The whole office got sent home early on Friday because of the Laquan McDonald shooting trial verdict. We got an email about it stating that people who were worried about their safety could go home, and I was going to stay because I live on the far north side and don't have anything to worry about. Then the section chief went around to talk to people while I was in the stairs, and then my boss came to me and very nicely told me to get out, so I went home at 10:45.

I mean, the whole "We need to protect ourselves! You know how those people are!" aspect of the warnings are pretty racist, but also I'm not going to argue against going home early on a Friday. And then when I came in today, there was an email that building management closed the whole building anyway. I ended up going to the art museum with lisekatevans instead with my afternoon, and then later out to Izakaya Mita for Japanese food and shōchū. Delicious.

On Saturday I woke up early (after going to bed at 3:30 a.m.), took a shower, and then took the train out to the suburbs to visit my parents. This weekend was the Scarecrow Festival, probably my favorite cute suburban festival I've been to, and so I went out into the rain to look at the scarecrows with my parents. They weren't as impressive as previous years, and I think that a lot of people didn't even show up. The mechanical section was almost completely empty, for example, but there was this one in a tent:


The scarecrow itself shot out steam and there was a zeppelin circling in the background. Sadly, this was really the most interesting scarecrow there was. There were a couple others I liked, one designed like a butterfly and one with a scarecrow monster emerging from the corn, and one straw statue of a large wolf that wasn't a scarecrow at all but was still really neat. Not as many as previous years, though, and even the lack of crowds due to the weather wasn't enough to make up for it. I look back on the festival two years ago more fondly, but maybe that's because all of the pokemon scarecrows. Geek scarecrows will always be a draw for me.



Not sure how much straw is actually in this one, but I usually like the more abstract scarecrows.


Here we go, a scarecrow. It's the vengeance scarecrow, the scarecrow formed in response to the one I saw years ago with a giant papier-mâché crow attacking a scarecrow and devouring it alive. The ghosts of scarecrows past haunt the cornrows, hunting the defilers of the corn, bewitching those who enter the rows so that they wander lost without a way out. Is that the leaves rustling?

More scarecrows like this.

I was staying at my parents' house, and while I was there they told me they're planning to make me a successor trustee to their trust, in a conversation that just makes me think "there comes a time in every middle-class white person's life where..."

Well, and also:

We are Sex Bob-Omb and we're here to make you think about death and get sad and stuff!

Better now than later, of course.

The UN just released a report about climate change and the capsule summary is "we're fucked." Sure, it says that decisive action can still avert catastrophe, but proto- or actual fascists are being elected all over the world and they're much more likely to go to war over resources rather than work together to fix the problem. We're not going to do anything to fix it, industrial civilization will get increasingly strained, the refuge issues now are going to seem like nothing compared to what will happen in twenty years, and while humanity probably won't go extinct, who knows what will happen to global civilization.

We are doomed and no one will save us.

That's basically been my thought process for years and really, every report about global warming just confirms that I'm right. I don't end up despairing over it, fortunately, but I can't say it doesn't affect my life. Part of the reason I was on the fence about having children for so long is because of climate change, because I wasn't sure I wanted to bring a child into a world where they'd grow into adulthood in a time of civilizational collapse. Previous generations didn't have the choice not to do that, but we do, and I think it's a pretty rational choice.

I don't know why climate change doesn't fill me with despair when so many other things do. Maybe it's because it's such a large problem that there's literally nothing I can do. No action I take will affect climate change in any measurable amount. I mean, one hundred companies are responsible for 71% of emissions. Me personally not buying them won't affect those emissions any more than me not going to see movies for years after MPAA support of SOPA kept the FCC from dismantling net neutrality, and I missed out on all the Marvel movies. Maybe it's that there's no point I can latch onto as a shortcoming in my myself, and so I am more detached from it? Or maybe it's just that the enormity of the problem is overwhelming--I can understand people being cruel to me but not the end of the world.

Happy Monday.