Moonlight Maude
Had a hard day today. Or noticed I had been having several of them and needed it to be different. In many ways this week was an improvement over the preceeding two, but in some ways it was worse. It’s been several weeks since we’ve been able to work together on some household tasks. Between that and you needing extra care while you’re sick, I’ve moved into a mode where I optimize for reactive work and try to do literally nothing that isn’t urgent. It’s not a great place. It kept me from eating today. And it feels a lot like being trapped, particularly when it rubs up against the way I can’t get help with any thing that makes you nervous. I have confidence it will be better again but it is rough to lose the coordination we had been building. Rough to be triggered about all the times I couldn’t keep up with being in charge of everyone in the house.
There are lots of bits in “The Only Girl in the World” that match my life closely, and here’s one I didn’t remember until today – I always wished that I had a big brother to do for me what I tried (and often failed) to do for the Kids. What I was doing – what I needed – was parenting. But at the time the best I could imagine was a slightly older abused child.
I really liked that Maude escaped with the aid of a kindly old person who was prepared without prompting to undertake a heist against father. It’s a weird reverse Music Man that allows Maude to find a way out of their camp and into the world.
I also connected with the way they felt “a breed apart”, much like I describe being inhuman. It’s part of the abandonment of self that comes from being so carefully denied humanity. And a lot of other parts that line up through the strange rules of being part of a small cult that’s afraid of the world, that hates you, and that is dependent on you. And I appreciated the way the whole thing is presented without comment, without perspective, in exactly the way it is experienced.
Watched Moonlight (2018) today. It’s a movie about one dude having a hard time for about 30 years while the world tells him it’s his role and his fault. He eventually believes that it matters what he thinks. The movie does not tell you whether or not it matters. The long shots tell me about limited perspective. The close shots tell me it’s hard to keep up with all the things going on around me. It’s pretty good.
ZiB
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Sent from a phone.
