davidgoldfarb

I've done five interviews in the last week and a half. Just more than a week, actually, as the first one was a week ago Friday and the last one this Friday. All of course for Designers and Dragons Origins, my new four books of history that crowdfund in just more than a week (https://www.backerkit.com/call_to_action/0477a26f-723e-4d2f-8f11-74cdc007daf1/landing).

There was one text interview for Rascal News (paywalled), one YouTube interview with Orkus Dorkus and one more interview for text and two more interviews for YouTube that haven't appeared yet.

Thursday night, I'd finished up the Orkus Dorkus interview, which was two and a half hours talking during and after the interview. And that was on a top of a business meeting that I'd had earlier the day. And I was realizing that my voice was starting to falter and I still had two more to do the next day!

I've never done a press tour, and this isn't quite that, though maybe it is in the age of the internet. But whether it's a virtual tour or a real tour, I can now say _EX-HAUST-ING_.

(Friday I was fortunately mostly recovered, and the interviews that day ran maybe two hours between them.)

I've got at least two or three more in the planning or scheduled stage, but I don't think I'll have another week like this. Whew!

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Among the lessons learned: my desk setup just isn't great for doing interviews. The biggest issue is that almost everywhere in this Hawaiian house gets blinding sun until at least noon, and window coverings are scant on the huge windows and doors downstairs, where our offices are.

So I end up sitting too far from the camera and angled from my desk and it's all awkward.

I scouted the rest of the house today, and decided that the end of the dining room table is probably better than my office for comfortable sitting (and there are curtains for the window next to it, which is also partly shaded because it looks out onto the lanai).

So we'll give that a try next time.

I wish I'd picked up on that faster, but those first five interviews were just such a blur that I didn't really pick up on the discomfort in my sideways seating until I looked at the Orkus Dorkus interview today and could see myself shifting around.

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Part of the reason it was so exhausting was that those five interviews were just part of the busyness (and business) last week. That was next to two days of tech writing. Said business meeting. Appointment with our cat behavioralist as we talk about remaining (but scant) issues in the house. Dentist appointment.

And two meetings about another writing project.

That other writing project was some volunteer work for an organization that I believe in. They wanted to write about a grant that they're starting work on.

So we got organized in the first meeting, and then started interviewing people in the second meeting.

Except by the second meeting, we'd seen some shitty headlines about the corrupt chuckleheads in Washington canceling some grants in a sort of related category. Just that weekend! Because Trump and his lapdog cronies don't like any grants that might actually better people who aren't billionaires. So the person I was writing for had the very real concern that if we stuck our head up and mentioned this grant, it could actually get it canceled.

I had to agree. I think the odds of the illiterate imbeciles in DC noticing are very low if I were to write that article, but the consequences very high.

So we cancelled the article.

Now I hate-hate-hate censorship. It's right up there with cruelty to animals and people who take really long turns in simple games.

And I'd be the first to say, "Don't comply in advance." The wanna-be clown-car fascists in Washington are weak men and women. They can't stand up to pushback, so we need to push back. I 100% agree with John Oliver: we need to tell them, "Fuck You. Make Me."

But this wasn't the same. It wasn't an article fighting against them, it was an article supporting work that predated them, and those weak men and women actually DO have the power to cancel it (because the weak men and women in Congress and the Supreme Court are letting them, power of the purse be damned).

So, that's one less thing to do, but the facts of it all left me deeply disturbed.

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That's actually the second time I was directly affected by Trump and his sore-loser policies in the last month. And that's really what's different this time. First time around, he was doing absolutely horrible things, but more often than not it was non-Americans he was screwing, at least while he was in office (as many of the worst effects were the result of his Supreme Court nominations and that's been a trailing indicator). This time around, he's screwing just about everyone in the whole country in real-time.

So it was a month ago or so that Kimberly and I went looking for our COVID vaccines. And we knew that Hawaii was a state where we should just be able to get them as long as we claimed one of the conditions that allowed them for under 65. And one was anxiety, and I'm happy to say that I'm anxious that there's a delusional narcissist who seems to be falling into dementia with his tiny vulgarian fingers on the nuclear football, or I was happy to say that I'm not physically active enough, since I sit at a desk 8 hours a day. (I think maybe this isn't necessary any more, from the last meeting of dead-animal Kennedy and the Anti-Vaxxers.)

But we got to Costco and those *)@#$ers required a prescription. Which is absolutely not what the law is in Hawaii. So I have no idea what's going on with a big chain that I'd previously had fair respect for licking the shoes of either Trump, the insurance companies, or both.

So we got our vaccines at CVS the next day. (And CVS in Poipu had a *great* pharmacist that we had a great talk with.)

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Yeah, I'm well aware that a lot of people have it even worse thanks to Trump. We're just the privileged tip of the iceberg.

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There's so much more I could talk about. The cat situation here at home continues to quiet. It's been maybe two weeks since we heard about Elmer in Boston, but we're comfortable with that: we didn't expect to keep hearing updates forever. My dad and Kimberly both picked up a cold (or maybe each picked up a cold) last weekend, and since we played a game together last Sunday (Harmonies), I was nervous about picking it up too, on my week of interviews. And maybe I did, as I hit a point of absolute exhaustion Thursday afternoon, but if so it passed mostly unnoticed (other than that fatigue). My step-mom Mary is in China right now, and seems to be making an absolutely amazing-looking tour of the interior of that huge, huge country.

But it's interviews and the unusual entrance of Federal politics into the life of every single person in this country that are taking up my head space at the moment.