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Five Questions June 2023

Posted on 2023-06-24

Once again trying to keep up with christyotwisty's Five Questions.

gopher://sdf.org/0/users/christyotwisty/phlog/2023-June-Five-Questions.txt

Describe the most expensive object you'd like to buy.

Part of me wants to say "nothing, I need to stop buying expensive things" but that's a copout.

Part of me wants to buy a new car, preferably electric (and preferably not a Tesla.) But a bigger part of me wants to not buy another car at all, and continue adjusting my life so I don't need to drive. Already I live above a supermarket, and five minutes from the Metro, so that eliminates a lot of driving for me.

I'll go with the car. Barring that, those Mac Studios look pretty sweet (but are also much, much more computer than I need.)

What is something the generation preceding you loves that you don't understand?

"Smooth jazz."

What is something the generation succeeding you loves that you don't understand?

Memes (in the internet sense, i.e. "I took some random picture from the internet and put some text on it. Now it's a meme!")

Bonus: Something the generation succeeding the meme generation loves that I don't understand: TikTok.

what holiday in your calendar needs to be replaced, and with what other observation or commemoration?

I can't think of one currently, but I can think of one that was recently replaced: Virginia, my home state (I don't want to give you a kiss, sorry) had, for a long time, a holiday called Lee-Jackson Day, celebrating the lives of Confederate traitors Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. This was part of the decades of odious racism that followed the U.S. Civil War, and was celebrated around the same time as when we now celebrate Martin Luther King Jr's birthday. Indeed, for a time, the two holidays were celebrated on a single day as Lee-Jackson-King Day, which is still not even the largest insult perpetrated on Black Virginians by their government (King later got his own day separate from the traitors.)

In 2020, as part of the wave of reckoning following the murder of George Floyd, Virginia did away with Lee-Jackson Day. It is not missed. It was replaced on the state holiday calendar with Election Day, which should have been a state holiday all along. (Unlike most U.S. states, Virginia has state elections in odd-numbered years, combined with the even-numbered federal election years, so there is an election every year, making Election Day work as a holiday.)

what do you think it means to be redeemed? Have you felt redeemed at one time? Can one be redeemed an iota without the drama of a constructed fiction narrative?

I don't believe in redemption in the religious, or at least Christian, sense of the word. I'm not sure I believe in it in a secular sense, either. To me it implies that something you have done has magically undid some prior malfeasance on your part, which is rarely the case. In the case when that actually does happen (to some extent if not entirely), such as returning something that has been stolen or righting some prior wrong, there is often a better word, such as "restitution" or "correction."

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