Star Wars: The Last Jedi

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Star Wars: The Last Jedi. Second viewing (the first). The opening bombing run is really good. I'd forgotten about it – holds up on rewatch. The casino interlude is so, so dumb. I appreciate the visual contrasts in the salt planet battle. Not just the colors, but the scale, like with Finn's tiny figure juxtaposed with the gigantic tanks in empty space. We need more like that. So many close-ups. Love the tortured silence of Kylo Ren. So depressed, a mindset to just let it all go, burn it all down. Broader theme here of how brash, seat-of-the-pants heroism is often foolish. The writing still strikes me as bad in many spots. I didn't notice the first time around how the kid Force-pulls himself a broom at the end.

Good Things in 2018

It's never too late to reflect. I walked a lot. It's the best. One of my goals was to walk every street in downtown Atlanta. Done. I also walked from my place downtown out to the peak of Kennesaw Mountain. This was ~23 miles of mostly road walking that was mostly... pretty miserable. It's hard to feel like you're living your best life when you're walking a narrow strip of grass next to a 4-lane divided highway through light-industrial zoning. But you grow in some odd way. You feel a bit more sympathy for when you see someone doing it who maybe didn't have the same choice in the matter. Similar to my walk to Stone Mountain I featured in Good Things in 2017, "Really glad I did it, and I will never do it again." I also got some good walking when I made a summer visit to Glacier National Park with my dad and brother. We hadn't had a guys-only trip like that since... I couldn't tell you when. No place like it. Only downside was not being able to disappear into the wilderness immediately. Glacier was my second National Park of the year. Earlier in the spring I went on a volunteer trip to Saguaro National Park, working on a long-running project to remove invasive buffelgrass (which increases wildfire risk, among other issues). It was the most incredible experience. I've long loved the outdoors and hiking and such, but there was something about that trip where nature just really bowled me over. I was there after a dry winter (I am told), but rains had come through just before I arrived. Over the course of the trip, I got to see the desert wake up. Spring was beginning. So many crazy plants I'd never seen up close, or even heard of, were leafing out over the course of the week. To see the dry brown scrubby landscape come alive, and then return home to the lush damp south... I was absolutely drunk on nature. I went to my usual weekend stomping grouds, a favorite state park, and I was just in aww. "Look at these grasses! These leaves!" That new appreciation for nature ended up feeding into an amazing reading streak. I surfed one of those rare waves of books, hitting a stride where every book leads to the next and the next and the next. I think it really kicked off with McPhee's Encounters with the Archdruid, just before the Saguaro trip. I read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and that led me to The Hidden Life of Trees and then I figured I'd give Desert Solitaire another shot, and loved it this time around. I read Goodbye to a River, where I got a feel for the frontier, and more curiosity about the history of the west and non-white experience of the environment. Empire of the Summer Moon was a nice complement. A Natural History of the Senses worked its way in, and Black Nature, and This Radical Land, too. (In the midst of this I took an excellent workation trip to Toronto, and saw Niagara Falls on one of those little boats, and had an out-of-body experience.) After adding Coming Into the Country and Rainy Lake House to the reading binge, I'd touched just about every region of the country. This all tied together and peaked with what I think was my favorite book of the year, Empires, Nations, & Families. Whew. What a ride. Outside of that, some other 2018 reads I enjoyed more than average, with especially goods ones asterisked:

I watched some good stuff, too. Many of the stand-outs were smaller-scale movies. Favorites, among those new to me, mostly in reverse chronological order:

I built on my daily push-up and squat habits, slacked off on meditation, and got a lot better at flossing regularly. (Don't economize on floss. Buy the good stuff and use it liberally.) I started doing evening journal to match my morning one. I've really liked this addition. It's a good opportunity to scrub my brain clean before I sleep. Usually it's just bulletpoints of what happened during the day, and that's plenty. Good year, though it didn't always feel like it. 🤔