Oh, how I wanted to like this movie. I remember watching the moon landing in 1969. I had the mission profile memorized. I built the humongous Saturn V model, the one with the detachable stages and the lunar module you could dock with the command module. I had a larger scale lunar module on my bedroom dresser. I listened raptly to Walter Cronkite. This was my jam in the 1960s-70s.

That was a good thing, too, because this movie would have been incomprehensible without that background knowledge.

The story focuses (I used that word figuratively) on Neil Armstrong. Unfortunately, the story is told with lots and lots of closeups on Ryan Gosling’s face — we are apparently supposed to figure out what is going on from the expressions flickering across that face, and the faces of the other astronauts and engineers. It doesn’t work for a couple of reasons: 1) they’re all^* playing stolid engineers who clearly don’t believe in emotions. Gosling in particular is a repressed robot who occasionally has to let a drop of lubricating fluid trickle out of his eye-holes. 2) We get no context, very few names, very little about the situation. Oh, hey, there’s another robo-astronaut whose name we don’t know, let’s try to guess who it is from the pattern of pores on his nose. 3) Except we can’t actually see those pores, because of the liberal use of shaky-cam. Blurry shaky cam. Sometimes the only action in a scene is the way the lens meanders in and out of focus while the camera wobbles about.

But…big rockets, you say. There must be some wonderful thrilling big-machine-flying-into-the-sky cinematography. Not really. The guy who made this movie seems to think we want an astronaut’s eye view of three Phillips-head screws holding a bracket to an interior wall vibrating wildly. I almost walked out a few times when the shaky-cam got so insane I was starting to feel nauseous.

You want to watch a movie about the space program? Go see Hidden Figures again, or The Right Stuff. They actually manage to tell interesting human stories, and focus the camera at the same time.

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Except for Clare Foy, playing Armstrong’s wife, who does express the fact that she’s getting increasingly pissed off as the movie goes on. I identified a lot with her.

I got called up again to participate in jury selection today. I almost made it on to a jury — I was on the last panel before the final selection. And then the prosecutor started asking questions.

“What 3 things come to mind when you think about law enforcement?” He asked a few people. They said various platitudes, like “protect and serve”, “help the community”, etc. Buncha timid suck-ups. Then he asked that anyone who held a different opinion should raise their hand … which I did, because I was going to answer honestly. And I said some combination of words like “avoid”, “mistrust”, and “bias”. Later he asked the panel in general about the legal system as a whole, and got more affirmative nods and comments, and he zoomed in on me and asked my opinion, and I made some flippant remark about how it might be OK as long as this case wasn’t going to the Supreme Court.

This was a sexual assault case, by the way.

Thus endeth my opportunity to participate in the courts system.

Don’t look at me that way. How can anyone answer that kind of question without serious reservations in the state where Philando Castile was murdered?

I knew that already. Now I have photographic proof.

They paddle along the rivers because it’s hard to fly when your broom is waterlogged.

In my 20s, I started making pancakes on Sunday morning. It became a tradition. Whenever I make Sunday morning pancakes, I think back to being young, newly wed, and poor, and bringing pancakes and coffee to my wife in bed, which was only a mattress on the floor of a tiny studio apartment.

In my 30s, I had young children who were excited about pancakes in the morning — they wanted chocolate chips in them or for them to be made in the shape of Mickey Mouse. Whenever I make Sunday morning pancakes, I think back to being young parents with little kids who would giggle over a special breakfast.

In my 40s, the kids were becoming teenagers, and sleeping until noon was what they wanted to do on Sunday mornings, and I made Sunday morning pancakes less and less frequently, and most often it was just for one or two kids at a time — a quiet breakfast together. Now when I make Sunday morning pancakes, I think back with pride in young independent people we’d managed to raise.

In my 50s, the kids were moving out, we were alone again. I made pancakes less often. When I did make them, every time I’d be thinking about what Alaric & Connlann & Skatje were doing, far far away. Those were lonely, wistful pancakes.

In my 60s now, I made Sunday morning pancakes and coffee and brought them to my wife in bed, and I thought all of those memories at once — I was an old man in a mostly empty house, I was a father to a very serious teenager, I was the parent of a small swarm of adorable little kids, I was a newly wed student, I was all of these people.

I think this is what getting older means. Everything, every little thing, even making pancakes, begins to reverberate in your head and floods you with meaning.

Also, it means I’m well practiced and really, really good at making perfect pancakes.