fuck fuck fuck

The Collegetown rental office was eerily quiet today. All of Collegetown was, actually -- and Ithaca in general was subdued. New Hire called out sick (Aunt Boss and I suspect it was stress/grief rather than germs) and Mom Boss stayed home and did a bit of remote work.

Fuck.

Anyway I have set up a monthly donation to the ACLU. Gonna look into some other options next week once I am less numb -- I need to pick things that don't require a big in-person time commitment (or making cold calls, or knocking on doors) because I will 100% flake out on that and it's better to find some activity I can stick with.

In a tiny silver lining it looks like my House district may have swung to a Democratic challenger instead of the Republican incumbent? The margin was very tight, though, so a mandatory recount may be triggered. We shall see.

some stuff I've been reading

Apropos of nothing in particular:

So about twenty years late to the party, I have been reading the Percy Jackson books. I was already an adult when The Lightning Thief was published, so I think my first awareness of the series was when the 2010 movie adaptation was declared to be iffy at best and kind of went nowhere. Also there's an exploding toilet incident in the first book that somehow became, like, THE THING I knew about the series? And I wasn't super interested in reading gross-out tween boy humor, so I passed.

The thing is, there is some gross tween boy humor, but mostly these are books about friendship and determination and how to keep going when there aren't any perfect choices and all that good stuff, wrapped in sort of a jazz riff on the Titanomachy (occasionally played on kazoos).

Am I thrilled about Rick Riordan's portrayals of the Greek gods? Not always, but eh, that's fiction for you.

Anyway I have now moved on to the first sequel series (The Heroes of Olympus) in which we discover that the Greek gods also have Roman facets and we are loosely riffing on the Gigantomachy. Also we are now in third person instead of first person and have multiple POV characters, which is an interesting changeup.

...Tangentially, I have also been reading some Percy Jackson fanfic and it baffles me that almost none of the stories I've encountered are in first person. Possibly this is a bias of the way I find fics (I tend to find a writer, read their stuff, search their bookmarks, rinse and repeat), but it's really noticeable after a while.

Anyway, my hold request for The Son of Neptune just came in today so I'm gonna start reading that.