Bryce Moore's Blog, page 177

Eating the Same Lunch

General question for you all: how long can you go eating the same thing for a meal each day? I ask this for a couple of reasons. First, it’s a slow news day and a busy Bryce day, which means I don’t have a whole lot of time. But second, it’s something Denisa and I have discussed at length in the past.

Personally, I seem to have a very high tolerance for identical breakfasts. I’ve been eating the same thing for breakfast for well over two or three years. (Raw oatmeal with milk. Uncooked. With a bit of sugar and chocolate chips back when I was eating sugar, but with a few raisins now, instead.) Every day. Day after day. That’s it. I eat it because it’s quick and fast, and I’m always reading something when I eat it, so I don’t really need to care what it is I’m putting in my mouth.

For lunch, I tend to need to switch up every half year or so. I’ll eat a ham sandwich every day, and then I’ll get tired of it after a while, so I’ll go to peanut butter, and then I’ll move onto bagels, and then I’ll be back at ham sandwiches. Apparently I do eventually like diversity at lunch. Just at a glacial pace.

Dinners, are a little different. Denisa has trained me over the years to actually want some variety there, though in my college years, I was content to eat boxed mac and cheese with tuna every evening. And in all honesty, I could go back to that without too much trouble.

The biggest trick (for me) is that I generally eat meals when I’m doing something else. If I’m watching TV or reading a book or working, then what does it matter what I’m shoving in my face to keep my stomach from growling? I’m hungry, so I need to eat something. When I go to a restaurant or have a sit-down meal where I’m actually focused on the food, then yes, the “what” matters.

But generally? I just don’t care. How many of you are the same way? Inquiring minds want to know . . .

Procrastination and Game of Thrones

If you’re a fantasy fan (in book or tv/movie format), then you’re probably at least somewhat familiar with George RR Martin’s Game of Throns/Song of Fire and Ice series. HBO’s been adapting the books, and they’re now into their 6th season, which started Sunday.

What’s garnering a fair bit of attention right now is the fact that the shows are finally ahead of the books. For a bit of context, the TV shows started in 2011. The first book was published in 1996. Specifically, the first book was published in 1996, the second in 1999, the third in 2000, the fourth in 2005, and the fifth in 2011, the same year as the TV series began. Supposedly, there are still two more novels to go to finish the series, and three more seasons (including this one) to finish the TV adaptations.

I’ve read all the book and watched all the movies. I’ve been reading the books since they came out in 1996, so I’ve been with the series for quite some time.

The natural question that comes up is “How is it that Martin is taking so long to write these final books? How long can it really take?”

I’m not George RR Martin. I don’t know anything about his writing process, and I don’t know anything about what’s affecting his speed in this instance. This really isn’t a case where I can even pretend to have some idea about what he’s going through, since I write books and he writes books. Nope. My books are about 60,000 to 110,000 words long each. His books? 300,000 to 425,000 words. (And writing a longer book isn’t just a matter of writing more words. They become a lot more complex. More moving pieces to keep in mind, more plots to pay attention to. It’s exponentially more difficult.)

On the other hand, I’m also friends with Brandon Sanderson, whose books regularly clock in over 300,000 words, and yet is able to churn them out year after year with no end in sight.

The question seems clear: How is it that Sanderson can do it and Martin can’t?

Well, for one thing, writing is an art. People approach it different ways. So trying to compare writing speeds is basically unfair. Composers might take different times to pen a piece of music. Why? Because that’s how they work. Art shouldn’t be rushed.

So, you ask, what exactly are you qualified to talk about, Bryce? Why are you writing this article?

Basically, it’s a response to seeing the Game of Thrones story continue at long last, and a reflection on how seeing it unfold affected me. See, there are plenty of times in my life that I feel like I have an insurmountable task in front of me: that I have something I need to tackle that just can’t be tackled. I don’t even know where to start.

It’s like I need to write the sixth book of A Song of Fire and Ice, and I just can’t get going.

But when season six started? It just moved forward. It began advancing plot points, just like all the other seasons have done. Bit by bit, the blanks get filled in.

That’s been my personal experience with writing. That when I hit a wall, the best thing for me to do is just keep writing. Nothing is insurmountable. Nothing takes forever.

And that’s when I realize I just wrote a blog equivalent of this scene from the Three Amigos. Maybe I should have just linked to it to begin with. Ah well. Happy Thursday, everybody!

The Wire 5:1 and 5:2

Yeah, I know I said I’d do three episodes for today. What can I say? Life got in the way. I’m still planning on three for next week and the week after, but today we just have two. My apologies.

Episode 5:1

The first scene in every Wire season is always pivotal. It explains the meaning of the entire season, and this one is no different. Lies are just as good as the truth, in many situations. I won’t say more than that right now, but remember this scene for later.

The fallout from Carcetti’s refusal to accept state funds is front and center in this episode, an easy feat when they jump forward a year in time. The “new day” Carcetti had promised is closer to a nightmare, with the cops not just not seeing their pay bumps, but not getting paid overtime, not having working cards, not getting forensics done quickly. It’s a complete and utter mess.

And yet Carcetti still has the nerve to talk about how it’s all part of his master plan. How he can fix it all once he’s the governor. I know some people have questioned my dislike for Carcetti. Here’s where we begin to see just where he decided to make his stand, and it’s firmly in the “What’s best for Carcetti?” camp. That $54 million he turned down at the end of last season is just killing his city.

And, naturally, it’s driven McNulty to drink and sleep around again. The initial thought I have is to wish he’d just stayed on the beat, like he had been. But let’s be honest: things would have been just as bad for him there, judging by how much heat Carver’s getting from the troops. I’m thinking McNulty was doomed one way or the other. Poor Beadie.

Major Crimes gets disbanded, and it’s upsetting. But look at it this way: they’d been on Marlo for over a year, and they had pretty much nothing to show for it. Lester is confident Marlo will slip up eventually, but how long can you go on paying people to get no results? It’s not like nothing else is going on in the city. Let’s call it like it is: Marlo was winning, plain and simple. And now it looks like he’s won, period.

Herc has managed to get hired by resident weasel lawyer Levy, and how much does it irritate you that he seems to be much better off for it than his former co-workers. The Wire certainly can’t be accused of trying to portray a world where making the right decisions ends up putting you in a better place.

And then we have the newspaper people. Season one was all about cops and drug dealers. Season two was the docks. Season three was politics. Season four was schools. Season five is newspapers. All of them connected. All of them a mess. But nothing seems to happen in Baltimore unless enough of the public cares about it, and they can’t care about something they haven’t heard about.

I’m a big fan of the hero editor, Gus Haynes. But why wouldn’t I be? The guy is presented as close to a saint. He’s smart, perceptive, generous with giving credit to others, level-headed. Meanwhile, his underlings are sneaks (well, one: Scott “I want to work at the Times”) and his bosses are bumblers. (Some parts of this season seem rushed compared to past seasons. I’d say that’s likely due to it being cut short at only 10 episodes, so the creators had to jam more into each episode than they wanted to.)

And then we have Bubs. On the one hand, it’s great to see him clean and back in his sister’s basement. On the other, it’s incredibly sad to see he him still in such agony. He’s not on drugs, and he goes to his meetings, but what is he doing? He’s not living, that’s for sure. He hasn’t replaced drugs with anything. He’s just not dying.

It’s a good episode, but a return to the scatter-shot set-up episodes of seasons past. 3/5 for me.

Episode 5:2

Let me get the elephant out of the room right off. I’m just as put off by McNulty’s actions as the Bunk is. Yes, we can see McNulty’s torn up about it (he’s only able to go through with it after drinking on the job), but really? Really? It’s important to have Bunk there, horrified by what McNutty’s doing. It manages to keep the scene grounded at least a little. (And while I find this entire plot very outlandish, some have pointed out (rightly) that it’s no more outlandish than a police chief creating Hamsterdam. Point taken.)

Still, it’s possible to understand what McNulty is up to. The episode leads to this, if you know what to look for: McNulty hearing from Lester about how no one cares about the bodies because they weren’t white, and how if white people were getting killed, then things would be different. McNulty hearing about how you can do things to a body post-mortem to make things still look like murder, with no one able to tell the difference. And having McNulty be as far into the bottle as he is.

It’s a dangerous combination, and McNulty is just dumb and crazy enough when he’s drunk to go for it. I’m more at ease with seeing it go into action on my second viewing than I was on my first.

In other news, we see just how much good Major Crimes was doing by staying on Marlo: as soon as they go away, the killings start right back up. Three people shot (and two boys orphaned) because someone had been heard to have possibly said that Marlo was gay. Michael’s right in the middle of it all, and while it’s nice to see he still has some shred of a soul (he doesn’t shoot the boy), it’s still terrible to see what he’s up to.

Bubs seems to realize he has to start doing something more with his life, and him volunteering at the shelter is a nice improvement. At the same time, it was painful to watch. How can he come back from what he did? Knowing what happened to Sherrod. It’s heart wrenching.

Scott the newspaper guy is the opposite of Gus. We’re set up to love Gus. Scott? How can we do anything but dislike him? While we don’t know for sure that he’s making stories up, the implications are clear and repeated. We also see him schmoozing with the bosses, and then see those same bosses magically show up to help him out. The lines are clear: it’s the Gus way of reporting vs. the Scott way of reporting, and it’ll be interesting to see how it plays out.

Avon’s back for an episode, and how pitiful does he look? Back when he was in prison before, he had underlings to do his bidding. He was in a position of power, and he didn’t need to tell anyone about it. Now? He’s there in person to tell Marlo hist how big of a deal he still is. Then again, he’s able to use his connections to get his sister $100,000, so maybe he hasn’t fallen too far. But he’s nowhere near the position of power he used to hold.

Marlo, meanwhile, is circling the waters. Looking for more ways to gain importance. The man is downright frightening.

But what am I talking about? There’s a serial killer loose in Baltimore, and who knows where things will go from here . . .

3/5 for me. A fine episode, but nothing extraordinary.

Like What You’ve Got, and Don’t Compare

For his birthday, Denisa and I got TRC a gaming mouse. It’s red and black and it lights up when you plug it in, and he was pretty much in love with it the moment he laid eyes on it. A highlight of his birthday celebrations. He put it to use as soon as he could, and he was overjoyed with how it worked so well. 6 buttons! Weights in the base so you could make it the ideal weight you liked! Optical! Great texture!

Last night he was talking all about how he was going to bring it to school today and show it off. “It isn’t wireless, though,” he said, a little apologetically. “Some of my friends think that wired mice are worse than wireless mice.” I reassured him that wired mice actually have a faster response time, and that he shouldn’t worry about things like that. He nodded. “Yeah.”

But why did I have a sinking sensation that logic and facts weren’t going to make much of a difference when it came time to Middle School debates?

After he had gone to bed, Denisa and I talked for a while about it. I said that I wished two things for TRC and his friends: first, that they’d be able to learn to like the things they had without needing other people to confirm that those things are good. Second, that they could learn to appreciate what others have without the need to put those things down so that they can feel good about what they have.

Denisa nodded, but then said, “Yeah. But since we’re still struggling with that as grown ups, I don’t know how easy it’s going to be for them.”

And she’s right. Do we ever really give up on deciding how good we’re doing by comparing ourselves to how other people are doing? I’d like to think we get better at avoiding it, but it’s still there. Checking how other families run traditions. Eying what someone else is driving. Comparing our vacation to where someone else goes.

Why should it make a difference? If you’re having a good time or content with what you have, what should it matter if someone else has more or owns something that’s nicer than what you have?

It’s an easy principle to spot when you’re looking at Middle Schoolers trying to keep up with each other. Kind of hard to see in your daily life however. (Ironically, I’d say a lot of Middle Schoolers would look at the things adults use to compare themselves and be just as bewildered by how in the world the adults can actually care about such silly things . . .)

I suppose the first step is to recognize you have a problem. Step two is to try and consciously avoid falling into that trap. Here’s hoping I can get better at that.

12 Years and 15 Years

Quite the weekend at the Bryce household the last few days. TRC turned 12, and today Denisa and I have been married for 15 years. Let’s do TRC first, since that’s chronological and everything. He’d been looking forward to this for quite some time, of course, though we kept asking him what he wanted to do and what he wanted to get, and he waffled all the time, trying to figure out what would be the best choice. It was made more complicated by the fact that we’ve all been sick for the last several weeks. So in the end, we stayed home and didn’t have any huge adventures.

He didn’t mind at all. He played Minecraft for a good long while, played some games with everyone else, had cake and ice cream, and topped it all off by watching The Force Awakens again (which we got on Blu-Ray for the occasion.) He said it was the best day of his vacation. (He was off school last week for spring break.) Really, in hindsight, there’s a lot to be learned from that. Having a great day often isn’t that hard: just spend the day doing the things you love to do, and don’t worry about all the chores you ought to be doing regularly.

I have to keep that in mind for my next birthday . . .

As the oldest child, TRC is constantly breaking new ground for our family. He’s very driven by the desire to do things the right way, and he’s extraordinarily bright. It’s fun watching him get older and more capable of so many things, though of course it’s also hard to let go of the old times. Sunday was an interesting snap shot. In the Mormon church, when kids reach the age of 12, they transition from the classes for children to going to the classes for teens. It was TRC’s last time in Primary (the class for children), and he was just there long enough for them to sing him happy birthday before he left it for good and went to Young Men’s.

In our Primary (Denisa is the President) they let the kids wear funny hats when they’re sung to for their birthday. Some kids decide not to, but TRC was all for it. I watched him happily put on a T-Rex hat and enjoy being goofy there in Primary, and then I took him down the hall to the Young Men, who (for the most part) wouldn’t be caught dead in a T-Rex hat that made them look goofy. (Too worried about their image, I suppose.) It was a sharp contrast to me as a parent, seeing him as a child and as soon-to-be teen, all at the same time.

You want your child to grow up and be everything he can be. You also want him to stay young so you can have him forever. Of course, I know which I’d prefer, logically. I want him to be able to reach his full potential. But I still can’t help missing the little guy who would come with me to my office or sit next to me just to watch me play World of Warcraft.

Anyway. Happy birthday, TRC!

And now, onto anniversaries. I can’t really believe that Denisa and I have been together for 15 years. That sounds like far too long for it to be possible. I’ve posted about our marriage before (typically on anniversaries, of course), and I’m not really sure what else I can add to what I’ve already said. Instead, I’ll just resist the temptation to reread those posts and say a few thoughts for today. Sorry if they’re repetitive.

I was scared stiff of marriage, plain and simple. I was mainly worried that I’d end up needing to get divorced, and it wasn’t something I wanted my kids to have to go through. How in the world would I be able to know that someone I was marrying was someone I’d be a good fit for for such a long time? Denisa was the one person I dated where all those questions just evaporated. Being with her was as natural and normal as being by myself. I didn’t feel the need to be different or special. I could just be me.

I still remember coming home from our first date. It had gone so well (we’d gone on a double date with my sister and a friend to go to the Tanner Gift of Music at the Salt Lake Tabernacle.) We got a flat tire when I was dropping my sister off, and Denisa came out to help me fix it. I stayed up until about 2am that morning, unable to really think about anything else. It was just such a good date. (And I’d been on a fair number that semester, if you’ll recall.)

Somehow, I was already thinking about marrying her. After one date. And things just got smoother and easier from there.

Do we have a perfect marriage? I’m not sure what something like that would look like, honestly. We disagree occasionally, though very rarely, and usually over things that don’t matter all that much. Living with another person and adapting your life to their life is a difficult thing to pull off, and when both people have strong wills and opinions, it’s inevitable that there will be disagreements from time to time. Personally, I think it’s remarkable that I could probably count the number of times we’ve gotten into very big arguments on one hand alone. After 15 years, maybe I’d need a second. I could definitely leave my shoes on.

And even for those rare occasions, our disagreements last all of a few hours or so, and then they’re done.

We still spend a ton of time together. Usually a couple of hours a day at least, with just us, watching a show or talking or reading. We still get along fantastically. She’s my best friend by far, and I can’t think of anyone I’d rather do anything with.

A spouse changes you. Not intentionally (hopefully), but if you live with another person for years and years, change is inevitable. I think you both drift toward the center point between you. For Denisa, that means she now watches way more movies and TV than she would otherwise. For me, it means I actually can tell when a room is dirty, and I have some semblance of an idea of what I should do to clean it.

The day you stop changing and drifting toward the center point, something’s going wrong, I think.

Anyway. This is getting a tad sappier than I’d like it to get, so I suppose I’ll end it here. Happy Anniversary, Denisa! I love you.

Easy to Judge

Nothing specific for you today. More of a general observation that applies to me just as much as it applies to anyone else. I love me some social media. It’s a great way to keep in touch with friends across the country and even the globe. I love being able to know what people are up to and keep tabs on the latest news and my friends’ responses to that news. But it doesn’t come without costs.

Because we’ve all got windows into many people’s lives, we get to see them making decisions or standing up for things we disagree with. And it can be really tempting to think less of those people because of what they do or say. I’m not saying you shouldn’t hold it against your Aunt Millie that she keeps retweeting Trump quotes, but rather that the influx of social media has forced us to know more about casual acquaintances than we otherwise would have.

Unfortunately, I see this being a bad thing more often than a good thing. If you meet a nice person and talk to them for an hour or two, that used to be the end of your interaction. You’re left walking away with a generally good impression of the person. Maybe you run into them two or three more times over the next month or so. Fine. But with social media, you might end up Friending them, and then you see all sorts of stuff about them that you didn’t know. And that’s when the judging can begin.

In a way, judging relative strangers isn’t as bad as judging friends and family. Certainly the effects can be much worse with friends and family.

I’m meandering a bit with this, but maybe here’s one point I’m getting at: social media forces us to know what our friends and family think about a topic. it keeps shoving our face in it, repeatedly. And since it’s come on so quickly, many people don’t know how or when to share things, and how to limit whom they share what with. Online etiquette is still an abstract thing for many people, and often those people seem to be all over Facebook.

You would think that this online forum would be a net good thing. That it would get lots of people to see things in ways they hadn’t thought of before. But how often do things actually play out that way? Instead, you find people picking sides and having flame wars with anyone who might disagree with them.

The thing is, you don’t typically get those sort of interactions with close friends and family. Just with the ones you don’t see too much and don’t (let’s be honest) care that much about. Yes, every now and then a close relationship will implode online, but it’s rare. Instead, we’re left judging the people we don’t know that well. And the verdicts can be pretty scathing sometimes.

Here’s the thing: it’s easy to judge. It’s easiest when you don’t know the person (or group of people) you’re judging at all. It’s easy to be racist when you only know your own race. Easy to hate when you don’t personally know and care about anyone of the group you’re hating. If you don’t know any transgender people, it’s easy to make your mind up about who they are and what’s “wrong”  with them. If you don’t know (or realize you know) a Jew, a Palestinian, an African American, a homosexual, a Mormon, a whoever. So easy to judge.

Once you *do* know a person and are close friends with her or him? It’s amazing to me how much more slowly we are to judge. How all sorts of extenuating circumstances explain why they made a mistake or acted a certain way. I think it’s just part of human nature: if someone else cuts me off in traffic, I yell at them and call them an awful driver. If I cut someone else off, I apologize, but I’m quick to reason why what I did was necessary or justifiable.

Same principle, except on a universal level, where it applies to everything else.

I wish social media would connect the world in a deep enough way that it would help with this, but in the end, it seems most social media connections are fairly shallow. And so we’re left instead with comments that aren’t thought through, accusations that don’t hold water, and hurt feelings all around.

What can we do about this? Be a little slower to judge. Keep in mind that everyone has extenuating circumstances. Remember that not everyone has the same values you do, and that your values aren’t even necessarily the “right” ones. See the world as less of a black and white place, and try not to miss opportunities to be more understanding instead of more critical.

Or am I just being wildly optimistic?

Revising is Like a Rubik’s Cube

I’m taking a break from the first draft of UTOPIA to do a third draft of MAGIC AT 30,000 FEET. Why? Good initial feedback from my agents, and I’d had to step away from UTOPIA for a bit anyway when I did the quick copyedit of THE MEMORY THIEF.

It’s interesting to me how different revision feels from writing new material. With new material, the thing that drives me is the exploration: discovering what’s going to happen next. I’ve tried plotting before, right down to having every little detail mapped out before I write the book. It made the drafting process easier, but I didn’t enjoy it as much. These days, I plot out the book in very broad strokes. The best way to describe it would be to liken it to a cross country trip, where I know which big cities I’m going to visit on the way, but that’s about it. The adventure is in getting to those cities and finding out what they’re actually like in person.

Revision, on the other hand, feels much more like a puzzle to me. When I approach a revision, I’ll read through the old draft and make notes about big things that need fixing. I’ll also check to see what alpha or beta readers have had to say (including my agents, naturally). Then I’ll come up with a list of changes that need to happen in the book. At that point, I delve into the book and start tweaking things to get everything off that list.

Sometimes it’s easy. Go through and eliminate a character or a few scenes that are just extraneous. But other times, it’s tricky. If the character you’re eliminating played a major role in some scenes, then you need to retool those scenes so they work without that character. That, in turn, sometimes necessitates more revisions to make the retooled scenes fit in with the whole of the novel.

It can be very non-linear, with me spending time on one spot, then flitting over to another to work on it, before having to go back to the original spot.

The other trick is that it’s an entirely different skill set than original writing. What I mean is that when I’m writing original material, I decide if it’s good or bad by how engaged I am in the plot. If the momentum feels good. If the characters feel right. There’s just a sense to it when it’s working, and when it isn’t.

None of that applies in a revision, particularly a revision of a book I’ve worked on a fair bit. It becomes harder and harder to trust my gut, because I can’t get a read on how the book is doing as a whole. I’m just focused on these small goals in the bigger revision checklist. I have to keep my head down and just barrel through those one by one, trusting that fixing those will in turn help the book as a whole.

With original writing, it’s a forest. With revision, it’s the trees.

Anyway. This is just a long way of saying “I’m revising again.” Not sure how long this one will take me. At first I didn’t think it would be too bad, but it’s proved to be thornier than I anticipated. (Once you get into a book and start pulling things apart, you can discover other problems that were hiding at first. Sort of like car repair. Have I used enough analogies yet?)

The good news is that the book is still one I really enjoy, and the changes I’m making make me even happier with it. Always a plus.

Wish me luck!

The Wire 4:13

I debated clumping the end of season 4 in with the beginning of season 5, but it just didn’t feel right. This season finale deserved its own article, even if that means I’m going to have to book it through the remaining episodes. (By the way, my plan is to do three episodes a week instead of 2 for season 5. It’s 10 episodes total, which means I’ll do 1-3, 4-6, 7-9, and then a series finale, all over the next 4 weeks.) But enough of the ground work. Let’s launch into this brutal episode.

Episode 4:13

It’s fantastic television, but this extra long episode doesn’t exactly leave us with many spots of brightness. In fact, I can really just think of one: Namond. Somehow, the corner kid least likely to escape the corner is the one who manages to pull it off. How? By Bunny talking to Carver, who knew Cutty, who knew Wee-bey, who was willing to listen to Bunny because of Cutty’s good word. And then Wee-bey was smart enough to realize he didn’t want this sort of life for his son, and humble enough to step back and let Bunny take over. And also strong enough to stand up to Mrs. Wee-bey, who’s still just a revolting waste of human tissue. But however it happened, Namond’s out.

His friends aren’t so lucky. Michael is now a full fledged murderer, killing people for Marlo. The act has changed him a ton, as he’s pretty much stopped caring about Bug other than to provide his brother with a bedroom and a nanny in the form of Dukie, who has dropped out of high school completely instead of trying to keep dealing with it. (Side note: it’s easy to be frustrated with the school for Dukie’s plight, but in the end, I put the blame for it on Dukie himself. The end of the school year was going to come regardless. This was Dukie’s chance to step up and take himself to the next level. It was going to be difficult, but we saw nothing to make us think it was impossible. Instead, Dukie didn’t even try. He just turned around and left school. Sad.)

And then there’s Randy. The “Snitch” label followed him to the group home, and Carver was unable to save him. Interesting that they even tried the Hollywood ending, with Carver volunteering to be the foster parent for Randy. But this isn’t Hollywood, and the solution isn’t that easy. It’ll be months before Carver could be approved as a foster parent. Anyone want to give odds on how Randy will fare over those few months? It doesn’t look pretty.

And of course the episode has a quick call back to the kids and how they used to be, showing Carver scattering a new pack of kids from the same haunts Randy, Dukie, Michael, and Namond used to haunt. So much happened to that crew over this season. Very tragic.

How about Carcetti? I don’t think it’s clear in this episode just what a betrayal the man has made to his city in the name of his political career, although we get hints of it. (His advisor is truly disgusted, for example.) Let me spell it out in case it’s still fuzzy: Carcetti was presented with a $50 million dollar shortfall in the school budget. He has spent all the rainy day funds the city had in giving the police raises, so there’s no money left to cover that shortfall. He had a chance to get the Republican governor to help him, but he knew that if he did that, the rest of the state wouldn’t want to vote for him if/when he ran for governor.

So he was faced with a decision: accept state money and solve the problem for the kids and his city, but hurt his political chances of becoming governor, OR turn the money down, scrabble through things for a couple of years, and make a run at the governor’s office.

He chose to go for the politically prudent one for himself. This means that Baltimore is now in the same mess it was already in, except needing to cut $50 million or so to balance the budget. And what’s Carcetti’s justification for it? He’ll be able to help the city once he’s governor. It was a despicable choice he made, and I’m sticking to that statement.

Wait for the fifth season to see the fallout.

Rawls has managed to fast talk his way into not just keeping his job, but remaining a powerful force in the city. Powerful enough to yell at Rawls for trying to undercut him, and have Rawls now weak enough to have to take the chastisement silently. Politics is a big factor in the fate of these characters.

You’ve got bodies appearing everywhere. You’ve got the co-op splintering enough that the Greek’s henchman shows up again to smooth things over. Omar seems like he might be in a good position, but he’s certainly put a huge target on his back with Marlo’s people. It’s not a position he’s shied from before, but he hasn’t had too much to do with Marlo just yet.

What about Bodie? I loved the call back to the chess analogy Dee made back in season one, and here Bodie finally sees he’s never going to be anything more than a pawn. The game is rigged, and he’s through with playing, so he goes down guns blazing. Sad to see him go. He was a bit of a weasel, but he was one of the few remaining honest weasels, if that makes sense. So much better than Marlo and his crew.

McNulty feels guilty for Bodie’s death, so he’s convincing himself he can handle going back to the MCU to do the job that just about killed him. Does anyone else have a *really* bad feeling about this? The man was a wreck, and that job already ruined one marriage he had . . .

But I suppose there are a few other mildly bright spots. For one thing, Kima and Lester are bright enough to find Chris and Snoop’s gun, so Marlo’s hitmen look to be in a bit of hot water. For another, Herc looks like he’s actually paying a price for his idiocy. It doesn’t repay Randy back for the world of hurt Herc inflicted on him, but at least he’s not getting off without any scratches.

Cutty seems like he’s well and truly out of the Game now. He’s not even a player with the ladies anymore, having found a suitable nurse. Another ray of brightness.

But all the rays of brightness in the world can’t make up for Bubs and his story this episode. When I saw him hanging in that interrogation room, I just about had a heart attack. I thought he was dead for sure, and props to Landsman for somehow caring enough to see past Bubs’ appearance (and projectile vomit, and the effect it’ll have on the clearance rate) to let Bubs go free. I’ve always liked Landsman, and I think some of that is because I remembered this one single action of his.

Bubs meeting up with his AA sponsor again is especially poignant, as he’s the man who told Bubs that addicts don’t quit until they hit rock bottom. We thought Bubs had hit that a long time ago, but is it possible for the man to go any farther down? I want Bubs to succeed so bad . . .

Anyway. A stunning conclusion to the best season of the show. Brutal, heart wrenching, but riveting. I’ll warn you right now that season five isn’t able to match this, though I will add that the end of season five is the best series ending I have seen . . .

5/5 easily on this one. What are your thoughts?

Binge-worthy Television: Person of Interest

Denisa and I are only in the second season, but with a season and a half under our belts, I’m definitely ready to give this the official Bryce Stamp of Approval. If you don’t know already, the show’s premise is that the government has been watching everyone in the country, looking for terrorist threats. Its tool to do this is a complex machine that keeps track of everyone and everything and makes connections to identify potential threats. They only use it in cases of national security, but it also sees people who are going to be in trouble (or make trouble) on a more personal level. A couple of guys take interest in these side cases and do their best to either protect the person in question (if they need protecting) or stop them (if they need stopping.)

Each episode has a nice bit of mystery at first, where they’re trying to identify why the machine gave them this person’s identity: to protect or to stop. There are sub-plots surrounding each character, as well as some of the police they’ve enlisted to their cause, or the government agents trying to catch them.

What’s to like about the show? It’s generally well-acted and produced and written. Yes, there are plots you can guess ahead of time, but it’s entertaining pretty consistently. I generally avoid shows that are too formulaic, drawn instead to series that deal with more overarching plot lines as opposed to “problem of the week.” Burn Notice, for example, was a favorite for a while, until it just got bogged down by too little movement with the overarching story. They’d dribble out extra information here and there, but mainly just string people along so they’d keep watching week after week.

In many ways, Person of Interest reminds me of Burn Notice. It’s got much of the same formula at play, just with a few extra layers to make it even more interesting. But it also hasn’t lost site of the big picture yet. There’s enough movement (in the first season, at least) to make it feel like it’s going somewhere and not just spinning its wheels. Maybe this will fall apart later on, but for now, Denisa and I have both been having a good time with it.

Anyway. Just thought I’d pass that along. The show is generally clean and consistently good. I’ve seen over thirty episodes so far, and I’ve given the bulk of them 3/5 or 4/5. Only one 2/5, and three actual 5/5s. That’s a good track record from me, so I thought I’d tip other people looking for something to watch in the show’s direction.

Hacking Birthday Presents

It was MC’s birthday yesterday. Hard to believe it’s already been three years. We’d asked her what she wanted to do on her special day, and it changed depending on when we asked her. But some things remained the same: she wanted a table cloth, a cake with fruit on it, and presents.

Easy peasy.

Denisa is our resident cake-making and decorating specialist, and she whipped up a chocolate wonder with strawberries, mangos, and kiwis. We still had a birthday tablecloth from one of the other kid’s parties, so that was brought out. All that was left was the presents.

Presents are more problematic for me, typically. A big part of me wanted to give her something new and exciting. Something she hasn’t seen before. But another part of me realized that whatever we gave her, she’d be happy. She just wanted to unwrap cool new things. And if there’s one thing that we already have plenty of, it’s kid toys.

However, I also realized that we decluttered kids toys about two or three years ago, putting a slew of them into some bins in the basement for ultimate donation later on. These were toys MC had never even caught whiff of. They’d be totally new to her.

So Denisa and I took a trip to the basement and went through what we had. Honestly, we could have given the girl a veritable toy store worth of presents, but we ended up settling on a few “best of” selections. She opened them, and she was (as predicted) overjoyed.

How do I feel about this? A little guilty, to be honest. I remember when TRC was turning 3. You want to get him all sorts of things. It was still the same with DC. But as time goes by and you see those new presents turn into old presents. and then you’re giving those old presents away and no one wants them . . . You start thinking maybe there’s a better way of spending your money, especially on kids who aren’t even going to remember those presents five or ten years later.

Though I still feel heartless.

It helps that Denisa’s been teaching a class on Zero Waste this semester. When you look at it all as STUFF, then it’s easier to divorce yourself from wanting more of it all the time.

Anyway. If you have a fair number of kids (or are planning to), and have then spaced out apart a bit, then I can certainly recommend this approach to others. Just box up the toys when they get tired of them, and then unbox them for the next child in the form of presents.

You’ll be their hero.

Do DC and TRC mind? Actually, no. They were really happy to see MC be so surprised and play with their old toys. So I think it was a good experiment, all the way around.

And that’s all I have to report this Monday.