oh baby, oh baby
When I was small, my neighbor Sarah was the coolest person I knew. She was 3 years older than me, lived one house over, and was an only child. She was the first person I knew of with a Nintendo, and the first person who had an American Girl doll (Samantha, natch). When she got to middle school, her parents put a tv in the basement and I would go over and watch MTV, wide-eyed, while she painted her nails. I could not imagine a person who was almost my age and was so confident, so sure of what she wanted. Then, I met Kat Stratford.
Thinking about it now, I cannot imagine a more ideal set of circumstances than those surrounding the release in 1999 of 10 Things I Hate About You and its impact on me. I started reading Austen and Shakespeare in middle school (in the mid-late 90s), a reaction to adaptations like the BBC Pride & Prejudice, and Branagh's Much Ado About Nothing. Clueless and the Gwyneth Paltrow Emma coming out nearly back-to-back gave me an intro to creative adaptations. By the time I started seeing ads and trailers for 10 Things I Hate About You, I already knew the plot of The Taming of the Shrew, and was primed to appreciate the effort to update it. Plus, it starred Larisa Oleynik, whose role as Alex Mack had been very important to me, and featured the lead singer of Letters to Cleo, a band I loved.
I was so excited about 10 Things I Hate About You that I tore an ad for it out of a magazine and pasted it in a scrapbook. After I saw it, the ticket stub went in there, too. And, unlike many other things which I loved in my youth and found upon revisiting them that they don't hold up, I have watched and rewatched 10 Things throughout my life (at one point for some reason I owned 3 copies of it on DVD and 2 copies of the soundtrack CD), so I know it has stood the test of time.
I have been listening to a lot of the podcast You Are Good recently, a show in which hosts Alex and Sarah discuss movies and emotions and dads. I listened to their episode on 10 Things yesterday, and it just brought to the forefront how fortunate I was to be 14 in 1999. It's a movie about teenagers which doesn't seem to dislike or talk down to teenagers, it was genuinely funny then and remains so now, and it gave me Katarina Stratford, a girl who stood straight and tall and did what she liked, read what she liked, listened to what she liked, wore what she liked, lived confidently in spite of her trauma, and truly, genuinely loved her friends and family, in spite of her "shrewish" exterior.
I wanted, so badly, to be Kat. I think the closest I got to it was owning a pair of platform flip-flops, but I'll hold her in my heart forever.
dog thing
mixed media
good reads: Nowhere Else by Felicia Davin: I'm still not reading very much, but I was thrilled by this release, the third book in Davin's Nowhere series. I love the near-futureness of this series' sci-fi, and loved the soft one/prickly one of this pairing. All-around fun and satisfying. And they solved the cosmic mystery!
Turtle in Paradise: the Graphic Novel by Jennifer L. Holm & Savanna Ganucheau: An adaptation of Holm's middle grade novel about a girl in 1935 who moves to the Florida Keys to live with family she's never met, this graphic novel has such a beautiful sense of place, and as always Savanna's characters are so expressive.
(disclaimer: both Felicia Davin & Savanna Ganucheau are my friends! I would have bought these books anyway tho)
good music: Jubilee by Japanese Breakfast: I have been loving the newest jbrekkie album, so much so that I can only listen to it if I've got nothing else going on, I get too distracted by it otherwise. It's got a bigger, sweeping sound that I have come to associate with her, and I dig it.
good podcast: You Are Good: as mentioned above, I've been listening to You Are Good, which started out as a podcast called "Why Are Dads" and covered movies with an eye towards the dad content. I didn't think I would find it very interesting, but once I started I realized that not only was the dad angle fun and illuminating, but as the podcast progressed it became more about talking about emotional stakes in movies. Alex & Sarah (Marshall, of You're Wrong About fame) approach films and characters with such compassion, and I find I am increasingly drawn to conversations about compassion.
good film: F9: I made my triumphant return to my local cinema to take in F9, and was bowled over with joy. It's Justin Lin's return to the franchise (he directed Fast 5 & Furious 6), and it was WONDERFUL. It was the installment that's the most invested in its own history, I think, but god I just love how much the people in these movies care about each other. no overly masculine posturing here, folks! bring it in for a hug.
good game: Mass Effect Legendary Edition: there was no question that I was going to adore the remaster of mass effect, but I was surprised by how much I enjoyed the first portion of the series in particular. I played mass effects 2 & 3 before I ever played the first game, and going back has always felt like a necessary evil to flesh out the plot. this time I had a grand ol' time. I'm most of the way through a replay of Mass Effect Andromeda now, a game I continue to love in spite of its reputation.
lastly
even if you have been unaware of the furor surrounding Isabel Fall and her short story “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter,” I highly recommend reading How Twitter can ruin a life by Emily VanDerWerff. This quote from Fall in particular resonated with me:
“We make boxes that seem to enclose a satisfying number of human experiences, and then we put labels on those and argue about them instead,” she says. “The boxes change over time, according to a process which is governed by, as far as I can tell, cycles of human suffering: We realize that forcing people into the last set of boxes was painful and wrong, we wring our hands, we fold up some new boxes and assure ourselves that this time we got it right, or at least right enough for now. Because we need the boxes to argue over. I do not want to be in a box. I want to sift through your fingers, to vanish, to be unseen.”
xoxo door