the act of upheaval
A thought experiment for you: close your eyes. No, leave them open actually, unless you have a screen-reader. Otherwise, just sort of--pretend you're closing your eyes. I've already spent longer on this bit than I meant to. Alright. I assume you've got the eyes situation sorted, so now imagine you've opened your mailbox. There's some junk in there--sorry, cinéma vérité--and what's this? A lovely red envelope, addressed to you from me. There's a Snowy Day stamp at the corner.
Inside, you find a holiday card of some sort. It's probably got trees and snow on it, maybe a sled or a cabin in the woods. You've seen these in the wild probably, go ahead and pick one. It's lovely cardstock, matte and weighty. A pleasing tactile experience. There are absolutely zero puns on it. Inside, you find a generic holiday message in a lovely bold script, a photo, and a small piece of paper.
You look at the photo first:
Aw. You unfold the little paper and maybe it reads:
"Door and Vista had an exciting year! By the time you receive this, Door will have (somehow, bafflingly) attained a Masters of Library and Information Science. She doesn't know what's next, but she's determined to use her MS in the most art historian ways possible. How she'll achieve that is a 2022 problem. Vista continued to reign supreme in Agility class, which remains her favourite thing. Her bones and joints don't seem to be aware that they are 12 1/2 years old, so please don't tell them.
Wishing you and yours joy and good health in the new year!"
There. You've experienced the Christmas card. Maybe you keep it, set it on your mantle or magnet it to the fridge. Maybe you toss all but the photo. Maybe you place the photo in a dish and set it on fire. Vista and I will never know. We have achieved much in 2021, and are resting on our laurels. Have a happy new year.
Mixed Media
good reads: No Modernism Without Lesbians by Diana Souhami: I am very interested in the interwar period in Europe and queer communities. This book ostensibly focuses on four prominent queer women (Bryher was arguably trans, but applying modern notions of queer identity to historical figures is fraught, to say the least) in Paris: Sylvia Beach, Bryher, Natalie Barney, and Gertrude Stein. The focus varied section by section. Bryher's portion was as much about her lifelong partner, H.D., and Natalie Barney's was more about the many, many women she slept with than it was about her (perhaps because Souhami felt she had covered it all already in a previous book. Faults aside, I enjoyed it very much.
good film: I haven't been feeling very holiday-y this month, but I have managed to watch two very good holiday movies which I hadn't seen in a long time: The Shop Around the Corner (1940) and The Holiday (2006). Both were as delightful as I recalled, and both were also very much of their times. Lots of office devices in The Holiday, for example. No texting, only Blackberry emails. Wonderful.
good tv: Somewhat to my shock, I have fallen very in love with The Wheel of Time. This is shocking because one, I don't generally like live-action fantasy tv shows very much (they tend to be very brown), and two, I've never read the books and have had no interest in them. But I'm liking Wheel of Time very much. I listed some of my reasons in a tumblr post here. On the subject of fantasy tv which isn't brown, I watched Arcane and loved it. And finally, this week I caught all of the new adaptation of P.D. James' Dalgliesh mysteries, and it's excellent.
good music: I've mostly been in the mood for sad Christmas music this month, and First Aid Kit's cover of Blue Christmas is leading the pack.
good podcast: Stuff the British Stole is an Australian program about the echoes of British colonialism told around the objects still in British museums.
good fic: Mitte by sunsmasher. Ace Attorney, Miles/Phoenix. There's a seven-year gap in the Ace Attorney games during which the titular ace, Phoenix Wright, is disbarred. There's a wealth of fan speculation about just what he and Miles get up to during that time, and this might be the most utterly ruinous take I've seen. It's glorious.
A Mixed Martial Artist and a Journalist Walk Into A Bar by Misthios. Arcane, Caitlyn/Vi. This is a modern AU, and the casting of Cait as a journalist and Vi as an MMA fighter strikes me as genius.
Pragmatics by Derkish. The Mandalorian, Din/Luke. Modern AU, in which Luke is a PhD student whose life has recently been completely disrupted. He transfers schools, moves to a new city, and promptly finds himself having to call on his next door neighbor for aid. This does the thing I love in Star Wars modern AUs, where it just shrinks the Star Wars galaxy down to the size of the Earth.
Lastly
Occasionally a post from Reddit's Am I the Asshole (AITA) forum escapes containment, which is what happened this week with the story of workplace cats Jean and Jorts. I won't recap it for you, but if you have time to read through the saga, it's delightful. But the best thing to come out of it, I think, is this piece in which a disability activist using Jean and Jorts as maybe the best metaphor for workplace accommodations I've ever read.
that's all from me! see you in the new year xx