A Return to Clarity

 Was off work today, as I had -- unbeknownst to myself -- scheduled two medical appointments on the same day.  To be sure, there is something to this; getting them done all at once, one day off of work is better than slipping in and out, for instance.  But mainly this was just me not checking the calendar (as I so often do) and not realizing I had double-scheduled something (again, which I often do).  

The unimportant news is that my health is fine, and my vision (eye doctor was the second) is unimpaired.  The important news was that I decided to drive home after the eye doctor (she is on the East Side).  Yes, my pupils were dilated, but the rain meant no glare, and I could see well enough... which was true.  I forgot how awful East Side driving is; I know they are Hope and Changers, and nary a Christian in the bunch, but... whoa.  Let's just say it was, yet again, another reminder of how happy I am to have a new job and that I am not hauling ass across town every day.

Anyways, while I got some reading done today, the fact was for a few hours I was a little blurry, so I decided to watch some movies that had been "recommended" to me by Kanopy.  The first, "Benediction," was a recent UK film about the life of Siegfried Sassoon, the War Poet (I read most of their works in college, but that, sadly, was many moons ago).  The movie was...meh.  Very jumbled, and it mainly told the story of him through his same-sex affairs (illegal back then) and his tortured mental state after WW1, which was nice, but... well, I expected more.  War experiences?  His future works?  That sort of thing.  Alas.

The next film was a documentary called "GameStop:  Rise of the Players," and it discussed how a bunch of day traders beat a short-selling hedge fund into losing billions of dollars by driving up its share price.  It was pretty good; funny, because, it took a while to get there, and I was getting impatient, but then I realized that I was doing something that the big firms had done... part of the story was that the company -- left for dead -- was able to save itself during the pandemic.  Some of it was luck, but a combo of cutting excess stores, changing business practices, and realizing that people were home and had nothing to do but game... they were able to save the company, and the people on the ground saw it before Wall Street did.  Which is pretty cool.