Time off is over

I go back to work tomorrow, although luckily not yet back to the office. I’ll be working from home on Mondays starting this week, and also starting summer hours. So that should be interesting.

The weekend was okay. I watched Die Hard again on Friday night for some reason, not that anyone really needs a reason to watch Die Hard. On Saturday, I watched Greenberg, and I’m not entirely sure how I feel about that. I’ve also been watching episodes of Better Off Ted, Orphan Black, and The Fall. It’s amazing that I actually also got some reading done — Under the Dome and World War Z, in preparation for both their adaptations — or writing. But I did:

I wasn’t born on Mars, not like my brother, who nearly died when the borders were closed — he says — and the space ports stopped letting refugees like our parents escape off the planet. They made it as far as Phobos, thanks to a pair of forged visas, my asthmatic brother in tow, and that’s where I was born, in this half-built lunar colony that was never supposed to be anything but a staging ground for the red planet below. If the government of Mars even knows we’re still here, they haven’t publicly acknowledged that fact in fifteen years, just like they’ve said nothing about the military listening posts that are supposed to be someplace on the far side of Deimos, either on the moon’s surface or in near orbit, radioing back to Earth. I don’t know how you can be afraid of someone who’ll keep their head in the red sand like that for so long, but my brother says we’re lucky they don’t turn their attention towards us.

“You weren’t there at the fall, Mary,” David says. “You don’t know what it was like. When they wrested control, it was bloody and brutal and — ”

To be honest, I sometimes just tune him out. David has a flair for the dramatic; and while sometimes that’s fun — it’s maybe the only flair this old abandoned moon base has going for it — it can get a little tiresome. He’s too cautious, which I guess I understand. He’s not wrong, I wasn’t there, and I didn’t see what the new regime did to dissenters less lucky than my parents. Whole villages reduced to dust, like reverse terraforming, the tools of the original Martian settlers turned into weapons by Kendall and his followers. We still have some of the footage, and David’s right about the bloody and brutal part. Kendall was a maniac, vicious and power-hungry, and he forced good people like my parents to flee to this ramshackle little moon.

But is he even still alive?

That was the weekend.

And this is my monthly music mix for May:

1. “Q.U.E.E.N.” by Janelle Monáe (feat. Erykah Badu)
2. “Dayton, Ohio – 1903” by Randy Newman
3. “The Rains of Castamere” by the National
4. “Buildings & Mountains” by the Republic Tigers
5. “The Dark End of the Street” by James Carr
6. “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)” by Milan & Phonenix
7. “Mr. Spock” by Nerf Herder
8. “Au Revoir (Adios)” by the Front Bottoms
9. “Dead Against Smoking” by Admiral Fallow
10. “Always Alright” by Alabama Shakes
11. “My Love Took Me Down to the River to Silence Me” by Little Green Cars
12. “Dougou Badia” by Amadou & Mariam (feat. Santagold)