Mango Roses Light My Path
It's January 26. January is very long, is it not? Here's the Potpourri.
Mango Roses Light My Path
These roses are making my week. You can see the gypsophila behind them going strong, too.
Copywronging
I decided to try my hand at a copywriting fundamentals course. It's going pretty well; I seem to have the knack, more or less. And it feels good to be prospecting about for ways to grow my professional skill set. Don't know what will come of it, and I question whether I could spend all day writing pithy email subject lines. But it's nice to poke the periscope up for a peek.
Cineteca Dell'Orso
Google Translate tells me this is the Italian for "film library of the bear." Lately it's cohering for me that collecting films in physical formats is a personally viable lifelong hobby. I've mostly jack-of-all-trades-ed it by halfheartedly collecting physical versions of books, games, music, television, and film, but television sputtered out years ago, games fell to the pandemic, books have become scarce indeed, and even physical music is more of a keepsake at this point. With the streaming economy what it is, it's easy to let these things fade into the digital surround. In some respects that's sad, especially as a person of the last generation that remembers before and after the consumer internet. But in more specific and personal respects, it frees up a lot of energy that I've reinvested entirely into movies, and for whatever reason that feels right.
A Scanner Diverly
I remember liking this idea from one of those kitschy, business slash self-help books: people are "scanners" or "divers." Scanners stay near the surface and look at lots of things, getting a full picture; divers go deep on one subject at a time, delighting in the small details. In most everything in life I have been a scanner, but sometimes things slide silently into place and the depths reveal themselves to me. These are moments of quiet happiness and warm significance. I may not actually believe in personality typologies of any kind, but this model at least helps me discern patterns in the random flitting of my thoughts.
It has required patience. As Frank O'Hara put it, "Now I am quietly waiting for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again."
Cineteca Dell'Orso, Part II
Anyway, it is the 26th day of the year, and according to my Letterboxd account I've already seen 35 movies. Viva la cineteca!
The Quiet Revolution
There's a quiet revolution going on in my body. A series of medical dominoes that's been slowly tipping over for the last few years is starting to pick up speed, and I'm experiencing real relief from chronic pain for the first time in embodied memory. Life feels more possible at this moment than it has in years.
I still have serious health issues to work out, of course. But there is a sense now that I am getting to know my body, that maybe it and I can experience happiness together. At no point in my young adulthood did I ever think this would be the case. It's a hell of a thing.
With love.
—Dara Khan