Steve agreed to watch thirty minutes of Portrait last night (he set a TIMER) and when it went off he was like “well we should finish this scene and then the next scene” so I feel a great personal victory has been achieved.
yes indeedy- though it takes an episode or two to get going, it hit a very particular vibe for me. It's weirdly kind of realistic and surrealistic at once; like it's intent that "a lovingly done/very earnest period piece *can* coexist with a show about how ridiculous teenagers/young adults are in any period."
Nicky, I really appreciate these newsletters. I find myself too mentally taxed to comment all the time, but they have been surprisingly grounding to me and I hope you recognize how much we appreciate you giving of yourself. Beauregard woke me up early this morning and I thought of you all. ❤️
I'm staff at a college department and just got a letter from one of our visiting faculty for when one person goes up for tenure eventually. In the best of times he is often in my office asking for help with ...pretty basic computing. He was very worried about the prospect of teaching completely online for the rest of the semester and described the links and tutorials IT sent around as "sending an erector set to a St. Bernard." The letter talks about how the younger faculty showed him how to use various tools, and in particular about how one of them went so above and beyond in spending hours on facetime going step by step that he now feels comfortable using the tools he needs. It was just a really really nice thing to read first thing this morning.
Love to everyone. My 3-in-June-year-old crawled into bed with us at 6 this morning usually when she does it's a hot mess of feet in your trachea and/or solar plexus somehow at the same time, but this morning she was just really affectionate and snuggly, so I felt extraordinarily blessed, just quietly drifting towards consciousness with spouse, her, baby #2 kicking up a storm, and 90 lb of dog (65 lb lab mix and 25 lb beagle mix) and snuggled up together. It's a totally shit time, and I have so much to be grateful for.
I hereby promise if you work on a Broadway or off-Broadway show and are one of my readers I will go to it when things happen again and give you the biggest hug.
my brother is a bartender-slash-aspiring actor who is associated with an experimental off-Broadway company (I will divulge which one if he says it's okay) and boy am I right there with you. the first thing I want to do once travel to NYC is okay again is go down and crash on his couch and dance on his bar and go see some weird theater and C R Y.
I am hoping for the best, but in actuality counting down the days to finding out my summer stock work (July/August) is ultimately cancelled... it’s rough out here for theater folks right now!!
(Also I am a pedant and try to remind everyone that we exist all across the country outside of NYC as well and those of us in “the regions“ are getting hit hard too)
Thanks so much for these - I had a day yesterday where I found out that the guy had been fooling around with the last year or so is quarantining with his ACTUAL GIRLFRIEND. A drama revealed in iPhone location tags. Who knew middle-aged quarantine could be so dramatic? Anyhow, this is my cry into the wind, as I am a single parent with two kids and I have to go teach French and fractions now.
I mean it already is a sort of funny story. Who tries to pretend to be in one place during a quarantine then sends photos/videos very clearly marked with another place? In another country?
Congratulations!! You were considering delaying submitting, right? I'm happy for you that you submitted it. You're an extra badass for finishing it and getting ready to defend in the midst of, you know, everything.
Yes I was! On the advice of my advisor and department administrator, I am basically playing Defense Chicken. In my department it is the custom to submit to the committee a month before the defense. There is at least one postdoc that has expressed some interest in me and I guess has not canceled its search. So if they (or somewhere else) take me on sometime in April, I will defend as planned; if not, I will cancel the defense, ask the committee to send me any critiques they have, and delay the whole thing another year. Thank you for the lovely well wishes.
Had to drop my summer graduate classes - major first world problem, I know. I can't afford them thanks to *gestures at virus, economy, etc*. My fiance took a massive pay cut so I'm the breadwinner for now.
I'm focusing on the positive though. We've kept our jobs, our housing is secure, and my loved ones are healthy. My menagerie of pets is healthy too. That's all I want. Well, I want all of you to be healthy and safe too. Ok, final answer. <3
I rewatched Rear Window last night (even though my WFH setup actually faces the Front Window). And now I want to start a blog tracking All The Times Jimmy Stewart Is Good At Playing Heroes Who Are Also Kind of Assholes.
I hadn't watched it (I think?) since my teenage Classic Movie Girl phase; and it was quite fun noticing things I wouldn't have then. A) The age gap between Grace Kelly (26, seems older) and Jimmy Stewart (46, seems younger despite the grey hair and curmudgeon-ness) ; B) the New York bits, after living in NYC for 5 years. (The West Village address seems to be fictional but I ogled the apartments anyway)
This weekend I took out the binoculars to better read the signs the across the construction site neighbors have put in their windows (one knock knock joke that feels incomplete, another "Jeb! 2016"). It felt too much Rear Window and I maybe should rewatch it.
On the other hand I watched Charade for the first time on Saturday and maybe Hitchcock is not the mood I need at the moment.
Huh, despite a lifelong Cary Grant fixation, I have never seen Charade. *notes down on the list* And I think in a time like this, as long as you have a mix of moods, Hitchcock is okay to slot in. (i.e go with a ridiculous space opera right after)
Every time I watch Charade I think, these are the two most charming humans ever to exist, like if we needed to convince space aliens not to annihilate the planet they would be the dream team. Enjoy your first watch!
Whooooo we just got our statewide stay-at-home order, with a very strong tone of "because You People apparently can't follow more chill instructions," which, fair, I have seen some nonsense in my neighborhood.
I am reading the Man from the Train and let me tell you I can watch Dateline, Forensic Files, listen to true crime podcasts and read true crime books and not have an issue. I routinely impress my boyfriend by hating horror movies but am yet still able to sleep at night without nightmares. But I stayed up until 11:30 reading it last night and I was 100% scared and kept waking up to check that the night light in the hall hadn’t come on (motion activated low tech early warning system). I know these events happened 100 years ago but the concept of some rando going around axe murdering 100s of people scared the bejesus out of me in a way that the stories about known and captured serial killers do not. So I will not be reading it late at night anymore. Day time book only.
For some reason, the part where they speculate that the victims didn't appear to wake up not because the murder snuck up the stairs so quietly, but because he ran up them and was in their rooms before they could fully wake scared the daylights out of me. That mental image still lingers and I think of it every time I pass stairs in the dark. I thought the book was great, but definitely a daylight read
Yeah that definitely creeps me out. I kept thinking about how unless I was already awake I wouldn’t know the hall light had come on until someone had already opened the door to the bedroom and that would not be enough time to grab a weapon of some sort. So obviously every little sound woke me up last night.
I could NOT stop thinking about it after I read it -- even though, obviously, the murders took place like 100 years ago, I would lie awake calculating our distance from the nearest rail line (the subway, lol)
I happened to finish that book one night while my husband was away on a business trip and I checked the front door... a lot of times... and may have blocked it with a chair. And the bedroom door also. YOWZA.
If I had been by myself I would’ve put a chair under the door and maybe moved the heavy dresser in front of it. It’s a 1st floor if there was a fire I could escape. We have 4 doors into the house, including 2 sets of sliding glass doors, and that many possible entry points already freaks me out.
Oh boy. Your description of it scares me and I know it will give me troubles with sleeping but I can’t help but want to read about this! Off to wiki...
Honestly had to stop myself from just adding the whole dang O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack when I got to Big Rock Candy Mountains for the Spotify playlist. :) It's the first movie soundtrack I ever bought with my own money after seeing the movie in middle school and it still remains one of my favorite soundtracks and my favorite Coen Brothers movie.
does anyone wanna talk about the books they are reading? I just finished the Call Me By Your Name sequel Find Me (needs an editor), and have started rereading Ovid's Metamorphoses. It's going slowly because I have gotten considerably more stupid since five years ago and also, lol, a pandemic is not helping my attention span. I've also started listening to a readalong to Emily Wilson's translation of The Odyssey while folding laundry and it is SO NICE.
I find it very hard to read books online so despite my nice little NYPL membership, when I run out of the library hardcovers I've been hoarding I will probably attempt the Difficult Classics I own and have never got around to
I've been slowly working through War and Peace with the A Public Space #TolstoyTogether reading group. Love to have structure and a communal project in this weird time.
I've also loved these fabulous new(ish) releases:
- The Glass Hotel, by Emily St. John Mandel (a disappearance at sea, a Ponzi scheme, a remote Vancouver Island hotel, ghosts?)
- The City We Became, by N.K. Jemisin (personifications of the boroughs of NY defend their city against an extradimensional threat)
- Temporary, by Hilary Leichter (breezy and off-kilter Calvino-esque yarn, following a temp whose placements include filling in for a pirate and a chairman of the board)
I am finally reading Watership Down and am really getting into it. I will admit I kind of found the initial pages a bit of a slog (like the bunnies, ha!), but once they made their way into the warren just below the Downs, I was really into it. The last book I read was Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett so it's a bit of tonal downshift if you will.
I just read my first Discworld novel (Night Watch) for the first time last week! I actually have an e-copy of Guards! Guards! on hold at the library, so that should be fun except for the whole slog of reading on a screen.
I am rereading the All Souls trilogy, because boy do I need slightly-elevated vampire pulp and early modern England self-insert fic right this second. The Emily Wilson translation of the Odyssey is SOOOOO GOOD!
Right now I'm reading JA Baker's The Peregrine (classic nature writing, it's awesome) and I just finished Kent Haruf's Eventide. His books kind of remind me of Marilynne Robinson, except not religious at all? Is that a thing?
I think soon I will also be into the Difficult Classics too, Li -- virus time is finally Moby-Dick time! But before that I plan to read Circe by Madeline Miller and The Master Butchers Singing Club by Louise Erdrich. And maybe some other things too.
I finally finished A Darker Shade of Magic, and I guess I'm gonna have to read the rest of the series now. I'm about halfway through Tuesday Mooney Talks to Ghosts and I'm really enjoying it. One silver lining to all this is that since I cannot go to the library or the bookstore, I am now forced to whittle down the pile, which I have been halfheartedly attempting for the past few months.
i'm nursing about a dozen cookbooks right now and anthony bourdain's typhoid mary; i'm also stuck halfway through the GENIUS full surrogacy now because i left it at the office the day before i went into isolation :(
I am swimming in audiobooks and can't decide what to read next. I normally like immersive literary or thrillers (Kavalier & Klay, anything by Sarah Waters, Stephen King, etc), or good true crime (e.g., Killer of Little Shepherds) but having a hard time finding something really engaging or page-turning. Any recs?
I find audiobooks quite hard to get into generally so my brain may just work differently from yours and I'm not sure if you're into poetry, but the Claire Danes-recorded audiobook of The Odyssey sounded really good when I played the sample on Amazon!
Re: knitting, a small bright spot for me: My friend has hosted a regular monthly "crafternoon" for a year or two now, and I rarely attend because I'm not even a little bit crafty, though she always invites me and tells me I'm welcome.
But since social distancing went into effect, she's decided to do it twice a month on Zoom, and everyone just kind of turns on their cameras and works on their own thing, and there are little conversations here and there, but mostly it's just hanging out. So I've been attending those and coloring, the one thing I am happy to do, and it's really nice to see everyone!! And feels less effortful than some video calls kind of are.
uuuuuhh i'm just learning the news about John Prine here and this might be the thing that breaks me. He was my darling dad's absolute favorite singer/songwriter and i'm deeply attached to him. I've had the privilege of seeing him and his band live about six or seven times and each time i feel a kind of magical re-connection to my dad (whom i lost 23 years ago tomorrow). For someone who's not particularly spiritual, it's been a tremendous, tremendous gift. I guess i'll go listen to Lake Marie on repeat for the rest of the day and pray for Fiona and John.
When it is finally sunny in New England I will be sitting in a camp chair in my driveway in my bathing suit and I am full of gleeful anticipation for that day. I wish you all a similar feeling.
Steve agreed to watch thirty minutes of Portrait last night (he set a TIMER) and when it went off he was like “well we should finish this scene and then the next scene” so I feel a great personal victory has been achieved.
yessssss
I am gonna coax my gf into watching The Favorite with me, we should start a lesbian period movie thread
related-has anyone watched Dickinson (apple tv)? Would you recommend it?
yes indeedy- though it takes an episode or two to get going, it hit a very particular vibe for me. It's weirdly kind of realistic and surrealistic at once; like it's intent that "a lovingly done/very earnest period piece *can* coexist with a show about how ridiculous teenagers/young adults are in any period."
also, Mulaney as Thoreau nuff said
Nicky, I really appreciate these newsletters. I find myself too mentally taxed to comment all the time, but they have been surprisingly grounding to me and I hope you recognize how much we appreciate you giving of yourself. Beauregard woke me up early this morning and I thought of you all. ❤️
I feel exactly the same way! Thank you for bringing us Beauregard.
I'm staff at a college department and just got a letter from one of our visiting faculty for when one person goes up for tenure eventually. In the best of times he is often in my office asking for help with ...pretty basic computing. He was very worried about the prospect of teaching completely online for the rest of the semester and described the links and tutorials IT sent around as "sending an erector set to a St. Bernard." The letter talks about how the younger faculty showed him how to use various tools, and in particular about how one of them went so above and beyond in spending hours on facetime going step by step that he now feels comfortable using the tools he needs. It was just a really really nice thing to read first thing this morning.
an erector set to a St. Bernard <3
I originally read it as just "to St. Bernard" and I thought "come on, he was a pretty smart guy, I bet he could figure it out." lol
Love to everyone. My 3-in-June-year-old crawled into bed with us at 6 this morning usually when she does it's a hot mess of feet in your trachea and/or solar plexus somehow at the same time, but this morning she was just really affectionate and snuggly, so I felt extraordinarily blessed, just quietly drifting towards consciousness with spouse, her, baby #2 kicking up a storm, and 90 lb of dog (65 lb lab mix and 25 lb beagle mix) and snuggled up together. It's a totally shit time, and I have so much to be grateful for.
I hereby promise if you work on a Broadway or off-Broadway show and are one of my readers I will go to it when things happen again and give you the biggest hug.
my brother is a bartender-slash-aspiring actor who is associated with an experimental off-Broadway company (I will divulge which one if he says it's okay) and boy am I right there with you. the first thing I want to do once travel to NYC is okay again is go down and crash on his couch and dance on his bar and go see some weird theater and C R Y.
I am hoping for the best, but in actuality counting down the days to finding out my summer stock work (July/August) is ultimately cancelled... it’s rough out here for theater folks right now!!
(Also I am a pedant and try to remind everyone that we exist all across the country outside of NYC as well and those of us in “the regions“ are getting hit hard too)
Thanks so much for these - I had a day yesterday where I found out that the guy had been fooling around with the last year or so is quarantining with his ACTUAL GIRLFRIEND. A drama revealed in iPhone location tags. Who knew middle-aged quarantine could be so dramatic? Anyhow, this is my cry into the wind, as I am a single parent with two kids and I have to go teach French and fractions now.
I'm sorry, that sucks and he sucks. I hope you eventually get to a point where you can tell it as a funny story.
I mean it already is a sort of funny story. Who tries to pretend to be in one place during a quarantine then sends photos/videos very clearly marked with another place? In another country?
That's amazing, if nothing else you're almost certainly better off not being involved with someone with such bad opsec.
UGH. The jerk! The wind hears your cry and carries it far away.
I submitted my dissertation to my committee last night. PRAISE ME.
Congratulations!!!
Congratulations!! You were considering delaying submitting, right? I'm happy for you that you submitted it. You're an extra badass for finishing it and getting ready to defend in the midst of, you know, everything.
Yes I was! On the advice of my advisor and department administrator, I am basically playing Defense Chicken. In my department it is the custom to submit to the committee a month before the defense. There is at least one postdoc that has expressed some interest in me and I guess has not canceled its search. So if they (or somewhere else) take me on sometime in April, I will defend as planned; if not, I will cancel the defense, ask the committee to send me any critiques they have, and delay the whole thing another year. Thank you for the lovely well wishes.
That sounds like an incredibly stressful situation, fingers crossed for at least one postdoc!
Had to drop my summer graduate classes - major first world problem, I know. I can't afford them thanks to *gestures at virus, economy, etc*. My fiance took a massive pay cut so I'm the breadwinner for now.
I'm focusing on the positive though. We've kept our jobs, our housing is secure, and my loved ones are healthy. My menagerie of pets is healthy too. That's all I want. Well, I want all of you to be healthy and safe too. Ok, final answer. <3
I rewatched Rear Window last night (even though my WFH setup actually faces the Front Window). And now I want to start a blog tracking All The Times Jimmy Stewart Is Good At Playing Heroes Who Are Also Kind of Assholes.
This sounds like a perfect staying inside and away from people activity. I love Rear Window, it's the kind of movie I can watch anytime of the year.
I hadn't watched it (I think?) since my teenage Classic Movie Girl phase; and it was quite fun noticing things I wouldn't have then. A) The age gap between Grace Kelly (26, seems older) and Jimmy Stewart (46, seems younger despite the grey hair and curmudgeon-ness) ; B) the New York bits, after living in NYC for 5 years. (The West Village address seems to be fictional but I ogled the apartments anyway)
This weekend I took out the binoculars to better read the signs the across the construction site neighbors have put in their windows (one knock knock joke that feels incomplete, another "Jeb! 2016"). It felt too much Rear Window and I maybe should rewatch it.
On the other hand I watched Charade for the first time on Saturday and maybe Hitchcock is not the mood I need at the moment.
Huh, despite a lifelong Cary Grant fixation, I have never seen Charade. *notes down on the list* And I think in a time like this, as long as you have a mix of moods, Hitchcock is okay to slot in. (i.e go with a ridiculous space opera right after)
I did watch the Picard finale later Saturday night!
Enjoy Charade. I watched it on Kanopy, but the failure of copyright issue should mean you can stream it anywhere.
Every time I watch Charade I think, these are the two most charming humans ever to exist, like if we needed to convince space aliens not to annihilate the planet they would be the dream team. Enjoy your first watch!
"Charade" isn't directed by Hitchcock.
No, but seeing how I responded to the suspense in it clued me in to how I'd handle Hitchcock right now.
Ah, gotcha!
No way! We just rewatched Rear Window last night. I like Jimmy Stewart's character in an abstract way but Lisa could do better
Whooooo we just got our statewide stay-at-home order, with a very strong tone of "because You People apparently can't follow more chill instructions," which, fair, I have seen some nonsense in my neighborhood.
I am reading the Man from the Train and let me tell you I can watch Dateline, Forensic Files, listen to true crime podcasts and read true crime books and not have an issue. I routinely impress my boyfriend by hating horror movies but am yet still able to sleep at night without nightmares. But I stayed up until 11:30 reading it last night and I was 100% scared and kept waking up to check that the night light in the hall hadn’t come on (motion activated low tech early warning system). I know these events happened 100 years ago but the concept of some rando going around axe murdering 100s of people scared the bejesus out of me in a way that the stories about known and captured serial killers do not. So I will not be reading it late at night anymore. Day time book only.
For some reason, the part where they speculate that the victims didn't appear to wake up not because the murder snuck up the stairs so quietly, but because he ran up them and was in their rooms before they could fully wake scared the daylights out of me. That mental image still lingers and I think of it every time I pass stairs in the dark. I thought the book was great, but definitely a daylight read
The book is SO GOOD
Yeah that definitely creeps me out. I kept thinking about how unless I was already awake I wouldn’t know the hall light had come on until someone had already opened the door to the bedroom and that would not be enough time to grab a weapon of some sort. So obviously every little sound woke me up last night.
I could NOT stop thinking about it after I read it -- even though, obviously, the murders took place like 100 years ago, I would lie awake calculating our distance from the nearest rail line (the subway, lol)
I happened to finish that book one night while my husband was away on a business trip and I checked the front door... a lot of times... and may have blocked it with a chair. And the bedroom door also. YOWZA.
If I had been by myself I would’ve put a chair under the door and maybe moved the heavy dresser in front of it. It’s a 1st floor if there was a fire I could escape. We have 4 doors into the house, including 2 sets of sliding glass doors, and that many possible entry points already freaks me out.
This sounds great! Thanks..... I think.....
Oh boy. Your description of it scares me and I know it will give me troubles with sleeping but I can’t help but want to read about this! Off to wiki...
Honestly had to stop myself from just adding the whole dang O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack when I got to Big Rock Candy Mountains for the Spotify playlist. :) It's the first movie soundtrack I ever bought with my own money after seeing the movie in middle school and it still remains one of my favorite soundtracks and my favorite Coen Brothers movie.
It is a killer soundtrack and I arbitrarily give you permission to add it.
does anyone wanna talk about the books they are reading? I just finished the Call Me By Your Name sequel Find Me (needs an editor), and have started rereading Ovid's Metamorphoses. It's going slowly because I have gotten considerably more stupid since five years ago and also, lol, a pandemic is not helping my attention span. I've also started listening to a readalong to Emily Wilson's translation of The Odyssey while folding laundry and it is SO NICE.
I find it very hard to read books online so despite my nice little NYPL membership, when I run out of the library hardcovers I've been hoarding I will probably attempt the Difficult Classics I own and have never got around to
I am reading lurid true crime novels and also Portrait of a Lady on Fire has me back on Duolingo to stay sharp.
I am getting back on Duolingo April 1; I forgive myself for being too overwhelmed this month.
you gotta name names!!
Nicole884562
I've been slowly working through War and Peace with the A Public Space #TolstoyTogether reading group. Love to have structure and a communal project in this weird time.
I've also loved these fabulous new(ish) releases:
- The Glass Hotel, by Emily St. John Mandel (a disappearance at sea, a Ponzi scheme, a remote Vancouver Island hotel, ghosts?)
- The City We Became, by N.K. Jemisin (personifications of the boroughs of NY defend their city against an extradimensional threat)
- Temporary, by Hilary Leichter (breezy and off-kilter Calvino-esque yarn, following a temp whose placements include filling in for a pirate and a chairman of the board)
Ooh The City We Became just arrived this week from my local indie!
I am finally reading Watership Down and am really getting into it. I will admit I kind of found the initial pages a bit of a slog (like the bunnies, ha!), but once they made their way into the warren just below the Downs, I was really into it. The last book I read was Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett so it's a bit of tonal downshift if you will.
I just read my first Discworld novel (Night Watch) for the first time last week! I actually have an e-copy of Guards! Guards! on hold at the library, so that should be fun except for the whole slog of reading on a screen.
Guards! Guards! was my introduction to Discworld and remains one of my faves. Reading on a screen will be worth it.
Guards! Guards! is the best place to start; he's really gotten his legs by that point.
I’m reading it again for the first time in years - it’s a wonderful comfort book.
I have been reading Code Name Verity.
Such a good (and heart-breaking) novel!!
Augh it's so good and so sad!
I'm not reading, lolsob. I keep trying to start something and then I get distracted and start crying. Maybe today is the day for Night Film!
I haven't been able to read either :( Just passive tv watching for me, thanks. Hopefully that changes soon for us both!!
Take care!! Night Film looks v cool.
Thank you! I loved Neverworld Wake and I know I'll love this, but the focus! I have no focus!
I am rereading the All Souls trilogy, because boy do I need slightly-elevated vampire pulp and early modern England self-insert fic right this second. The Emily Wilson translation of the Odyssey is SOOOOO GOOD!
Right now I'm reading JA Baker's The Peregrine (classic nature writing, it's awesome) and I just finished Kent Haruf's Eventide. His books kind of remind me of Marilynne Robinson, except not religious at all? Is that a thing?
I think soon I will also be into the Difficult Classics too, Li -- virus time is finally Moby-Dick time! But before that I plan to read Circe by Madeline Miller and The Master Butchers Singing Club by Louise Erdrich. And maybe some other things too.
I finally finished A Darker Shade of Magic, and I guess I'm gonna have to read the rest of the series now. I'm about halfway through Tuesday Mooney Talks to Ghosts and I'm really enjoying it. One silver lining to all this is that since I cannot go to the library or the bookstore, I am now forced to whittle down the pile, which I have been halfheartedly attempting for the past few months.
i'm nursing about a dozen cookbooks right now and anthony bourdain's typhoid mary; i'm also stuck halfway through the GENIUS full surrogacy now because i left it at the office the day before i went into isolation :(
I am swimming in audiobooks and can't decide what to read next. I normally like immersive literary or thrillers (Kavalier & Klay, anything by Sarah Waters, Stephen King, etc), or good true crime (e.g., Killer of Little Shepherds) but having a hard time finding something really engaging or page-turning. Any recs?
I find audiobooks quite hard to get into generally so my brain may just work differently from yours and I'm not sure if you're into poetry, but the Claire Danes-recorded audiobook of The Odyssey sounded really good when I played the sample on Amazon!
Re: knitting, a small bright spot for me: My friend has hosted a regular monthly "crafternoon" for a year or two now, and I rarely attend because I'm not even a little bit crafty, though she always invites me and tells me I'm welcome.
But since social distancing went into effect, she's decided to do it twice a month on Zoom, and everyone just kind of turns on their cameras and works on their own thing, and there are little conversations here and there, but mostly it's just hanging out. So I've been attending those and coloring, the one thing I am happy to do, and it's really nice to see everyone!! And feels less effortful than some video calls kind of are.
uuuuuhh i'm just learning the news about John Prine here and this might be the thing that breaks me. He was my darling dad's absolute favorite singer/songwriter and i'm deeply attached to him. I've had the privilege of seeing him and his band live about six or seven times and each time i feel a kind of magical re-connection to my dad (whom i lost 23 years ago tomorrow). For someone who's not particularly spiritual, it's been a tremendous, tremendous gift. I guess i'll go listen to Lake Marie on repeat for the rest of the day and pray for Fiona and John.
It feels SO PERSONAL.
It really really does. I'm NOT okay rn.
It does. And we have tickets to see him in August.
When it is finally sunny in New England I will be sitting in a camp chair in my driveway in my bathing suit and I am full of gleeful anticipation for that day. I wish you all a similar feeling.