{"id":1059,"date":"2020-09-14T22:29:49","date_gmt":"2020-09-15T02:29:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/?p=1059"},"modified":"2020-09-14T22:33:12","modified_gmt":"2020-09-15T02:33:12","slug":"doing-the-covid-clench-tenet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/doing-the-covid-clench-tenet\/","title":{"rendered":"Doing the COVID Clench; Tenet"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yeah, I know; I haven\u2019t updated much. Sorry. There hasn\u2019t been a lot of\u00a0news that I can really talk about yet, although if you want to be up to date on Tidepool<\/i> happenings and any other writing news I might have, please sign up for my mailing list<\/a>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In the last month, I finally left the house and interfaced\u00a0with actual humans who were not Bill for the first time since mid-March. These people\u00a0were doctors and dentists, so I wasn\u2019t excessively concerned about being unsafe in their presence.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I learned at the dentist that I\u2019ve been clenching and grinding my teeth to the point that it\u2019s starting to damage a back molar, and so I\u2019m now the owner of a spiffy new night guard. It takes about two weeks to get used to sleeping with one, so they say. I am almost through week one. I look forward to being used to it, because trying to sleep with a plastic thing covering your top teeth\u00a0is hard and I am very tired.<\/p>\n

My\u00a0dentist asked me why I was grinding my teeth and we both laughed, because do you really need an answer other than “2020”?\u00a0\u00a0Turns out this is something\u00a0a lot of dentists have been noticing lately<\/a>. My dentist dubbed this the COVID Clench. That\u2019s me, always on-trend.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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In addition to the night guard, I got the casting of my teeth used to create it. This is one of the coolest things I\u2019ve ever been given, even if some of the teeth broke before I got it.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

But! Not all my outings involved jabby dentist instruments and trays of nasty gunk in my mouth. Bill and I are lucky enough to live near an Alamo Drafthouse that set up a pop-up Alamo Drive-In, and a week ago, we drove out to Ashburn and caught Tenet<\/i>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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Robert Pattinson and John David Washington in a rare calm moment from the movie.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I have not been to a drive-in movie since my 80s college days, when a bunch of friends and I piled into a car to go see Nightmare on Elm Street Part 3<\/i>. While I think NoES3\u00a0was probably more suited to a drive-in situation than Tenet<\/i>\u00a0because “Spooky knife-finger guy kills kids in dreams” is not a complex plot to follow, <\/i>I enjoyed the latter movie anyhow. I miss going to movies, but not enough to go sit in a theater. A drive-in seemed like a brilliant solution.<\/p>\n

The whole setup couldn\u2019t have been much smoother. We found a spot where our view wasn\u2019t blocked by a giant SUV. The food we\u2019d pre-ordered was delivered to our car without a hitch. And the weather was absolutely gorgeous after a long, LONG spell of scorching heat, humidity, and rain.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Bill and I sometimes joke about the “Drafthouse Curve,” which holds that we tend to like movies more if we\u2019ve had a couple of drinks\u00a0with them. Alcohol was not an option at the drive-in because of the \u201cdrive\u201d part, duh. But I think I graded Tenet<\/i> on a \u201cJesus, it\u2019s so<\/em> nice to get out of the house and see an actual movie again\u201d curve. I definitely want to see it again; there were enough distractions around that I didn\u2019t catch some of the more complicated aspects, and this being a Christopher Nolan film, there were complications aplenty.\u00a0But it was so great to do a fun thing.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Finally, holy shit, y’all: Lovecraft Country<\/em>. I have not read the book. I am very glad I haven’t\u00a0yet because I want to be surprised by the show, and this show surprises and shocks and horrifies and devastates me every week. If you’re a horror fan and you haven’t checked it out yet, I just don’t know what to tell you. \u00a0I love the kind of horror where real-life evils like racism run parallel to the supernatural monsters, and that’s Lovecraft Country<\/em>‘s sweet spot. Highly, highly recommended.<\/p>\n

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I am still not OK about Uncle George.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yeah, I know; I haven\u2019t updated much. Sorry. There hasn\u2019t been a lot of\u00a0news that I can really talk about…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51,44,61],"tags":[48,63,62,5],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1059"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1059"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1059\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1065,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1059\/revisions\/1065"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1059"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1059"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1059"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}