First Cup of Coffee - March 14, 2019

On brand today, I go from talking about how much I loved The Umbrella Academy to the concept of sacrifice, spiritual growth and character transformation. 

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Good morning everyone. This is Jeffy Kennedy here with my first cup of coffee. Today is Thursday, March 14th, and it's snowing it's still snowing. Snowing for the rest of our lives. At least it's not so blustery today. Um with the dangerously high winds yesterday. Apparently it was called a bomb cyclone. I don't know if there've always been these names for weather and people are dragging them out, or if it's uh you know, like the media coming up with things like snow copocalypse and snowmegiddon and anything to make it sound sexier. But they made it seem like it was a meteorological thing. They said a bomb cyclone happens when the barometric pressure drops by 24 uh millibars, at least 24 millibars in the space of 24 hours. And apparently ours all over the Rocky Mountains and the Midwest uh dropped by 33 millibars. So the winds were high. And it yeah, it was a we'd gotten torrential rain on Tuesday evening, and all of the rain barrels were full and overflowing, tons of rain, and then by about nine o'clock it turned to snow. So the next day was all snow and ice and high winds. So now today it is no longer windy, which is a relief, nice and calm, but we've got several inches of snow on the ground, and it's still coming down pretty wet and heavy. Uh a spring-feeling snow. I guess it's a pretty massive storm. It's all the way from the border of Mexico up to South Dakota. Places in Wyoming are closed, Haiti and Nebraska's closed, Denver International Airport cancelled a whole bunch of flights. So I guess good on us that we're just staying here at home. Well, David hasn't been going out to drive, but I don't know that he'd get many rides anyway. So today is another day. We'll see how that goes. I am noticing I'm covered in cat hair. Jackson had a little uh problem this morning with his uh I'm trying to decide how explicit to be. He had um a dingle ball, as it was called, and it was a little bit lodged inside him too, so I had to help him with that, and he wasn't very happy with me. I think it was a little painful and also undignified. So got it handled, but I'm noticing now that he left a coating of fur all over me. He really is such a gentle cat, even when he's annoyed and fighting me and biting my arm, he doesn't ever hurt me. He doesn't ever actually bite down or actually claw. It helps to have a smart cat who knows that you're trying to help him, even if it is terribly undignified. Oh, otherwise, things are going well here. I'm making progress on the fiery citadel. It's coming along very well. Um knock on wood. I'm a little shy of 25,000 words now, past the Act 1 climax. I'm figuring I'm gonna end up somewhere in the low 90s by the time I'm done. And it seems to be I'm getting a feel for the characters again. I think I mentioned that I've got the uh paper galley proofs now. I haven't uh dug into them yet. I really need to get all of the tax information finalized by tomorrow. So I think my plan is to get that finished off today and uploaded. My accountant has a site where you can just upload it, which is nice. And then once I get that done, that'll sort of free up my non-writing time. I think I might spend this weekend. I need to do some things like laundry and cleaning house, but I think I'll go through those proofs, and that will be a good opportunity for me to pick up on any threads that I might have uh left, not picked up on and characterization and so forth. But I'm getting a my head back into Con and Leon and figuring out what I'm doing. They are an interesting couple to write about with interesting challenges. So that's fun. I'm enjoying the story. That's always nice when you enjoy the story that you're writing. I'm doing I've been doing three thousand words a day. Seems to be going okay. Again, knock on wood. I don't want to jeopardize that. Helps that uh other things have more or less settled down in the greater world. Well, at least my greater world of cefa and so forth. We had a board meeting call yesterday that was remarkably uneventful, so that's always nice, huh? We finished watching the Umbrella Academy on Netflix last night. Uh and I've just enjoyed the heck out of that show. I it was one of those shows where I was really looking forward to continuing on with the next episode. And it's from I never read the comic. All of these shows. I I like missed out on the comics. I don't know why I was never the read the comic or graphic novel kind of person, but I never was. I never known, you know, like all Marvel Universe, DC, all that stuff. I know it entirely from what, like visual media or moving media representations, TV shows and movies. I know that that is a huge gap in my understanding, but I'm also not going to try to catch up now. Also the shows it is. So anyway, um, yeah, um Umbrella Academy was um ten episodes for the first season. It looks like there will be a second, or at least they've got a trailer for the second. Also that'd be nice. Uh Ellen Page is in it. She plays a character named Vanya. Uh it's uh yeah, just a very interesting character show. I enjoyed all of the superpowers and so forth, but I enjoyed the characters. And Vanya is one of these seven kids that were born under very strange circumstances, which the show never explains. All of these women, like 43 women, give birth at the same time on the same day, uh, which is extraordinary because none of them were pregnant that morning. So we never find out exactly what force created this. Maybe it's in something else. But this eccentric millionaire uh adopts seven of these kids. Adopt being A loose term for sounds like he bought them from some of their poor parents. And so there's seven of them, and he raises them up basically to be like a superhero fighting team. Uh except for Vanya, who has no superpowers. She's kind of a dud. And so the it's really the six kids in the Umbrella Academy are the ones who go fighting crime and doing these exploits and everything. And the show takes place with them all as grown-ups. And they've all come home because, and this happens in the very first episode, so it's not spoilery, their father, this eccentric millionaire, has died. And so they all go home for the funeral. And the reunion's really great. So I'm still rubbing cat hair off of my face. I should probably just give it up and change clothes. Why does cat hair always make it up to your face? You know, if it's do it on the clothes, that'd be alright. So anyway. Vanya is a violinist. Um, and she's uh it's kind of funny because she's only third chair, but you know, she's also works at the symphony in what is clearly Toronto, filmed in Toronto, and they don't make any effort to disguise the fact that it's Toronto. You know, so um I she's supposed to be kind of a failure, except that uh being third chair employed in a symphony is a pretty phenomenal accomplishment for any classical musician. But never mind that. She's also very meek, she takes medication for anxiety, and I love the whole development of the person who is left out. She is it's it's really heartwrenching, you know, like all of her six siblings doing things and getting to, you know, all this attention and praise and everything, and she is the nothing. You know, and they're all like, oh Vanya. So I think that this is much the same syndrome of what people really loved about my heroine Andy, the middle princess and the mark of the Tala. And it is a uh, I think we've all been there, we've all felt that way. You know, the person who really has uh nothing interesting to offer among far more scintillating uh cohorts, like uh a more scintillating cohort. This is where I'd go back and fix it, edit in my if I were writing. So there were a lot of things I liked about it. Uh actually I liked everything about it. There was nothing I did not like about this show. The mu excuse me, the music is great, the whimsy in it is great. Uh I thought the world building held together. I liked the time travel, the characterizations, and the acting was great. There were a few things that weren't answered, but I'm alright with that. I'm looking forward to season two. One thing I really liked about the about Vanya's arc in particular, and it's something that uh I know I complained about with the prince and me, with the heroine kind of changing her priorities. With Vanya at the very end, and I'm making an effort not to be spoilery here. I think I can do this without giving away anything important, they're looking for her, and they realize that she has an important concert that night. And so they go to look for her, and she is, of course, at this important concert playing her violin. Because this is something that is incredibly important to Vanya, and playing in this particular concert is a huge accomplishment for her, and I really liked that, even though she has all of these other things going on that she still followed after this thing that was always hugely important to her, and she goes and she plays at the concert, and I I appreciate that. I think it's very easy with um character transformation, especially when we get into something where we're looking for a character making a deliberate sacrifice in order to have happiness, which is like what it was supposed to be in the prince and me, that they kind of do the trolla trolley, oh, it turns out I don't care about this thing anymore after all. And because what really matters to me is love or happiness and so forth. And that's not the point. The point of a sacrifice is that you give up something that does still mean something hugely important to you, and you give it up for a reason. You give it up on purpose so that you can have something else. Otherwise, you know, it's not it's not a sacrifice, right? I think we lose sight of that. You know, the stories get dry when, you know, like the biblical story of Abraham being asked by God to sacrifice his only son, Isaac, I think I got that in the right order. You know, and we find it kind of um both dry and appalling, right? It's like, how could some guy think that God wanted him to sacrifice his only son? And, you know, and I remember some of the illustrations from the books, or perhaps I made them in my own head, but you know, Abraham taking Isaac to the altar and preparing to sacrifice him and the whole time saying, Do I have to do this, God? Do I have to? And you know, and we kind of ask, well, why did Isaac just go along with this? You know, because Isaac is shown as a strapping young man. But Isaac goes along with it because he loves his father, right? And his father says, Well, this is what we have to do. And Isaac's like, Well, that sucks, but okay. And we kind of lose the power of that, that Abraham is willing to do this thing because it's for something that, sorry, I just shift there, that he believes is truly important, and he's willing to do something that is personally devastating him. And really, Isaac is willing to give up his own life for it, too. It's an extreme example, and it's one that we don't really have a good comparison for in our modern society, and we're not often asked to give up our lives for other people or for causes. But in fiction we find it very interesting. And it's not always your life, but it's what you love. That's I think that's the whole point of the Abraham story is uh sacrificing it's the metaphor of sacrificing what you love more than anything else in the world, uh, for something that is more important that enables you to grow, I think. That's the whole idea of um, you know, when we talk about being closer to God in the Christian Judeo-Christian metaphor, that it's about spiritual growth, it's becoming more yourself, evolving spiritually. So, and I do think that um part of self-fulfillment, of finding love and happiness, of overcoming your own personal weaknesses is part of that. So, from Umbrella Academy to uh deep thoughts on spiritual growth, we bring it all to you here and all in the space of a single cup of coffee. Totally my brand. So, all right, I am going to go get to work. Hope you all have a wonderful Thursday, and I will talk to you tomorrow. Bye bye.