In my small, Catholic grammar school, I had a class called Social Studies. One year, maybe when I was in six or seventh grade, we had to bring in newspaper clippings weekly, and learn about “current events”. I didn’t like this. I never knew what was going on. I remember bringing in articles about OPEC or Anwar Sadat, and having no clue about what I was presenting.

My memories of watching the news are my mom saying, “Oh…those poor people, can you imagine what they’re going through?” And I would think, No, I don’t want to imagine that at all. I was used to watching The Guiding Light, The Jeffersons and Three’s Company. I’d rather think about Star Wars or Michael Jackson or E.T. I was busy amusing myself to death.

Since my last blog post, I vacationed in Las Vegas and New York City, helped with the annual trimming of my dad’s arborvitae bushes, spent a few days getting back into routines, helped Sarah shop for a car, then I got sick.

I plopped myself on the couch and watched a bunch of movies and I also had a YouTube relapse. I was watching videos of “current events” and they were nutty. There was the attempted assassination of Trump, Biden stepping down from campaigning, Kamala possibly running for president, an IT outage, and the opening ceremonies of the 2024 Olympics in Paris. I’m noticing a big difference between these YouTube videos and the newspaper clippings from my middle school class. For one thing, they’re more addicting. They are also seemingly never-ending. And they are mostly reactions and opinions about what happened, or parts of stories leaving you with unanswered questions. Was that blue screen of death on my laptop in the summer of 2023 from an IT outage?

Anyway, you’ve got to expect times to change in 40 something years. I recently watched some movies that were set in the 90’s that seemed like so long ago. Remember when answering machines seemed cool?

I don’t really have a point to this post. I just needed to get off YouTube and I felt like writing. I also wanted to post some pictures of Las Vegas and New York to look at in the future. And as usual, I need to be caught up with the current events in my life so that I feel ready to write more.