and then i almost immediately said "$10,000"
at craft night, as we drank the great bottle of natural-ish wine that ec brought, hm asked whether deborah and i had tried the esther perel card game that was sitting in the tv stand and we shared that we had tried it a few times, often during the days when we're coming up on molly, and had some good experiences, but found that often the questions felt way too heavy or difficult and we would find ourselves skipping lots of them and then eventually give up, and she said she and her partner had basically the same experience with it.
that gave me an opportunity to remember a decade ago one of the first times when deborah and i were visiting my family together and we were all playing the similar but sillier question game hypertheticals and one of the questions was basically like "you're walking through the woods and meet a wizard. he makes you an offer: for each dollar you give him, he will make you ever so slightly more attractive. this is not a scam or trick: it will 100% actually happen, but one dollar will buy only an almost imperceptible change to your attractiveness. you can give the wizard as much money as you want, but you only can do it once—once you've given him money and he's made you more attractive, he'll disappear forever. how much money do you give him?"
there was a beat of silence as my family considered it and then i almost immediately said "$10,000" (quickly clarifying that i had ~$12,000 in savings at the time) and after another beat everybody laughed their asses off because it turns out they were considering like a hundred dollars or something. i've never really liked how i look (in myriad ways, and even less so as i age!) so there's something deeply personal about it but also imo it's a practical thing (cf the opportunities that the more attractive get) and also like a wish fulfillment thing (almost any hypothetical involving genuinely real magic doing something positive in my life like i think i'd invest a lot!). when i was in college in florida i loved tanning by the pool (which was partly an affectation and partly something i genuinely loved) and i had this joke about how my personality was like a swimming pool, both shallow and deep. at craft night, i noodled with ambient music as the others drew and ec asked me if i'd ever gotten into drawing and i told her about how i did as a kid and had various little spurts as an adult but didn't really because i wasn't very good at it and i'd rather do things i felt good at.
yesterday deborah and i went to the movie theater to see the new mission impossible movie. earlier in the day, i had gotten slightly annoyed when deborah told me she had told her friend that me wanting to see this movie was "the most straight male thing about me" as i always get annoyed when what i see as the perfect and irreducible idiosyncracy of my personality is put into some kind of standardized box, especially if it's not a box i like (similarly remembering when e compared me to her brother-in-law a few times (not entirely inaccurately!) and i got annoyed and she asked her partner at the time, a fellow scorpio, about it and he explained and said "yeah, he's annoyed, just don't do it again!")
the mission impossible movie was basically just what you want out of a mission impossible movie. the references to AI (the "villain") were mostly dumb and imo pointless (the whole series from the start is premised on the idea that governments and terrorists and even lone wolves have almost limitless power and everything in the world no matter how secure can ultimately be hacked so how is it novel or interesting that this time there's an AI can do it instead of like an actual good actor (rip phillip seymour hoffman)) and also the AI must be represented visually by these squiggly matrix joy division oscilloscope tangles and like it's so silly it's 2023 people don't need this bleep bloop bullshit. but tom cruise was as tom cruise as he always has been (and the rest of the cast was good) and there were lots of good set pieces (our favorite was the one that took place in the dubai airport—airports are such spaces of control and quiet banality and to see one exploded by spy hijinks was very fun) and i was often on the edge of my seat (not literally we were at the theater that has reclining seats and leg rests).
the twix ice cream bar i got at the movie (it's a single bar that is labeled right or left is how they get over the ontological problem of a single twix) which was so good, up there with a snickers ice cream bar, although the relationship to its parent twix was a bit more confounding even beyond the two bar problem because there either wasn't at all or was a very limited cookie presence in the bar (which would be like if you had a snickers ice cream bar without peanuts) but it was still great. zapp's jazzy honey mustard pretzels, which have a density and concentration of flavor powder that should be a standard in flavored snacks (and which made up for me not realizing at the same time i was accidentally buying the "thins" version of my favorite potato chip the zapp's voodoo rather than the standard kettle version, which is way superior). on the podcast i look forward to the most each week, popcast deluxe, joe praised choco churro turtle chips which k and t introduced to us and are simply a perfect sweet snack (the savory flavors are also great—architecturally, the way i think of them is what if bugles were croissants).
last night i finished reading we do what we do in the dark by michelle hart, which is not to be confused with the book i'll be gone in the dark by michelle mcnamara or the book i just read and recommended to you how high we go in the dark by sequoia nagematsu (or the recently returned mockumentary what we do in the shadows). it's about a freshman in college in long island whose mother has just died after a long cancer and who gets involved with an older woman who teaches at the college and how this intense relationship affects her life then and in the future. i don't read as many realist novels as i used to (everything is genre (and of course i know realism is a genre, but i guess what i mean is everything is high concept)) but i really enjoyed it and felt such a connection to the main character. i've also started rereading the fifth season books.
my dad finally had his drag show performance last night and my mom sent our family group text some great pictures and videos (there was one where he was flirtily handing things off the stage to people in the crowd and i though they were joints but my mom confirmed they were novelty penis lollipops) and i'm thankful i have a dad who is in drag shows and not a dad who wants to ban them! i'm thankful that the last little rose bush in our back yard that the landscapers didn't cut away has been blooming beautifully. i'm thankful to be writing this on the back patio in the shade and that the sky is blue all over.
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