average malcolm in the middle episode. malcolm wants to impress a cute girl but gets too in his own head and self-sabotages. dewey does something zany and adorable, which no one appreciates. reese kills a blind old lady with hammers. halfway across the country, francis is put in a genuinely terrifying situation (played for laughs). lois has a conniption because someone mixed the spoons with the knives in the cutlery drawer and also poured biohazardous waste into her bed. hal experiences psychosis.
I walked up to a restaurant entrance at the same time as this guy and he held the first door for me and then I held the second door for him and he said "we call that the Midwestern two-step" with a laugh and I've been thinking about it all day.
forever in awe of people who pay attention. people who wait for you while you tie your shoes while the others have walked away. when they continue listening intently while the rest of the group stopped listening. noticing your moments of silence when everyone else hasn’t. “this made me think of you” noticing things you never even noticed about yourself. people who say “text me when you get home safe.” people who make you laugh until you cry. childhood friends who keep in touch. people with genuine intentions. people who are soft when the world has given them every opportunity to turn hard. the “let’s get ice cream” at 3am friend. the turn up the music in the car and sing friend. people whose actions match their words. people who make the world feel less chaotic. kindred spirits. the trustworthy and honest. hard workers. good listeners. clear communicators. people who love you for who you are. people who don’t ask you to be anything other than yourself. people who choose you. people who stay.
I wish there was a single word to describe the way anything, the instant it falls into investor hands, takes a massive quality nosedive, absolutely scorcher earth unusable. While simultaneously any time any single one of those investors or major shareholders makes any kind of public comment, without being filtered through several public relations experts, about literally anything at all, they reveal they have a grasp of the world similar to a four year old, but with far less ability for self reflection or basic reasoning. And, parallel to this, the only positive qualities of whatever the investors sullied turn out to come exclusively from middle to bottom tier employees fighting tooth and nail for a shred of product quality, enduring a monsoon of ridicule from said investors who subsequently take credit for the minor uptick in quality for something they remain determined to ruin. And at no point does anyone on the investor end even by accident consider themselves the source of the commensurate nosedive in consumers and profit, despite mountains, oceans, galaxies of evidence piled around them.
There should be like one derogatory word for this, and don't say "capitalism" because no investor thinks of capitalism as derogatory.