Mallory's Camera

One of Icky's side hustles is dog-sitting.

He showed up here yesterday with an absolutely adorable spaniel mix, an eager-to-please guy named Tofu.

Pity the poor animal that is abandoned to Icky's care! Think puppy version of Oliver Twist at the orphanage or a canine Jane Eyre at Lowood.

I felt so sorry for poor Tofu that I volunteered to take him for a walk.

We hit the rail trail in a drizzle. But practically the moment we got out of the car, the sun burst from the clouds & within five minutes, the sky was blue & in my red sweater, I was overdressed for the heat!

My mood-o-meter swung from bleak to benificent in a heartbeat.

Which makes me think I do not have Seasonal Affective Disorder.

I have Angst-When-the-Sun-Isn't-Shining Affective Disorder.

I really should move to Nevada or Arizona or something.

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Otherwise, I spent the day Remunerating & reading Barry Diller's autobiography, which I found quite fascinating.

When Who Knew first came out, it racked up huge amounts of press because Barry Diller is gay but Barry Diller is also Mr. Diane von Fürstenberg. (I must note here that back in the Jurassic when I was modeling, my two DVF wrap-around dresses were my proudest possessions, & I just love Diane von Fürstenberg to death!)

For years, the assumption was that Diane von Fürstenberg was a beard.

But, no, sez Diller in his autobiography. The two met & fell in love back at the dawn of time. They had passionate sex just like any other two people in love. And in between dates, Diller continued to have sex with guys.

Forty years later, they got married.

I don't understand why this is so hard for the maintream media—I am pointing my finger at yew-w-w-w-w, Daily Mail!—to comprehend.

Personally, genitalia has never been the determining factor in who I fall in love with.

I fall in love with men, I fall in love with women. And anyone I fall in love with, I want to have sex with.

(Although it occurs to me that I probably should have written that in the past tense because I doubt very much I am capable of falling in love with anyone anymore.)

Obviously, sexual desire is a spectrum.

But more than that, terms like "gay" and "cis" are essentially marketing categories—"gay" considerably more than "cis" because show me a marginalized group, & I'll show you a business development opportunity!

But anyway, Barry Diller's sexuality & love life don't interest me.

No, Barry Diller's horizontal leap from Hollywood mogul to digital tycoon is what interests me.

Today, Diller owns InterActiveCorps (IAC), a media fleet that used to include Match.com & Tinder, and still owns a lot of B-list cyber-publications. (People! Barry Diller owns People! I used to work there!) Diller also owns Expedia & all its subsidiary vassals like Tracelocity, OrbitZ, Hotwire, etc.

How do you end up owning all these companies?

Well, you start out in the William Morris mailroom, just like everybody else. And you devote the first 10 years of your career swinging from salary-star to higher salary-star, spending relatively little on status details.

And after you accumulate a stake, you start buying the little pieces of the Rube Goldberg machine that the tastemakers ridicule or overlook but that you see potential in because you have vision. Barry Diller bought the decidedly low-rent QVC because when he looked at it, he immediately understood that screens could be used for purposes other than telling stories.

That was genius-level insight.

I was around during the early days of the Internet, too, & I never had that insight! Although, of course, today—a mere 35 years later—it seems so-o-ooo obvious.

Also, Barry Diller refused to feel bad about his own failures. I mean, he registered them and felt disappointment, sure. But he refused to dwell on them. Describing a mega-deal-fallen-through to someone, he commented, They won. We lost. Next.

Which I think is a demonstration of extraordinary emotional intelligence.

Grey day. Rain is predicted all week.

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BB, Flavia, & I showed up yesterday at the mall where the Middletown demo was supposed to take place, only to discover it was one of those curbside protests where you stand valiantly at the side of the road, breathing in automobile exhaust for a couple of hours while drivers (mostly) ignore you.

As one, our eyes met: No-oo-ooo, thank you!

Not a total loss: We scurried off to Tranquili-Tea for an hour and enjoyed home-churned ice cream & thunderstorms on the drive home.

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On the phone with Ichabod, I had a revelation.

Ichabod was saying something about always wanting to be his authentic self, & I was thinking, What a drag that would be—when it occurred to me that that might be because I spent so much time when I was slightly younger than Ichabod is now maintaining.

Maintaining was something you did when you were high on drugs & didn't want anyone else to know. But sometimes you maintained when you were feeling social anxiety or stage fright, or just had to be somewhere you did not want to be. You did not reveal (let alone exhibit) your inner quailings. There was a fair amount of honor involved in maintaining.

Of course, I don't know all that many Millennials except for my kids & their friends. And I know no Gen Z-ers.

But I do watch a lot of television with Millennial & GenZ characters, and if the representations are correct, they never maintain! Millennials & GenZ are constantly talking about how nervous they are or how incapable of functioning because of some incapacitating internal state. They have absolutely no concept of fortitude. Oversharing is their idea of virtue.

It's a manifestation of privilege when you think about it—(a) their belief that other people really care about what they feel and (b) that the world is a safe enough place that what you feel won't get you into trouble.

Maybe that's the true rift between Boomers & Millennials: We maintain; they don't.

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Other than that, I tromped and read more Tess of the d'Urbervilles.

Gotta say—Tess's passion for Angel Clare is rather annoying. Angel Clare has a big stick up his ass.

Alec Stoke-d'Urberville seems like he would be a lot more fun.

The other interesting thing about rereading Moving On is that I actually go through a brief interval of disorientation when I put the book down like I'm kind of surprised to find myself in my present time/space continuum. I expect to be somewhere else.

I have no idea whether this is due to the immersive quality of the prose or the fact that I have read this book so many times before, & in such a wide variety of settings, that my mind doesn't quite know where to throw down its anchor.

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Meanwhile...

The political situation in the U.S. continues to grow worse & worse.

Thousands of international students attending U.S. universities apparently woke up this morning to emails urging them to self-deport. This is not being reported upon in the American press, only in the international press. Some of these students engaged in campus protests against American-backed destruction in Gaza—but some of them only denounced American-backed destruction in Gaza on social media sites, and some of them only "liked" postings denouncing American-backed destruction in Gaza on social media sites.

This is a Very Big Thing.

Essentially, it means the Facebook community apparatus that once upon a time was scanning your posts to make sure they were inference-free of racial, national, religious, & gender slurs is now on the hunt for sedition.

I personally do not understand how anyone thinks they can get away with posting naked political dissent on social media sites right now. I shudder every time one of my sweet friends posts, Let's not pay our taxes!

I've been using pseudonyms in place of politicians' names for over five years now, figuring that AI will be struggling a while longer to make the leap from the literal to the figurative.

And I'm quite confident it will be safe to post dissident thoughts via remote cyber-outposts like LiveJournal & Dreamwidth for a while longer because nobody actually reads LJ & DW. If you feel well-intentioned toward the poster, you may leave a heart or remark about their first sentence. But are you actually reading what they wrote? Are you reading this? No.

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The other Big Thing that's happening now is Trump's attempts to overhaul U.S. elections by executive order. He wants presumptive voters to prove citizenship at the polls.

Of course, there is no legal way Trump can overhaul U.S. elections by executive order since the U.S. Constitution clearly assigns that right to the states. Thus, Red states will go along with Trump's voter suppression attempts, and Blue states will not.

In a way, this executive order pleases me because it gives a very actionable agenda for resistance—namely: We should all be assisting potential Red state voters in tracking down those birth certificates and other documents that prove citizenship so they can continue to exercise their vote.

If I had an extra million dollars or so lying around, I would consider setting up a 501c3 for this purpose.

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There's a Big Protest scheduled for next Saturday, April 5th.

I'm a bit ambivalent about attending.

On the one hand, one feels one must do something.

On the other hand, I'm not sure the protests will be accurately reported on in the American press—and if they're not reported on, they're essentially a meaningless type of virtue signaling.

If I go, I'm going to protest in Middletown—prime Trumplandia country! And I'm going to research ways of thwarting facial recognition software.

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Meanwhile, I didn't accomplish nearly enough Remuneration-wise as I wanted to yesterday and must hunker down today.

Sigh...