continuing on...

Yesterday, we ran around doing something like 90% of the funeral prep. Luckily Grandma had taken out a couple of insurance policies for the express purpose of paying for the funeral; we went to the funeral home and pretty much just ran down the list of stuff she'd chosen, nodded, and signed the contract. The whole thing's already paid for and the home didn't try to upsell us on anything. This is one of the few things Mina ever did to make our lives easier.

Then we went to get me some shoes for the ceremonies - I just don't own anything appropriate for this kind of thing; I have some ugly sneakers and a pair of sandals that's going to fall apart soon. We ended up at Payless where I found some serviceable black pumps, and a pair of sneakers that was right on the border between 'hideous' and 'amazing'. Although we also discovered that I have some expensive taste; we'd checked out a new shoe store in the area first, whose prices ranged from $150 to $400. Guess which end of their price range I actually liked... but, you know, if I pay that much for something that's going to go on my feet, I expect it to be that costly because I sat down with the shoemaker and threw some sketches back and forth, and had it made for my feet!

Tomorrow is the funeral; I'm really not looking forward to that. A whole morning of standing around nodding and smiling at other people's expressions of sympathy, then watching the corpse-box get closed and put in another sealed box - what the fuck is up with our cultural denial of decomposition, anyway?

Monday is a visit with Jason and Jennie, and then Tuesday is transit. And then I can get back to work.

edit: ...and back to a normal sleep schedule because waking up before the sun sucks.

an occupied frontier

Earlier this morning, my mom was watching a show she'd taped. This silly thing she apologized for in advance called "Ghost Whisperer" about a woman who sees ghosts and helps solve the problems that keeps them hanging around haunting folks.

What struck me about it was not the plot or the premise.

What struck me about it was how casually the net was handled. Maybe this is perfectly normal; I dunno, I don't watch much TV. But every time I see the net in movies or TV for the past few years, I find myself laughing at how it's presented, at the way it has to be constantly explained, at the way they get it so wrong.

This show? This show got it mostly right. This show didn't dwell on the net; it took it as a fact of life. There was a guy described as a blogger who filled the role that a reporter would have a few years ago, and nobody felt an urge to explain what a "blogger" is. The ghost scared people at one point by making an entire high school get the same text message at once. His motivation was delved into by looking at his "Myface" page.

None of this stuff was presented with any whizzy cinematic effects. Nobody clicked 'send' on their mail client and got an animation of the text folding up into a picture of an envelope. It was all perfectly routine. Nobody explained how anything worked. Every character accepted it; the audience was expected to not need anything explained at all.

The Internet is not the future any more.

I wonder what will be?