(no subject)

It has been a weird few days.

Yesterday I got to leave work early to go to a "vendor fair" where all our vendors and those who wish to be our vendors set up tables and tell us about how awesome they are and give us swag. I got some pretty cool stuff, a couple of pens and a backpack and tons of candy, which I'll mostly be giving to my coworkers because I'm not enjoying eating lately (don't worry, I am eating, I'm just not enjoying it; I suspect a return of the ulcer, I'm getting checked out next week). The topper, I think, was the chocolates Trump Tower gave out, which are little gold bars with TRUMP stamped on the top. The thing is, they're not wrapped in foil; the wrappers are plastic and retain their shape after you take the chocolate out, so you get a little gold bar AND a little bar of chocolate to eat.

It tastes like the 1%, my friends.

The fair is weird because if you don't make eye contact, nobody talks to you, but as soon as you do they are ALL OVER YOU and then you have to be sociable and interested and it's a script, so that's mostly ok. But I spent a lot of time saying "Yeah, I'm the Project Manager for our group, so I do all the supplies and purchasing" and watching the Staples sales representative's eyes light up. (She gave me a box of whiteboard pens because I told her all my ducklings have whiteboard calendars and love them.) Swissotel, which is a hotel-and-conference-center very close to my work, gave me a super-fancy pen and, weirdly, a nail-file-and-mirror combination that has to be seen to be believed.

Anyway, I was so exhausted by the time I got home that I slept for like three hours, and both then and during the night I had bizarre nested dreams, where I'd have a dream, wake up, go to tell someone about the dream or lie in bed feeling glad it was over, and then WAKE UP AGAIN. One of them involved thinking I was back in grad school and had neglected to prep some scene design work, and the thing about those dreams is -- if you dream you've missed a test or haven't attended a class all semester, the only person it really hurts is you. But if you've fucked up a show you're supposed to be working on it affects you, the rest of the team, and whoever has to step in to replace you and do all the work super-fast. I never have the "missed a test" dreams and this is the first "fucked up a design" dream I've had, and I'm telling you, the relief I felt when I woke up and remembered I was long out of grad school was unbelievable. But then I heard mice in the walls and freaked out and WOKE UP AGAIN.

For the record there are no mice in my actual walls.

Thankfully I'm off work today, so I got to sleep in, and I'm about to head downtown to take in some sights and have lunch at the SECRET CAFETERIA under the Board of Trade. I might go to the Fed Museum again, that was fun.

(no subject)

Wow, if this isn't an appropriate post to make on December 7th...

To unwind, lately, I've been reading this book a friend gave me called The Rape Of Europa, about art crime in Europe during WWII. It's pretty awesome, but it's a very densely packed book, so I've been reading it for like a month now and we've only just beat the Nazis.

It's such a great book, even if I have trouble keeping everyone straight. It jumps around a trifle because in the early days a lot of stuff was happening in a lot of different places, so you get a chapter about Nazi looting (or "safeguarding" as they called it) in Germany and Austria, and then a chapter about American museums hiding their collections in case of bombings, and one about Great Britain, and one about what happened in the east, to the Soviet Union, which is especially interesting from a White Collar point of view. Spoiler: Siberia is not a great place to stash priceless temperature-sensitive art, or its curators.

It does make me want to do two things: one, find a biography of Rose Valland, possibly the most awesome woman of WWII. She not only participated in the hiding of French art but then during the occupation worked for the Resistance and tracked where Nazi spoils went and then after the liberation of Paris went to the MPAA or "Monuments Men" from Britain and America and told them where all the art had gone.

Two, it makes me want to write a novel about the Monuments Men, because they led fascinating lives during the end of the war and after V-E day. These were usually low-ranking men who had in civilian life been museum curators, engineers, and art lovers. With almost no funding and no official unit support, they ran around Europe in borrowed or stolen cars (or hitchhiking), often only a week or two after Allied troops had been through the area, digging up art and books and trying to preserve historic monuments. They supervised the rescue of art from hidden caches, including scrounging food for the workers and transport trucks for the art. And then, when the US decided it deserved all of Germany's own art as reparations -- under the guise of "safeguarding" again, what a dreadful word -- they protested so loud and so long that they not only kept most of Germany's art in Europe, they managed to shame the US government into sending back the two hundred-odd works that had made it to America. (After a whirlwind tour of the US, which brought out a million visitors in four weeks in Washington DC alone.)

So it's an awesome book, but it's a bit of a plow to get through.

This probably isn't unrelated, though the decision wasn't conscious, but I've also been watching a significant amount of WWII documentaries on Netflix.

( There follows an essay upon WWII, history, documentaries, and my stupidly inaccurate education regarding both. )

Anyway. It was a horrible war on every side, not that war ever isn't horrible, and there are no easy answers, and I'm just about done with my little mini-inhale of it.

Still want to find a biography of Rose Valland, though.