by I played tennis tonight. We’d booked the court till eight, and it was getting pretty dark by then. Seeing the crows fly overhead made me miss living in that part of town. Where I am now is fine, but being in the centre was quite magical, especially at the beginning.
Yesterday morning I had a Skype conversation with my parents before cycling to Dumbrăvița for my lessons. What started out as a pleasant chat about the little one morphed into anti-woke diatribe by Dad. I find the whole thing, on both sides, extremely tiresome. I’m not woke in the slightest and I find some of the newfangled linguistic innovations jarring to say the least, but it isn’t something I can get worked up about. Sure, it all seems a little odd to me, and I imagine it seems a great deal odder to someone 30 years older than me, but that doesn’t make it wrong. Dad was likening the woke movement to flat-earth or anti-vax, which is a false equivalence because those fly in the face of well-established facts. Being requested to call someone “they” instead of “he” or “she” might annoy you; being opposed to vaccines actively kills people. What I find interesting is the most vehemently anti-woke people are those least affected. It’s like my parents’ regular complaints about all the Maori words on the TV and radio. Perhaps it has gone too far – I don’t live in NZ anymore so I don’t really know – but Mum doesn’t meet a Maori from one year to the next, and the last time I checked she didn’t even know what a koha was.
Something Mum complained of yesterday was the majority having to “kowtow” to minorities. Well Mum, being in the majority does give you significant inbuilt advantages which you’ve probably never even taken the time to consider, and giving some of that back once in a while to those less fortunate seems pretty reasonable to me. These sorts of discussions aren’t easy for me – although I get on well with my parents, we don’t really inhabit the same world. (My brother’s world is closer, so he probably doesn’t have the same issues.) My parents are about to buy a brand new electric car. Dad recently sold a painting for something close to what I’ll spend on my next car if I buy one. We’re orders of magnitude apart. (On the subject of advantages, as an immigrant to Romania from a richer country, I have certain privileges here. It’s important to be aware of them.)
I hope I can get back to baby talk in my next conversation with Mum and Dad. Covid was great for my relationship with them, when I look back. It affected everybody, and we were in agreement on masks, vaccines, the lot.
I took second place in a poker tournament earlier today. I was lucky to get that far, but having reached the heads-up stage it’s a bit of a mystery how I didn’t win. I’m still down a little for September, which has been a torrid month. I got absolutely nowhere in any of the three WCOOP tournaments I played.
