prevnar, prevnar everywhere

Matt and I like to laugh about how it feels like they’re running out of available names for pharmaceuticals because they’ve just started sounding more and more awkward and ridiculous to pronounce.

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We noticed at some point this year while watching the show Parenthood that we were pretty much only getting ads for drugs. It seems weird since we happen to be a household that rarely visits a pharmacy counter, so prescription drugs aren’t a slam-dunk thing to advertise to us…and here we thought the internet companies were doing a good job stalking us. But even a toddler could give us a once-over and see that they should be advertising gadgets, food, and pretty much anything Star Wars or vampires to us.

Then it occurred to me that this might be happening because I’m getting to be “of a certain age.” And maybe these are just the ads you get when you’re rounding this bend in the road of life. 🤷🏻‍♀️

We started keeping track of the drugs we were seeing ads for just for fun, and this is the list we came up with over the next few weeks. 27 pharmaceuticals total! Someone please tell me what I win for doing this.

shadow puppet season.

Today is a snowy Saturday in March. We’ve been having a cozy day, watching movies and drinking hot chocolate in front of the crackling parlor fire. 

quarantine dream.

We’ve been quarantining for almost two weeks and this is the most caught-up I’ve been on household tasks in years.

And I’m still not fully caught up. Because this is the season of life where one really can’t be, at least if one has kids and works full-time, I guess.

of swatch-dogs and diet-cokeheads.

I rewatched the classic 80s dark comedy Heathers a few months ago, and I’m still thinking about it. Nothing against Mean Girls, but what even was the point of it while Heathers is still here to cast its perfect shadow on that and every other facsimile that rises up? The dialog, the caustic humor, the themes, the hard truths—it’s all still there, and maybe it hit even harder watching it as an adult trying to navigate professional life and friend circles pulled between several competing extremes, each one (surprise!) worse than the last.

A goodbye to the very best guy

My grandfather’s funeral was last week.

It was not a surprise, as he had been declining sharply due to prostate cancer lately. And just a couple of weeks before, the hospice worker told Dad that she thought he only had two weeks or so left. He even went down to the funeral home and told them exactly what he wanted while he was still able to get around.

But sometimes people beat so many odds and so many prognoses over the years that it still feels like a surprise when something finally catches up with them. It’s hard to face the loss of such a warm, generous soul when I think about all the things I had hoped he would stick around for.