It sure doesn’t feel like war. There was a small outdoor gathering for megillah reading yesterday morning, but that sort of resilience hasn’t been interesting since Pesach of 2020. Rather, there is the time I’ve had to not work or study once the dishes are done and my child is asleep between sirens. I made deep fried mars bars. The recipe was for 4-6 bars, and the very concept made my wife feel nauseous. That left only me. I should’ve considered how rich they would be. One of them still sits cold in the fridge. I don’t think I’ll eat it.

If I’m being honest the thing I’m thinking about the most is the movie ‘Isle of Dogs’. I saw a touching clip on my Instagram feed and felt compelled to watch it. Disney plus normally only have garbage, but on this occasion, it rose above any of my other three streaming services to provide the goods. Wes Anderson’s stop-motion animated masterpiece works on both an allegorical level and on a human level. It is beautifully crafted emotional storytelling which manages to bake in some blatant social commentary. The voice acting is superb, courtesy (mainly) of Bryan Cranston, and the visuals are obviously breathtaking. Leave it to Anderson to make aesthetic choices which lend themselves perfectly to the message being conveyed.

I’ve been thinking about that movie a lot. Better that then some BBC articles Eulogising Hitler and taking his high command’s word on death tolls in schools for gospel, or some cluster bombs in the sky soaring above my daughter’s head, or the cancelled bachelor party in the desert that starts today or even the cancelled trip to London for my wife’s cousin’s bat mitzvah which I secretly was okay with going to. It occurred to me momentarily this evening while pondering what I would like to have for breakfast tomorrow, that good sausages are almost impossible to find in this country. The cuisine here is excellent and far more interesting than the country I left behind, yet we had far superior sausages in England. Here it really seems to consist exclusively of Merguez and Chorizo, which I suspect are the same thing. This sausage issue occurred to me about an hour ago and it has brought an existentialism upon me which is actively keeping me awake.

Yeah, I think I’ll just think about ‘Isle of Dogs’. It’s really quite good.