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Different Day

We went on our usual walk through the old part of town on Christmas day. The weather acted confused going back and forth between glorious and gloomy like a metaphor for the year that it has been. There were glimpses of normal followed by bad news - sun followed by cloud and rain. Just as we got used to the whipsaw of our alternate realities and fortunes over the year, so we did to the weather. Many folks were out taking a walk - we did not exchange holiday greetings with anyone. I seem to recall there was a time when wishing a stranger Merry Christmas or Happy Holidays was no sacrilege, it did not take much thinking to do this. Now, the issue is far more complex and presumably no one wants to go there. Strangers ignored strangers no matter the holiday.

Watching Don't Look Up later in the evening was a fitting finale to a day that had been remarkably different this remarkable year. The movie can be about different things to different people. For me it was about how hard it is to communicate a message to your intended audience. As a parent, you have experience with your kid - as you routinely fail and they veer off in a different direction and you have no idea how to course correct. In the workplace, the message landing incorrectly or not landing at all has a variety of consequences. In relationships lack of good communication can leave partners stranded each in a different universe. But the movie is not about this at all:

Nothing about the foolishness and outrageousness of what the movie shows us — no matter how virtuosically sliced and diced by McKay’s characteristically jittery editor, Hank Corwin — can really compete with the horrors of our real-world American idiocracy. 

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