We are always the same age inside. Gertrude Stein

I’ve been watching this guy on TikTok gradually build an eel pit (exactly what it sounds like) under his house for months now, and tomorrow he is FINALLY going to add the eels. gonna be a huge day for me Julia Glum @SuperJulia news editor @Money, fangirl at heart. my tweets are like 80% pop stars and 20% personal finance.

This started out as “Today is my birthday”, then “Yesterday…”, then ” The day before yesterday”, now I’m just going to say “The last June 15th, was officially my eighty-second birthday.” Although that convention always seems slightly wrong to me because the day before June 15th was actually the last day I was eighty-two. Today I am eighty-two years plus four days. Eighty-two plus four days and, I’m pretty sure, I’m no wiser than I was at eighty-one plus three days. More jaded perhaps but that is not wisdom.

These are not good times, most of us have been driven into some sort of isolation by a plague that doesn’t seem to want to go away. We sit at home watching people trying to destroy our democracy and then blatantly lie about that destruction. It is discouraging. Seeing the evidence pointing towards Trump knowing he lost the election and not really caring about that inconvenience in his quest for power and money and then seeing almost the entire Republican political establishment lie about it has been discouraging in the extreme.

In Europe, seventy-five years after close to fifty million people were killed in World War II, we have another unthinkable European War, in Ukraine again (in World War II, an estimated four million Ukrainians were killed). This war is more localized than WWII was but also much more locally destructive. Maripol is rubble and Severodonetsk is on its way to the same state while the Ukrainians impatiently await the arrival of more deadly equipment so they can kill more Russians. It is barbaric but Ukraine is fighting for its life just like The USSR was seventy-five years ago.

In the background is the existential problem of Global Climate Change. It seems that the only people even willing to admit the problem are those people that don’t have the power to do anything about it. That, for me, is even more discouraging.

On the plus side, there is a guy on Tic Tok who has built an eel pit in an unused cistern. I can think of a half a dozen reasons why putting any energy into building an eel pit is a bad idea but the world is in a better place for it and for people like him.

Happy Birthday to me and Happy Summer to all.