AI and I agree on one thing
This is going to sound boring for a second, but bear with me for one little paragraph:
I’m dreading Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas because they’re all very social holidays and I’m not very social. I also don’t like the pressure to have a good time and to be happy. I feel like I have to put on a mask and pretend to be someone I’m not. I just want to be able to relax and enjoy the holidays without feeling like I have to perform.
Well, that was stupid, but don’t blame me. That paragraph was written by ChatGPT, using artificial intelligence, not your farm-to-table sort of intelligence that I prefer.
And I guess it’s passable in terms of a sixth-grade English assignment in which you’re told to write an essay about your feelings regarding the holiday season.
Even so, ChatGPT made some good guesses about why I dread the annual holiday season, including the fact that I’m not very social.
Give me a keyboard and I’m the belle of the ball, chattering away with abandon or blathering like a buffoon, tossing my opinions and observances around like ticker tape on the Canyon of Heroes.
But lock me in a room with other people—the more, the less merry—and I can come across as anywhere from laconic to arrogant. What’s worse, the more laconic and arrogant I feel myself appearing to be, the more laconic and arrogant I tend to appear. Eventually, I just take an Irish exit and flee to the sweet, loving arms of my car which dutifully takes me home.
It occurs to me that “Irish exit” might be on the wrong side of wokeism, but I don’t have a PC way of saying it other than maybe it’s an innocent offshoot of ghosting.
So, yeah, holidays, a two-month orgy of socializing and fellowship that always sends me spiraling into a seasonal depression that commences the day after my wife’s and my wedding anniversary in mid-August. It would set in sooner, probably around Labor Day, but my wife forbids it until after our anniversary.
It also flares up occasionally during the less holiday-infested parts of the year when clubs and classes and organizations invite me to speak. It’s an honor and it’s flattering to be asked, but, please, don’t, unless you want 45 minutes of what will appear to be laconic arrogance.
All of that said, however, my daughter has been after me for a couple of seasons now to add Christmas arches over our stretch of sidewalk, something I’ve managed to forestall so far, but this year I’m giving in and having them put up, primarily for Hannah, but also, so as not to appear to be such a Grinch since practically everyone on our block does it.
Anyway, would it kill me to show a little Christmas spirit?
We’ll find out.
What I’m watching
Have I ever steered you wrong before? I’m guessing yes, because we all have different tastes when it comes to everything, including streaming movies and serials. A lot of people liked “Squid Game,” for instance, while I couldn’t watch my way through one hideous episode, and I didn’t get the feeling that I was ever going to come around if I’d just stuck with it. And while I enjoyed “Stranger Things” for a couple of seasons, it got too chaotic and the kids started turning into sullen teens as the years passed.
And perhaps not everyone is going to like “The Burial,” but I’m afraid I’m going to have to insist that you watch it, now out of theaters and airing in the privacy of your home theater on Prime Video.
Its cast is absolutely killer, with co-stars Jamie Foxx as an attorney with a near-Pentecostal style and Tommy Lee Jones as a small-town funeral-home director who hires Foxx to represent him in a civil suit against a corporate funeral business. It is certainly Foxx’s finest role and one of Jones’ best as well.
I’m a complete sucker for courtroom dramas and “The Burial,” directed by Maggie Betts (“The Novitiate”) is one of the best I’ve seen, rivaling the first season of “Goliath” and “A Few Good Men.”
The movie is fact-based, adapted from a 1999 article by Jonathan Harr in the New Yorker.
What I’m reading now
Gotta put “Killers of the Flower Moon” by David Grann on speed-read before the film adaptation, with Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro and directed by Martin Scorsese comes out Friday on AppleTV+.
After that? I’ve ordered “While You Were Out: An Intimate Family Portrait of Mental Illness in an Era of Silence,” by Meg Kissinger, a journalist who has covered mental health for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for more than 20 years. It’s a memoir of growing up in a family of eight kids and two parents, all suffering to various degrees of severity (two committed suicide) and the silence prompted by shame and exacerbated by botched public policy, along with hope offered by modern treatment.
The book comes strongly recommended by our ace food writer Caitlin Antonios. She’s never let me down before. This could be the time; we’ll see how it goes.