Funny how?
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At some point in my erstwhile travel-journalism career, I must have written critically about Global Entry, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection program that lets you get pre-approved for re-entry (i.e., so you can skip the lines), because while everyone else gets to renew online, I have to do it in person. If I found that annoying when I lived in New York City and was often at airports anyway, I had no idea how good I had it. This time, I had to drive 90 minutes to L.A., then 90 minutes back, all for a three-minute interaction. The officer asked a few questions—along the lines of had I been convicted of a felony—and took a new photo and a new set of fingerprints. Before I could finish asking why I get to do this in person (having coached myself to phrase it like an opportunity), the officer insisted that the system is totally random. If that were true, I wanted to say, other people would get to renew in person, too. No matter, they still clearly hate me.
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The house is moving forward, which is a relief, because for a long time the contractors seemed to rip something new out on a daily basis. It should be done by year end, which is when we have to move out of the rental, but just in case, we've rented a place in wine country for the first week in January. That sounded much more appealing before the state issued a three-week stay-at-home order likely to be extended into January....
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Adam: What state is Wisconsin in? Not Minnesota.... Not Illinois....
Me: I don't know what to say.
Adam: Help me.
Me: Wisconsin is a state.
Adam: Oh. But there's a city called Wisconsin, too, right?
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Three cultural recommendations: 1) Barack Obama's new memoir, A Promised Land, is fantastic; the writing is so clean and smooth, it goes down like water. I read a chapter a day, which makes the 700-page length seem achievable. 2) Deutschland '83—along with its sequels, Deutschland '86 and Deutschland '89—is excellent television. Unfortunately, the first two are on one streaming platform and the third is on another. 3) As members of the Santa Barbara International Film Festival's Cinema Society, we occasionally get early access to films, such as Assassins, a documentary about the murder of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un's estranged brother by two unwitting young women. I worried it would be sensationalized, but with a story that good, it didn't need it.
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I also enjoyed watching Broadcast News for the first time since it came out in 1987—the movie has aged terribly in some ways and not at all in others—not least of all for this kid, who looks just like Adam did as a child.