we all know Y
Not a lot to update you on today—typical for a Tuesday, after a Monday DLU info dump on all the goings-on of the weekend. Yesterday I rode my bike home from work, and I basically just . . . watched a bunch of TV.
Shobhit and I had leftover egg curry and Afghan bread for dinner. It was tasty. He also had a Braeburn Condos Board meeting at 6:00, during which I decided to check out the new FX series Y: The Last Man, in which every mammal on the planet with a Y chromosome spontaneously drops dead—with the exception of one guy, and also, bizarrely, his pet monkey. The guy, whose name is Yorich, is a vapid twentysomething who has very little about him that is interesting, surely one of many things contributing to the show getting quite mixed reviews. But! I find the concept itself inherently compelling; I really like Diane Lane in the role of his mother as well as the sudden President after all the many men ahead of her in the Line of Succession dropped dead; and so far at least, it's not nearly as grim and humorless as a lot of reviews have painted it out to be (I've even laughed out loud a couple of times). You want "relentlessly grim," try season one of The Leftovers; this series has got nothing on that.
Of course, this series isn't nearly as good, either. But, I was surprised to discover, there are three episodes available on Hulu, and after I went out to the living room to catch up on two episodes of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, I went back to the bedroom and watched the second episode of Y: The Last Man.
I do find the President's two children's names to be a tad pretentious. Yorich has a sister named Hero. The narrative follows both of them as they take way too long to evacuate out of New York City whose corpse-clogged water supply is now toxic. Kind of ironically, and several reviews have mentioned this and I agree with it, the scenes back at the secured Pentagon where the President and other female staff are holed up are far more interesting. But, whatever. So far, it's true that the show squanders a whole lot of promise and possibility when it comes to gender circumstances, leaving the show oddly far too much like countless other post-apocalyptic shows and movies. But, I started it thinking I would just stop when I got bored. Two episodes in and it hasn't happened yet.
Tracy asked me for some help this morning with these roundtable discsussions she's facilitating that have to do with race in the workplace. It kind of became clear that she was only hesitating to ask me to participate before now because she still doesn't have a full handle on the degree and contexts in which I am introverted. I just think it's tricky to insert myself into something like this given the obvious: that I am a white guy. But, she clearly trusts me and she's asked me to try to find articles that might be helpful for her to share with people to go home and read. I suppose I can do that. It also sounds like now I will be participating in these roundtable discussions, maybe. I don't know yet exactly when they will be happening, though.
In other news, Shobhit's Project Management classes are now over. If I remember right, he needs to take some kind of certification exam and then hopefully he can start looking for relevant work.
That said, he actually got hired for an acting job! I mean, of sorts: it's for an internal training video for Microsoft, so it's not anything that will be seen publicly (so, probably no credit on IMDb, for instance). But, it's still covered by the SAG-AFTRA union, so that's cool. He has a fitting soon, I keep forgetting to write in my calendar when the hell it is. This seems unlikely, but I keep thinking about how kind of funny it would be if he suddenly got regular work of this sort—working at Microsoft again after a decade, but in actual acting gigs. A surprising cross section of both worlds, considering his history with both. I'd kind of love if it he got hired for something like this with them again.
[posted 12:22 pm]