So much has happened over the last week, and I don’t have time to write it all down. I try to do this daily, but my web hosting platform hasn’t been letting me in. Sheesh.
Anyway, here’s the short take: Thanksgiving was mixed, nice dinner with my family followed by food poisoning, which kept me from my wife’s family’s dinner. Birthday was good all the same. Enjoyed my days off as much as I could. Glad to be back at work.
I’m listening to a very depressing book called “Secondhand Time” by Svetlana Alexievich. It’s powerful. It’s about how average people coped or didn’t cope with the end of the Soviet Union. What I like about it is that it simply records what people had to say without dressing it up. What you find, though, is very sad. Life under communist rule was terrible, but then, life without it has also been terrible. You had Party true believers who lamented their reduced status after the fall of the USSR, but then they talk about all the killing and mass arrests and torture that was done by their own. At the same time, the changes brought about by capitalism were roiling – gangsterism and corruption took hold immediately.
I am glad to have the life that I have. I wouldn’t trade for anything.