Cooling Down

It has been unbelievably hot this past week.  It finally rained today on and off.  I stayed home, though I did slip out for a short grocery run between rain bursts.  It was nice to not have to run the AC for a while.

In general, the teleworking has been ok and team productivity has been maintained, but this past week it did feel like the wheels started falling off.  This could be because there just don't seem to be any tangible goals to work towards (non-work goals at any rate) and a full return to work will probably not occur until Sept., which is kind of a drag, though I may end up coming in once or twice a week towards the end of July.  Hopefully, I will be able to rest a bit this weekend (with the heat wave finally broken) and be somewhat recharged next week.

I've been doing a bit of extra reading and managed to get through Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being.  It started off reasonably well, but I wasn't crazy about the middle section and then it got a bit postmodern (with Kundera breaking in and commenting on the action in the novel, along with 3 or 4 dream sequences kicked off by Teraza that weren't obviously dream sequences until the end).  I'm curious whether the movie sticks faithfully to the plot of the novel,* which zigzags between characters, or if the plot has been straightened out (and just focuses on the Tomaz and Tereza arc).  Still, it's one of those novels that aspiring members of the intelligentsia must read.

I haven't heard yet if my piece on executives coming up with COVID-related tv series was taken for Monday night's SFYS, but it was nice not to have to worry about the deadline for once, as I got my piece in early!  It's mostly a satire of entitled executive behaviour, but I do have a few snarky things to say about how humourless the baying Twitter crowd is.  Likely that will rub some people the wrong way.  My next post will focus on this more directly.

This is the last night to watch any of the Toronto Fringe Digital pieces.  I think Act 3 was still my overall favourite, though I'm a bit disappointed I missed out on the Lear-inspired puppetry in Act 1.  I'm also very disappointed in myself for not checking the UK National Theatre website.  I missed out on Lorraine Hansberry's Les Blancs by one day, and there was another one a few weeks back that I also wanted to catch.  I'm hoping that they will stream this again or push it to Netflix or something, as it is so rarely done (in fact I don't think I had ever heard of the play before!).  I basically had to remind myself that between work and keeping up with the Toronto Fringe this week I probably wouldn't realistically have watched a 3 hour(!) performance anyway, but it did take several hours for me to cool down once I realized that the opportunity was lost.

And on that note, I think it is time to turn in for the evening.

* Apparently, Kundera wrote that the movie was not faithful at all to the spirit of the novel (hardly a surprise) to the point where he lost his cool and no longer allowed movie or tv adaptations of his works.