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Birthdays and Sociopaths
Apr. 12th, 2022 09:13 amMy birthday was just as fabulous and filled with adulation as anyone could possibly desire a birthday to be!
L hosted a tea party in my honor!
Loraine gave me gardening gloves that matched my manicure!
RTT made me the star of his vastly popular Instagram and gave out my texting particulars to all his friends so that all evening long, my phone kept chiming with messages from strangers! This apparently is how all the Kool KidZ in Ithaca celebrate their birthdayZ:
(RTT also produced his tax documents so now I don’t have to worry that he’ll spend the next 10 years languishing in debtors’ prison.)
None of my TaxBwana clients was annoyingly psychopathic! (And farewell Monday night TaxBwana pod—I’ll miss the zombie stalks through the ill-lit and ominously echoing Galleria-after-closing-time.)
Good times! Had by all!
Came home and binged the last four episodes of The Dropout—which is just so extraordinarily good at telling a deeply chilling—and true!—story that I find myself completely at a loss of words to describe it.
Adam Neumann is just your garden variety sociopath, amplified—true!—by the huge amounts of drugs and alcohol he consumed as well as by the buckets of money thrown his way—practically a green equivalent to a red carpet.
Elizabeth Holmes is something else entirely.
I don’t know quite how to describe it.
More a kind of Hannah Arendt essence of evil.
And Amanda Seyfried is so very, very good at portraying her. There is never a moment in the entire 8-episode arc where she breaks character for a single second, overplays as a kind of aside to the audience: Ain't I awful?
She is guiless. She is duplicitous. But in the service of what? What exactly are her motives? You never can figure that out, and that’s part of the creepiness.
Everything about The Dropout is amazing, the writing, the editing, the directing, the art direction, the acting, but Amanda Seyfried is in a class by herself. One of the best acting performances I have ever seen.
Of course, the deal is that the Hannah Arendt essence of evil is often a screamingly funny evil if you’re lucky enough to be able to view it from the outside. And The Dropout is often howlingly comic. Still. The Elizabeth Holmes saga is so upsetting on such a deep, deep level that even though I knew that Holmes gets busted in the end (‘cause real life!), I had to watch the final episode before I watched episodes 5, 6, and 7, just to reassure myself, yes! she does get her takedown!
###
I am giving myself a week off before I tackle the next Remunerative Project. The last one was exhausting (but well received!)
The only Have-To is TaxBwana-ing tomorrrow.
Of course, it is raining again today, so I’ll probably spend the day finishing The Future Is History and ruling Tropico.
Ichabod is arriving in New York on Friday, and we are heading up to Vermont this weekend.
L hosted a tea party in my honor!
Loraine gave me gardening gloves that matched my manicure!
RTT made me the star of his vastly popular Instagram and gave out my texting particulars to all his friends so that all evening long, my phone kept chiming with messages from strangers! This apparently is how all the Kool KidZ in Ithaca celebrate their birthdayZ:
(RTT also produced his tax documents so now I don’t have to worry that he’ll spend the next 10 years languishing in debtors’ prison.)
None of my TaxBwana clients was annoyingly psychopathic! (And farewell Monday night TaxBwana pod—I’ll miss the zombie stalks through the ill-lit and ominously echoing Galleria-after-closing-time.)
Good times! Had by all!
Came home and binged the last four episodes of The Dropout—which is just so extraordinarily good at telling a deeply chilling—and true!—story that I find myself completely at a loss of words to describe it.
Adam Neumann is just your garden variety sociopath, amplified—true!—by the huge amounts of drugs and alcohol he consumed as well as by the buckets of money thrown his way—practically a green equivalent to a red carpet.
Elizabeth Holmes is something else entirely.
I don’t know quite how to describe it.
More a kind of Hannah Arendt essence of evil.
And Amanda Seyfried is so very, very good at portraying her. There is never a moment in the entire 8-episode arc where she breaks character for a single second, overplays as a kind of aside to the audience: Ain't I awful?
She is guiless. She is duplicitous. But in the service of what? What exactly are her motives? You never can figure that out, and that’s part of the creepiness.
Everything about The Dropout is amazing, the writing, the editing, the directing, the art direction, the acting, but Amanda Seyfried is in a class by herself. One of the best acting performances I have ever seen.
Of course, the deal is that the Hannah Arendt essence of evil is often a screamingly funny evil if you’re lucky enough to be able to view it from the outside. And The Dropout is often howlingly comic. Still. The Elizabeth Holmes saga is so upsetting on such a deep, deep level that even though I knew that Holmes gets busted in the end (‘cause real life!), I had to watch the final episode before I watched episodes 5, 6, and 7, just to reassure myself, yes! she does get her takedown!
###
I am giving myself a week off before I tackle the next Remunerative Project. The last one was exhausting (but well received!)
The only Have-To is TaxBwana-ing tomorrrow.
Of course, it is raining again today, so I’ll probably spend the day finishing The Future Is History and ruling Tropico.
Ichabod is arriving in New York on Friday, and we are heading up to Vermont this weekend.
