a person to whom things do not happen
Hello!
If you follow me anywhere on social media, you will know that I have been reading Mark Dery’s recent biography of Edward Gorey, appropriately called Born to Be Posthumous. You will know this because I absolutely cannot shut up about it. It has somewhat consumed my life, and brought out latent creative instincts in that I have been making little collages in my Instagram stories when I come across a passage in the book that seems to require it of me. On the whole, the reading of this book has been illuminating in a number of ways. I’ve always felt something of an affinity for Gorey, based on a deep admiration of his work and the scattered interviews I had read. This book has pushed that vague affinity into a sometimes pointed recognition.
However, beyond the at time uncomfortable mirror that the book has been holding up to my anxious face, my main takeaway from the reading of it (I’m only halfway through. It’s a dense book.) is that lives are long.
It’s easy, when you’re in your early 30s, unmarried and childless, living a life which is absent of the milestones which society has told you all your life are essential for a worthwhile existence, to feel as if time is running out. Time for what? you ask your panicking mind in the middle of the night. Time, your mind insists. Time!! (Panicking minds are not terribly eloquent.) You’re in the prime of your life, soon you will be old and ugly, the two greatest sins a person–particularly a woman–can commit in the eyes of the world. And once that happens, why bother doing anything?
Well, for the doing of it. Reading a dense history of one person’s life, and a person who never traveled, who professed to be someone to whom things did not happen, and still seeing a full, exciting life, has been illuminating in that respect. Now, when the midnight panic starts to set it, it’s easier to look at it head-on. Shh, I say. I’m only just beginning.
Dog Thing
Mixed Media
A good movie: Mirai. We were lucky enough to catch Mirai in the cinema last week, and it was lovely. The story of a boy who fears being left behind when his little sister is born and starts having encounters with his family, both in the future and the past, whenever he’s near the tree in his courtyard, it brought up a lot of presumed-forgotten emotions for me, an older sibling who didn’t handle the birth of her younger brother SUPER well. I also caught Widows last week, and whew is that a film. If you like heist movies, don’t skip it.
A good book: All Systems Red by Martha Wells. I just realized how far behind I had fallen on my Goodreads challenge, and with only a month left went into something of a panic. So I’ve been plowing through all of the novellas I’ve meant to read this year and haven’t gotten to and the best by far has been All Systems Red. Part One of what Wells calls “The Murderbot Diaries,” this is the story of an android intended for security use, which has hacked its own mind, gained free will, and mostly uses it to watch tv. It’s riddled with anxiety and somewhat hopelessly comes to love a ragtag group of humans. This shit is my kryptonite. There are 3 other Murderbot novellas, which I’ll be working through this month as well. Also: Mapping the Interior by Stephen Graham Jones is a gut-punch of a story, about a Native American boy who comes to believe that his dead father is attempting to return to them. It reads like a horror movie, and I was very glad to have read it in the full light of morning.
A good tv show: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power. We’ve been slowly making our way through this, and loving it. It’s a thoughtful reboot, full of heart and genuinely funny.
A good album: Coconut Oil by Lizzo. This EP isn’t new, and neither is my love of Lizzo, but it’s been all I’ve wanted to listen to that isn’t Chistmas music lately. (For Christmas, you can’t do better than Darlene Love, The Crystals, and the Ronnettes.)
A good fic: it’s all that i am, and it’s all that i have by eternalmagic. Ace Attorney. This is an Apollo/Klavier You’ve Got Mail au, that’s very good and made me ache to watch both You’ve Got Mail and The Shop Around the Corner.
Lastly
bye! you better watch out! bye!