Margaret's Nearly Monthly News: Ides of March 2025 Edition
Is it just me, or is this March Ides-ier than usual?
The Ides of March have passed, along with Pi Day, Mardi Gras, Purim, Holi, and St. Patrick's Day. Is March always this festive, or did the calendar just know the first two months of 2025 were going to last fourteen years?
I don't know if it's helping, but I do appreciate the excuse for baked goods.
In addition to baked goods, this month I have found myself taking comfort in the wisdom of Nick Fury. After all, who could fail to be inspired by such stirring lines as:
"You look like somebody's disaffected niece."
Hang on a second. Not the Nick Fury Quote I was looking for.
[Sticks another quarter in the Nick Fury Bot]
"B*tch please, you've been to space."
[Tries again]
"Sir, I'm gonna have to ask you to exit the donut."
[Frustrated sigh]
Okay, fine, I give up. On to the news!
(But I'm not leaving my donut.)
From My Desk
Huzzah! Not only have I been working since the beginning of the year--
Wait. What was that? Can I say what am I working on? No of course not. Why would you even--? Oh. Are there companies who don’t insist on NDAs that make employees sound like they're poorly covering for a job in national intelligence when their friends and family ask them what they do? Weird. Anyway, once again, moving on.
I've been working! Yay! Not only am I employed, I have an actual office with a door and everything. I've even been encouraged to decorate, so it doesn't look like I'm bracing to be evicted at any moment. Still not sure I believe that last part, but it is nice to have a place to write that does not have significant overlap with my living room.
(Plus, free snacks!)
In work I can talk about, I recently wrote a short essay for a collection of remembrances of Simon's Rock. While the deadline has technically passed for submissions, if you're an alum and want to contribute your own, drop me a line and I'll pass along the info I have.
This project has also led to looking through old photo albums, where I found this documentary evidence of your narrator, age 20.
Things I'm Reading and Watching
Book club recently read Nothing to See Here, by Kevin Wilson. A novel about a young woman who leaves the small town she's stuck in to take care of her rich former schoolmate's two stepchildren, a pair of twins who spontaneously catch fire. Honestly, the rich friend and her Senator husband are weirder than the self-immolating children.
On the film side, I have two vaguely surreal recommendations this month. Universal Language is a mostly Persian-language Canadian film that is simultaneously a love letter and dis track to Winnipeg, Manitoba that plays with language, time, and space in unexpected ways.
Less outwardly strange, but similarly unburdened by conventional narrative is Eephus, named for a baseball pitch so slow and curving it messes with the batter's sense of time. The film tells the story of the last game played in a small Massachusetts town on a field due to be demolished so that the locals can finally have their own middle school.
The experience of watching it is less like seeing a movie than it is like spending the day at a ball field. I watched it in a tiny theater theater that was nearly full, and by the time we hit the seventh inning stretch, I swear we were all singing along to "Take me out to the ball game."
From the Cutting Room Floor of the Duolingo Dystopia
2025 has arrived, and Duolingo understood the assignment.
You do you, mysterious stranger.
And That's the Nearly Monthly News!
Happy Ides of March! Are you being followed by a mysterious stranger? Do they, like chief conspirator Cassius in Julius Caesar, have a lean and hungry look? Is is possible they are thinking about food? Questions? Comments? Drop me a line! Otherwise, in the words of the great LeVar Burton: "I'll see you next time."