Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness

I mentioned A Man on the Inside (which we've finished now; so good, I'm so excited there will be a second season) and told them it has Ted Danson in it.

Them: like, from Cheers?

Me: Yeah... How do you know about Cheers?

Them: it's on Netflix now, it's like a comfort watch for me.

Them: wait, isn't Ted Danson dead?

Me: what?? No!! Didn't you watch The Good Place? Oh you have to watch The Good Place, you'll love it.

Them: I watched The Good Place!

Me: oh! Well he's in that!

Them: is he?

Me: yes! He's Michael!

Them: ooohhhhh!

I heard the news of Andre Braugher's death on the radio this morning and immediately picked up my phone to text Andrew to say I was thinking of him. (Something it turns out I could not do since my phone seems to have lost his mobile number!)

I was thinking of him because he loves this show and central to that love is how much he identified with Holt. That whole show is great representation of various kinds of neurospicy brains, and Andrew considered himself to be as much Holt as he was any of the characters (though he said he was about as much Boyle).

We watched Brooklyn 99 so much together that I haven't been able to see an episode since I left three years ago, and that is about twice as long as I was watching it in the first place and yet it never seems to be long since I've referenced Holt, whose representation of leadership I really admire.

The other day it was about how there's no such thing as the best dessert: "If you're still hungry, you should've eaten more dinner." But sometimes it's what he says when Rosa comes out as bi in an episode that gave me a more realistic depiction of what my parents would be like if I tried that than I ever expected to see in any media.

Holt says "Every time someone steps up and says who they are, the world becomes a better, more interesting place." And Andre Braugher really made me believe that, as he did so many great lines, in how he delivered it.

I'm babysitting for the first time since someone who's now about 10 was a toddler.

This is another friend's toddler, one I'm delighted to see every so often with her mum who's an old friend of mine.

Today I've had a really easy job: I got here in time for the toddler to be put to bed and ideally I won't have to do anything more. It's the first time she's been left without her parents for an evening so it's a bit of an adventure for us all. She seemed extremely suspicious of someone else being around while she was being put to bed, but was really her usual cheerful self. It's been an hour and all has been quiet so far.

So I'm watching the Rugby World Cup and one of my favorite radio DJs talking about one of my favorite things: a ghost story.

My day is hard to describe without some ridiculous sentences, like "When I got back from makeup there was someone else in the greenroom, who simply said 'Hi, I'm Shappi,' and it was all I could do not to say 'Oh I didn't know you still used that name at all because I know you went back to Shaparak a couple years ago!"

And "The chauffeur car was late enough getting me back after my BBC Breakfast appearance that I was worried about not having time to prep for meeting the shadow cabinet minister, but luckily I sat down at my laptop with one minute to spare."

Luckily (?) I was so tired that I wasn't phased by any of this. I think I surprised the very kind, very young people who shuffled me around the BBC building, because I wasn't really nervous. I felt a lot like I was in a hospital waiting room or something (not least because that's probably the last place I encountered TV news), if a very fancy-looking one. This might also have contributed to how very little I could remember of the live national TV interview once it was done: when my colleagues started commenting on things I'd been asked ("that question about the help point!" "X's question was so bizarre and you pivoted away from any problems!") I had no memory of even these general subjects coming up.

This was very weird -- I couldn't even remember anything I'd done wrong, and I otherwise can't help dwelling on what I did wrong! But of course that also made it an enviable state; I was careful not to click on the video clip I saw on LinkedIn, where the person who'd delivered that media training I did last year tagged me to heap praise on me and also big up her own work (as well she should! considering that it apparently works subconsciously!). She also sent me a message that listed off the things she was happy about -- "Key message delivery, repetition and even a bridge! You nailed it. More please!" -- which I was happy but also baffled to read. (Please no one tell her that I can't remember what a bridge is in this context! That's definitely not her falt, it's definitely mine!)

D even warned me not to come in the room for a bit while he and MB were going to watch it this evening, but my curiosity got the better of me (I was fully prepared to run out of the room at any second, but I settled for a mental equivalent of watching with my fingers over my eyes). I was fine. I am not used to watching how I look and sound and that was a little bit rough from an internalized-bigotry point of view but it was okay.

I'm just glad my work liked it. The comms and PR people loved it, I got a random e-mail from someone high up who hasn't even met me congratulating me, sweetly imagining their message to be among "hundreds" so telling me not to worry about replying, but it was practically the only e-mail I had so I did reply. The other e-mail I got was bang on 5 o'clock, from someone on my team, and its ending made me laugh: "Well done! I was very impressed watching it just now!! Hope you're going to sleep and drink this weekend!"

In that order: I had a nap right afterward, until dinner was ready (D, in addition to supplying me with tea this morning and turning on my work laptop so I could join a meeting as soon as I sat down at my desk, also made dinner today; he's been such a good househusband!), no drinking yet. But it sure seems like a good

Apart from all the work people praising me, i was delighted to get a phone call from a good friend I haven't heard from in way too long -- I think we were both stuck in that "it's been way too long since we talked and we're both busy/stressed so we don't know where to start now" loop for a while, and it turns out one way to get unstuck from that is to call up your friend on your way home from work and say "You were on the telly! I was having my cup of tea this morning and I saw you!" Very sweet.

Luckily, after I got back from MediaCity and got through the shadow-minister meeting (again, these sentences!) my day calmed down a lot. I think everyone still thought I was really busy but my other tasks had been outsourced and/or completed already (a couple new ones turned up at the end of the day naturally, but nothing urgent). Despite having started so early, I did stay online until 5 because I knew I'd be summoned during everyone else's working hours if need be. But I'm so glad it was an easy day after that, I needed it!

Oh and it turns out Shaparak Khorsandi is absolutely lovely to chat to. It probably helped that she was very sympathetic to my reason for being there. Me who knows approximately zero celebrities and cares about even fewer would of course find myself faced with one of the few where I actually had to prevent myself from squeeing over. Having to say something to "Hi I'm Shappi" that wasn't "omgggggg!", I had to say something else because my mouth was already open, so I said "Hi, I'm Erik. I'm here to talk about train ticket offices closing," and she talked about how horrid it is that we're expected to do everything without interacting with a person now, and how hard that is for her which she thinks might be because of her ADHD. And indeed that's what she was soon whisked off to talk about -- she's...maybe written a book? I can't remember, I was being whisked to and from different places with TVs while she was on so I didn't get the whole gist... about being diagnosed as an adult, actually as a result of lockdown's upheaval and stress making her struggle to cope and seek help. To be a late-diagnosed brown woman with a thing still so associated with little white boys makes me so glad that she's talking about it like this.

But yeah. What a weird day.

I cannot believe it's time for Eurovision already. I can't believe it's May!

But here we are.

I like the semi-finals at least as much as the final. You always end up seeing great stuff that doesn't go on to the Saturday night! (I felt a little bad for illustrating this for diffrentcolours last year, which I think was the first he watched it: he got very attached to I think it was Lithuania, and then they didn't make it through).

My quick, non-exhaustive notes from tonight might give you an idea of what I enjoyed.

During the intro:

Liverpool is the best city to host this except maybe for Manchester. Because it's so serious about itself as a Musical City. I just can imagine down the other leg of the trousers of time where we're listening to an emotional version of "Sit Down" by James instead. And then New Order in the background for them to talk over...

Malta set the tone early: it was an extremely 80s night. Not many ballads -- a relief after last year!

I actually hoped for a ballad eventually, for a break from the strobey lights (my nystagmus has been bad since Gary woke me up at 5:30 this morning...tiredness usually makes it worse and I guess I just didn't sleep enough to get any of these spoons back last night!). But when I eventually got a proper ballad, even that was strobey!

I did like how sparkly everyone was this year though! And gay. This was even gayer than usual I think.

I complained about the commentary so much that D changed it to the Radio 2 version. Still a white guy, but at least not Scott Mills! It actually came in handy, because someone narrating Eurovision for a radio audience is basically providing audio description. Still boringly hegemonic, and trying too hard for the sarcasm that Terry Wogan was so good at but drifting too often into just meanness. But it sure came in handy for Finland, which was so flashy I literally couldn't see what was going on. J added to the audio description too: there were apparently other dancers, in pink, something about ribbons on the crate...so not just the regular guy and the big Godzilla projection of him that I knew about.

I just wrote "heck yeah Czechia!" for them. Easily my favorite of the night.

During the touching Ukrainian performance while people were voting, J said "I've been spending too much time on Grindr..." The screen was showing a graphic of text messages as they appear on a phone, on a black background with the colors of the Ukrainian flag, blue and yellow...which is also the color scheme Grindr uses. Hearing that they were sweet messages of someone texting their mother ("I miss you," "I hope you're okay" kind of stuff) made him feel guilty for the comparison, heh.

One thing I love about my manager is our shared aspiration to be like Columbo when we plan how to deal with difficult people.

He mentioned it again today when we were planning for a meeting, and it wasn't the first time.

I've been trying to catch up with my RSS reader the last couple days. ( Here's some stuff I've read. )

I would have liked more sleep, but I woke up at 6 this morning.

So I watched TV (I watched four episodes of Ms. Marvel which is so much television for me, especially now that I can't really watch it at all on work days (this morning I still was relying on audio description much more than I'd usually expect to).

And I finished one library book (A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers, holy shit that was good) and read about a third of another, admittedly a short one (The Teeth of Joe Gould by Jill Lepore, a book that is about the longest book ever written (maybe, unless it wasn't written at all but it probably at least sort of was...).

And after all that, diffrentcolours and mother_bones did LFTs again. Hers is still positive, which is no surprise to her -- she says she feels okay now except for a cough that sounds nasty but apparently just happens to her any time she gets any virus -- and diffrentcolours's was negative which was a great surprise to him. As he was trying not to get too excited about the lack of a line showing up while he waited out the timer he'd set, he told me "If this is negative I'll do another one," and then he said "If the second one's negative..." and I had no idea about how he was planning to end that sentence but when he did I answered so quickly I probably would've sounded like I was expecting it: "...do you wanna go to the pub?"

"Yes." It was a beautiful day, I'd just been enjoying sitting in the sunny garden while the temp is still in the low 70s (it's gonna be one hundred goddam Fahrenheit degrees on Tuesday and only a few cooler on Monday) and it seemed like a great time to go sit in a pub beer garden.

He was hit by a lot of emotions and a lot of overwhelm and a lot of lingering tiredness so we didn't go crazy but we did have two nice pints (in my case, of the terribly named but tasty pale bitter Youth On A T-Shirt) and stopped on the way home for the kind of provisions, beer and snacks, that I hadn't felt up to replenishing on my own this week.

We got celebratory takeaway, from Tokyo Noodle, yum, and watched a documentary about whisky, which made me want some whisky, so I drink some of the Talisker diffrentcolours bought on Skye when he was there recently, and drank that while we watched another documentary about Robert Johnson -- I teased D that his still-addled brain had finally gotten down to the level for TV viewing that mine is always at, heh -- which left me very sentimental about my teenage relationship to his music, and got us talking about how differently music is perceived by someone like Keith Richards (who was interviewed for this) than it is by the youth of today, who have so much more access to so much more rock (and blues, and everything) music than even existed never mind was easy to know about than previous generations, and to what extent that's good or bad because surely it's both.

It was nice to have a halfway abstract conversation, it was nice to be eating and watching TV all in the same room (Gary loved it, and fell asleep contentedly in a chair after his efforts to get me to go to bed with him at eight o'clock proved fruitless) after twelve days of not doing those things.

I can't even say that I didn't know what I had till it was gone, I absolutely did know, I appreciated it all along, and I am so goddam grateful to have it back.