And Now You’re Even Older

I’m not sure why I’m not writing again. I mean, obviously it’s more of the same, but I’m not exactly clear why it’s harder now than it was last week. There were some schedule disruptions and extra errands related to holidays, but I’ve had opportunities to write, even ideas about what that might be. Still, I can’t quite bring myself to summon PwW, or at least it doesn’t readily take when I try.

I suspect the amount of little things I’ve had to deal with are a factor. I’ve spent lots of time dealing with customer service and in other high-energy interactions trying to keep my house and life in order. I’m still working on satisfying the insurance company and the state, with the hopes of actually getting some money while I’m on leave. I’ve had problems with my headphones and basement keypad ¹This is particularly annoying because it means I need my phone or a key to unlock a door you could previously open without tools. But after several rounds of being fucked with I am excited to have sent this message, which worked: You don’t need it. You know the serial number – I had to tell it to a bot before I could even talk to you. I sent … Continue reading and water bill and gift returns. I migrated everyone’s email off my server, which was a whole job in itself. But I also know that none of those things actually keep me from writing, at least no on their own.

---

During other times this year when I wasn’t writing I generated a number of hot takes on media. But the usual plan of finding a Screed where they’d be thematic or of relating them to my on narrative doesn’t work when you aren’t publishing Screeds. So let’s try a speed round in an attempt to avoid repeating that funk.

The Half of It (2020) – Netflix ²I hate these capitalist steaming services – the way they are all different from each other, the way they won’t use standard media controls, they way they refuse to help me keep watching what I like, the way their catalogues disappear, the way they’re pumping me for information and decisions in every interaction in an attempt to extract more … Continue reading
THoI has almost the same plot as Sex Education, which I’m sure is why Netflix produced it, but it’s a good enough shape for this sort of movie. It has a take on Rural High School that was very familiar to me (other than the cell phones). It see the cost of conformity that’s required to participate in the “safety” of small towns, and has a lot of Life is Strange energy (including the queer and the PNW). This film has a good take on love ³Mostly – it gets stuck a little on monogamy.. That isn’t always what you get out of a coming of age movie, but the choice everyone makes here is to leave, to find new life in being free even at the cost of letting go. Do watch.

I Am Mother (2019) – Netflix
IAM gets full points merely for its use of capital-M Mother as a name. But I liked it beyond that too. It’s a story about a young person who is locked in a bunker with Mother, an anxious and fearful robot who imposes extreme isolation on them both. The film spends a good deal of time showing us how Mother provides nearly unavoidable attention and frames all their behavior as supportive and focused on child-rearing. But Mother also clearly talks about how Daughter is a practice human that Mother is using to learn how to parent, not a real human in their own right, which Daughter eventually cannot ignore. There’s a sci-fi plot line in there too but honestly the further they get from the bunker the less I cared what was happening. That’s maybe my bias in the way I feel about being a practice child to a capital-M Mother, or maybe just the demands of film finance showing through an unoriginal genre treatment of a one-room drama. Do watch, just don’t expect the lore to matter.

The Midnight Sky (2020) – Netflix
Don’t. I mean, there’s like a list of films you could put this on where it might make sense as part of a series — films shot in 2020 where there are never more than 2 people in a room, films that use space or radios or bunkers to keep people from interacting, films where someone re-imagines the ship from 2001: A Space Odyssey with modern CGI (and modern sensibilities about space) instead of model car scraps. But it’s terrible on its own. George Clooney elects to be a crazy old hermit even while being offered help, invents a manic pixy dream child to cope with their own shitty behavior, and flashes back to show us how they were terrible for their entire lives to everyone around them. It then rewards this life with George being the person not only to discover the only hope left to humanity ⁴After a disaster they go out of their way to not talk about despite wanting to show us. I am totally okay with a post-disaster movie not telling us what the disaster was, but if you do that you aren’t allowed to have ongoing vague dialog and graphics about it, like someone censored the movie post-production., not only the person who saves some of the last humans with their brave radio operating skills, but the literal genetic father of the last woman (who is currently pregnant). Eventually George dies but not before taking credit for saving humanity and being a good Daddy to this child he never met (and by proxy their children). It’s sort of good in a bad-movie way – every few minutes an alarm goes off or space rocks attack or dying seagulls squawk and we have a short action sequence. But even if the story wasn’t trash the main character would still be.

Happiest Season (2020) – Hulu
I told Shanda I would watch exactly one movie from this category – Hallmark-style holiday films – and this is what you picked. Given that category I think this one was fine. Kristen Stewart had high enough levels of queer ⁵So did Aubry Plaza. This film gets full points for actual queer chemistry and energy, whatever its sins may be. that you can excuse some of the rest of the film. But it’s got all of the same problems a typical holiday rom-com does — the main romantic relationship is toxic, gestures shown as romantic are actually terrible, the wrong people end up together, there’s very limited character growth. I’m also sensitive to the way parents in this movie are given a pass not only on all their historic wrongs but on all the current ones, just for the sake of having a “happy” “family” holiday ending. So I wouldn’t recommend it, but if you’re going to watch this sort of thing, you could do worse.

Yes, God, Yes (2019) – Netflix
YGY is about religious trauma in teens and specifically about the way religion (hypocritically) uses sex to hurt people. It’s got Timothy Simons in it as Youth Pastor Tim-Tom, which is a great choice for the sort of selfish-creepy-charisma that position demands. The story presents the situation as sometimes abusive but tolerable, and gives the protagonist a self-directed ending. It makes me yell though, just to see the organized, intentional abuse of captive young people, even if it’s something we widely tolerate in society. Shanda had lots of cries about this one – it’s not quite your story, but I can see how it’s close enough to be hard to take. But I think the film lives up to its promises, and is able to talk about religious abuse even if it limits its ambition to recovery and self-empowerment. Do watch.

---

My hair has evolved from Grover blue to UV-reactive blue, and I added a red-purple swirl eyebrow in time for Christmas. Which was particularly good this year because masks don’t allow the sort of warpaint I would prefer for my holiday adventures. Pandemic concerns limited our contact with people — it’s not safe to see several groups of people same-day — but we still made the rounds at least for drop-offs. I didn’t get to see L at all, which is unfortunate but not unexpected ⁶I was making good progress toward more reliable access last year, but the virus has made that very difficult this year. I’ve only seen L at all one time since last Christmas, and even that required special effort and essentially bullying through the barriers that L’s caregiver erects. It won’t last forever but I’m disappointed to have made … Continue reading. I only saw J in passing but did get their attention for chat later, and an unsolicited reassurance that they had recently wanted to be in contact with me. We made a couple other quick stops and eventually ended up with CS, where at least we could stop for a minute without fear of bringing death to our friends. So socializing was pretty light, and I presumably wasn’t able to meaningfully disrupt anyone’s FoO isolation, but not bad. We didn’t get to connect with M or LS, and there were moderate mixed feels from Shanda during prep, but overall things were low-stress and mostly enjoyable this year, which is not always true.

I think part of that is Shanda skipping your FoO abuse conference this year. Usually on the 24th or 25th you arrange to have your family of origin trigger you into all the old terrible feels. You’ve got plenty of bad feels about the gifts and holidays and whatnot in your daily experience, and being actively hurt in the same old ways doesn’t make life easier. We haven’t talked about this yet, which makes me worry that you’re still planning some version of it later, but it at least didn’t happen on Christmas. I hope if you are joining this year’s conference – which is not mandatory no matter what guilt or longing you imagine – that you are at least prepared to defend yourself. It’s easy for you to blind yourself to the hurts they offer and to repeat the old pattern of pretending you aren’t injured, but it doesn’t really work — you just save it up as resentment and anger until you explode. Then you feel bad for losing control, and for “letting” yourself get angry. I know you desperately want to make up for the holiday times your shitty parents stole from you in the past, but I’m pretty sure you can’t do that by continuing the same things that didn’t work before. I know I can’t give you the sort of family bits that you lost, but if you wanted I could help you find other options, so you could build parts you actually like.

---

I’m temporarily housing another dog. This one pays much more careful attention to me, which is not always easy for me to take. Eventually my calm would wear off on them, but over the course of a week I’ll probably just have to tolerate it. It’s not bad. I like dogs and this one agrees that I’m cool. But it makes me miss Dog. Shanda is really excited to have a dog back and is doing lots of things about having one, but also is right back to seeing some of their own anxieties projected onto a furry friend. It makes me worry that I’ll let the next dog be hurt by it – like I let Mother hurt the Kids, like Pete let people hurt me, like I let you sometimes hurt Dog – because it seemed too hard to make something different happen. It’s probably not fair to put all those in the same category but in my brain all those abandonment feels are an inch apart, and they’re all proof of how insufficient I am to even the parenting a dog needs, let alone humans.

ZiB

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

•