MTWTFS

So huh. It's been an interesting week. This is not a very professional blog post, but I think it's mostly friends who subscribe to this blog anyway. 

On Monday I had a hell of a day: some bad news, some weird omens, and big, big feelings. The situations that initiated these feelings weren't new - they'd just come to a head on Monday, for whatever reason. Big messy terrible situations. I took a long hike, tried to make sense of what to do next, and felt my feelings, something I rarely do with success. 

On Tuesday I felt better: recovering. I also made a decision about something that had been paining me, and although I'm not sure if it's the right one - and it's very rare that I make decisions about this thing without consulting everyone around me - it felt so good to have made it, and especially on my own. 

On Wednesday I did a pile of work I've been putting off for many weeks, and that night I felt happier and more satisfied than I have in some time. I needed the feelings to rise and crest in order to break. To make way. To give me the space to get to work. 

On Thursday I told my therapist about all of this; she was happy for me. I think she was surprised that I made the Tuesday decision before I asked her about it, but she was supportive nevertheless. 

On Friday, I continued the work with great enthusiasm. The situation is far from ideal, but I'm going to make the best of it. I'm not going to give up. I owe it to the people who've decided to go in on this work with me. 

Yesterday I socialized even though I didn't want to, and I cleaned the gutters (a little), and I made Matt go out on a hike. It was raining, or trying to rain, poorly. 

The point is, this has been a medium-transformative week. I think the reason is partly the new vitamins I'm taking (r u depressed or r u just mineral-deficient? bodies are fun!), partly that my time on social media has dropped by roughly 90%, and partly that circumstances which were making me feel bad crested and broke. 

by Sid the Visual Kid, whose work I reservedly love

Weaning off socials has been going well (you're reading this because I haven't been tweeting any of it), but I've gotten a little (re)addicted to doing NYT crosswords on my phone. I've also been reading books - a biography of Garbo, a deeply weird mid-20th c novel called Jamie Is My Heart's Desire, and Betty Gilpin's book All the Women in My Brain. The latter is stunning. Highly recommended for feminists and fans of hers - basically anyone who loved GLOW. 

As for writing, tbd. I'm cooking a story, for fun, part of a cycle of fun stories I started and then abandoned sometime last year. I'm still researching for the Bern book, and although I desperately want to be writing it, my experience tells me it's not time yet. (Starting it now would be like putting semolina dough in the water before it's been flattened and cut.) Might actually return to the Tom Paris essays while I'm still subscribed to Paramount+, which I'm going to cancel after Lower Decks ends. 

I'm still not sure how to solve the problems presented to me on Monday. But it's better to have problems and not hate yourself than the alternative. That's an advertising slogan for Prozac, I think. 

Blessings Inside My House

I made this, and you can buy it here

I'm working on weaning off socials and deleting the majority of my tweets. I don't know what my long-term strategy is - possibly Canada - but for the next however long I don't want my words being farmed and scraped by that emerald miner. I'm going to try to put them here, on Medium, and in my notebook instead. 

A bunch of stuff just came in for me to read and evaluate, which is pretty unusual these days. It'll keep me busy for a couple of weeks. I'm also trying to get rid of stuff in my house, which is hard for me: a constant process of swallowing terror about impermanence and departure. 

First weekend of November I went to the Portland Book Festival, which was fun. Not much like what I expected. I saw everything I really wanted to see in the first half-hour, spent another couple hours hanging out at the Autofocus/Split Lip booth, and then I went home. Or back to my hotel, actually, which was an absurd, hipper-than-thou establishment, where I had an uncarpeted room with no extra blanket and no fan in the bathroom. Don't stay at the Moxy unless you are 23. 

wet and cold, the PNW way

We're having a stupid problem at our house that is turning out to be expensive, stressful, and lengthy to try and solve. It could be a lot worse, but it could also not be happening, that would be okay. 

Some of what I'm reading is books by Richard Dyer, one of the only people who cares about star studies to the extent that I think most film studies people should. I'm also still slogging through biographies of powerful men from the 1930s. On the plane to PDX I started taking some real notes about how to write this thing, the different ways I want to set up the stories of each narrator and the interpretive problems I'll have to get past. 

On the plane back, however, I reread The Godfather, because I was prepping to record a podcast episode about it and the film version (pretty obscure, you might not have heard of it) with my friend Emma. That happened on Wednesday, November 6. We agreed to just pretend it was not Wednesday, November 6, which meant we had a wonderful time. That episode should be out in a few days. 

There are a lot of blessings inside my house. So many books to read, things I made with my hands or things that were made for me. What I know is so small.