(morning writing, health)

[elainegrey]

A little sliver of moon, low in the south east, gleamed in the brightening sky this morning.

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Yesterday i was out of it, having had a very poor night's sleep. The two nights previous my watch was yelling about my heart rate variability being too high - it's possible i was having CPAP mask/apenea events. Saturday morning i woke 3 am-ish breathing hard and fast. It took a long time to get back to a regular breathing. I guess i didn't do the saline nasal rinse too many days in a row.

My cough was back a little yesterday, which maybe is the poor breathing?

The freaking spots are back, too. I probably should have immediately gone for a blood draw (but it would have had to have been to a hospital); i'm trying to decide if i should go this morning (ugh) or wait until tomorrow morning. Good news is i have a hematologist visit in early March.

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Now that i have a working python/Jupyter Notebook environment back, i want to try and get some better skills with Python's data analysis.

Dad comments that he's an Eisenhower Republican, and i roll my eyes thinking how long ago that was meaningful. I was wondering though how Eisenhower fit in his and my lifetime. I knew "before i was born" but that wasn't informative, so i made a timeline. Interestingly his experience of Eisenhower relative to his age, is similar to my experience of Reagan. Both were presidents before we could vote, serving two terms, and our first presidential election was for the president in the following term. Intriguingly, the current most populous birth year in the US is around 1991. And in a similar way, the George W years followed for them. So, how do i frame for Dad what it might be like for them if they were to imagine thinking back to Eisenhower: apparently it would be for him to think back to Taft.

Knowing Dad's born before the boomers, and i'm on the downward birth rate slope of Gen X, neither of us is very representative of the larger cohort of voting age Americans.

(Apparently Millennials outnumbered Boomers in 2020, per Pew, and Gen X will out number Boomers in 2028.  I do have the Gen X bitterness about Other Generations. Although an advert came on recently and i was stunned because it was for ME, an ad for my age cohort! I can't remember it, but i remember the jaw drop.)

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/04/28/millennials-overtake-baby-boomers-as-americas-largest-generation/

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/board-games-and-firepits-senior-communities-are-pulling-out-all-the-stops-to-lure-generation-x-heres-why-2d2a31fb

"Gen X members are projected to outnumber boomers starting in 2028, when they will number 63.9 million, while there will be 62.9 million boomers, according to the Pew Research Center."

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Still trying to get to previous comments (as well as the email that sort of jammed up my effort to respond promptly).

Comments

[lyr]

For some reason, it never occurred to me before that we will eventually outnumber the boomers. Huh.

[elainegrey]

I'm still somewhat indignant that the point where it makes a difference is in "retirement" (over 55) communities.

[lyr]

Well, it's not like one of the defining characteristics of our generation isn't being outnumbered, ignored, and forgotten.

[elainegrey]

Truth, that.

[cmcmck]

Thatcher was the PM when I was first able to vote (I'm a late boomer) and in 1979 I was able to vote against her and the tories although it did little good.

[elainegrey]

I always though the Boomer generation was more of an American thing than a global thing, but i guess it *was* a world war.

[cmcmck]

It was a worldwide thing for sure.

[warriorsavant]

I take the "Gen" stuff with a grain of salt, but some interest. Other than both Republicans, can't see much similarity between Ike and Ronnie Raygun.

[elainegrey]

Eisenhower was before the Republican "Southern strategy," Reagan after with the "Moral majority" etc etc. I don't know it the party changed that much between Taft (before WWI) and Eisenhower (after WWII), but my guess is the change of the US on the world stage after WWII would make Taft's Republicanism irrelevant by the time Dad was voting. Similarly, i'm pretty sure my dad is clutching a ghosts when i hopes for Eisenhower Republicans to make a stand. They're rolling over in their graves, i'm sure.

[warriorsavant]

Good point. I think Reagan is similar to Trump in 2 ways (although infinitely better): charismatic movie/TV personality, did remake the Rep party. Goldwater, as the standard-bearer and extreme wing of traditional Reps brought them down to crashing defeat. Nixon pulled them up again before he crashed and burned.* Reagan rehabilitated it by bringing it more to what we’ve seen of the Rep party recently, with Trump bringing that to the extreme.

*I have mixed feelings about Nixon, and contradictory to what most ppl had. He was actually rather progressive. He is almost the definition of a Greek tragic hero: a great man brought low by a single, but overwhelming character flaw. His paranoia drove Watergate (using that for shorthand of many things), but if that hadn’t been there, he would possibly have gone down as one of our greatest Presidents, considering things like rapprochement w/ China and ending the VN war.