over the years that I’ve thought were garbage (especially Freakonomics and Malcolm Gladwell’s stuff, although in the former case, I liked it initially before realizing it was shit in retrospect). But I’m finding myself actually enjoying this to my surprise and maybe I shouldn’t be that surprised because both Klein and Thompson are almost exactly in my age cohort, so they have certainly watched the enshittification of everything just like I have.

I’m gonna try and have the R column done by the end of the week, but it might not be as soon as Thursday since I need to keep up with my other work, I have an interview tomorrow, and I’m also still editing my master driver list right now. I’m going back over the European Touring Car Championship results because I just noticed a few days ago I forgot to enter all the class winners for that series and I’m fixing that right now. Here are all the Ps.