thank you notes 11/1
(contains spoilers for the black mirror episode "san junipero," which you should watch if you haven't)
i'm thankful that it is november. i'm thankful to remind myself to buy a gift for my dad's birthday, which is in just a few days away. i'm thankful his birthday is near the beginning of november, but not at the very beginning. i'm thankful for d, who is a more thoughtful person than me and already bought him a gift. i'm thankful for amazon prime's two day shipping option, which has helped me not to be late for birthday and holiday gifts, which i would probably otherwise often be. i'm thankful that my dad likes (prefers) to receive silly and childish things for his birthday and i'm thankful, since my mom is not as silly and childish as i am, to indulge him in this way.
i'm thankful that it is november. i'm thankful to remind myself to buy a gift for my dad's birthday, which is in just a few days away. i'm thankful his birthday is near the beginning of november, but not at the very beginning. i'm thankful for d, who is a more thoughtful person than me and already bought him a gift. i'm thankful for amazon prime's two day shipping option, which has helped me not to be late for birthday and holiday gifts, which i would probably otherwise often be. i'm thankful that my dad likes (prefers) to receive silly and childish things for his birthday and i'm thankful, since my mom is not as silly and childish as i am, to indulge him in this way.
i'm thankful for his collection of antique toys and am thankful for the photos he sent my brother and i of the decades worth of copies of playboy magazine that he had to get rid of when my parents moved last week. i'm thankful to have stolen a few copies from his stash during puberty and am thankful that when he found out i had this, as well as some outré erotica i had printed (lol, thankful to remember printing pornography on our family inkjet printer) off literotica, he got rid of the printed erotica but let me keep the playboys. i'm thankful to remember what it felt like to masturbate when i was 13 years old while also being very thankful that i am no longer 13 years old.
i'm thankful for "san junipero," the fourth episode of this season of black mirror. i'm thankful for its sweetness and light and for how it actually made me briefly feel hopeful about what life will be like when i am (when, hopefully, d and i together are) old, which is something that i rarely feel hopeful about. i'm thankful for the long conversation d and i had after the episode, which reminded me of the endless conversations that my college roommate j used to have about the matrix during the period when he was a philosophy major. i'm thankful for d and i's various world deflating questions—
1) this is great for the quadriplegic woman, but what if you're schizophrenic or bipolar, do you have that mental illness in san junipero or can that be healed (or turned down with a "pain slider") too? if not, that seems kind of a shitty form of eternal life; if so, what does that say about perception and consciousness?
2) how is order maintained? biff or whatever outside the bar seemed pretty rape-y. you can't do physical violence to yourself or others in san junipero (kelly's car crash and trying to break the mirror with her fist), but what about the serious emotional damage that can be done without physically hurting someone (which we see on the internet all the time), are there laws or police maintaining order in san junipero to prevent this? are there courts, a government? if so, do those institutions still reflect the larger structural problems of society, even in the fantasy of san junipero, the way they do in the real world? are there things that you could do to get eternally hellbanned? is there an actual hell (cf the "white christmas" episode with jon hamm)?
3) along similar lines, are there crimes serious enough that committing them would mean that you aren't allowed to end up in san junipero when you die? on the one hand, it seems like child molesters or murderers or racists shouldn't be allowed to be in the same space, but on the other hand, it also seems like a human rights issue to allow all people the prospect for eternal life except certain excluded groups. on the other other hand, could conceive of them being segregated in a kind of prison island of their own server—would that place be mayhem or would there be the possibility for rehabilitation and serving a sentence and being released to another, more "normal" afterlife
4) there don't seem to be any children or old people in san junipero, which seems strange, what happens if you die at age 5? or if your early twenties aren't the time in your life that you feel most nostalgic for/want to live in forever? what about that poor nerdy dude with glasses in the arcade part of the bar, whose afterlife seems to consist almost entirely of standing awkwardly in a smoky bar and being rejected by mackenzie davis? (thankful that he at least had fun playing DDR that one time)?
5) what if you don't like or connect with any of the other people in san junipero? what if you prefer the mountains to the beach or hate hot weather? what if you're, say, a trans person who died in the year 2025—what if the world of 1995, which might supposedly be your nostalgia sweet spot, would just be a place where you're even more horribly assaulted for your identity?
6) what does the fact that the dead can communicate with the world of the living (through the "comm box") mean for the concept of death? even if that technology is limited and so, for example, communication between the two world is limited to text or voice, doesn't that mean that the technology would eventually be refined enough, the bandwidth increased, to allow a dead person to basically, fundamentally, still "live" in the real world rather than in the fantasy heaven of san junipero? if you're a living person and a person you love dies and enters san junipero, can you communicate with that person through the comm box and so what does that mean for the concept of death and the sadness we feel about losing people we love—what if they aren't really lost?
7) on another plane, what kind of societal issues would the end of death create for dynastic wealth and political hegemony—if steve jobs died and went to san junipero, could he continue to manage apple for decades from san junipero? what if the "ghost" of george w. bush wanted to run for president in 2050? also, if this is true, what would it mean for work and for retirement—the world of the episode seems to be a future world of prosperity with a well developed welfare state, so maybe this would be moot, but what if the afterlife is one in which you just continue having to work at a stressful job forever?
8) even if there are rules preventing the dead communicating from the outside world, does it ever work the other way? in san junipero, can you follow the news of the real world? are you frozen into the world as it existed when you die—just the art and culture of then—or, as time passes, can you continue to experience the future as it comes rather than sitting in one time-place or jumping back and forth between existing ones? can you actually experience eternity if you choose or can you just visit and revisit and live in times that you've already lived?
—which did not ruin the episode and i'm thankful, in fact, that the holes in the episode made a space for us to think and talk about them, which was fun. i'm thankful for the painful protracted fit of laughter we collapsed into when d came to the realization that if we were in san junipero, we would probably spend most of our time sitting on our couch and watching netflix and talking about the shows we had watched. i'm thankful to imagine our couch would be nicer and more comfortable in san junipero.
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