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Reading Watching Listening
Reading… I’m actually still slowly making my way through Meghan Daum’s The Unspeakable. Her essay on being someone who loves animals perhaps a little too much really hit home for me. Can we talk about the fact that I tear up at lost cat posters? Or maybe not. It might make me cry. Watching… Re-watching New Girl. I needed a sitcom-y palette cleanser. I’ve been tired this week. I loved the early seasons just as much upon re-watching them. I’ve just reached the point where I stopped watching last time because I was starting to feel kind of “meh” about the whole series, so we’ll see how things go from here on…
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Read This
Required Reading. This is what it is like to be a woman in this world. And it makes me angry. It should make you angry too. Read it: Marry Karr’s “The Crotchgrabber“. I particularly appreciated these paragraphs, early in the essay: “In case you haven’t been on the receiving end of this sort of assault, you should know the primal physiological response it evokes—in this woman, anyway. The stomach drops, as if you’ve been shoved backward from a skyscraper and are flailing through space. Time dismantles. There are more frames per second, and people’s facial features become very specific. This guy had a squashed-down forehead, wide-set eyes, and heavy but…
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Quoted
Only a man who knows what it’s like to be defeated can reach down to the bottom of his soul and come up with the extra ounce of power it takes to win. — Muhammad Ali
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Quoted
I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal. — Jane Austen, letter December 24, 1798
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Reading Watching Listening
Reading… The Unspeakable and Other Subjects of Discussion by Meghan Daum. When I discover a writer I genuinely like, I have a tendency to dig deep into their body of work. My interest in Daum started with a piece in Harper’s Bazaar about choosing not to have kids. Then it was the collection of essays on the same topic, edited by Daum. Next I finally picked up her personal essays. In what is perhaps an illogical or contrary approach, I started wit the most recent collection first. The writing is fantastic. It is easy to see why Daum is lauded as a master of the personal essay. Her unflinching, at…
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Read This
If you know me at all, you know I am a self-professed musical theatre junkie. I even occasionally flirt with the idea of ditching grad school and running away to join Broadway. An impractical life plan if there ever was one, but one that has appealed to me in some way or another for as long as I can remember. As a result, I think about the practicalities of life in musical theatre more than most, and I am particularly interested in the role of age in stage productions. How old is too old to play a role? Could I, creeping up to 30, convincingly play the teenage Natalie in Next…
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Quoted
Everybody has an inferiority complex when they step into a room … When I was young I had so many inferiority complexes. I had an inferiority complex because I didn’t got university … because I didn’t train. Then it gets tiring. And you get bored of it … “Fuck it” is my guiding philosophy. — Helena Bonham Carter
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Quoted
We all walk this earth feeling we are frauds. The trick is to be grateful and hope the caper doesn’t end soon. — David Carr
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Reading Watching Listening
Reading… Carl Jung. It’s for the thesis, but I am finding it far more lucid than I recall it being last time I picked his work up in undergrad. This may simply be because a lot of the other things I’ve been reading have managed to give me headaches after only a sentence or two. Watching… Season 2 of You’re the Worst. I know I wrote about this one in last week’s post, but season 2 deserves its own shout out. This season has the most compelling and realistic portrayal of clinical depression I think I have ever encountered on television. The writers knocked this one out of the park…
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Read This
I cannot begin to count the number of times someone has tried to sell me on meditation as a way to deal with anxiety. This concept is laughable to me. Like, I literally burst into laughter most times it is suggested to me. I know it works for many people. I know it is a practice, and therefore I might need to, you know, practice if I want it to be useful down the road. But, honestly, right now, at this point in my life, meditation does sort of the opposite of what it is supposed to. As I once told a dear friend, “Yes, because what I need is more time…