7 Days of Grieving - 6

Today was a busy and hard day. After I was done with all my four classes, I had a short conversation with my mother as I had to rush to a committee meeting. Mom lives in Russia and our Skype communication is one-way: she calls me when she can, I cannot reach her at all. So I pick up whenever she calls, even for a short call. Mom called me the first time today right in the middle of the class I was teaching. My students were amused to hear me speak Russian to her as I was making sure that nothing major bad happened and asking her to call me back later. She called about an hour later and we exchanged all the family news (we rarely talk politics as it is simply not safe). After that, I went to my Assist Committee meeting.

After the meeting, I spent a couple of hours reaching out to students who have missed enough classes to raise an attendance concern. That's the part of my Assist Committee duties: as faculty member, I am expected to reach out and offer the students help and resources when they are struggling. After my college introduced this policy about three years ago, our retention rate went up. So we are trying to keep this up, not to let the students slip through the cracks of non-attendance. Sending those emails out was a tedious job requiring attention to a lot of details, so I took a short break in between and wrote this Drabble. It took me forever to trim the fat from it to exactly 100 words but I did it:

Prepping and grading for tomorrow's class took me awhile as well. Before I knew it, it was 6:15 pm. My colleague teaches a night Introduction to Film course and sometimes I sit in it to watch the movies I haven't seen. Today he planned to show Spike Lee's 1989 movie "Do the Right Thing." I had a quick dinner in the office, and went to watch the film.

Given what we are living through right now, it was incredibly insightful and poignant. Too many things predicted from today's reality, including police brutality, BLM movement, Trump and heat waves. It made me feel unsettled and distressed again. I liked the movie a lot for its artistic and social commentary value, but I would rather it not be so relevant today. It also reminded me of Tarantino's "From Dusk to Dawn" in the sense of how quickly a regular unremarkable reality escalated into something that no one could control and resulted into death and destruction.

There's a lot more about this movie that I need to reflect and contemplate on, but one question is nagging me, "Will this ever end?" Thirty-five years later and we still face the same issues of violence and exclusion in the society, but now they are exponentially worse because of the social media and the post-post-modern post-truth society we are living in.

I've been also checking into the world of cryptocurrency today. Something nefarious and large-scale is happening there as all the crypto coins are rising up in their value for the sixth consecutive day after the election. Even Elon Musk said that it is not sustainable, and given how heavily invested he is in the meme Dogecoin, it is surprising. My own history with Dogecoin is for another story, but I'm watching it wearily, trying to decide when I want to sell it because this quick raid looks too much like a pump-and-dump scheme.

It's 10 pm, I'm finishing this up in my office and going home. Still need to take my evening walk before I go to bed. Good night to everyone in this hemisphere.