Where’s That Focus

So it is not exactly a great and guarded secret that my focus has not been all that it could be, the last while. As may have been noticed, I missed another blog entry last week, in what we must now admit to being a pattern. I really haven’t written anything of significance in a while, and this latest semester at the Day Job has been a tough climb.

Some of this is no doubt the result of the enduringly dire vibe of the present moment, and the stress of the current situation where I am, along with ordinary background stress. Budgeting our energy is something that I think everyone is having to do, to differing degrees, right now.

However, there’s a particular thing with me right now that I have to admit is affecting me. I didn’t really plan on writing about it yet, or maybe at all, since there’s not a great deal to be done about it and this isn’t in any significant sense a blog about my life or anything similar. On the other hand, as much as I was hoping it wouldn’t, it is affecting my writing (and everything else), and I feel like I should at least explain a little to whatever limited audience this blog does have.

About a month ago I went in for what was meant to be some routine testing relating to a stress episode I had in the winter. Two different doctors were pretty certain that there was nothing to be found or worried over, but the tests are covered and so why not be exhaustive.

Well, what we discovered was that I have a defective mitral valve in my heart that is going to require surgery to fix. It’s not the result of diet or lifestyle, just a bad draw from the genetic deck that has always been there. Since then, I’ve been doing some further tests to determine how urgently the repair is needed.

The good news is that (according to the cardiologist) the surgery is relatively routine at this point and that recovery from it generally goes really well. And, with the repair done, I will be back on the same ‘longevity curve’ (as my cardiologist put it) as I would have been had the problem never been there in the first place.

Even so, ‘bit of a shock’ rather undersells it. If you had asked me earlier last month about my health, I would have said it was good, or at least that I had no serious issues or worries. There’s a lot of conceptual space between that point and ‘heart surgery needed’, and I guess I’m still covering it. Any medical procedure where they stop your heart has a certain weight to it that I, at least, am not easily able to shrug off. I think I’ll feel better when I know how soon I’ll need to have the procedure and can start to plan around it a bit.

But, whatever answers materialize, it’s a major, life-changing thing that sort of dropped out of the sky on me that day, and it’s soaking up a lot of my brain juice just about now.

I don’t have any particular wisdom about this – maybe I will later on in the process – but if you’ve been wondering ‘man alive, where’s Evan’s head these days?’, that would be it.

Thanks for reading.

Indy 5(00?)

Hey I have something to write about this week because apparently they’re casting another Indiana Jones movie. If you know me very well at all and/or have been reading this blog for a while, you will know that I love the first 3 Indy movies very much; they were some of my favourites growing up. They’re fun, undeniably exciting, pretty charming adventures, and Nazis get punched in 2/3 of them.

(yes, I know about the reading that Indy doesn’t actually affect the course of events in Lost Ark at all)

Then they made Crystal Skull, which I still haven’t watched (despite the presence of Cate Blanchett) because I thought, and still think, that Last Crusade was just such a perfect ending to the series and for the characters that they should never have touched it. I really believe in that idea that sometimes the greatest skill of an artist is knowing when something is done, and the Indy movies were done when everyone rode off into the sunset at the end of Last Crusade.

But, of course, money, and the nostalgia wave that shows no sign of cresting is fairly overwhelming, and so we have not one but soon two additional movies. I continue to think it’s a bad idea, and I have more reasons all the time.

In addition to the above, obviously Harrison Ford is getting older and is really well past the point where it makes a lot of sense to have him star in an action movie. There’s probably a whole thing to be written about how the cutoff that clearly exists for women actors does not appear to affect male actors, even in action roles like this one, but I’m not the right person to write it. I do think a 78-year old playing Indy is not a great plan.

Aha! Some people will say. Recast the role like James Bond, or indeed Han Solo, so that we can have more stories. I was one of those who thought Solo was not a bad movie at all (far far better than the egregious Rise of Skywalker), and yet – I still think this is a bad idea.

It’s mostly because I think we should really just let Indiana go. The movies were fun, and exciting, and the characters were lovable, but I also think the central conceit is problematic enough that it’s time to move on. Without belabouring a point many others have made, the story of a white guy running around the world sending artefacts back to a museum in America is, uh, not one that we would tend to describe as especially heroic, these days.

And that’s ok. I don’t think that invalidates the first three movies – they’re still fun – and I don’t think it means everyone who worked on them is a terrible person. It’s just as a society, we have a better understanding now, and while we don’t have to burn every copy of an Indiana Jones movie ever made, it also makes sense to just not do it any more.

I was heartened today to see an interview with the Simpsons actor Hank Azaria, who after the controversy about the character of Apu (who he used to voice) went and spent some time listening to people and learning about the issues of a white actor voicing a role like that. He recognizes now that it wasn’t right and he’s just gonna stop. Azaria isn’t a terrible person for having done the role for as long as he did, I don’t think – he didn’t understand the issue. Now he does, and he’s gonna do better.

That’s all any of us can do. Do our best, until we know better, and then … do better.

I think we’d do better by moving on from more Indiana Jones stories.

It’s not like there’s any shortage of great, great stories out there whose creators would be delighted to see take their turn in the spotlight.

Thanks for reading.

No Entry (again)

So (as was likely apparent) no blog entry last week – I got some tough news that sort of knocked me off the rails briefly, and then the rest of the week was scrambling to make up for that.

This week is a tough one also, because the pandemic situation here is not great and I wrote a whole post in reaction to that – but I don’t want to post it, and I’m not going to.

I want to stick to the idea from my previous entry that better days are coming, and we just need to hang in there a bit longer, and tough as it is right now.

We can do it.

Take care of each other.

Thanks for reading.