honey I'm still free
hi
I’m already tired of summer. I don’t know if I’ve just grown weak in my old age or this summer really is as bad as it feels already, but the heat is killing me. I move restlessly from place to place, always with a book in hand, seeking cool and shade and iced caffeinated beverages. The only good time of day is the evening when the sun has mostly gone down and I can sit on the porch and argue with my dogs about which children deserve to be growled at (all of them, per Leilani) and it’s almost cool and sometimes it rains.
I like it best when it rains.
Notable Breakfast
Dog Thing
#relatable
Mixed Media
My friend Jody remembers everything about where she sees a movie for the first time. I don’t remember all of them, but I remember a few: Love Actually, The Princess Diaries 2, the second time I saw Pride & Prejudice, and the first time I saw The Mummy. There was this big old multiplex, a proper warehouse-shaped one, with an arcade and, in 1999, a working photochemical photobooth. I was 14, and I saw The Mummy with Arielle, Will, and Ronald, who were my classmates but not my close friends. I have no memory of why we four ended up at the multiplex, but we piled into the photobooth after the show. I had the strip on my bedroom wall for years, with a star sticker placed strategically over where Will flipped off the camera in one of the shots.
But the movie! The Mummy was everything my adventure-loving, romance-reading heart could want. It has a brave, bookish heroine, a swaggering hero, a comic relief, a handsome mystery, and a great villain. It’s funny, and sweet, and genuinely scary–I grabbed Ari out of fright so many times I left nail marks on her bare upper arm.
Rick and Evie’s romance is wonderful, because they treat each other as equals, and genuinely like each other–in fact, all of the heroes like each other, which is why The Mummy Returns is such a satisfying sequel. They’ve both become happy places for me, and it’s very rare that I rewatch one without also rewatching the other.
I love The Mummy Returns as much as I love The Mummy, honestly, because I am a sucker for an epilogue. I like the big kiss at the end of the story, but what I really want to see is the house the heroes live in. The Mummy Returns builds on the Rick and Evie romance and gives us Rick-and-Evie as a unit. Evie is finally respected by her peers, Rick is the dad he was always meant to be, and our heroes are even more a family than they had been. Ardeth Bay is still very handsome.
The CGI is rocky after a decade and a half, but even that can’t put a dent in my love for these movies. The only thing that disappoints me about the franchise honestly (aside from the third movie, which we don’t speak of) is that there was never a tie-in series of novels about the O’Connell family’s adventures. I would have gobbled them up back then. I’d gobble them up today.
I’m still reading fantasy nearly nonstop, mostly sequels and revisiting beloved books. I read A Conjuring of Light, the final part in V.E. Schwab’s Shades of Magic series, and loved it completely. I’m going to miss that universe. I reread Howl’s Moving Castle and A Wrinkle in Time after picking up used copies of both of them purely for their cover art, and still love both of them a great deal. I read The Serpent Sea and The Siren Depths by Martha Wells, books 2 and 3 in her Raksura series about not-gargoyles, another universe that’s grown on me. And I read Jackdaw and Rag and Bone by KJ Charles, both tied to her Charm of Magpies series. In comics, I read and loved Knife’s Edge by Hope Larson and Rebecca Mock, the sequel to their swashbuckling Compass South. I read Golden Kamuy vol 1, about an ex-soldier searching for gold in turn-of-the-century Japan, and loved it despite the number of entrails in it. I read volumes 1 and 2 of My Love Story, and got very emotional about friendship.
I’ve been listening to a lot of Abba, because I remembered that they existed and are great. Also Lorde’s new album Melodrama, which I love but have to be in the mood for or it makes me sleepy.
Aside from The Mummy and The Mummy Returns, I watched Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, which is the first film in my local cinema’s Ghibli Festival! It was thrilling to see it on a big screen.
Fics I Shouted About
Katsudon by azriona // Yuri!!! On Ice, Yuuri/Victor, Hiroko character study. This fic is mostly about Yuuri’s mom, following her as she prepares for Yuuri and Victor to return from Barcelona. It’s simply wonderful.
What We Pretend We Can’t See by gyzym // Harry Potter, Harry/Draco, AU. This is one of my fave fics, and I’ve been rereading it over and over, bit by bit, every night. I love it so much I made a moodboard for it, an act which consumed by life for a full weekend.
Lastly
This post about Brendan Fraser came along at the perfect time. I have the emotions about Fraser that only a person whose childhood was bookended by Encino Man and George of the Jungle can have: even before The Mummy entered my life, I loved him in all his earnest handsomeness.
My emotions about Colin Trevorrow and everything he represents are the opposite.
If you need me, I will be in the hole in the ground where I live now. It’s cool there.
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