John Wise

Back in 2008, we drove a rental Prius while on vacation up in the Pacific Northwest; a few years later we bought one. That car served us well until the end of 2018 when, without any credit card debt or car payment, things started looking peculiar regarding our credit rating and we quickly realized that we were being penalized for not carrying any debt, so we traded the Prius. We would have grabbed another Toyota hybrid but they were sold out. Looking for another car led us back to Kia. We’ve owned a few of them over the years along with a number of Hyundais, and we’ve always had good experiences with these Korean cars. Within 24 hours of encountering a dramatic change to an interest rate, we were driving a new 2019 Kia Niro that cost us $28,700 while the offending credit card was canceled.

Four years and 78,000 miles later, we were ready to trade in our Niro as we were approaching the end of making payments on it, and we didn’t want to fall afoul of the credit rating agencies. At the moment we decide to buy another car and are about to finalize the deal, we become horribly attached to the vehicle that is about to go away. You see, a car for us is not just a means to live in the city, it is a thing that has carried us to adventures, oceans, trails, museums, concerts, and into a good number of books because Caroline has been reading out loud the titles we’ve decided to share in the car. For us, the car becomes an experiential tool for uncovering adventures and so many memories are attached to it, but as we all know, change is the spice of life.

At first glance, it may not be obvious, but this is the same car we are leaving behind, another Kia Niro Touring model except this one is the 2023 version. While the deal was done yesterday, I didn’t pick it up until this afternoon because there were a few things that needed to be done on the car before it was ready for us. Our new Niro had just been delivered and was still covered in protective tape and because it was late in the day on Sunday afternoon before financing was complete, we’d have a slight delay in taking possession of our new car. Speaking of finance, this updated version now costs $34,900 or thereabout. The car is smoother and quieter, features updated smart cruise control and other driving conveniences in addition to some rudimentary self-drive functionality. We had to purchase a spare tire as we didn’t want to rely on the TMK or Tire Mobility Kit which is now standard equipment.

While we’ve only had the car some hours as I write this, it’s definitely an improvement and appears to get a few more miles per gallon compared to our other Niro so it feels like a win. In retiring the old car, we are also moving on from our old plate that read FIBER, which references Caroline’s love of the fiber arts. Our new plate is chosen and it’s available but I’ll wait on sharing it until we have it in our possession. Now the hard part of all this begins, where are we going for an inaugural road trip?

Who cares what we might think about the Oscar contenders for best short films? I’m not so sure I’m invested enough to write this, but with travels being so light this year, I don’t have much of anything else to share so why not this? Not to imply I’m not writing or doing stuff but those behind-the-scenes things don’t always warrant the granular microscope.

So here we were out in Peoria, Arizona, at 11:00 in the morning ready for nearly 6 hours of short films over the next 8.5 hours. First up were the documentaries and the first one was a bomb titled How Do You Measure a Year? about a father interviewing his daughter on her birthdays from age 2 to 18 that could only have been included for consideration due to a single answer that his daughter gives when she’s two years old and dad asks her what she thinks “power” is. She ultimately tells him that it’s “her vagina.” Subtitles tell you she had figured dad asked what “powder” is and her answer was about where to put it. Off on the wrong foot. While the idea is a nice gimmick of doing something for our children, it is not Academy Award material.

The Elephant Whisperers was better by a wide margin, allowing hope for the rest of the films yet to be seen. This short film shows an Indian couple raising an orphaned elephant in an elephant camp/reserve. Caroline enjoyed this film, but it was a bit too anthropomorphized for me. Also, this is yet another reflection that tragically, animals are being squeezed out of their natural existence and humans must become their caretakers if animals are to have a place in our world.

Stranger At The Gate, the next film, was beyond the pale of insulting. Ex-Marine bent on killing a bunch of innocent people dips into the local mosque to case the joint and finds god and community so he abandons his terroristic thoughts. WTF. The Martha Mitchell Effect was a good documentary about a kick-ass woman lost in the passage of time whose reputation is being rehabilitated after she was marginalized in the typical 1970s fashion that implied that strong women could only be crazy and hysterical.

Haulout, set in Siberia, looks at a colony of 100,000 walruses who must turn to land because there is no sea ice to haul themselves onto, which 10 years earlier was the norm. This is a small reflection of a remote situation where climate change is ruining environments and demonstrating that we humans are contributing to mass murder on an unfathomable scale.

Of the animation shorts up for Academy Award consideration none stood out other than one about a boy, a horse, a fox, and a mole that was so annoying, cloyingly sappy, and full of clichés that we should have walked out of the theater screaming in horror that such a POS was ever made. How in the world was Woody Harrelson involved with this tripe?

As with the other categories, there were 5 titles in the Live-Action Short films but I’ll only focus on the two real contenders in my eyes. They were Ivalu and The Red Suitcase and neither of them was an easy feel-good piece. Both films are gut-wrenching looks at the brutality girls are facing and both should be seen for the stark reminder of what we’d prefer to remain hidden from view. Ivalu tells the story of a young girl in Greenland, looking for her older sister who, we eventually find out, committed suicide after her dad had raped her, and The Red Suitcase follows a 16-year-old teenage girl arriving in Europe on a flight from Iran, clutching a red bag with her treasured art supplies and drawings. She had been sold as a wife to a 40-something-year-old, but by dropping her hijab she was able to slip by her would-be groom waiting for her at the gate. The tension of her nearly being caught before her final escape was riveting, but the film makes clear that this penniless girl who doesn’t speak any foreign languages is heading into an uncertain future, forced to leave everything behind, even her suitcase.