Groundhog Day

Everyone has been likening life under COVID to Groundhog Day, the Bill Murray classic, and I'm pretty sure there's a lot of substance to the comparison. The problem is that -- unlike so much of Murray's body of work -- I've only seen the movie once. Somehow it escaped me in the early days, it wasn't ranked up there with Animal House, The Blues Brothers, Caddyshack etc. as one of the classics in the canon of early SNL films in my brain. Maybe they just didn't play it enough on the Movie Channel and HBO while I still had subscriptions to them.

To make matters worse, despite her great love of all things Bill Murray, Mary is reticent to rewatch it with us as a family viewing option. She's just not much of a re-watcher in general. But I'd really like to watch it with Graham.

Speaking of family viewing, I know that over the course of the pandemic negotiating group viewing has been particularly difficult. Maty's just tough because she doesn't watch that much TV. Graham has his own challenges. But getting something for the three of us to agree on is really hard. In many ways it was worse with Natalie added, though having Community and then Bob's Burgers to watch as a family have been lifelines.

But I was really happy when I talked about the family viewing negotiation process with a friend and fellow board member and she said it was the same in their household, where they have two boys in their 20s home from grad school. Their TV negotiation process is equally arduous. It was good to know we are not alone. 

Democracy and consensus-building are just touch, even amongst the smallest and nominally most aligned groups of people. No wonder the macro processes are messy.