#just a teenage girl who is a bit too obsessed with helen

[heleniad]

my thought is that hyacinths are kind of helen's flower — the flower she wears most commonly. it's only right, seeing that hyancinthus was a spartan royal like helen, and hyacinths as flowers have come to symbolize great pride and beauty.

in edgar allan poe's poem 'to helen', he says this line:

thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face, / thy naiad airs have brought me home / to the glory that was greece, / and the grandeur that was rome.        

which is what's inspired this post.

( also, in my roleplays on quotev, i have always referred to helen as wearing hyacinths in her hair because it felt right to me. but i never had a good reason for it until now. poe's poem really reassured me that i'm not the only one to feel hyacinths to be fitting for helen lol )

[jodilin65]

FRIDAY, MARCH 31, 2023 I have 2000 miles left of my trip. I’ve done about 180 miles so far. Getting closer to France!

Tom notices a strange tingling sensation when he touches his legs. This could be diabetes, his thyroid, or both. In a couple of months or so, he’s going to see his own doctor and get a suspicious spot on his forehead looked at. It might be what I had and need to be sprayed with liquid nitrogen.

Right now, I’m more worried about my weight than anything else. I don’t know that I’m going to be able to stop from gaining let alone lose. But then I haven’t been able to control my weight since being over 35, like most people. To lose weight AND keep it off is the impossible dream unless I want to damn near starve myself and I don’t. Just gotta roll with the punches of aging. Unless you’re one of the few percent with great genes, this is just life for most of us.

During our 11th session, Helen and I discussed various things. We mostly focused on the world in general and how it impacts us. I’m not worried about war, but when I see more and more restrictions put on women’s reproductive rights and other things going on in this country, I know the craziness is getting closer to affecting all of us. Hearing about doctors fleeing states instead of treating women like they’re trained to do only adds to the problem. When you don’t take a stand against extremists and you let them run you out of wherever, you become part of the problem. At the same time, the only way to fix the problem going on in this country isn’t possible. That’s because we can’t expect every single one of these extremists who are in charge of things to drop dead. Even Helen feels that if things keep going as they have, the loss of freedom and life as we know it will really suck.

Some people are so obsessed with control that there’s no rhyme or reason for it. The control freaks control things just because they can. They enact crazy laws and restrictions just because they can. Because it makes them feel powerful. Nowadays, fewer women can control what happens to their lives and bodies. People can’t always read what they want to read. Harmless entertainment is now harmful.

I’m starting to wonder if we’re all going to be microchipped someday and controlled in the privacy of our own homes. Maybe there will be mandatory cameras all through our homes and we’ll be zapped or something if whoever’s in control feels we’re spending too much time in a certain room of our house or some crazy shit like that. When I see us step so far back into the Dark Ages in this day and age, I start to think anything may be possible no matter how horrible or off the wall it may seem.

THURSDAY, MARCH 30, 2023 You know you don't know what you're doing when playing Sims 4 if you can't keep a teenage girl from jumping into bed with her father. beats head frustratedly

My gallbladder now has an execution date of April 12th! That week will be a busy one with appointments three days in a row. New bridge on the 10th, pre-op testing on the 11th, and surgery on the 12th. For my pre-op appointment, they’re going to do x-rays, an EKG, and blood work. I’ll have a follow-up appointment three to four weeks after surgery. I hate the money it costs us but will be so glad to have the new bridge and gallbladder out. We forgot to ask if I’ll have stitches. I asked through the portal but didn’t get a reply. That’s exactly why I prefer Galileo over dealing with doctors that I see in person. It’s just that Galileo docs can’t reach through the phone and yank my gallbladder out.

The surgeon's waiting room was a bit crowded on our way out the other day. It was so funny when I was in the bathroom right off of it and I heard someone ask him if he came there that often as if it were a spa or a salon, LOL.

“This is a doctor you don’t want to have to see very often,” he told them. Then he waited for me outside the waiting room because they wanted to chat like they were all good buddies and Tom isn’t very sociable on or offline.

The surgeon did have an accent that was a little hard to understand and his mask muffled his voice, making it even harder. I was wondering if I was ever going to see a maskless doctor again but then my GI doc wasn’t wearing one.

The GI appointment was quick but the waste of time I expected it to be. It was nice to get out but it was to learn nothing new. The doctor agrees the gallbladder is most likely causing my problems. Gee, you think? Well, like I told him, two more weeks and it’s gone. Yeah, 13 days left to live, you crampy little bastard!

He mentioned the propofol they used to knock me out and how people love it, and no wonder Michael Jackson loved it, LOL. That was exactly what I was thinking.

We were out for about four hours today. Funny how things are greening up out there, even though we haven’t had much rain.

We stopped at Whole Foods for over an hour while the car charged. We ate at the buffet and sat at one of the tables where I took notes in my journal, and we also played on our phones and stuff like that. For the millionth time, why does nearly every store and restaurant I enter have to sound like a fucking concert hall? The music was loud and annoying. It was a nice day overall, though, and barely humid out.

Noticed the flags across the street were taken down yesterday and the golf cart is gone too. I was wondering when in April they’d leave. So I’m guessing the trailer will show up tomorrow, and they’ll leave on the first. That’s OK with me! I was a bit worried they’d stick around till mid-April or May, even though it’s not like they’re horrible neighbors.

Jess is one contradicting and confusing person! First, she had no problem on 100s, then no problem on 88s. Then she was glad to have fewer palpitations on 88s but complained she gained 3 pounds in a month, and why was her dose even lowered in the first place, she asks, since she was fine on 100s?

Had a dream I ran into Chris and he was a doctor of all things. We were about to move and I asked if I could see him if the move didn’t work out and we returned. He agreed and started to write me a prescription for my medication when I told him I didn’t need any at the moment.

Then I told him that while I hadn’t told Tom yet, I discovered blood on the tampon I was wearing. Why I was wearing one at this age is beyond me. He looked worried and disappointed. I assured him I would talk to Tom soon but was busy with other things.

It's going to suck not going to the beach this summer since he’s going to be working. Maybe I’ll go to the pool more often instead.

Just got an email saying I have to pre-register on the hospital site for surgery. Health work, health work, health work! Imagine if I could spend the time on other things that I spend working on my health. I’m so sick of practically making a career out of it.

My urine analysis came back negative. So the antibiotics did their job after all. I do feel much better. Just slight burning every now and then.

Random thought: My foster mother never would have cried for me if I’d died the way I cried for her when I learned of her death.

MONDAY, MARCH 27, 2023 After waiting for the better part of an hour, I met with the surgeon this morning. He was in a complex that included a hospital and emergency room. A guy was driving a six-seat golf cart around the parking lot that took us directly to the building I needed to go to.

The waiting room was small and comfortable, but a bit chilly. Wearing just a tank top, I wished I had brought my cardigan with me. Anyway, we each used the bathroom off of the waiting room and settled into our seats to play games on our phones when I whispered in his ear, “Someone smells like a smoker."

A second later, a youngish guy sitting with a youngish woman said he was trying to quit.

Oops! LOL, so I apologized and he said it was no problem. The woman even seemed amused. Maybe him hearing me say that will influence him to quit just like I influenced Andy to give up the pot when he read in my blog that I thought he sounded high all those years ago when he left me a voice message.

So the doctor is going to remove the gallbladder, explaining just about everything I was able to Google about the subject of low-functioning gallbladders. It’s going to be 4 incisions, though, and not 5. They’ll be across my lower stomach. They need the other ports for “hands” to lift the liver out of the way and insert tools. I let him know that my TSH was a few points elevated and about the UTI and he said that would be no problem. I didn’t think it would be, though.

They will call to set up a date/time which should be within the next few weeks. Really hope I’m on days when they call! We let them know the 10th was out of the question. The only thing that worries me about having it done before the 10th is whether or not it would throw off my schedule for the dentist but Tom doesn’t think it will.

At the end of today, I take the last Nitrofurantoin and while it seemed to work great at first, the burning is picking up again and I'm not sure the UTI is gone. There are a couple of other things as well. For one, I noticed a slightly greenish tint to my pee when it's usually pretty clear, and I had lower left back pain (a dull ache that would come and go) for a couple of days. Today it hasn't been as noticeable but yesterday and the day before it was. I don't know if there's a connection, though. It could have been a pulled muscle or something. Maybe it's time to do a urine culture?

I updated my docs on all this, and we’ll see what they say.

I’m down 2 pounds since beginning the IF diet, but I know my stubborn dumbass body. It’ll lose 2-3 more pounds and then automatically reset itself to where it was, even if I keep doing what I’ve been doing.

SUNDAY, MARCH 26, 2023 For the last couple of days, I’ve been having a dull, intermittent ache in my lower left back and really hoping to hell that my next problem isn’t going to be kidney stones. Tomorrow is the last day of the nitrofurantoin. It’s also surgeon meeting day. I worry that the UTI, gastritis, and hernia may delay gallbladder surgery. Basically, I’m just wondering how many more appointments I’m going to have before I can finally get a break from them and I’m worried about money as well.

We ran out to Twistee Treat and got ice cream. I’ve noticed after I eat, no matter what the quantity, I feel not just unusually full, but also a bit short of breath and bloated. I guess I’ll find out more about that on Thursday.

We went to the dollar store before going for ice cream to get some Vienna’s and OMFG. This bastard was getting ready to blaze out on his motorcycle and I was trying to hurry across the parking lot so the sound wouldn’t blow up my eardrums but I couldn’t get across fast enough because a couple of cars were in the way. Why is this shit legal? Why don’t we use the technology we have today to limit the volume of these damn things?! I’m so sick of this fucked up world at times and its twisted laws. Why is it more important to regulate women’s bodies and what people read than deal with how insanely loud and disruptive people can be?

Then when we got home, the loud motorcycle that visits Toni on occasion came and went. Yesterday was the bitch down the street, gunning and running hers with her little friend.

I understand that planes have a way to go before batteries can be made to quiet those down. But there’s no excuse left for anything on the ground. Not many commercial planes today, but a small plane was zooming back and forth and being a little annoying for a while. They don’t seem to share the air space, even though the commercials are up higher. Yet when they’re not around as much the small plains take the stage.

As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t diet because I hate being hungry. I have to bring my calories to an unsustainably low amount which means a lot of hunger for very little results. I don’t want to work so hard for so little. But I’ve really got to try to stop from gaining any more weight. So Tom and I decided to do intermittent fasting and only eat during an 8-hour window. This means I’m going to wait until I’ve been up for 4 hours before I start eating. I know I won’t lose weight since I can pack in more than 1000 calories in 8 hours but I’m hoping I’ll at least stop gaining.

If I understood the news brief Alexa gave me, some top official in Kansas is going to fight to ban abortion there, even though the majority of the people voted against bans and enshrined reproductive rights into their constitution. What’s the point of the people voting and enshrining things into constitutions if whoever is running the show is just going to undo it all and what they personally want?

SATURDAY, MARCH 25, 2023 No problems with resuming the nitrofurantoin. I wish I hadn’t let my stupid PTSD scare me off of it. Especially since the amoxicillin didn’t work. Things are definitely feeling better where the sun doesn’t shine. I’m still trying to figure out how the hell I got the UTI to begin with since having a bidet means a cleaner booty. Read an article saying that some UTIs are contracted from tainted meat. I cook all my meat except for the Vienna’s.

Had a horrible nightmare. Tom and I owned some land somewhere and recent rain left lots of puddles around the land, most of which were barely an inch deep. One of the puddles was a little wider than Tom, who stepped on its edge. Then he slipped down into it and at first we were surprised to see him sink down to his hips. Then a second later, he was up to his neck. The same instant he told me to call 911, I knew we weren’t going to be able to get him out ourselves. That’s when I woke up from the nightmare.

Two more days till I find out if I’m having gallbladder surgery or not and hopefully, also when, if I am.

FRIDAY, MARCH 24, 2023 Took the 88 that would have been a 75 today. Yesterday was one of those wonderfully unusual days where I had energy. Today, I’m back to the usual fatigue, but I expected it. This is what my body is used to, though. Who knows how many days it will be before I have energy again?

My day started off a bit emotional yesterday thanks to all the stress I’m under. Helen made me feel a lot better when we were done talking. Next week is when we’re gonna do the EMDR.

I have three appointments next week, counting Helen. I swear it never ends! I gotta make sure the GI appointment doesn’t spawn another appointment. Hopefully Monday, I’ll find out what’s going on with the surgery.

Continuing with this entry after taking a nap and doing other things…

Sure enough, I’m still having UTI symptoms. I was warned, after all, that it can be resistant to amoxicillin. I’m going to finish the nitrofurantoin. I have 7 left. They said the drowsiness and warm flushing are OK as long as I don’t get hives, stomach pain, or trouble breathing or anything like that. If I still have symptoms after Monday, then we’ll do a urine culture.

I called Margaret yesterday thinking she just had a few tech questions and it was horrible. The woman babbled non-stop for 45 minutes, mostly about Dixie and Diane. Dixie was like that too, and I had to wonder how they could have been friends for over a decade. I mean, how could they have gotten a word in edgewise? I know I barely could. I don’t understand why there are so many people like this in the world. I get that she’s 93 and lonely and that her kids don’t live anywhere near her, but it’s not like she’s alone all the time. She does have a large group of friends. There seem to be a lot of people of all different ages and walks of life like her that can’t shut up.

Not once did she ask what was going on with me. I will admit that a part of me was hoping that as long as she agreed to let us pay her back, she would help get us out of debt since she’s supposed to be wealthy. But it was all about her past friendship with Dixie and how she only hung on to that friendship for Diane’s sake. She said Dixie had 1.4 million dollars before she died and was so obsessed with money that she would do things like not eat at expensive restaurants and would find old clothes to sell and do whatever it took to make and save money. Margaret still doesn’t know what became of the money.

Then she talked a little bit about the 4000-square-foot home she and her husband used to have in Loomis on 17 acres. She’s now in a 3-bedroom house outside of Sacramento.

So yeah, it was all about her. I politely listened but I’m sorry I gave her my number. I could have hung up on her rambling away as she did and she wouldn’t have known it for a half hour. I’ve always hated one-sided relationships of any kind. I hate it when a person wants to know all about me and won't let me in on what's going on in their life, and I hate it when everything is all about them only.

And yet again I continue this entry. This time I’m determined to finish it! We ran out to CVS and got some treats. I’m sipping pink Moscato that should be mostly out of my system by the time I take my antibiotic, though it’s not on the list of ones they say you shouldn’t have alcohol with. Even so, now that I’m going to begin treatment again, I won’t drink anymore until after I’m done.

I also got some cranberry pills enriched with vitamin C and probiotics.

Saw a pest control truck at Ray’s earlier.

Finished the latest VZ challenge! It took me about two weeks to do it and there’s a little more than a month left.

THURSDAY, MARCH 23, 2023 Wow, that’s interesting. Margaret sent an email asking that I call her. Could it possibly have to do with what’s going on with us here? I did mention the health issues and that he would likely be returning to work but I certainly didn’t ask for anything either. I told her that was simply life. I think she just wants me to call to help test her phone and internet. She’s been having a lot of problems with AT&T. I remember how horrible they were. She said she was in the middle of replying to my message when it all disappeared. Same thing when she was on the phone with a friend.

Part of me is sorry we didn’t get to meet before we left Cali. She’s such a nice lady and we do love most of her jokes. She’s in her 90s now, so as she says, she could be here today and gone tomorrow. I’ll call her after my meeting with Helen.

Yesterday, I ended up a bit tearful over the stress of all the health issues and the debt we’re racking up. We both know it’s not my fault and that I didn’t ask for these problems, but I still feel bad anyway. These concerns are now spilling over into my dreams. I don’t know if he was getting retirement money in the dream I had but he had just gotten a job and I was thinking that it was just in the nick of time. But the very next day they fired him for his essential tremor and I said, “I knew that job was too good to be true.” I had a bad feeling that we would be forced to end it all if we didn’t want to end up on the streets.

At least there’s certainly no risk of that happening in real life! Unlike when the recession went to hell, we do have a steady income. It’s just not much. The medical part of what’s going on is harder on me than the financial part. I think I ran into Jessie in the dream too, and was about to tell her that I may never see her again, but couldn’t bring myself to do it.

My doctors are acting like my TSH of 7 is really 77. I was told by more than one doctor that being under 10 isn’t dangerous. They’re also aware of the side effects I have from the medication. So we’re going to go extra slow at titrating the dose. I still don’t think I’m ever going to be able to handle being in the normal range but I’m going to get as close as I can comfortably get. So for the next six weeks, I’ll be taking six 88s every other week. I think it’s 50/50 as to whether or not I can handle six 88s every single week but seven is too much for me.

What I don’t get is why they asked if my surgeon asked for clearance and if he feels comfortable operating on someone with an elevated TSH. Again, I didn’t think 7 was that high. And secondly, how can it be dangerous? I’ll discuss it with him next week, and as I reminded them, I don’t have a surgery date yet. I meet with the surgeon next week.

I still have to see an endo but as my docs and I discussed, I’m going to wait and schedule one closer to home after what’s going on now is dealt with because I’m overwhelmed as it is. They understood too. As I said before, I don’t know what an endo can do that the last two didn’t but they can’t hurt either and will make my docs happy. I really hope to hell they never want to check my cholesterol. They'd go ballistic over that.

I was shocked to learn that the endoscopy I had cost $19,000! We paid $236 of it. Almost 20K just to shove a camera down my throat for 12 minutes. The cost of the HIDA must have been insane too.

Today I finished the last of the amoxicillin and I’m not sure that the infection is gone. So that’s another thing stressing me out right there on top of the three grand the new bridge just cost us. I had the temporary bridge put on yesterday and it wasn’t a rough appointment at all. Triazolam is good stuff and so is this dentist. I love her. I think she’s the best of the three I’ve had between California and Florida. Despite the money it costs, it’s nice not to have stinging in that area when the root was exposed. It looks better already and this is just with the temp bridge.

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 22, 2023 Handling the amoxicillin well. Most of the infection seems to be gone. I was a little alarmed for a minute when I started to get a rash in the groin area, realizing it wasn’t the right spot for an allergic reaction to amoxicillin, which I’ve never gotten from it before, and a little late in the game for it to be because of the UTI. But then I realized it was just a heat rash. Those are common in these kinds of climates, even though it was surprisingly cold last night. Got all the way down to 39. 30 freakin 9 degrees in March in Florida! Anyway, a little hydrocortisone helped clear it up.

Got my results after getting up this evening. No results on whatever that liver test was for yet but my T4 is 1.3, and my TSH is 7.12. So right about what I was expecting.

A part of me wants to do nothing because I’ve felt so much better emotionally. But because I've been having so much fatigue and even mild hypothyroidism can cause issues with fatigue and weight - fatigue being debilitating - here's what I'd like to do and I ran this by my docs too.

First, I can't stress enough just how sensitive I am to this medication and how much of a fine line it has between helpful and hurtful for me personally. If I'm not really careful, I have epic anxiety, a booming heart, insomnia, the runs, and I feel like I'm on fire. Therefore, I’d like to add just one 88 a week, but ONLY EVERY OTHER WEEK and do this for SIX weeks. The last time we did the slow titration method I only did each step for four weeks and then realized that wasn’t enough time for it to fully build up and that’s why I struggled for a while.

My calculations say I should be at 5 if I can ever stand to take six 88s a week every week. But there's no way I can stand to get to around 3. Way too many side effects there. And again, I know people say they have anxiety when they're low on thyroid, but I'm actually the other way around for some reason. The closer the numbers get to the normal range, I have off-the-charts anxiety. So it's important that I take it extra slow, especially since he may have to go back to work, which means I'll be alone more. It once took me several tries to tolerate 75.

If worse comes to worst, we know I can handle 88 five times a week and that it doesn't put my TSH in those dangerous double digits. But I’d like to try this every other week for six weeks. I'm just tired of being tired, even though I don't know for sure that my thyroid is to blame.

Downloaded Sims 4 to my desktop and a mobile version as well. I want to like the game because it looks like it could be fun if I could just understand it. Some of it I get, but it’s such a complex game that I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to figure out the mechanics of how everything works. There are just so many controls and options.

Robert added some new songs to the playlist, but I’m not liking them so far. They’re not bad. They’re just boring. Half of them are by people I’ve never even heard of. At least he got rid of three of the five Pitbull songs.

I took triazolam before bed, but I can’t say that it helped me sleep better. Maybe just a little. I didn’t sleep as long as I thought I would. Just like yesterday, I awoke tired and ended up going down for a nap shortly after. The second and last pill will be taken an hour before this morning’s bridge replacement.

I had this dream I was riding this little scooter that was shaped sort of like an upside-down T. You place your feet on the sides and hold the stick in the middle. I was riding up a dirt driveway in a wooded area, hoping no dogs would jump out and chase me.

The house I entered had a back door as well. But once I stepped inside and into the living room, it looked like this place. I could see Tom out in the lanai with the bitch revving her motorcycle beyond the window as he gathered some old stuff. Some of it contained old vinyl records that were only a few inches wide. I insisted he sell them, saying he could get good money for them. But he said all he could get for them was $10.

TUESDAY, MARCH 21, 2023 I just want to cry right now. I am so frustrated and overwhelmed with all the health issues and appointments that it’s really getting me down. I feel so much older than my years at times. I kind of wish I could magically make Helen appear on my cam right now. I hate to say it, but I can see how Aly sometimes wished she would get something that would just kill her. I’m kinda wishing that myself right now only I don’t see myself getting that wish like she did, even though she didn’t really want that deep down. Far from it. She wanted to live. She just wanted to do it without constantly suffering. I would like to live without the regular suffering as well, even if I don’t have the zest for life that she did.

The nitrofurantoin proved to be too strong for me so I was switched to amoxicillin. I looked back in my journal and found that I last took it for a sinus infection back in the 90s and had no side effects. I can take penicillin, but it gives me the runs. They gave me that a few years ago when I had a tooth infection. The only problem is that some resistance has been reported when it comes to amoxicillin and UTIs. That’s what my doctors told me anyway. But the other stuff was way too powerful. It was making me very drowsy and I would have these scary warm flushes come over me that weren’t like a regular hot flash. I think most of the infection is gone, but not all of it.

Went to the lab bright and early in the morning, but there was no urine test ordered for me. Just the thyroid and something else. I wonder if they canceled the pee test because the home testing kit showed I have a UTI. I did notice another test I don’t think I ever had before called a PSC. I guess it has to do with the liver.

I’m just really stressed out not just over all the appointments, but the constant fatigue that rarely seems to give me a break. I don’t know what to think at times because there are so many possible causes. Maybe something else is going on with me that hasn’t been diagnosed, but I doubt it. I just feel really overwhelmed, and I know that today I’m going to be told my TSH is shitty. The question is how shitty?

I’m having one of those days when I’m wondering if there’s something up there that’s punishing me, or if this is just random. I just feel like I shouldn’t be having this many health problems until I’m over 65.

I started my day - or night, I should say - off on the warm side and my heart started racing before I took the amoxicillin but after I finished eating a frozen dinner. Hopefully, that was just because there was too much sodium in it. Every now and then I take a break from healthy stuff and get pre-made stuff, especially when I don’t feel well. I’m hoping some of the fatigue will lift once the infection is cured, but it’s been really bad the last couple of years, and I certainly haven’t been infected that long.

The honker left at 4:30 yesterday morning and I thought they were going on a road trip or something but nope, they were back a few hours later.

Tomorrow’s dental bridge replacement day. Ughhh… They said it was OK to take the triazolam with the amoxicillin, though. I can’t say whether or not the amoxicillin is making me drowsy because of the fatigue, but it doesn’t seem to be as noticeable as with the other stuff. So hopefully, if I take it before bed I’ll sleep better because I definitely haven’t been sleeping well, which doesn’t help.

Can’t believe how cold it is here, and it’s almost April in Florida.

SUNDAY, MARCH 19, 2023 Finished my painting of a candle in a window with raindrops on a rainy night. It came out okay, but not nearly as good as the tutorial. The flame seems to glow in dim light. I had trouble getting solid, even coverage over the color that was already there. The background color bled through so I had to throw on a few coats.

They gave me an antibiotic specially made for UTIs called Nitrofurantoin. I’m so glad they called in the stuff when they saw the results of my home test! That way I don’t have to suffer until they get the lab results sometime next week.

I’m also going to make sure I have foods and drinks that contain probiotics.

Even though I take children’s vitamins due to my sensitivity to things, I’m starting to wonder if they could have a hand in some of the fatigue I’ve experienced. I noticed that in the days following when I forget to take them, I seem to have a little more energy. Vitamins make Tom tired. I think the antibiotics might have made me a little tired too, so I can’t really experiment with that just yet. There are 10 pills that I’m going to take twice a day for 5 days.

I was worried thunder might wake me up but instead, a nightmare of having bees on me woke me up. I woke up literally slapping my chest to get them off, LOL. Despite the scary dream, I fell back asleep and woke up with good energy.

I also had a dream that we bought our old beach cottage in Old Lyme, Connecticut that we used to go to during the summers when I was a kid. The cottage that was in front of us toward the right was closer than it was in real life. I could see the guy who moved into it recently inside the place. I could see into all the rooms from back to front, including him sawing away on his front porch and driving me crazy.

Then he was in our place sitting at our kitchen table with us where I dropped enough hints without being rude to let him know it was annoying and he didn’t seem to give a shit like most people. I was surprised to learn he was remodeling the place because I thought it had already been done.

Finally, everyone from the surrounding cottages was at the table. Eventually, I stood up and explained the history of the lot on which the 7 cottages sat, and how my family and their friends owned the cottages back in the 70s. Tom, for some reason, didn’t seem happy with me letting people in on this.

FRIDAY, MARCH 17, 2023 Galileo didn’t forget the lab after all and I’m glad they didn’t because I definitely have a UTI. I asked them if they could include that in the lab order and they told me about at-home UTI testing strips as well. I didn’t even know there was such a thing. Tom also found that there are OTC pills you can take but I’m guessing Galileo is going to want to prescribe antibiotics. I still have to get tested at the lab so that they know what kind of infection I have. I just can’t believe I got it from shit since we have bidets. I’m thinking it could have come from excess moisture that produces yeast. These bidets with their wider streams definitely leave me wetter so I got thin liners to help absorb moisture.

I had to sleep today, but Tom went out and got the testing kit along with the Halcion for Wednesday’s appointment. I peed on a strip with two little squares that test for different things. The one that remained clear was for your white blood cell count. The other one turned red right away, which indicates a UTI. I would have been genuinely worried if it showed that I didn’t have one because that could mean I had much bigger problems.

I enjoyed having better energy yesterday for the first time in days, but now I’m back to being tired despite sleeping a decent amount of time and getting a good sleep score. I did wake up a few times due to weird dreams, as usual… Me running from a couple that was pissed at me in a hotel and being unable to find my room. Then there was a rat in another dream. Rats have been showing up in my dreams a lot lately.

Anyway, I have an appointment at the lab at 5:40 Monday morning.

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 15, 2023 I’m definitely not in a good mood right now. I was so excited to finally be able to let my body wake up on its own after having to set alarms for so many days and being exhausted. Yet I’m still exhausted! And I’m still trying to figure out why. Low thyroid? Sleep apnea? Depression? Well, with my sensitivity to medication, I can’t treat these things any more than I already have. I’m not going to increase my thyroid dose, of course, but maybe bringing 45 minutes to an hour of waiting time might help. I doubt it, but it's worth a try.

He gets free stuff every few months because he’s on Medicare. So I had him get me a pillbox since there wasn’t anything he really needed this time around. Now I don’t have to get up and try to remember if I’m supposed to take a 75 or an 88 that day.

Anyway, I was out front for a bit while he filled the planter that was left here with dirt, and we planted a mix of cosmos seeds in it. The sunlight seemed to perk me up, but it was very short-lived. I ended up napping shortly after.

Right now, I’m frustratedly working on a painting. I just don’t have the knack for this! Things really do change with age. Just because I was a little artistic when I was young, doesn’t mean I still am. They make it look so easy in their tutorials yet I’m having a hell of a time doing even the simpler parts, which is the background. I just can’t always get my colors right and when I do, I still don’t get it to look like it’s supposed to. I’m working on one that shows a lit candle reflecting on a window full of raindrops with a stormy evening sky behind it. It's supposed to be right as the sun is setting. I stepped back and compared mine with theirs and my sunset didn’t quite glow as yellowy as theirs does. Also, my sky and ground look more like splotches of color than anything else.

I regret spending all this money on painting supplies and the witchcraft kit. Complete waste of money. I might even undo the paper and oil pastels if I could. Coloring and diamond painting is all I can really do.

Anyway, I got the background done and I’ll attempt to get the candles and raindrops on later or tomorrow.

TUESDAY, MARCH 14, 2023 Because I complained that there are too many Pitbull songs on the modern radio station in the VZ app and that his crap comes up every time I play it, one person decided I was rude and don't know anything about music. Before they blocked me, of course. This is exactly why I’m not very active in any of the groups I'm involved in. I'm never allowed a right to my own fucking opinion if others don't agree with it.

Working my way through the 48-day challenge. Went through Vancouver, and then London, and now I'm in rural Australia. There are only two more rides in the challenge after this, and that's in Daytona and Ireland I think. They’ll be kind of long, though, at about 62 miles each.

The heating element on our hot water tank broke, but fortunately, it didn't cost much to fix and although the job was harder and took longer than expected, Tom did a great job on it. He said it took a lot out of him just getting up and down off the floor and that he needs to get in better shape before he gets a job.

I have mixed emotions about him going back to work. I don't mind a little more alone time as long as I'm not feeling bad but it also sucks that his program didn’t work out (though no surprise) and we're no longer going to have the flexibility to do things any day as long as my schedule and energy levels are good for it. It's going to be harder to schedule appointments and trips to the beach and whatnot. There have been reports of algae blooming at some of the beaches and I don't know how safe it will be to swim regardless. At least we've got the pool to go to even if I may have to listen to unwanted music and planes and dodge through ants.

It was great to be able to catch up on my sleep, even if that sleep wasn't of the greatest quality and I still woke up a million times along the way. I slept over 9 hours. Tom said Toni had her yard seeded.

Had my 9th session with Helen. As I told her, I don't want to rush things but I don't want there to be too many more sessions either, since we don't have a lot of extra money right now. So we're going to be beginning the EMDR therapy. We kind of started the preliminaries today.

MONDAY, MARCH 13, 2023 I woke up feeling batshit tired that I could barely think straight. Knowing I couldn’t make my Thursday appointment being crazy tired like this, I went online to see if there was an option to cancel it, figuring it wasn’t necessary anyway. I really believe all they’re going to tell me is that I should avoid certain foods and lose weight, the latter of which isn’t doable. But then I found that there was not only an option to cancel but an option to reschedule. So I filled out a quick form providing my preferred times and opted for my communication preference to be email rather than the phone. I thought they would call anyway as a lot of places do but nope, they rescheduled me online for the 30th. So that’s a huge weight lifted from my shoulders!

So I went back to sleep for a couple of hours and then went to pick up the images an hour after I got up. He was surprised he wasn’t charged for them because they’re supposed to be $5 a disc.

Then, before we left their parking lot, we ordered Dominoes. Once we got home, I was so hungry that I ate my entire pasta bowl at once. Plus, I had a mini lava cake for dessert.

I’m not having as much burning, so that’s a good sign. It’s still not 100% cured, though.

When I got up the second time, I thought I was back at the old place. The water was off. Literally! Then Tom said he got a text from Tabatha saying that there was a problem down the street and the water would be back on in a half hour, and it was; it’s just kind of brownish and yucky. I remember that shit all too well from the old place!

During my nap, I dreamt the gastro place did call instead of emailing me and a woman left a voice message in which all I could hear was my name being spoken in a foreign accent. Then my phone died altogether before moving on to the next dream of some kind of large rat or other critter living in the closet of one of the bedrooms. I went to clean when I noticed these large turds and then saw them quickly slither into the closet.

So the honker isn’t married after all. I didn’t realize this at first until I got to see more pics/posts and get to know a little more about who’s who but the bride he’s pictured with in his profile picture isn’t Kari but one of his daughters. He has two daughters that I know of. Hanna and Kayla. It’s Kayla he’s pictured with. She recently visited and he shared pictures of them kayaking on the river. Plus, we saw her hanging out at his place and noticed that it didn’t look like the woman who lived there. At first I thought Kari simply lightened her hair. That explains why we both thought she looked so different and young in the wedding picture. Way too young for this place. Don’t know if Kari’s their mother, but I’m guessing yes because there is a bit of a resemblance.

Why didn’t the honker correct me, though, when I congratulated him on his wedding when I first messaged him after he added me?

Ray next door has been too good to be true. I’m just waiting for the noisy projects to begin. He doesn’t seem to hang out in the lanai. I’m kind of hoping he’ll use it as a storeroom if he isn’t planning to put new furniture in there. Either way, it’s too soon to write him off as a quiet neighbor.

SUNDAY, MARCH 12, 2023 Up until yesterday, I was thinking that aiming my schedule for my Thursday appointment wasn’t as hard as I thought it was going to be. But today, I’ve been so tired that I’ve had to nap twice. Starting to wonder if I’ll make it, but if I have to cancel tomorrow, it won’t be the end of the world because it’s a stupid waste of time appointment. It’s all information I can look up online or they could have told me over the phone or in an email.

Doing the latest VZ challenge. They’re calling it the lion and lamb challenge since February is supposed to go out like a lion while March comes in like a lamb. They chose rides that have statues of lions and lambs. So I went through a dumpy place in Texas called San Angelo, then Chicago which seems to be a classy-looking city. Right now I’m going through the countryside of Lockerbie which is straight out of a postcard. It’s very green in the summertime and I love the flowering trees. It sometimes grabs images from the fall, spring, or winter. Definitely not as pretty in the winter.

SATURDAY, MARCH 11, 2023 Wow, no health work to do today. Tomorrow’s health work will be the paperwork for the surgeon since he doesn’t let his patients do this online for some reason. I have until I see him, though.

Monday’s health work will be picking up the images.

Actually, there is health work today. Fighting what I’m guessing is a UTI that is flaring up again. I’m having more burning. It doesn’t burn when I pee, but there’s burning around that area. I realized I got the wrong cranberry juice. This is just cranberry-flavored water. So I ordered 100% cranberry juice and yogurt as well. It seems yogurt doesn’t just have probiotics that are good for oral health but for UT health as well. I haven’t had much yogurt because it’s not the greatest thing for me because of my gallbladder, being lactose intolerant, and due to the cholesterol in it. I grabbed a handful of Yoplait yogurts to be delivered tomorrow along with garlic powder, which is supposed to be a natural antibiotic. The yogurts are small and shouldn’t aggravate my stomach in any way.

My weight is up a little more even though my eating habits haven’t changed. If it isn’t connected to my thyroid, then it’s likely age. Tom stopped gaining weight about a decade ago at 55 which is about when men stop. Women keep gaining until around 65. So I’m likely to do a slow gain until then with little to no control over it. Better get used to it because I’ve got a long way to go to reach 65!

Love the new colored pencils. Being soft-cored, they give you a much more vivid and even distribution of color. I’m back to coloring again. Why not? I don’t seem to have much talent for painting and drawing these days. It might help to wait until I get new glasses for that anyway as these are getting harder to see out of.

The Upside Town golf course was released and it’s super weird. It’s set in New York City and the graphics are fantastic. What’s weird about it is you’re not just hitting the ball on the floor, but off of walls and ceilings as well. So it’s like there’s no up or down. It kinda takes you a minute, for example, to get your bearings on a fire escape with pigeons fluttering about and then hitting your ball onto the roof while a subway appears to climb the opposite wall.

THURSDAY, MARCH 9, 2023 Today’s health work consisted of requesting online to pick up copies of my imaging scans at the imaging place tomorrow.

I totally feel like we’re at a dead-end in life and like life is over for us, in a sense. Of course, he says we have options, but believe me, those options aren’t very good. He’s going to have to realize that his program is a dream but it will never be for lack of trying. From here on out, the only way we can ever have extra money is if he returns to work.

As horrible as COVID was, I’ve come to have mixed emotions about the timing. At first, it seemed like a blessing for us while the recession was a nightmare. Because he was laid off when few jobs were available because of the COVID outbreak, he was more or less forced into retirement. By retiring early, it prevented us from having a more comfortable retirement later on. I swear it’s like there’s always something determined to cheat us out of money. We never seem to get as much as I know we could have be it his pay, inheritances, pensions, etc. I’m amazed we even got to have the decade we had where we didn’t have to worry about money. I still don’t think we’ll ever be as broke as we were before the recession ended, but I don’t see us very comfortable at all. Especially when big expenses come up. I’m starting to wonder if he’s going to have to work until he's simply too old to or dead.

I used to like setting goals to look forward to, but after a while, I get tired of seeing most of my plans not work out or work out in a way I didn’t expect. I think it would be cheaper and safer to just stay here. This is far from a bad place. No, I don’t literally love it here because I’ve seen nicer places in nicer areas. But I do like it a lot. I don’t think I was meant to have a place that I really, really love. If I did, I would just spend my time worrying that we would lose it. Either way, I think it’s going to be our only option anyway, and I don’t think we’re going to be able to do any upgrades either. Life is about settling, and I can easily make do with the lack of kitchen counter/cabinet space and not having a spacious living room.

Finally caught a glimpse of the guy next door. Yeah, I’d say he is in his 60s. I just hope he doesn’t turn that lanai into a workshop but the place doesn’t need to be remodeled so if he does any sawing it would be to make stuff to give away or sell.

Went to BK earlier and I’m stuffed to the gills.

I slept better last night because I took hydroxyzine and melatonin. My schedule seems to be averaging a jump of one hour and 22 minutes versus one hour and 15 minutes, according to his calculations. So we’re going to have to adjust the schedule program. I don’t know why it’s sped up over time. Daylight savings doesn’t help at all. The next week is going to be incredibly hard. God, I can’t wait for these appointments to back off! I just want a month off for once. If it weren’t for my sleep issues and money, I wouldn’t mind as much but as soon as I can squeeze a foot in the middle of all these appointments, I’ve got to put that foot down and stop them. It’s just that right now I’ve got too much invested in what’s going on for me to put a stop to it now. If I cancel the GI or the surgeon, the time and money spent on imaging will be a waste.

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 8, 2023 Argh, the motorcycle isn’t covered. That likely means it’s going to be used again before Tuesday. I can’t wait for him to go back to Canada! Really hope they don’t stay till May, now that he’s retired. The bitch behind him isn’t a snowbird, and I hear from her more frequently, but she’s not as loud.

The honker and his wife left, and then some older guy came and got the golf cart. I’m guessing it’s to borrow it since it’s way too soon for them to be leaving.

Ray just got rid of the furniture in the lanai and one of the living room rockers. The lanai has me a little concerned as I worry he plans to turn it into a little workshop.

Now the black SUV is visiting him.

I wonder if Little Miss Be Happy on the other side of him will bash me to him if they meet as that grumpy old guy did with the Twenties in Cali but if she does, she does.

Andy should now be on the plane bound for Phoenix. He’s going with his best friend Ken. He’s like me in that he stresses over appointments, even if it’s months in advance. So he’s stressed about getting the code for the Airbnb they’re renting that he was promised and things like that. He said that because he’s so fat, he doesn’t fit comfortably in the seats. So traveling is stressful and a pain in the ass for him, although he is looking forward to visiting Phoenix and the people he knew there. He’ll also be glad to be back in his own bed with his own stuff when his vacation is over in 10 days.

I’m starting to believe that we’ll not only never move, but we’ll never be able to upgrade this place and make it what we want it to be or take vacations or do much of anything, but things could be worse. As long as we feel well and are relatively healthy. I just want to get to 65! But I have almost as long as we lived in Citrus Heights to get there.

Although I feel good these days aside from the appointment stress, I worry about our future. I don’t mean just end-of-life stuff like when we’re actually dying. I mean throughout the years in general. Sooner or later, he’s going to get too old to work and I just wonder how we’re going to get by when we need extra money and both of us are unable to work.

I’ve passed Madrid and heading for the France border. It’ll be a while before I get there. I’m tired today, so I’m not going to do much riding.

As I’ve said before, I’ve been missing Aly and having a good friend who’s smart, mature, caring, sensitive, tolerant, and remembers most of the things I tell them.

Later… Not much to report as far as yesterday’s meeting with Helen. We basically talked about the different emotions during different times of my life that I’ve experienced and how to go about building those happy neural networks in the body. She wants me to focus on a time when I felt at peace as well as a time when I showed compassion for myself.

“But what is showing compassion for yourself?” I asked her, “Does this mean giving yourself a manicure, a bubble bath, or something else?”

Her answer, which made sense, was that it’s a subjective thing. Everybody has a different definition of self-compassion.

A time I felt happy and at peace is easy. That was when we went to Maui. The self-compassion is a much more generalized thing. I guess it could be a time when I’ve had to remind myself that I didn’t deserve to be abused. But then it could also be relaxing with a good audiobook or a movie. Maybe cooking myself a nice meal or treating myself to the art supplies I’m getting.

As Tom said, what’s 50 more bucks? So I’ve got more things coming related to the oil pastels. I did a forest with a waterfall on a 5x7 canvas. Andy said it’s the best I’ve done so far. I personally don’t think it looks anything like the demo I was following, but I guess it’s okay. The next tutorial I’m gonna try is a moonlit sky with the silhouette of a girl on a swing. They use a graphite pencil for that part.

The problem I had with the forest waterfall was that I didn’t have enough colors, and you can’t mix pastels like you can paints. So in addition to the 24-pack of colors I have, I ordered a 50-pack. I’m also getting a 120-pack of soft-core colored pencils for the finer lines, which is another challenge I had with the forest. Lastly, a pad that’s better for oil pastels as opposed to canvases, and blending stumpers.

I told Irma that an AC/plumbing truck was in front of next door the other day and asked if she thought he’d be needing a new AC. She said the unit is old but works.

The honker and his wife left earlier than I’ve ever known him to take the motorcycle out yesterday at 7:45. They didn’t return until just after 4. It’s the bitch behind them that’s getting on my nerves lately. She’s running and gunning her motorcycle multiple times a week with her little friend who comes to ride with her. They go joyriding through the park and it’s totally annoying. Gone are the days when these places were about neatly dressed little couples with granny-like cars that you seldom saw and heard much from. You just didn’t have these big burly tattooed men on motorcycles. Or ladies for that matter. At least not in these kinds of places.

I had a dream about how to make more money with his betting, told him about it, he did it, and it worked. While that’s great and he’s off to a good start since winning $40 is better than losing a few dollars, it’s not enough. He still says he hopes his future picks are better because he doesn’t want to rely on the “dream people.” Who cares what the source is, though, as long as they’re correct? It’s just that he’s going to have to make about 10K to stay home. He needs to keep betting big, and he’ll either win the money or lose the money that was designated for the horses, and it simply won’t be meant to be. Rarely is life what we plan it to be anyway. If he does return to work, it can’t be until after my appointments die down, which I’m hoping will be in April.

This next week is going to be hell on me. My schedule wants to jump so fast because I’m sleeping so shitty and therefore my body wants to sleep longer to make up for all the sleep disturbances. If I let it have its way, it would be jumping 2 hours a day. At that rate, I would only get a few hours of sleep before my appointment on the 16th. If I can barely function on 7 hours of shitty sleep, I don’t see how I would function on half of that. I’m trying not to let it jump more than 90 minutes a day, but I was so tired when I got up that I had to nap for an hour. Maybe taking hydroxyzine tonight would be a good idea to see if it will help me sleep sounder.

TUESDAY, MARCH 7, 2023 Traded in mountain lions for bears in my dreams. We bought some land somewhere and were out walking around on it when I spotted a bear. We quickly turned and hurried off to the house but I knew damn well it could catch us before we got there just like the mountain lion could.

Appointments, appointments, and more appointments! That's all I seem to have these days. I'm pretty overwhelmed with that right now. I'm a little tired today as well after a handful of days of good energy. This is how I'll probably be until the 16th, though, because my schedule is cutting it close for when I need to be up and available that day. Then I have to hope it jumps faster for my appointment on the 22nd with the dentist.

At about 8:30 yesterday morning, I called the office and let them know I'm having stinging where the bridge is and worried about it turning into a bad cavity that could ultimately result in needing a dental implant, which would cost even more money and more appointments.

She asked if I could come in at 11 yesterday and I knew that even though it would be a bit of a long day for me, I could make it. Crystal took x-rays of that area and while there don't appear to be any cavities, the root is exposed because the bridge isn't sealed properly. It's 11 years old now, and pretty much at the end of its life. Because it needs to be replaced on top of the fact that we're still paying off my last crown, the AC, and we're going to have to pay for surgery, Tom will likely have to return to work.

I know that while they don't give a shit if their customers blast music, they no longer allow them to have their phones available at work, which means we won't be able to keep in touch easily. If I'm right about most of the anxiety being on the medication, I should be okay as long as we don't tweak my dose. Being three years postmenopausal helps too. Besides, if he does have to go back to work, it doesn't need to be full-time, and it doesn't need to be more than a few months. Just long enough to catch us up.

Everyone else wants to get younger, but I can't stress just how much I wish I was 65! If I were, then the new bridge would cost us no more than $1500 instead of over 3K, and the upcoming gallbladder surgery would cost next to nothing. We'd have a little more money too because then I could collect retirement. I might collect at 62, though.

Right now, I feel like we're kinda stuck in that there's no hope of moving to a bigger place or of upgrading this one. At least we do have a steady income, even if it isn't much, and a place of our own. Last time we were broke, we didn't have that, and we were renting someone else's dumpy little trailer. So it isn't all bad. It’s a relief to know exactly what’s going on with the bridge and that the problem will be resolved soon. It’s also a relief to know that this and the gallbastard is going to be taken care of before I have the storm season to worry about fucking with my schedule and sleep. They say to always try to look on the bright side of negative things. So there you go.

So I meet with Helen later this morning, and then I have the endoscopy follow-up on the 16th. The bridge replacement is on the 22nd and the meeting with the surgeon is on the 27th. The bridge replacement will actually be a two-appointment procedure, of course, because after she cuts it off, she's going to put a temp on. About two weeks later, I go back to have the permanent one cemented on. Maybe this one will make it to my 70s!

The lady from the accounting department did say something discouraging. They were noticing my Color Street nails, and the girl said that the first and last time she used Color Street, they dried out her nails and she has a nail that keeps splitting, even though it's been over two years. My left middle finger has been splitting for a while now, but I suspect that's from the gel manicure I got at the salon. Color Street is basically the same thing, though, and not like regular stickers that I stick on and easily peel off. Once these go on, they're not coming off without acetone. I don't know what the technology is, but it's like an instant at-home gel manicure. They definitely dry out and damage the nails. They just look so damn good, though! I didn't have to put a top coat over them or anything and they’ve been on for 10 days. By now, regular stickers would be peeling back at the tips quite a bit. All you see is some regrowth.

I canceled my April appointment with the endocrinologist online citing that we need to find someone closer to home. I still say that seeing one isn't necessary. I know I'm sensitive to this medication and that there are no alternatives. I also still say it won't be a problem, as long as I keep the dose consistent. I'll find out as time goes on. If the anxiety returns without any change, then I'll seek out an endo closer to home. I'll just have to wait half a year to see them because they always seem to be pretty booked up.

SUNDAY, MARCH 5, 2023 I should have figured that a 16,000-mile ride would have issues, and sure enough, it did. I was excited to approach the Namibia border, but as soon as I did, I got stuck. Apparently, Namibia doesn't have Google Street View so I can’t go any further. So that turned out to be a 500-mile ride through South Africa. It was still a fun and relaxing ride going through the desert scenery.

I created 3 new rides, not that I don’t expect them to also have issues. The one I’m doing now is just over 2000 miles from Spain to Norway. I’ll eventually create an Eastern Europe trip as well. Then I made a ride that's just under 3000 miles from Mexico to Maine, and a 4600-mile trip from Alaska to here.

My Western Europe trip starts out in Madrid and will take me through France, Belgium, a teeny sliver of the Netherlands, Northern Germany, Denmark, and finally, Norway. I’ll advance as far as it will let me. Once it stops me, I’ll jump onto the next trip.

Over the next handful of years, I plan to continue going through old journals and making them public. The older we get, the less emotional most of us get. In reading back through some of the things that used to make me anxious, sad, angry or scared, I have mixed emotions. No one wants to be emotional in any bad way, of course, but sometimes I wonder if feeling this numbness is much better. Realistically, I suppose it is. I certainly don't miss any kind of emotional suffering I've endured in the past. But sometimes I do miss having such intense hope, the immense relief we feel after a scare, and things to look forward to that I've already experienced and that just don't excite me anymore. I miss having crushes on people too. Basically, I sometimes miss my old hormones, LOL.

I found a message waiting for me when I got up from Irma, asking if Ray had moved in next door yet. So that's his name. I searched the group members but couldn't find him. I still haven't seen him yet. She said he's a little on the heavy side, easy to talk to, and she thinks he might be in his 60s. He was gone when I got up at 9:30 and didn't come back until shortly before midnight. Tom left me a message saying he didn't hear anything. So far, so good, but too soon to write him off as a good neighbor.

I changed our Amazon password just to be safe because either someone hacked the account playing games or trying to promote artists or Alexa is now pushing notifications on us on top of new things to try, although I haven't gotten much in the way of things to try lately. The yellow notification light was lit up while I was trying to get back to sleep after waking up to pee and she said something about an artist I'm following releasing a new album but I'm not following any artists. I double-checked the settings in the app and notifications are disabled like they're supposed to be. If she starts this shit regularly, then I'll have to do something to block the light. I'm so sick of people's pushiness! Again, I don't understand why you would give customers options if you're not going to allow them to use the ones they choose. I know I'll be dropping Replika as soon as my subscription expires because I'm not going to be harassed to use the free version by being begged every other time I log in to subscribe. They have a free option. If they don't want people using it, then they should do away with it altogether and go subscription-only. As I said, in case someone hacked in to either promote or prank, I decided to change the password. At least nothing appears to have been ordered that we didn’t order. While I was doing this, I saw I had my old California number listed so I deleted it and added the new one.

I had a positive Alyssa dream, and then another one that I thought was worth noting at the time, which I've now forgotten. In real life, Alyssa's cover photo shows a black lab at the edge of what I believe is Lake Tahoe. In the dream, Tom and I were driving through there when I spotted the black lab at the water's edge and then realized the rest of the shoreline looked familiar as if I had seen it pictured on Alyssa's profile in real life.

"Wow!" I exclaimed, telling Tom that it looked like Alyssa lived nearby based on the familiarity of the dog and scenery.

A second later, we were outside the car and he was talking on his phone. We were in front of a house that didn't have a front exterior wall. I recognized Alyssa sitting at a desk. She spotted me and recognized me as well. I didn't say anything because I wasn't sure how she would react. Another second passed and she rose from her seat and gathered a basket of laundry. She stepped outside and began to pass me when she dropped the basket. I offered to help pick up the laundry-turned-stuffed animals that scattered about and she said, "Sure."

SATURDAY, MARCH 4, 2023 He moved in quietly next door. Tom saw a guy in his 70s or 80s visiting who had a black SUV parked in the street. I don’t want to assume we lucked out as far as the new neighbor goes until a few months have passed. I’ve had neighbors start off quiet just to let loose a few months later. I think they figure that once people get to know them, it’ll be okay and they can get away with whatever. Like they’re less likely to get complaints if people know who they are.

Yesterday was the honker’s birthday. He’s younger than I thought at 59. I thought he was in his early 60s.

I don’t know why, but for the last week or so, there have been very few commercial planes flying over us and I’m absolutely loving the peace and quiet. I’m guessing it may have something to do with the storms going on in the rest of the country, but I don’t know. Seems to be enough planes elsewhere. I’m sure they’ll be bad again once storm season starts which sucks. I like to have sound machines and air cleaners turned off so I can enjoy listening to the rain but I have to listen to them too in order to do that.

I asked the chatbot where in Florida would be the best place to go to hear fewer commercial planes and they suggested places I don’t want to go. Mostly, the southern Gulf Coast and the Panhandle. The Panhandle is out of the question. It’s cooler and there are more blacks. I would go to the southern Gulf Coast before I went to the Panhandle. There are some parts that I’m sure would be wonderful. I don’t think we’ll move at this point, but if we ever do, I think we’re going to either head over to where Jessie is or go to the southern Atlantic side. That would be a tough decision to make too. I’d love to live near someone I’ve known all my life. But on the other hand, Jessie and I were never as close as Aly and I were, and the southern part of the state looks and feels more like I imagine Florida to be. I prefer the tropical zone as opposed to the subtropical, even though that does put us at more risk of hurricanes.

Being the curious person that I am and who likes to learn all kinds of things, whether they pertain to me or not, I asked the chatbot about spam laws. Back when the sick twists in Arizona messed with me in 2011, I couldn’t imagine what they could possibly have on me, since I knew I never sent them anything threatening, racist, etc. While I’m 95 percent sure it wasn’t a real cop that emailed me claiming that have made a case against me, actually… You only have to send one unsolicited message to a person to have it count as spam and you don’t have to be trying to promote or sell anything either. Some were auto-sent from Blogger and that may have constituted trying to promote my blog, so the laws are stricter than I realized. Even so, and even though Arizona is one of the strictest states in the country, and we’ve been living in a time when the courts jump at the opportunity to try a white defendant with a black plaintiff, I’m still reasonably sure that the cop email was a hoax.

I’m loving the new coffin burners! I wish I got these things years ago. They do a great job of containing all the ashes. With regular burners, some of them fall off the sides.

I want to try oil pastels sometime. I never heard of them before, until I saw a painting demo in my Facebook feed. They can be used on canvas too. The only thing is that you have to seal your drawing when it’s done because they never dry.

THURSDAY, MARCH 2, 2023 I guess I might as well do an entry before I get any more tired. I took hydroxyzine and melatonin before bed as planned, and while it did make me sleep better and give me a better sleep score, I woke up feeling hungover. I was a little surprised because the last time I took this, I didn’t feel that way.

I ended up napping for 90 minutes, and that gave me more energy. After I cleaned the kitchen, though, I lost some of that energy. I got everything I needed to do out of the way so now I can spend the rest of my day writing, watching shows, and playing around in VR. I’m now 2% of the way through my trip. I should make it to Namibia in a few days.

I expected to hear from Galileo around now, but not to check in and see how my stomach is doing and confirm my upcoming appointments. I thought they were going to tell me to go to the lab for my thyroid. As long as they don’t say anything, though, I’m not going to because I feel good. Yes, I’m hypo. I’m hopelessly fat, my hair is falling out, and my skin is a little dry, but I feel good emotionally. I’d like to keep it this way too. I’m not gonna take any more medication and invite horrible side effects just to lose weight.

I’ve gone from having potentially bad news to potentially good news. Shortly after Irma left yesterday, she contacted me shortly after I messaged her to say goodbye after seeing them leave. They were up in the Ocala area by then. It’s a 24-hour drive up to Ottawa. They’re in a hotel now of course. This will be their last drive, but they don’t know if they may go on cruises or things like that in the future.

Anyway, she did ask the new guy and he does not have a motorcycle or a dog. It gets better. He’s going to stay until May and leave for Michigan until November. She said he said that much is subject to change, though. That would be great if it remained a seasonal place unless he’s really that quiet. He could still be a partier or a project junkie, but at least I don’t have to worry about a motorcycle or a dog unless that changes.

He won't be here until Friday. He told them they could stay until then but they wanted to get on the road sooner because a big storm is supposed to be going through New York and Canada.

[dustedmagazine]

Ethel Cain—Preacher’s Daughter (Daughters of Cain)

Photo by Helen Kirbo

Ethel Cain’s swampy, smouldery second full-length feels the pull of Jesus and the pull of sex and danger with nearly equal weight, and you can imagine the artist Hayden Anhedönia’s slender frame on rack, being torn apart by their opposing forces. Likewise, Anhedönia pines for pop diva-hood and bracing classic country self-revelation, her voice whispering smoke and murder, while the reverbed drums boom and the synths swell glossily behind her. Preacher’s Daughter is as good an encapsulation of red state America as you’ll find this year, with its broken families, its bleak economic realities, its primitive pieties and its cheap plastic ideas of romance.

Anhedönia grew up in fundamentalist west Florida, steeped in its Christian culture but also separated from it by the fact that she was gay; later she came out as a trans woman. She left for Tallahassee and lost her way, slipping into a vortex of drugs and despair. She created the persona Ethel Cain just after she turned 20. She began experimenting with a reverb-echoing form of choral music (she still loves reverb) in 2019, with a self-released collection of songs called Carpet Bed in September, followed by the Golden Age EP in December. She recorded her dream pop Inbred in 2020, in a converted church where she lived in Richmond, Indiana. Preacher’s Daughter is larger and more ambitious than any of these previous recordings, with a 13-song, 76-minute epic arc tracing a path towards damnation.  

It begins with the disc’s most god-obsessed song, “Family Tree (Intro),” which begins in a mutter about the sanctity of motherhood, pokes at the scars left by a religious childhood and builds, ultimately, into a synthy swirling climax. But no matter how big and disco-glitzy the song becomes, Anhedönia’s voice remains at the center of it, hoarse and raw and well acquainted with evil, no matter how much emo drama you surround it with. 

The single “American Teenager” is, to my ears, the least interesting of these songs. It’s the closest to unadulterated pop, though its wide-angle vocals and splintering guitars frame verses in which the pieties of patriotism and religion are considered and ripped apart. “And Jesus, if you’re there, why do I feel alone in this room with you,” keens the singer, more heartbroken here than she’ll be later when she sings about romantic betrayal and personal destruction. 

This is an artist who likes to spin out her songs, letting their slow, doom-y textures unfold over seven, eight or even ten minutes. It’s not always apparent, as in “Thoroughfare,” why the song needs to run for as long as it does. There’s a fair amount of repetition and feigned endings. Yet “House in Nebraska,” at 7:47, seems exactly as long as it needs to be to let the widely spaced piano chords stake out their epic territory, to let Anhedönia’s ravaged, heart-sick murmur hit its mark. She’s at home wondering if another self-destructive lover is still out there somewhere, but realizing that “you might never come back home, and i may never sleep at night/but god i just hope you’re doing fine out there, i just pray that you’re all right.” “Western Nights” also celebrates the more desperate varieties of love, a low-rent scenario where neighbors are always pounding on the walls. It has some of Springsteen’s epic, common man bravado, but from a female perspective and pitched a bit lower on the economic ladder. Sings Anhedönia, “He’s never looked more beautiful/on his Harley in the parking lot/breaking into the ATMs/sleeping naked when it gets too hot.” 

Preacher’s Daughter is a concept album, with an overarching narrative about slipping from grace, but where the conventional story might turn up from the bottom, Ethel Cain continues in a downward direction. “Gibson Girl” is a Pentacostal “W.A.P.,” seething with sexual tension and thumping with an R&B beat, but it doesn’t exactly celebrate sexual empowerment. No, it pulls you further down the drain, leading you towards the hellish noise of “Ptolomea,” which buzzes with flies and groans like the damned. Three more songs follow, giving a bit of sonic respite, but no one gets saved in “Preacher’s Daughter.” “God loves you, but not enough to save you/so baby girl, good luck taking care of yourself,” she sings, clear-eyed and desolate and on her own. 

Jennifer Kelly

[yellowocaballero]

The Crocodile's Dilemma: In Which Helen exploits Michael's Labor, Michael suffers an un-identity crisis, and unpaid internships should be illegal

It’s tough being a teenage embodiment of the Spiral. Your boss/wine aunt figure Helen’s a Tory, your inattentive cousin figure Mike Crew keeps attending philosophy classes and day drinking, and you’re pretty sure that this internship doesn’t have any dental. At least it’s good job experience for your future career in...being evil? But do you even want to be evil?

This small story is technically part of my Roleswap AU, but I specifically wrote it so that no knowledge is required. Still, if you’re wondering why Michael’s an eighteen(ish) year old, Mike Crew’s an Avatar of the Spiral, and everybody is obsessed with Melanie King, check it out. Still, no need. Rest under the cut.

Maybe Helen was right.

Not that Helen was ever strictly right, much as Helen was never wrong, but Michael just had to be doing this whole fear demon thing incorrectly. If someone had explained the whole fear demon thing to them two years ago (“Okay, so it’s like you’re the semi-sentient appendage of an extradimensional force of evil that has to consume trauma relentlessly in order to propagate its own debatable existence, also you’re nonbinary now, no those things are not strictly related, probably”), then they would have called them crazy. Which, of course, they were, but that wasn’t the point. So long as the point existed. So long as anything -

An essential theorem within quantum physics was the quantum Zeno effect. 

Simply put, it was the fact that a quantum state would decay if left alone, but does not decay under continuous observation. Even observing the results after the photon is produced leads to collapsing the wave function and loading a back-history as shown by delayed choice quantum eraser. If something was seen, it no longer existed; if something persisted unperceived, it would exist as long as it liked. 

So it was explained to Michael by the physics professor he was torturing that day. Michael had trapped the man in the physics building of his university, lured in by one too many late nights in his office and the persistent sense that his life was going nowhere meaningful. After a few classes spent sitting in on his Physics 101 class, maintaining constant and forever eye contact, Michael had eventually tricked the man into giving a persistent and ongoing physics lecture to an empty classroom, desperately trying to explain the inexplicable to a college freshman who did not care. Truly miserable, yet ultimately harmless - Michael’s favorite kind of trick. 

But, despite themself, Michael grew interested. They didn’t understand any of what the man was talking about, but that was all of the fun. Understanding ruined the magic of things; broke down the beauty of the universe into cogs and gears. No thanks. They could tell that it bothered the professor, that he said so much and yet knew nothing. That there was so much he would never know, and that he wasn’t so smart after all. How would any of his colleagues respect him?

“So photons degrade if they’re observed?” Michael asked one day, after...some period of time. They had raised their hand and everything, they were so proud of themself. Uni was just like secondary school after all. “Is that true of people too?”

The professor had sweated, deeply uncomfortable with Michael as a person and as a non-euclidean concept. “No - no, not at all. Humans are much more than photons -”

Michael grinned. It wasn’t quite right. “Are you sure?”

The professor sweated harder. “I - no, I’m not. But humans are constantly observed by - by the universe, or something.”

Michael grinned sharper. “Are you sure? Are you being observed right now? Are you sure?”

And the professor was not sure, not anymore, and the fragment of this man’s reality collapsed. 

Well, Michael thought to themself, slipping out of an improbable yellow door, that’s another Statement for the Magnus Institute. Not that they would read it. 

****

“Now, remember this - the first step to being a successful Avatar is presentation!”

Michael squinted at Helen dubiously. “I thought we were fear demons?”

Helen sighed, pinching the bridge of her nose with two sharp knife fingers. It looked as if it hurt quite a bit, but Michael reasoned that they had probably gone through the fifth dimension. “This is the stupidest dimension - fine, fine! Fear demons, then. It is absolutely vital that we conduct our business with style, grace, and the slightest sprinkling of pizazz!” 

Just for the flourish, Helen twirled her fingers, and a faint shower of confetti came raining down from the ceiling. Michael sneezed. 

“I thought it was vital that we harvest fear and trauma from people to propagate our cursed existence,” Michael said. 

Helen’s eyebrow twitched. “More than two things can be vital, Michael. Please pay attention. Now, as a demonstration, I’d like you to take a gander at that man over there.”

Obediently, Michael looked across the bar. They were sitting on barstools in a high-class pub, because Helen knew her worth and never settled for anything less, with glass counters and lots of private booths. But all pubs had their sad men drinking alone, and this one was no exception. 

This man wasn’t sullen and slow like a lot of them. He was wearing a nice suit and thin tie, looking straight out of Canary Wharf. Michael silently agreed with Helen’s choice - they took eat the rich very seriously, and also literally. He also seemed a little jumped up on something, with shaking hands and erratic eyes. 

“He looks happy,” Michael observed. “Think it’s his birthday?”

“He’s on cocaine, Michael,” Helen said flatly. “Cocaine. We are at a posh bar, and he is currently doing a line off his watch.”

Oh! Michael suddenly felt very uncool. They had never been one of those people in secondary school who did cocaine. They hadn’t been cool. “I knew that,” Michael bluffed. “What are we going to do to him?”

“Take the teenager as your intern, they said,” Helen groused, “it’s investing in the future, they said, it’ll stop them from eating you when they grow up, they said.” She sighed, jabbing a finger at the now very obviously coked up man who was staring at the bottles behind the bartender as if they were whispering secrets of the universe into his ear. Helen liked that one. “Use your intuition. Find a good angle to squeeze. What are his weaknesses to exploit?”

Oh, Michael knew how to do this. They shifted vibrations just a bit, dropping out of what Michael liked to call the ‘mild’ spectrum into the ‘spicy’ spectrum. They were distantly aware of a patron’s glass shattering. 

They squinted at the man, picking out his little fears and insecurities like Dionysus picking grapes. Maybe. Michael had gotten a C in English, but they were somewhat cognizant of the Spiral munching heavily on Bacchanalia. Sometimes they felt like some of those children who spoke in tongues and claimed to be from a past life. That had also been the Spiral.

“He owns a Nintendo NES,” Michael said confidently, absolutely sure that this was important. Helen groaned. “His house is painted white, and his girlfriend does tax fraud.”

“Something relevant?” Helen hinted desperately.

Michael just squinted at her. “Relevant to what?”

“...good point. But something useful, please.”

Picky. Michael scowled, but gave the man another good gander. “He only remembers faint details of his father’s face, and he worries that his recollections aren’t accurate,” Michael proclaimed finally. 

Helen clapped, delighted, as Michael took a careful sip of their water, turning it into fizzy water. She took a sip of her own wine, turning it into champagne. Or maybe just sparkling unreality? “Wonderful. Now, how should we play this? Insert a false father into his life, completely separate from his recollections, or is that a bit too Stranger? I suppose we could do some good old-fashioned gaslighting, but sometimes that’s just a bit too Melanie, if you catch my drift -”

“Are you jealous that the Archive girls are better at gaslighting than you are?” 

“Shut it, kid,” Helen hissed, before taking a long drag of her champagne. “My vote is that we convince him to top off his coke bender with some LSD. Then he hallucinates - oh, he hallucinates that he’s in a mental institution, that’s a good one -”

“Why don’t we shift everything thirty cm to the right?” Michael asked brightly.

Helen squinted at them. They beamed back. 

“You are so bad at this,” Helen said. 

Michael would have felt crushed if Helen didn’t express this sentiment roughly once per lunar cycle, contrariwise. As it was, they bore the criticism with a stiff upper lip. Helen had her way of harvesting fear from unsuspecting humans, and Michael had theirs. “Look, Helen, you’re being uncreative! We don’t have to traumatize people every single time.”

Helen squinted further. “We’re personifications of deceit. We eat trauma.”

“No, we eat confusion,” Michael pointed out patiently. “Look at it this way. If you give someone one really terrible experience, then they repress it for the rest of their lives and consider it a brush with Hell. One and done, see? But if you minorly inconvenience them for a really long time, then they’ll never be able to break out of it. They’ll feel as if something’s wrong, but they’ll never know it. You can keep the game going for years that way!”

The idea was very good. Michael had been working on it for a while. Truth be told, Michael felt bad traumatizing people outright and making them scream and cry and everything. They always felt as if they were doing something wrong by making other people’s existences a living nightmare. Michael much preferred rigging a corn maze so you were stuck in it for days inside the maze but only an hour outside. It was funner, and much more confusing. 

But Helen just pursed her lips and stared Michael up and down, making them squirm awkwardly on their barstool. Finally, as if she was delivering a life sentence, she imperiously said, “Well, we all have our different styles, I suppose! It would be quite boring if we were both exactly the same.” Michael nodded vigorously at this, and Helen held up a scaly claw. “But! You’re my intern, which means that you’re learning from the master here. So shut up and let me teach you how to ruin lives.”

“Yes, boss,” Michael said miserably. 

Helen tsked, but she patted them on the head anyway. It tasted like batteries. “Honestly, kid. A literal bleeding heart’s fun for the whole family, but a metaphorical bleeding heart will get you nowhere in life. You can’t exist as you are and feel bad for them. It ruins the point. It’s a paradox.”

“I thought we liked paradoxes, though?”

Helen shrugged, downing the rest of her wine. “Rules for thee but not for me, honey. But I’m a good boss and drunken aunt figure, so I’ll appease you today. Now come on, let’s convince this bar to vote for Brexit.”

They did. It was quite fun after all, tricking a roomful of people into doing something actively against their own interests. But something about the whole thing left a strange taste in Michael’s mouth: not the good kind of strange, or the bad kind of strange that was also good. Just strange, and undeniable, and something that couldn’t be exploited at all. 

****

Maybe Helen was right. 

Not that Helen was ever strictly right, much as Helen was never wrong, but Michael just had to be doing this whole fear demon thing incorrectly. If someone had explained the whole fear demon thing to them two years ago (“Okay, so it’s like you’re the semi-sentient appendage of an extradimensional force of evil that has to consume trauma relentlessly in order to propagate its own debatable existence, also you’re nonbinary now, no those things are not strictly related, probably”), then they would have called them crazy. Which, of course, they were, but that wasn’t the point. So long as the point existed. So long as anything -

Michael was a bad fear demon of the Spiral and Infinite Twisting and That Is Not What It Is and The Twisted Door, etc, etc, All Fear Its Name, etc etc all Hail, because they didn’t always like how their internal monologue could no longer be described through common language. Words and images and understandings were nothing but approximations for Michael now, and sometimes it was frustrating existing outside the boundaries of understanding. Which, of course, was the point, so long as the point existed, so long as anything existed -

It wasn’t always easy. Still, nobody ever got what they wanted if they weren’t willing to put the effort in. The adult world and labouring under capitalism wasn’t easy for anybody. That was what Mum had always said. Who was Michael to complain about their 9-5? Or 24/24? Or infinite/infinite? Or nothing/nothing? Or -

Was it too much to ask to have a linear thought once in a while? 

Helen wouldn’t understand. There were only two other approximations of concepts that Michael knew, and Helen would hardly be any help. The other “person” would probably be a better sounding board, but there was the fact that he was kind of pretentious. Still, it was better than nothing. Well, it was nothing, but only in the sense that everything was - argh!

A yellow door appeared in a nondescript basement, and Michael appeared with it. They melted out of the “wood”, taking a second to check their outfit for this apparition - a nice vintage 50s dress with a painstaking stitch that reminded one of the oppressive nature of housewifery, nice. They elongated their curly blonde hair from a roguish mop into a nice little shag and melted into the crowd. 

It must have been a passing period, because Michael was buffeted to and fro by tall white men wearing backpacks and shorter white girls hoisting strangely identical water bottles. Somewhere Northern, Michael decided, likely private and small. Not that it strictly mattered, but it helped to solidify their grip in reality a bit if they had some idea. They already knew geography was purposeless and a distraction from the real issues, like shrimp, but occasionally it could be useful. Helen had been careful to impart the central tenet of existence as a non-euclidean concept in undefinable space in the twenty seventh dimension: location, location, location!

It was obviously the Philosophy Department, because all philosophy classes were held in old basements built in the ‘60s in identical hallways. For kicks, Michael turned all of the school hallways inwards and sent them in a mobius strip, and changed all of the door numbers into a headache. The key to enjoying your job was to take initiative in the workplace environment and to just have fun with it!

Michael found themselves in front of a door identical to all of the others, with fake laminated wood, and they decided to go in. The universe had guided them to this door for a reason, and who were they to reject its call? 

The small classroom was like most other small, private colleges in unpopular departments that nobody cared about. Lots of single person desks - Michael snapped their fingers and turned them all into left-handed desks - complete with a smartboard and a teacher’s podium. It was already half-full, so Michael carefully slid into a chair in the back and pretended that they had been there all along. A student wandered close, convinced that this was her seat, but Michael successfully convinced her that a different seat near the front was hers, prompting an impromptu game of musical chairs that sent ripples through the otherwise sedate classroom.

There was a blond student already sitting in the front, flipping through a spiral notebook and clicking a pen in no particular pattern. He was wearing a pea coat, jeans, and his hair was weirdly perfect. Michael wished they had a notebook. Was this what you did in university? They had never had the opportunity to go. 

Actually, they had never quite graduated secondary - three months away from graduation, actually. It probably wasn’t all that important. You didn’t really need a diploma to become a trauma eating fear demon. Was there a university of eating fear? That would be funny. What would the classes be in, ‘Enforcing the Powerlessness of Capitalism 101’? What was the difference between that and a Business major? 

Maybe Business majors were the real fear demons, Michael thought grandly. It was a good thought, they would have to remember to tell it to Melanie later. Melanie would approve. Hadn’t Tim been a business major? Yeah, in that case she would definitely approve. 

The student sitting in the front seemed to have finally noticed the game of musical chairs, and as the professor started clearing their throat and announcing something unimportant to the class, he turned around to find Michael sitting in the back of the class. They waved cheerfully. The student scowled. 

‘What are you doing here!’, the guy mouthed angrily. 

‘Hi Mike!’ Michael mouthed back. 

‘Go away!’ Mike mouthed back. 

‘But I’m going to eat your teacher :(‘ Michael mouthed back. They didn’t actually frown. 

‘ >:(!’, Mike Crew mouthed back, also without changing his facial expression. 

This was probably why Mike wasn’t Michael’s biggest fan. Which was a pity, because Michael thought Mike was really cool. He had the coolest name, for one. But shorter, and snappier. Mike was the kind of name girls would call you at clubs. Michael was what, like, your Mum would say as she yelled at you to clean up your room before her book club girls came over. Why were they girls? They were, like, fifty.

Mike Crew was an Avatar of the Spiral completely unwillingly. Chosen as a child and chased throughout his life by an improbably long lasting Lichtenberg scar, he had eventually succumbed to the inevitable and transformed into an even more improbable man. Personally, Michael found it strange that ‘inevitable’ and ‘Spiral’ was in the same sentence, but - well, it had to be everything at one point. Even a melting clock was right once an endless twilight. 

Strangest of all, Mike Crew was a philosophy major. The class, of course, was a high level philosophy course. Mike Crew had been in uni - well, a while - and he tended not to waste his time with the boring shit anymore. Michael listened with interest as the professor dived into the lecture. 

Two minutes in, Mike subtly gathered his things and slipped into the conveniently empty chair next to Michael. He was still glaring at them, as Michael tried their best to look innocent and cute. The effect was a little ruined by the inherent maliciousness of Michael’s pores, but they liked to think it was the thought that counted. 

“To continue our conversation on the topic of paradoxes,” the professor began, “I’d like to introduce a few thought experiments for your consideration as a class. I’ll mention the concept, and then allow you to break into pairs to discuss them.”

Mike leaned into Michael’s ear. “We were discussing Descartes!”

“But isn’t this more interesting?” Michael asked. 

“If you give my professor a mental breakdown we’re going to fall behind on the syllabus!”

“The first paradox I’d like to bring to your attention is the Crocodile’s Dilemma.” The professor flipped to a new slide, which helpfully had a big crocodile on it. Michael admired it. They had seen a crocodile at the zoo once. “Similar to the liar’s paradox, the premise states that a crocodile, who has stolen a child, promises the parent that his or her child will be returned if and only if he or she correctly predicts what the crocodile will do next. The outcome is fairly obvious if the parent states that the crocodile will return the child, but the crocodile faces a dilemma if the parent states that the crocodile will not return the child. No matter the outcome, the crocodile is made a liar: if  the crocodile decides to not give back the child then the statement proves to be true, and he ought to return the child, thereby making it false. Whatever the outcome, he still violates his terms.”

Michael raised their hand. Mike forcibly lowered their hand. 

“If I give your professor a mental breakdown then you’ll have extra time for the test,” Michael whispered back. Mike seriously considered this notion.

“The next paradox is slightly related,” the professor continued. “The Infinite Hotel Paradox.” Michael’s face stretched into a grin as Mike Crew groaned. “It is demonstrated that a fully occupied hotel with infinitely many rooms may still accommodate additional guests, even infinitely many of them, and this process may be repeated infinitely often. This is what we call a veridical paradox: it leads to a counter-intuitive result that is provably true. Therefore -”

“Okay, yeah,” Mike Crew said, slumping in his seat. “You can eat him, this guy is just begging for it.” 

“Yay!” Michael went in for the hug, before Mike pushed them away. Michael’s quest for a cool big brother failed yet again. “Do you want to call the -”

“They’re your hallways,” Mike said, persnickety as always. Maybe he was just jealous that he wasn’t a hallway? 

Michael raised their hand, patiently waiting for the professor to call on them. He stumbled in the middle of his lecture, adjusting his thick glasses. 

“Uh, yes, Miss -”

“You no longer understand gender,” Michael said pleasantly, as they always did whenever they were misgendered. It was an understandable mistake, so they didn’t do it maliciously. Frankly, they just thought it was healthy. Everyone should not understand false things. “Professor, I have a question about the Crocodile’s Dilemma.” They waited for the professor to nod, somewhat confused. “How do you know that didn’t really happen?”

The professor blinked lethargically at them. “It’s a thought experiment. It’s not real, it’s just an idea proposed by philosophers to represent -”

“What makes you so sure?” Michael asked cheerfully. “Crocodiles eat babies. Or dingoes. I think I read a story about this happening in Australia, didn’t you?”

“I - I suppose I did, yes -”

“We wouldn’t talk about it if it didn’t really happen.” Michael felt their voice fall into a rising lilt, like an attractive song that was played to a concert hall but heard only by you. They were distantly aware of Mike lulling the rest of the students into their own hazy daze: aware enough to be confused, but trapped in their seats and the fog of misunderstandings. “Fiction isn’t real. Reality is real. But a thought experiment is in between, isn’t it? Something that strains the boundaries of reality, that proves the fundamental concepts of life, told through a framework of an intrinsic lie. A paradox is a lie telling the truth. You are a truth speaker telling only lies. What you know isn’t so much as anything at all, is it? What do you really know, anyway?”

“One of us tells only the truth and the other tells only lies,” Mike Crew called out, bored. But his eyes were shining in endless refraction, infinite rooms holding infinite guests. “But is it really a lie if you had mistaken it for the truth? What lies are you living, Dr. Young?”

Dr. Young was stammering, eyes swimming, and Michael didn’t dare to break eye contact. It was a delicate spell they wove, but Michael wasn’t so bad at bringing this simmer to a boil. Cooking was about improvisation, and Michael had always been great at that. 

“If your life is a lie,” Michael breathed, “then are you really alive?”

It was clear, when it happened: the professor started inhaling deep, deeper breaths, chest wracking with heaves. His eyes rolled up in his head, he clutched at his chest, and he finally slumped down on the floor. He twitched, jerking slightly, and he would continue jerking. At which point the students would become aware, and they’d call an ambulance for him, and he would be perfectly alright in the end. If a little mentally scarred. 

“Damn,” Mike Crew said, almost impressed, as both he and Michael stood up. He shoved his pens in a backpack, glad to be free of his examination for another week. “What’d you do to him?”

“Made him think he was dead,” Michael said serenely. “He thought his heart had stopped beating so he had a panic attack. He’s going to have to make an appointment with a psychiatrist but he probably should anyway, work’s very stressful for him.”

“Guess I have the rest of the hour off,” Mike sighed, as he held the door open for Michael so they could slip out of the back of the classroom. It was yellow, and a little strange.  “Want to grab a pint with me at the campus pub?” He paused a beat. “Wait, are you even old enough to drink?”

“I’m as old as eternity and reborn every second.” Michael paused a beat. “But I was eighteen last time I checked, and I’ll probably be eighteen for a while, so yes?”

“Great, let’s roll. I need a drink.”

****

Mike’s uni’s pub (Michael had asked the name of the uni but the information had, unfortunately, been lost in next Tuesday, so they’ll know then) was the exact opposite of the high class pub Helen had taken them to. Instead of glassy, shiny, and chromey, Mike’s pub looked strongly as if very many people had puked in it and the staff had tackled the problem somewhat half-heartedly. Michael enjoyed the sight of the puke existing in all points in time simultaneously, giving it a sort of weird yellow-ish shine. Actually, maybe all puke had that yellowish sheen?

When they asked Mike about it as they hopped up on the bar, he just sighed. He flagged the bartender down for a pint, and when the bartender squinted dubiously at Michael they revelled into the micro-confusion of ambiguous ages. Micro-feeding? Like mini muffins?

“Helen made a mistake hiring you. She’s stuck us with a perpetual teenager.”

“I’m as much a teenager as you are a uni student,” Michael said pointedly. 

“I’m not an embodiment of the It Is What It Isn’t Is,” Mike said, oddly aggressively. “I’m just a normal Avatar.”

“Fear demon.”

“Melanie King isn’t always right and I don’t know why everyone thinks she is.” Big words from an honored Special Guest on her show. There were many in the fear demon community who would kill for the honor. It was a good thing she hated intruders in her Archives - otherwise they’d never leave. “But I’m no different from - that douche Peter Lukas or that stoner Elias Bouchard or that btich Annabelle, okay? I’m just a guy. Who eats trauma. Plenty of guys do that.”

“Very good denial of reality!” Michael approved. “Normally Helen tells me to go further into denying reality as a concept, though.”

“God, you hallway people are impossible to have a normal conversation with.” Mike huffed, clearly not as irritated as his words would imply. Michael also approved of the incongruity. “I’m assuming that you’re here for absolutely no reason and that you have no idea why or how you ended up at my uni.”

Michael shifted uncomfortably. “Actually, I am here for a reason.” At Mike’s extreme surprise, they hurriedly clarified, “Not with any goal, meaning, or intention in mind! But I just wanted to talk about something to someone who wasn’t technically another facet of my meaningless whole. Helen and I are as index and ring fingers on the same hand, but we don’t really get each other sometimes, you know?”

“Does that make you the pinky finger?”

“I actually had a hypothetical for you.” At Mike’s nod, Michael snagged a napkin from the stack on the sticky bar and began creasing it, somewhat anxiously. “Let’s say, hypothetically, you were a teenagerish nongendered sentient hallway intern who happens to eat trauma.”

“This isn’t much of a hypothetical,” Mike said flatly. 

“I’m a hypothetical person. And I’m only a person hypothetically.” Michael started making little folds in the napkin, twisting it up into a strange origami. “So, let’s say, hypothetically, that this person - their name is Michael - enjoyed being them. It wasn’t always fun, and sometimes they kind of missed the world making sense, or at least not making sense in a familiar way. And sometimes Michael got tired of being a sentient hallway and wanted to finish secondary. And maybe even sometimes Michael grows sad that both their parents were eaten by their new boss, who is kind of a Tory! But that’s all fine. Michael’s probably happier like this than they ever were even when they did have parents.”

Mike Crew stared at them a little, slowly sipping his pint. 

Michael hunched their shoulders, and folded up the napkin further and further. They had read somewhere that any piece of paper can only be folded seven times. They folded the napkin seven times, then eight, then nine, then ten. That was something nice about the way things were now, they supposed: no rules, absolute freedom. Only rules, no freedom. That was what Dr. Yung would call a paradox. “But maybe the worst part about this new job is that Michael doesn’t really like hurting people. Sometimes it’s fun to randomly make people very upset, and you always kind of end up doing it anyway, but after a while Michael feels kind of bad about it. Michael likes doing other things better, like making terrible roundabouts and rearranging the pages of books. Maybe they even like reading books. They like reading comic books backwards, from the last page to the first, so every panel is a surprise.”

“There’s lots of ways to be a fear demon,” Mike pointed out, almost gently. Maybe only because he could relate. “Look at me. I’m not feeding off anyone. Just myself.”

“But I like the way I do it,” Michael said, frustrated. “Helen keeps trying to get me to do it the way she does it, but the point is that we aren’t the same. What’s the point in having two of us if both our viewpoints are the same? We’re different in every way, but we’re the same being. I just want to be the Spiral the way I want. Not the way Helen wants.” Their voice lowered, almost unwilling to say what they were about to say. “Not the way the Spiral wants.”

Mike stared at them for a long time, slowly sipping his beer, and Michael focused their efforts on forcing this improbable napkin into something that could be beautiful. A lotus flower? A mobius strip? Or should they just let it happen as it happens, and see what form it decided to take? 

Finally, Mike said, “You are the Spiral.”

“Then why am I always disagreeing with it?” Michael asked miserably. 

“Why are you, Helen, and the Spiral always disagreeing?” Mike pointed out. “Maybe that’s the point. So much as anything’s a point. Isn’t it the most perfect paradox of all, to split yourself into portions that are always disagreeing and bickering? Maybe everything you’re feeling is on purpose. I mean, it’s kind of improbable that you’re feeling at all, right?”

“I retained a lot of humanity,” Michael said. “Maybe a bit too much, actually?”

“Right.” Mike nodded decisively. “Then that’s the appeal. A human mind will always strain against its confines. It will always want different, want the same, want the old and the new and the perpetual and the fleeting and the eternity and the moment. What’s more nonsensical than a human? What’s more contradictory than human nature?” A dark shadow passed over his face, just for a second. “The Spiral kidnaps us and turns us into it. One part of our minds is entrenched in its eternity, and another part is always screaming in agony. But predominantly we are the unholy mixture of human and Entity, oil forced into water. It’s so intrinsically horrifying and wrong that we just get used to it. We are both demon and human, and so we’re neither, and so we’re both. Isn’t it weird, Michael, that unlike so many other Avatars, none of us want to be here?”

“You’re a very philosophical person,” Michael said diplomatically. 

“Thanks, I think too much about my lot in life.” Mike Crew sighed, slumping on his barstool and knocking back more of his pint. “I wish you and Helen would stop showing up in my life so often. When you aren’t around, I can almost pretend I’m a person.”

“That’s why we show up,” Michael felt obligated to point out. 

“Yeah, I know,” Mike said glumly. “I always know. I can’t stop knowing.”

There was nothing Michael could say or do that fixed this, or that could make Mike feel better. They understood, just a little - that nostalgia for a kinder time. But maybe it was more that Mike never had those halcyon, innocent days. He had lived life since childhood in aching knowledge that his days were numbered. Maybe that’s why Mike was allowed to live life as a human even now: his human life was just as confusing and isolated as his afterlife, and that when fear stained every second of his life there was no point in ceasing it. 

Maybe Michael couldn’t keep their human life because they had been happy. At the very least, they had been ignorant. That was one thing the Spiral could not abide: ignorance. 

These days, Michael knew everything. They knew everything so, so much.

So, in lieu of comforting falsehoods, Michael offered Mike Crew a slightest sliver of truth. They passed Mike the little piece of origami that they had made, and let Mike cradle it in his large and smooth hands. 

The origami had no shape. It wasn’t folded into anything. It was just a meaningless amalgamation of points, corners, and creased paper. It didn’t look like anything at all. 

“See?” Michael pointed out. “It’s a bear.”

Mike Crew smiled weakly. “Looks like a sea goat to me.”

There was something beautiful in ambiguity. When something was nothing, it could be everything at once. That was rather Michael’s favorite thing about it. 

“I think it’s a self-portrait,” Michael decided. 

And that, at least, was as true as anything else. 

***

Michael wandered their hallways. 

On some level, they were pretty much perpetually doing that. Even as one facet of them talked with Michael in a campus pub, even as another helped Helen convince a high class pub into voting Brexit, even as they traumatized a physics professor, they wandered these hallways.

Make no mistake: everything in this story has/will/is happened/happening simultaneously.

Of course, on another level Michael was literally their hallways, and thus they were not so much wandering as existing. Pulsating, one could say. Even twisting, if one would be so bold. 

There was a mirror, in the hallway. Not a funhouse mirror - although Michael did enjoy popping out from those and scaring Nikola - but just a mirror. Gilded around the edges, ornate with swirling curlicues. You could see yourself in it. You could see a lot of yourself in it. It wasn’t what you had always looked like, not really, but you just had the sense that this was what you really looked like. Maybe you had always looked like this, and everybody was just too polite to tell you. Were you really a brunette? This mirror had to be right. You had been a blonde all along. Nobody had told you. They were laughing at you. They were laughing -

But this was Michael, and Michael’s, and nothing in here could harm them. It was even comforting. They looked at themselves in the mirror, and saw themselves same as ever. Or not same as ever. They were still Michael, so far as Michael was Michael.

Shortish. Blondey. Raggedy hair. Curled as much as anything’s curled. Fun clothing that they really enjoyed. Tall shoes, because they liked feeling tall. Similar dimensions to the golden number. Non linear, but who’s counting? It was what they typically looked like. 

But, just for a second, Michael even fooled themselves. They saw someone in the mirror that they were not, someone who they had never been, someone who they never will be. Someone different.

Michael, just like everyone else, couldn’t stop themselves from reaching out. Come back. Come back! Let me touch you, let me be you! Michael’s fingers brushed the shiny glass, and the world tilted sideways, and Michael fell into where the sidewalk ended.

They emerged, or maybe they had always been, inside a bedroom. It was a nice little suburban bedroom. It had a peaked ceiling and a window seat. The walls were a soft, navy blue. There was a young person, lying on the shag carpet, leafing through a book. Big headphones were over their ears, and they were bopping along to music. Disco. 

Michael stood, an intruder into a familiar space, and watched the stranger. Their throat felt oddly tight, and their eyes felt strangely hot. The stranger was smiling faintly, flipping the pages of their book somewhat mindlessly. They were reading it for school. Flatland. It was just an assignment, but it was really fucking them up. It was making them think about all of these things that they didn’t normally, in new dimensions. It was really cool. All of their friends were just reading the Sparknotes, but they really wanted to talk about it with someone. 

 This, of course, had happened. It will happen in the future. It was happening now, as Michael watched the scene with an electric sadness. It would never happen, because the Spiral had never been here, and never would be, and always was. 

A knock echoed on the door, several sharp raps. Michael didn’t notice, legs swinging to the music. 

The knock on the door hit louder. “Michael!” A voice echoed from behind it. “Michael, are you ready to go?”

Michael reached up and slid off their headphones, without looking up from their book. “Coming!” They called back. “Be right there!”

The Spiral watched Michael, who hummed absentmindedly as the door knocked again. Dad was downstairs, making sure the gas was off and shutting off the lights. Mum was knocking, knocking, knocking, on a door that was and will always be wood. 

“Have you packed yet?” Mum called. 

“Sure I have!” Michael yelled back, glancing at the empty suitcase on the bed and the messy pile of clothes right next to it. They pushed themselves up, flipping the book shut and rising to their feet. “Be right out!”

“Hurry up,” Mum called, as the Spiral mouthed the words along with her. “We’re going to be late!”

The Bermudas aren’t going anywhere, Michael thought spitefully. They stuffed their clothes haphazardly in a suitcase, took far more care to pack their laptop and DS, and shoved Flatland in a side pocket of their backpack. 

When Michael slung on his backpack, unfolded the handle from their suitcase, they were not even looking at the door they left through. They were entirely focused on managing the unruly suitcase, and walked straight through the crazed yellow door.

Of course, Michael walked out. Slightly stranger, a little better, a lot worse. Exactly the same. They were back in their hallways again, fresh from their little suburban bedroom and the child exiting one world and entering one quite different. Maybe one part of that child would always be in that bedroom, another part in these hallways, and another part always caught in that doorway and the transition. 

Simultaneously, in all points in time, Mum knocked on that wood door, and Michael never let her inside. Simultaneously, at all points in time, Michael watched it all happen.

They hadn’t expected it to be so comforting. At all moments in time, in a little corner of their heart, Mum knocked on their door. If the Spiral lived in your soul and beat your heart, it was easy to find the beauty in it - the magnificence of eternity, and the joy in the moment. Mum was with them - literally, as he was pretty sure Helen was still digesting her. Maybe nothing was ever truly over - just over there.  

Michael stuck their hands in their pockets, whistling a jaunty tune that highly resembled the Shepherd’s Tone. Their hallways pulsated comfortingly, and Michael carefully toed off their platform shoes and eyed down the infinite hallways. No rugs for a while. 

Maybe Michael, Mike Crew, and Helen should get together more often. Just the three of them. They would drive each other batty. It would be a lot of fun. 

Michael set off running down the hallway, and skidded on their socks down the hardwood floor, whooping in joy as they skidded endlessly towards eternity. 

[grrmartin]

1) what I hate about arya/lyanna stans who argue over how a "war was fought for Lyanna's beauty" when arguing how Arya will be prettier than Sansa (and I've already said how uncomfort this is - they are little girls you freaks!!) is the way Elia is insulted even if they dont intend to. Like oh the WOC simply wasn't good enough. She's just a feeble Dornish woman that couldn't match up to perfect Lyanna. and honestly if these stans were better at literary analysis they would probably

You’re right! Yes, we need to always keep in mind that the war wasn’t fought for Lyanna. It’s a bit obvious when you look at when war was declared. Lyanna’s kidnapping LEADS TO Brandon demanding to fight Rhaegar LEADS TO Aerys imprisoning her and demanding the Warden of the North comes to KL LEADS TO the two of them being roasted alive LEADS TO Aerys calling for the death of Ned and Robert LEADS TO the north and other kingdoms declaring war. There had been a lot of resentment and drama from most Kingdom’s towards the Targaryens, some of it lasting for centuries, but which increased with Aerys’ fall into madness.

Based on the progression of events, Lyanna doesn’t have to be beautiful in order for war to be declared. Brandon just had to love his sister. He would’ve loved her even if she wasn’t the most beautiful woman in the 7k. It is possible to love a woman who is ugly. It is possible to love a woman who is average looking. Beauty is not the most important thing when it comes to falling in love. If it was, Rhaegar would have abducted Cersei or Ashara Dayne or Cat. But to Rhaegar, Lyanna was Ice and Lyanna was the perfect mother for his Visenya.

Rhaegar was hunting for a mother to his future child. He wasn’t simply overcome with lust and struck with Lyanna’s beauty. He planned on spurning Elia because of a prophecy, not because she wasn’t beautiful enough. It’s much creepier than OP made it seem.

I really don’t think Rhaegar and Elia were a love match, but Elia is Arianne’s aunt, and Arianne might be the YMBQ in the books. Arianne’s certainly described as a total smoke show. From what I see in the text, how Elia looked wasn’t a problem. For Rhaegar it was all about her reproductive tract. Rhaegar seemed to have a little madness too, what with just being obsessed with women’s ability to breed 3 perfect Targaryen babies. Lyanna wasn’t Helen of Troy, she was a misled teenager subject to a forced pregnancy.

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what Elia OR Lyanna looked like. They both have personality traits and abilities and strengths that make them valid human beings. Women aren’t just pieces of meat or sex dolls, they’re people, yeah?

[faraway-wanderer]

QUEER YA READS happy pride month here’s a list of lots of queer YA books!!

-          The Henna Wars- Abida Jaigirdar When Nishat comes out to her parents, they say she can be anyone she wants—as long as she isn’t herself. Because Muslim girls aren’t lesbians. Nishat doesn’t want to hide who she is, but she also doesn’t want to lose her relationship with her family. And her life only gets harder once a childhood friend walks back into her life. Flávia is beautiful and charismatic and Nishat falls for her instantly. Amidst sabotage and school stress, their lives get more tangled—but Nishat can’t quite get rid of her crush on Flávia, and realizes there might be more to her than she realized

-          Red, White and Royal Blue- Casey Mcquinston   First Son Alex Claremont-Diaz is the closest thing to a prince this side of the Atlantic. With his intrepid sister and the Veep’s genius granddaughter, they’re the White House Trio, a beautiful millennial marketing strategy for his mother, President Ellen Claremont. International socialite duties do have downsides—namely, when photos of a confrontation with his longtime nemesis Prince Henry at a royal wedding leak to the tabloids and threaten American/British relations.

-          You should see me in a crown- Leah Johnson Liz Lighty has always believed she's too black, too poor, too awkward to shine in her small, rich, prom-obsessed midwestern town. But it's okay -- Liz has a plan that will get her out of Campbell, Indiana, forever: attend the uber-elite Pennington College, play in their world-famous orchestra, and become a doctor.But when the financial aid she was counting on unexpectedly falls through, Liz's plans come crashing down . . . until she's reminded of her school's scholarship for prom king and queen

-          Tell me How you Really Feel- Aminah Mae Safi Sana Khan is a cheerleader and a straight A student. She's the classic (somewhat obnoxious) overachiever determined to win.Rachel Recht is a wannabe director who's obsesssed with movies and ready to make her own masterpiece. As she's casting her senior film project, she knows she's found the perfect lead - Sana.There's only one problem. Rachel hates Sana. Rachel was the first girl Sana ever asked out, but Rachel thought it was a cruel prank and has detested Sana ever since.

-          Like a love story- Abdi Nazemian It's 1989 in New York City, and for three teens, the world is changing.

-          I Wish You All the Best- Mason Deaver At turns heartbreaking and joyous, I Wish You All the Best is both a celebration of life, friendship, and love, and a shining example of hope in the face of adversity.

-          The Falling in Love Montage- Ciara Smyth Saoirse doesn’t believe in love at first sight or happy endings. If they were real, her mother would still be able to remember her name and not in a care home with early onset dementia. A condition that Saoirse may one day turn out to have inherited. So she’s not looking for a relationship. She doesn’t see the point in igniting any romantic sparks if she’s bound to burn out. But after a chance encounter at an end-of-term house party, Saoirse is about to break her own rules. For a girl with one blue freckle, an irresistible sense of mischief, and a passion for rom-coms.

-          The Fascinators- Andrew Eliopulos Living in a small town where magic is frowned upon, Sam needs his friends James and Delia—and their time together in their school's magic club—to see him through to graduation.But as soon as senior year starts, little cracks in their group begin to show. Sam may or may not be in love with James. Delia is growing more frustrated with their amateur magic club. And James reveals that he got mixed up with some sketchy magickers over the summer, putting a target on all their backs.

-          The Dark Tide- Alicia Jaskina The Wicked Deep meets A Curse So Dark and Lonely in this gripping, dark fairy-tale fantasy about two girls who must choose between saving themselves, each other, or their sinking island city

-          Summer of Salt – Katrina Leno Georgina Fernweh waits with growing impatience for the tingle of magic in her fingers—magic that has been passed down through every woman in her family. Her twin sister, Mary, already shows an ability to defy gravity. But with their eighteenth birthday looming at the end of this summer, Georgina fears her gift will never come.

-          Sawkill Girls- Claire Legrand Marion: the new girl. Awkward and plain, steady and dependable. Weighed down by tragedy and hungry for love she’s sure she’ll never find. Zoey: the pariah. Luckless and lonely, hurting but hiding it. Aching with grief and dreaming of vanished girls. Maybe she’s broken—or maybe everyone else is. Val: the queen bee. Gorgeous and privileged, ruthless and regal. Words like silk and eyes like knives, a heart made of secrets and a mouth full of lies.

-          The Priory of the Orange Tree- Samantha Shannon A world divided. A queendom without an heir. An ancient enemy awakens. The House of Berethnet has ruled Inys for a thousand years. Still unwed, Queen Sabran the Ninth must conceive a daughter to protect her realm from destruction – but assassins are getting closer to her door. Ead Duryan is an outsider at court. Though she has risen to the position of lady-in-waiting, she is loyal to a hidden society of mages. Ead keeps a watchful eye on Sabran, secretly protecting her with forbidden magic. Across the dark sea, Tané has trained to be a dragonrider since she was a child, but is forced to make a choice that could see her life unravel.

-          I was Born for this- Alice Oseman For Angel Rahimi, life is only about one thing: The Ark – a pop-rock trio of teenage boys who are currently taking the world by storm. Being part of The Ark’s fandom has given her everything – her friendships, her dreams, her place in the world. Jimmy Kaga-Ricci owes everything to The Ark too. He’s their frontman – and playing in a band is all he’s ever dreamed of doing. It’s just a shame that recently everything in his life seems to have turned into a bit of a nightmare.

-          Summer Bird Blue  Akemi Dawn Bowman- Bowman’s sophomore novel follows Rumi, a young musician plagued with grief and survivor’s guilt after her younger sister is killed in a car crash. Her mother sends her to liver with her aunt in Hawaii, and is also now mourning the loss of the music she would create with her sister and is unable to recapture her passion. As she navigates her loss, and feelings of abandonment from her mother, Rumi is also starting new relationships with neighbors, one a cute, easygoing surfer boy, and the other a irascible 80-year-old crankypants, while also becoming comfortable with her aromantic and asexual feelings.An immersive aromantic, asexual journey through grief and understanding.

-          Felix Ever after- Kacen Callender   a novel about a transgender teen grappling with identity and self-discovery while falling in love for the first time.

-          The Stars and The Blackness Between Them - Junauda Petrus Audre and Mabel, Black girls who find romance just in time for everything to fall even further apart.

-          By any means necessary- Candice Montgomery By Any Means Neccesary dives into the intersection of race and sexuality through the lens of its main character, Torrey, a gay Black college student.

-          Her Royal Highness -Rachel Hawkins- When Millie Quint discovers her best friend-turned-girlfriend has been kissing someone else, she decides to get as far away from her as possible – by going to boarding school on the opposite side of the globe. The only issue? Millie’s new roomate is the actual princess of Scotland.

-          Tash Hearts Tolstoy - Kathryn Omsbee, Natasha Zelenka (Tash), is a serious fangirl of Leo Tolstoy and a rising YouTube star with her webseries Unhappy Families, a modern-day adaptation of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, and Vlog, Tea with Tash. When a famous vlogger gives a shout out to the series, it goes viral. Now she, along with the cast and crew, are finding what it means to be a hit sensation and are managing the adoration, and the trolls, coming their way. Tash, a romantic asexual, has had a long time crush on the hit vlogger star Thom, who, as her online popular grows, so does Thom’s attention. Amidst the fame and romance, Tash is also dealing with her older sister creating distance, her parents announcing a new sibling on the way, college applications, the impending end of the series, and the big “What’s next.”An asexual romantic comedy coming of age.

-          Full Disclosure- Camryn Garratt Camryn Garrett’s debut novel follows a Black, HIV-positive teen as she explores her first romantic relationship. There are few books that discuss what it’s like to live with HIV, especially those that are light, relatable, and told through the lens of a young Black girl.

-          The Black Flamingo- Dean Atta Atta pens a coming-of-age story about a boy accepting his identity as a mixed-race gay teen, but then finds a place where he belongs as a drag artist named The Black Flamingo.

-          Juniper Leaves- Jaz Joyner   Kinky-haired  Juniper Bray used to believe in magic, until she lost her best friend: her grandmother. Now this 15-year-old shy girl is headed to her father's research trip on a farm hundreds of miles away, with a family she barely knows and the opposite of a best friend, her new arch nemesis, Bree Mckinney. As if she wasn't miserable enough. Little does she know the next few months Juniper will discover magical powers she never knew she had, get a crush on a girl she never knew she'd like and well, quite frankly, save the world.

-          Crier’s War - Nina Varela ‘In a world where humans are dominated by superior Automae, one human girl called Ayla takes the role of handmaiden to the Automae Lady Crier in order to help the human rebellion. But to Ayla’s horror, she finds herself falling for Crier.’

-          Queen of Coin and Whispers  Helen Corcoran -When a teenage queen inherits her uncle’s bankrupt kingdom, she brings with her a new spymaster – a girl who only accepted the role to avenge her murdered father. But faced with enemies at every turn, the two learn to rely on no one but each other . . . though it may bring their downfall.

-          Huntress- Malinda Lo – Ill fortune has befallen the land, and two girls have been tasked with the mission of setting things right. As Kaede and Taisin journey to the city of the Fairy Queen, adventure and romance awaits.

-          This Song Is (Not) for You - Laura Nowlin- This is not your usual love triangle. Ramona has been in love with her best friend and bandmate Sam for a long time, Sam has also been in love Ramona. When Tom joins the band, he completes them. Now Ramona is starting to have feelings for Tom, and those feelings are reciprocated. Tom is a romantic asexual, whose asexuality is fully explored

-          Seven Tears at High Tide-  C.B. Lee – After Kevin Luong drops, yup, seven tears into the sea, he ends up rescuing a boy from the waters. It’s love at first sight for Morgan who, unknown to Kevin, is a Selkie.

-          Loveless -Alice Oseman- (out on the 9th July!!) Georgia has never been in love, never kissed anyone, never even had a crush – but as a fanfic-obsessed romantic she’s sure she’ll find her person one day.As she starts university with her best friends, Pip and Jason, in a whole new town far from home, Georgia’s ready to find romance, and with her outgoing roommate on her side and a place in the Shakespeare Society, her ‘teenage dream’ is in sight. But when her romance plan wreaks havoc amongst her friends, Georgia ends up in her own comedy of errors, and she starts to question why love seems so easy for other people but not for her. With new terms thrown at her – asexual, aromantic – Georgia is more uncertain about her feelings than ever.

-          The Last Beginning- Lauren James-  (you probably need to read the next together first which I HIGHLY recommend) Sixteen years ago, after a scandal that rocked the world, teenagers Katherine and Matthew vanished without a trace. Now Clove Sutcliffe is determined to find her long lost relatives.But where do you start looking for a couple who seem to have been reincarnated at every key moment in history? Who were Kate and Matt? Why were they born again and again? And who is the mysterious Ella, who keeps appearing at every turn in Clove's investigation? For Clove, there is a mystery to solve in the past and a love to find in the future, and failure could cost the world everything.

[gadgetgirl71]

Amazon First Reads for May 2020

It’s that time yet again, to choose one of eight books that Amazon First Reads lets Amazon Prime Members download for free. I always look forward to the beginning of each month to see what is on offer.

This months books are:

Contemporary Fiction

If You Must Know by Jamie Beck  Pages: 362, Publication Date: 1 June 2020

Synopsis: Life turns upside down for two sisters in Wall Street Journal bestselling author Jamie Beck’s emotional novel about how secrets and differences can break—or bind—a family.

Sisters Amanda Foster and Erin Turner have little in common except the childhood bedroom they once shared and the certainty each feels that her way of life is best. Amanda follows the rules—at the school where she works; in her community; and as a picture-perfect daughter, wife, and mother-to-be. Erin follows her heart—in love and otherwise—living a bohemian lifestyle on a shoestring budget and honouring her late father’s memory with a passion for music and her fledgling bath-products business.

The sisters are content leading separate but happy lives in their hometown of Potomac Point until everything is upended by lies that force them to confront unsettling truths about their family, themselves, and each other. For sisters as different as these two, building trust doesn’t come easily—especially with one secret still between them—but it may be the only way to save their family.

Thriller

Don’t Make a Sound by T R Ragan, Pages: 285, Publication Date: 1 June 2020

Synopsis: Her own past could be a reporter’s biggest story in this twisting thriller about murder and family secrets by the New York Times bestselling author T.R. Ragan.

Plagued by traumatic childhood memories, crime reporter Sawyer Brooks still struggles to gain control of her rage, her paranoia, and her life. Now, after finally getting promoted at work, she is forced to return home and face her past.

River Rock is where she’d been abandoned by her two older sisters to suffer alone, and in silence, the unspeakable abuses of her family. It’s also where Sawyer’s best friend disappeared and two teenage girls were murdered. Three cold cases dead and buried with the rest of the town’s secrets.

When another girl is slain in a familiar grisly fashion, Sawyer is determined to put an end to the crimes. Pulled back into the horrors of her family history, Sawyer must reconcile with her estranged sisters, who both have shattering memories of their own. As Sawyer’s investigation leads to River Rock’s darkest corners, what will prove more dangerous—what she knows of the past or what she has yet to discover?

Biography

Gender Rebels by Anneka Harry, Pages: 277, Publication Date: 1 June 2020

Synopsis: Meet the unsung sheroes of history: the diverse, defiant and daring (wo)men who changed the rules, and their identities, to get sh*t done.

You’ll encounter Kit Cavanagh, the swaggering Irish dragoon who was the first woman to be buried in London with full military honours; marauding eighteenth-century pirates Mary Read and Anne Bonny, who collided on the high seas after swapping their petticoats for pantaloons; Ellen Craft, an escaped slave who masqueraded as a white master to spirit her husband-to-be to freedom; and Billy Tipton, the swinging jazz musician, who led a double life as an adult, taking five wives along the way. Then there are the women who still have to dress like men to live their best lives, like the inspirational football-lovers in Iran, who risk everything to take their place in the stands.

A call to action for the modern world, this book celebrates the #GenderRebels who paved the way for women everywhere to be soldiers and spies; kings and queens; firefighters, doctors, pilots; and a Swiss Army knife’s-worth more. These superbly spirited (wo)men all had one thing in common: they defied the rules to progress in a man’s world.

Book Club Fiction

Sorry I Missed You by Suzy Krause, Pages: 315, Publication Date: 1 June 2020

Synopsis: A poignant and heartwarming novel about friendship, ghosting, and searching for answers to life’s mysteries.

When Mackenzie, Sunna, and Maude move into a converted rental house, they are strangers with only one thing in common—important people in their lives have “ghosted” them. Mackenzie’s sister, Sunna’s best friend, and Maude’s fiancé—all gone with no explanation.

So when a mangled, near-indecipherable letter arrives in their shared mailbox—hinting at long-awaited answers—each tenant assumes it’s for her. The mismatched trio decides to stake out the coffee shop named in the letter���the only clue they have—and in the process, a bizarre kinship forms. But the more they learn about each other, the more questions (and suspicions) they begin to have. All the while, creepy sounds and strange happenings around the property suggest that the ghosts from their pasts might not be all that’s haunting them…

Will any of the housemates find the closure they are looking for? Or are some doors meant to remain closed?

Quirky, humorous, and utterly original, Sorry I Missed You is the perfect read for anyone who has ever felt haunted by their past (or by anything else).

Historical Fiction

Golden Poppies by Laila Ibrahim, Pages: 297, Publication Date: 1 June 2020

Synopsis: From the bestselling author of Yellow Crocus and Mustard Seed comes the empowering novel of two generations of American women connected by the past and fighting for a brighter future.

It’s 1894. Jordan Wallace and Sadie Wagner appear to have little in common. Jordan, a middle-aged black teacher, lives in segregated Chicago. Two thousand miles away, Sadie, the white wife of an ambitious German businessman, lives in more tolerant Oakland, California. But years ago, their families intertwined on a plantation in Virginia. There, Jordan’s and Sadie’s mothers developed a bond stronger than blood, despite the fact that one was enslaved and the other was the privileged daughter of the plantation’s owner.

With Jordan’s mother on her deathbed, Sadie leaves her disapproving husband to make the arduous train journey with her mother to Chicago. But the reunion between two families is soon fraught with personal and political challenges.

As the harsh realities of racial divides and the injustices of the Gilded Age conspire to hold them back, the women find they need each other more than ever. Their courage, their loyalty, and the ties that bind their families will be tested. Amid the tumult of a quickly changing nation, their destiny depends on what they’re willing to risk for liberation.

Legal Thriller

Legacy of Lies by Robert Bailey, Pages: 329, Publication Date: 1 June 2020

Synopsis: A small-town attorney takes on prejudice and corruption in this powerful legal thriller.

Small-town lawyer Bocephus Haynes comes home late one night to find District Attorney General Helen Lewis waiting for him. Her ex-husband has just been killed. She’s about to be arrested for his murder. And she wants Bo to represent her.

There’s a lot working against them. Just before his death, Helen’s ex-husband threatened to reveal a dark secret from her past. Bo has been in a tailspin since his wife’s death. What’s more, his whole life has been defined by a crime committed against his family, and he continues to face prejudice as the only African American litigator in Pulaski, Tennessee.

Bo’s back is against the wall, and Helen resigns herself to a dismal fate—but a stunning discovery throws everything into chaos. There’s a chance for justice, but to achieve it, the cost might be too much for Bo to bear.

Family Saga

A Decent Family by Rosa Ventrella, Pages: 251, Publication Date: 1 June 2020

Synopsis: For fans of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan series comes a captivating family saga focused on a willful young woman’s struggles against her oppressive small town by acclaimed Italian author Rosa Ventrella.

In old Bari, everyone knows Maria De Santis as “Malacarne,” the bad seed. Nicknamed for her dark features, volcanic temperament, and resistance to rules, the headstrong girl can only imagine the possibilities that lie outside her poverty-stricken neighborhood.

Growing up with her mother, two brothers, and a tyrannical father, Maria must abide. She does—amid the squalid life to which she was born, the cruelties of her small-minded neighbors, and violence in a constant threat of eruption. As she reconciles her need for escape with the allegiance she feels toward her family, Maria has her salvations: her secret friend, Michele, son of a rival family and every bit the outsider she is, and her passion for books, which may someday take her far, far away.

In this exquisitely rendered and sensory-rich novel, Rosa Ventrella explores the limits of loyalty, the redeeming power of friendship and love, and the fire in the soul of one woman who was born to break free.

Literary Fiction

A Man by Keiichiro Hirano, Pages: 295, Publication Date: 1 June 2020

Synopsis: A man follows another man’s trail of lies in a compelling psychological story about the search for identity, by Japan’s award-winning literary sensation Keiichiro Hirano in his first novel to be translated into English.

Akira Kido is a divorce attorney whose own marriage is in danger of being destroyed by emotional disconnect. With a midlife crisis looming, Kido’s life is upended by the reemergence of a former client, Rié Takemoto. She wants Kido to investigate a dead man—her recently deceased husband, Daisuké. Upon his death she discovered that he’d been living a lie. His name, his past, his entire identity belonged to someone else, a total stranger. The investigation draws Kido into two intriguing mysteries: finding out who Rié’s husband really was and discovering more about the man he pretended to be. Soon, with each new revelation, Kido will come to share the obsession with—and the lure of—erasing one life to create a new one.

In A Man, winner of Japan’s prestigious Yomiuri Prize for Literature, Keiichiro Hirano explores the search for identity, the ambiguity of memory, the legacies with which we live and die, and the reconciliation of who you hoped to be with who you’ve actually become.

***Which book will you choose? I can’t make up my mind between: “If You Must Know and Sorry I Missed You”. Let me know which book you think I should choose.***

[suchagiantnerd]

48 Books, 1 Year

I was just two books shy of my annual goal of 50! You can blame the combination of my adorable newborn, who refused to nap anywhere except on me, and Hallmark Christmas movie season, during which I abandon books for chaste kisses between 30-somethings who behave like tweens at places called the Mistletoe Inn (which are really in Almonte, Ontario). 

Without further ado, as Zuma from Paw Patrol says, “Let’s dive in!”

1. Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, from Pointless Bones to Broken Genes / Nathan H. Lents

We have too many bones! We have to rely too much on our diet for survival! We suffer from too many cognitive biases! Reading about our design flaws was kind of interesting, but the best part of this book were the few pages toward the end about the possibility of alien life. Specifically this quote: "...some current estimates predict that the universe harbours around seventy-five million civilizations." WHAT?! This possibility more than anything else I've ever heard or read gives me a better idea of how infinite the universe really is.

2. The Fiery Cross / Diana Gabaldon

Compared to the first four books in the Outlander series, this fifth book is a real snooze. The characters are becoming more and more unlikeable. They're so self-centered and unaware of their privilege in the time and place they're living. Gabaldon's depictions of the Mohawk tribe and other First Nations characters (which I'm reading through her character's opinions of things) are pretty racist. The enslaved people at one character's plantation are also described as being well taken care of and I just.... can't. I think this is the end of my affair with Outlander.

3. Educated / Tara Westover

This memoir was a wild ride. Tara Westover grew up in a survivalist, ultra-religious family in rural Idaho. She didn’t go to school and was often mislead about the outside world by her father. She and her siblings were also routinely put in physical danger working in their father’s junkyard as their lives were “in god’s hands”, and when they were inevitably injured, they weren’t taken to the hospital or a doctor, but left to be treated by their healer mother. Thanks to her sheer intelligence and determination (and some support from her older brother), Tara goes to university and shares with us the culture shock of straddling two very different worlds. My non-fiction book club LOVED this read, we talked about it for a long, long time.

4. Imbolc: Rituals, Recipes and Lore for St. Brigid’s Day / Carl F. Neal

Continuing with my witchy education, I learned all about the first sabbat of the new year, Imbolc.

5. Super Sad True Love Story / Gary Shteyngart

This in-the-very-near-future dystopian novel got my heart racing during a few exciting moments, but overall, I couldn’t immerse myself fully because of the MISOGYNY. I think the author might not like women and the things women like (or the things he thinks they like?) In this near future, all the dudes are into finance or are media celeb wannabes, while all the women work in high-end retail. And onion-skin jeans are the new trend for women - they are essentially see-through. Gary….we don’t…want that? We don’t even want low-rise jeans to come back.

6. The Wanderers / Meg Howrey

Helen, Yoshi and Sergei are the three astronauts selected by a for-profit space exploration company to man the world’s first mission to Mars. But before they get the green light, they have to endure a 17-month simulation. In addition to getting insight into the simulation from all three astronauts via rotating narrators, we also hear from the astronauts’ family members and other employees monitoring the sim. At times tense, at times thoughtful, this book is an incisive read about what makes explorers willing to leave behind everything they love the most in the world.

7. Zone One / Colson Whitehead

The zombie apocalypse has already happened, and Mark is one of the survivors working to secure and clean up Zone One, an area of Manhattan. During his hours and hours of boring shifts populated by a few harrowing minutes here and there, the reader is privy to Mark’s memories of the apocalypse itself and how he eventually wound up on this work crew. Mark is a pretty likeable, yet average guy rather than the standard zombie genre heroes, and as a result, his experiences also feel like a more plausible reality than those of the genre.

8. Homegoing / Yaa Gyasi

One of my favourite reads of the year, this novel is the definition of “sweeping epic”. The story starts off with two half-sisters (who don’t even know about each other’s existence) living in 18th-century Ghana. One sister marries a white man and stays in Ghana, living a life of privilege, while the other is sold into slavery and taken to America on a slave ship. This gigantic split in the family tree kicks off two parallel and vastly different narratives spanning EIGHT generations, ending with two 20-somethings in the present day. I remain in awe of Gyasi’s talent, and was enthralled throughout the entire book.

9. Sweetbitter / Stephanie Danler

Tess moves to New York City right out of school (and seemingly has no ties to her previous life - this bothered me, I wanted to know more about her past) and immediately lands a job at a beloved (though a little tired) fancy restaurant. Seemingly loosely based on Danler’s own experiences as a server, I got a real feel for the insular, incestuous, chaotic life in “the industry”. Tess navigates tensions between the kitchen and the front of house, falls for the resident bad-boy bartender, and positions herself as the mentee of the older and more glamorous head server, who may not be everything she seems. This is a juicy coming-of-age novel.

10. The Autobiography of Gucci Mane / Gucci Mane and Neil Martinez-Belkin

Gucci Mane is one of Atlanta’s hottest musicians, having helped bring trap music to the mainstream. I’d never heard of him until I read this book because I’m white and old! But not knowing him didn’t make this read any less interesting. In between wild facts (if you don’t get your music into the Atlanta strip clubs, your music isn’t making it out of Atlanta) and wilder escapades (Gucci holing himself up in his studio, armed to the teeth, in a fit of paranoia one night) Gucci Mane paints on honest picture of a determined, talented artist fighting to break free of a cycle of systemic racism and poverty.

11. I’ll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer / Michelle McNamara

McNamara was a journalist and true crime enthusiast who took it upon herself to try and solve the mystery of the Golden State Killer’s identity. Amazingly, her interest in this case also sparked other people’s interest in looking back at it, eventually leading to the arrest of the killer (though tragically, McNamara died a few months before the arrest and would never know how her obsession helped to capture him). This is a modern true crime classic and a riveting read.

12. A Great Reckoning / Louise Penny

The 12th novel in Penny’s Inspector Gamache mystery series sees our hero starting a new job teaching cadets at Quebec’s police academy. Of course, someone is murdered, and Gamache and his team work to dig the rot out of the institution, uncovering a killer in the process.

13. Any Man / Amber Tamblyn

Yes, this novel is by THAT Amber Tamblyn, star of “The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants”! Anyway, this book is a tad bit darker, and follows five men who’ve been victimized by the female serial rapist, who calls herself Maude. Going into this read I though that it might be some sort of revenge fantasy, but dudes, not to worry - we really feel awful for the male victims and see them in all their complexity. Perhaps, if more men read this book, they might better understand the trauma female and non-binary victims go through? That would require men to read books by women though. Guys? GUYS???

14. Ostara: Rituals, Recipes and Lore for the Spring Equinox / Kerri Connor

Yet another witchy read providing more information about this Spring sabbat. 

15. Scarborough / Catherine Hernandez

This novel takes place in OUR Scarborough! Following the lives of a number of residents (adults and children alike), the plot centres around the families attending an Ontario Early Years program as well as the program facilitator. Hernandez looks at the ways poverty, mental illness, addiction, race, and homophobia intersect within this very multicultural neighbourhood. It’s very sad, but there are also many sweet and caring moments between the children and within each of the families.

16. The Glitch / Elisabeth Cohen

Shelley Stone (kind of a fictional Sheryl Sandberg type) is the CEO of Conch, a successful Silicon Valley company. Like many of these over-the-top real-life tech execs, Shelley has a wild schedule full of business meetings, exercise, networking and parenting, leaving her almost no time to rest. While on an overseas business trip, she meets a younger woman also named Shelley Stone, who may or may not be her younger self. Is Shelley losing it? This is a dark comedy poking fun at tech start-up culture and the lie that we can have it all.

17. The Thirteenth Tale / Diane Setterfield

This is my kind of book! A young and inexperienced bookworm is handpicked to write the biography of an aging famous author, Vida Wynter. Summoned to her sprawling country home around Christmastime, the biographer is absolutely enthralled by Vida’s tales of a crumbling gothic estate and an eccentric family left too long to their own whims. Looking for a dark, twisty fairytale? This read’s for you.

18. Love & Misadventure / Lang Leav

Leav’s book of poems looked appealing, but for me, her collection fell short. I felt like I was reading a teenager’s poetry notebook (which I’m not criticizing, I love that teen girls write poetry, and surprise, surprise - so did I - but I’m too old for this kind of writing now).

19. Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows / Balli Kaur Jaswal

Hooo boy, my book club loved this one! Hoping to get a job more aligned with her literary interests, Nikki, the 20-something daughter of Indian immigrants to Britain, takes a job teaching writing at the community centre in London’s biggest Punjabi neighbourhood. The students are all older Punjabi women who don’t have much to do and because of their “widow” status have been somewhat sidelined within their community. Without anyone around to censor or judge them, the widows start sharing their own erotic fantasies with each other, each tale wilder than the last. As Nikki gets to know them better, she gains some direction in life and starts a romance of her own. (It should be noted that in addition to this lovely plot, there is a sub plot revolving around a possible honour killing in the community. For me, the juxtaposition of these two plots was odd, but not odd enough that it ruined the book.)

20. Beltane: Rituals, Recipes and Lore for May Day / Melanie Marquis

Beltane marks the start of the summer season in the witches’ year, and I learned all about how to ring it in, WITCH STYLE.

21. Summer of Salt / Katrina Leno

This book is essentially Practical Magic for teens, with a queer protagonist. All that to say, it’s enjoyable and sweet and a win for #RepresentationMatters, but it wasn’t a surprising or fresh story.

22. Too Like the Lightning / Ada Palmer

This is the first in the Terra Ignota quartet of novels, which is (I think) speculative fiction with maybe a touch of fantasy and a touch of sci-fi and a touch of theology and certainly a lot of philosophical ruminating too. I both really enjoyed it and felt so stupid while reading it. As a lifelong bookworm who doesn’t shy away from difficult reads, I almost never feel stupid while reading, but this book got me. The world building is next level and as soon as you think you’ve found your footing, Palmer pulls the rug out from under you and you’re left both stunned and excited about her latest plot twist. Interested in finding out what a future society grouped into ‘nations’ by interests and passions (instead of geographical borders and ethnicity) might be like? Palmer takes a hearty stab at it here.

23. The Trauma Cleaner: One Woman’s Extraordinary Life in the Business of Death, Decay and Disaster / Sarah Krasnostein

When Sarah Krasnostein met Sandra Pankhurst, she knew she had to write her biography (or something like it - this book is part biography, part love letter, part reckoning). And rightly so, as Sandra has led quite a life. She grew up ostracized within her own home by her immediate family, married and had children very young, came out as a trans woman and begin living as her authentic self (but abandoning her own young family in the process), took to sex work and lived through a vicious assault, married again, and started up her own successful company cleaning uncleanable spaces - the apartments of hoarders, the houses of recluses, the condos in which people ended their own lives. Sandra is the definition of resilience, but all her traumas (both the things people have done to her and the things she’s done to others) have left their mark, as Krasnostein discovers as she delicately probes the recesses of Sandra’s brain.

24. Becoming / Michelle Obama

My favourite things about any memoir from an ultra-famous person are the random facts that surprise you along the way. In this book, it was learning that all American presidents travel with a supply of their blood type in the event of an assassination attempt. I mean OF COURSE they would, but that had never occurred to me. I also appreciated Michelle opening up about her fertility struggles, the difficult decision to put her career on hold to support Barack’s dreams, and the challenge of living in the spotlight with two young children that you hope to keep down to earth. Overall, I think Michelle was as candid as someone in her position can be at this point in her life.

25 and 26. Seven Surrenders, The Will to Battle / Ada Palmer

I decided to challenge myself and stick with Palmer’s challenging Terra Ignota series, also reading the second and third instalments (I think the fourth is due to be released this year). I don’t know what to say, other than the world-building continues to be incredible and this futuristic society is on the bring of something entirely new.

27. Even Vampires Get the Blues / Kate MacAlister

This novel wins for “cheesiest read of the year”. When a gorgeous half-elf detective (you read that right) meets a centuries-old sexy Scottish vampire, sparks fly! Oh yeah, and they’re looking for some ancient thing in between having sex.

28. A Case of Exploding Mangoes / Mohammed Hanif

A piece of historical fiction based on the real-life suspicious plane crash in 1988 that killed many of Pakistan’s top military brass, this novel lays out many possible culprits (including a crow that ate too many mangoes). It’s a dark comedy taking aim at the paranoia of dictators and the boredom and bureaucracy of the military (and Bin Laden makes a cameo at a party).

29. Salvage the Bones / Jesmyn Ward

This novel takes place in the steaming hot days before Hurricane Katrina hits the Mississippi coast. The air is still and stifling and Esch’s life in the small town of Bois Sauvage feels even more stifled. Esch is 14 and pregnant and hasn’t told anyone yet. Her father is a heavy drinker and her three brothers are busy with their own problems. But as the storm approaches, the family circles around each other in preparation for the storm. This is a jarring and moving read made more visceral by the fact that the author herself survived Katrina. It’s also an occasionally violent book, and there are particularly long passages about dog-fighting (a hobby of one of the brothers). The dog lovers in my book club found it hard to get through, consider this your warning!

30. Everything’s Trash, But It’s Okay / Phoebe Robinson

A collection of essays in the new style aka writing multiple pages on a topic as though you were texting your best friend about it (#ImFineWithThisNewStyleByTheWay #Accessible), Robinson discusses love, friendship, being a Black woman in Hollywood, being plus-ish-size in Hollywood, and Julia Roberts teaching her how to swim (and guys, Julia IS as nice in real life as we’d all hoped she was!) Who is Robinson? Comedy fans will likely know her already, but I only knew her as one of the stars of the Netflix film Ibiza (which I enjoyed). This is a fun, easy read!

31. Midsummer: Rituals, Recipes and Lore for Litha / Deborah Blake

After reading this book, I charged my crystals under the midsummer sun!

32. Fingersmith / Sarah Waters

So many twists! So many turns! So many hidden motives and long-held secrets! Think Oliver Twist meets Parasite meets Lost! (Full disclosure, I haven’t seen Parasite yet, I’m just going off all the chatter about it). Sue is a con artist orphan in old-timey London. When the mysterious “Gentleman” arrives at her makeshift family’s flat with a proposal for the con of all cons, Sue is quickly thrust into a role as the servant for another young woman, Maud, living alone with her eccentric uncle in a country estate. As Sue settles into her act, the lines between what she’s pretending at and what she’s really feeling start to blur, and nothing is quite what it seems. This book is JUICY!

33. Rest Play Grow: Making Sense of Preschoolers (Or Anyone Who Acts Like One) / Deborah MacNamara, PhD

I read approximately one parenting book a year, and this was this year’s winner. As my eldest approached her third birthday, we started seeing bigger and bigger emotions and I wasn’t sure how to handle them respectfully and gently. This book gave me a general roadmap for acknowledging her feelings, sitting through them with her, and the concept of “collecting” your child to prevent tantrums from happening or to help calm them down afterward. I’ll be using this approach for the next few years!

34. Lughnasadh: Rituals, Recipes and Lore for Lammas / Melanie Marquis

And with this read, I’ve now read about the entire witch’s year. SO MOTE IT BE.

35. In Cold Blood / Truman Capote

How had I not read this until now? This true-crime account that kicked off the modern genre was rich in detail, compassionate to the victims, and dug deep into the psyche of the killers. The descriptions of the midwest countryside and the changing seasons also reminded me of Keith Morrison’s voiceovers on Dateline. Is Capote his inspiration?

36. I’m Afraid of Men / Vivek Shraya

A quick, short set of musings from trans musician and writer Shraya still packs an emotional punch. She writes about love and loss, toxic masculinity, breaking free of gender norms, and what it’s like to exist as a trans woman.

37. The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You / Elaine N. Aron, PhD

Having long thought I might be a highly sensitive person (lots of us are!), I decided to learn more about how to better cope with stressful situations when I don’t have enough alone time or when things are too loud or when I get rattled by having too much to do any of the other myriad things that shift me into panic mode. Though some of the advice is a bit too new-agey for me (talking to your inner child, etc), some of it was practical and useful.

38. Swamplandia! / Karen Russell

The family-run alligator wrestling theme park, Swamplandia, is swimming in debt and about to close. The widowed father leaves the everglades for the mainland in a last-ditch attempt to drum up some money, leaving the three children to fend for themselves. A dark coming-of-age tale that blends magic realism, a ghost story, the absurd and a dangerous boat trip to the centre of the swamplands, this novel examines a fractured family mourning its matriarch in different ways.

39. A Mind Spread Out on the Ground / Alicia Elliott

This is a beautiful collection of personal essays brimming with vulnerability, passion, and fury. Elliott, the daughter of a Haudenosaunee father and a white mother, shares her experiences growing up poor in a family struggling with mental illness, addiction and racism. Topics touch on food scarcity, a never-ending battle with lice, parenthood and the importance of hearing from traditionally marginalized voices in literature. 

40. Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay / Elena Ferrante

The third novel in Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet sees Elena and Lila move from their early twenties into their thirties and deal with a riot of issues - growing careers, changing political beliefs, the challenges of motherhood and romantic relationships, and existing as strong-willed, intelligent women in 1960s and 70s Italy. I’ll definitely finish the series soon.

41. Half-Blood Blues / Esi Edugyan

A small group of American and German jazz musicians working on a record find themselves holed up in Paris as the Germans begin their occupation in WW2. Hiero, the youngest and most talented member of the group, goes out one morning for milk and is arrested by the Germans, never to be heard from again. Fifty years later, the surviving members of the band go to Berlin for the opening night of a documentary about the jazz scene from that era, and soon find themselves on a road trip through the European countryside to find out what really became of Hiero all those years ago. Edugyan’s novel is a piercing examination of jealousy, ambition, friendship, race and guilt. And features a cameo by Louis Armstrong!

42. A Serial Killer’s Daughter: My Story of Faith, Love and Overcoming / Kerri Rawson

So Brad and I had just finished watching season 2 of Mindhunter, and as I browse through a neighbourhood little library, I spot this book and the serial killer in question is the BTK Killer! Naturally, I had to read it. What I didn’t realize is that this is actually a Christian book, so Rawson does write a lot about struggling with her belief in God and finding her way back to Him, etc. But there are also chapters more fitting with the true crime and memoir genres that I equally enjoyed and was creeped out by.

43. The Night Ocean / Paul La Farge

This is another book that made me feel somewhat stupid as a reader. I just know there are details or tidbits that completely went over my head that would likely enrich a better reader’s experience. In broad strokes, the novel is about a failed marriage between a psychiatrist and a writer who became dangerously obsessed with H.P. Lovecraft and the rumours that swirled around him and his social circle. The writer’s obsession takes him away from his marriage and everything else, and eventually it looks like he ends his own life. The psychiatrist is doubtful (no body was found) and she starts to follow him down the same rabbit hole. At times tense, at times funny, at times sad, I enjoyed the supposed world of Lovecraft and his fans and peers, but again, I’m sure there are deeper musings here that I couldn’t reach.

44. Glass Houses / Louise Penny

The 13th novel in Penny’s Inspector Gamache mystery series sees our hero taking big risks to fight the opioid crisis in Quebec. He and his team focus on catching the big crime boss smuggling drugs across the border from Vermont, endangering his beloved town of Three Pines in the process. 

45. The Bone Houses / Emily Lloyd-Jones

My Halloween read for the year, this dark fairytale of a YA novel was perfect for the season. Since her parents died, Ryn has taken over the family business - grave digging - to support herself and her siblings. As the gravedigger, she knows better than most that due to an old curse, the dead in the forest surrounding her village don’t always stay dead. But as more of the forest dead start appearing (and acting more violently than usual), Ryn and an unexpected companion (yes, a charming young man cause there’s got to be a romance!) travel to the heart of the forest to put a stop to the curse once and for all.

46. The Witches Are Coming / Lindy West

Another blazing hot set of essays from my favourite funny feminist take on Trump, abortion rights, #MeToo, and more importantly Adam Sandler and Dateline. As always, Lindy, please be my best friend?

47. Know My Name / Chanel Miller

This memoir is HEAVY but so, so needed. Recently, Chanel Miller decided to come forward publicly and share that she was the victim of Brock Turner’s sexual assault. She got the courage to do so after she posted her blistering and beautiful victim impact statement on social media and it went viral. Miller’s memoir is a must-read, highlighting the incredible and awful lengths victims have to go to to see any modicum of justice brought against their attackers. Miller dealt with professional ineptitude from police and legal professionals, victim-blaming, victim-shaming, depression and anxiety, the inability to hold down a job, and still managed to come out the other side of this trial intact. And in the midst of all the horror, she writes beautifully about her support system - her family, boyfriend and friends - and about the millions of strangers around the world who saw themselves in her experience.

48. Christmas Ghost Stories: A Collection of Winter Tales / Mark Onspaugh

Ghosts AND Christmas? Yes please! This quirky collection features a wide array of festively spooky tales. You want the ghost of Anne Boleyn trapped in a Christmas ornament? You got it! What about the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future drinking together in a bar? Yup, that’s here too! 

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So, what were my top picks of the year, the books that stuck with me the most? In no particular order:

Educated

Homegoing

The Wanderers

Know My Name

Scarborough

[miss-rumphius]

Best of the Best 2018

My yearly roundup of the the best forms of entertainment that I consumed this during the past 365 days. Let me know if you anything on this list also makes the top of your 2018 roundup too, always down to chat about my favorites! 

Literature

 Becoming by Michelle Obama-  Michelle's moving testimony of her lived experiences before and during life in the White House, is simply, a must read. She writes with charm and grace about her life and I was moved to tears multiple times. 

Hannah Senesh: Her Life and Diary- One of those historical documents that maybe not everyone has read, but absolutely should. The way Hannah wrote of her life in the 1930s Europe and later in Palestine, gives insight into the Jewish experience from that time period. In addition, she didn't shy away from her thoughts, her preoccupations with the things women do think and care about (like relationships, becoming a better poet, travel, etc). It is likely that you have read her poems "A Walk to Caesarea" and "Blessed is the Match," but this book includes her full breadth of writings left behind. 

The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street by Helene Hanff- For anyone who has ever read 84 Charring Cross Road and not known their was a sequel... get thee to a used bookstore and track down this lovely tome! Helene's diary of her first time in England made me cry and laugh throughout. 

Einstein and the Rabbi by Naomi Levy- I have not totally finished this book, but have read enough to attest to its brilliance. I am reading it slowly, it is sat next to my bedside and I pick it up every few days and read a chapter or two. It is one of those books about Jewish concepts that you want to savor slowly, let it sink in over time, rather then rush reading it. 

Television

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel- The episodes that take place in the Catskills are probably some of my favorite bits of television ever. Utterly brilliant and completely, and unabashedly Jewish. 

Queer Eye- Absolutely cannot forget about the fact that 2018 was the year we were introduced to the fab 5. I am obsessed and I love how these men are using their platform to spread goodness in the world. Plus, I genuinely now quote Antoni's, "a Mac & Cheese can be so personal," all the time.

 Schitts Creek- This show is totally delightful and hilarious. Plus, I love the character growth that has occurred over the last few seasons for the Rose family. 

Derry Girls- A late addition to my list, as I only watched it the other day! But this show is brilliant and reminds me of My Mad Fat Diary, in that it is slightly nutty and is about teenagers in the 90s. A wonderfully done Irish show that takes place in Northern Ireland during the troubles. I've learned a bit about that time period, as its something I vaguely knew about but didn't quite know enough. But it's done in a way thats more of a slice of life rather than taking itself too seriously. 

Movies

 The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society- I loved the book when it came out a few years ago and now I love the movie. It ticks all the boxes of what I want from a historical fiction movie: dynamic female lead, handsome slightly brooding but kind romantic lead, beautiful costumes, and a story that makes me cry. 

To All The Boys I've Loved Before- This movie is so enjoyable to watch and a perfect addition to the teen rom-com genre. 

Crazy Rich Asians- Obviously a historic movie in a number of ways, but it is also, just so damn good. Awkwafina was the breakout star for me, she absolutely took her role and ran with it. 

Music

Youthful Hearts by Axel Flovent- A wonderful Icelandic artist whose EP has probably been played almost daily since it was released this fall. My favorite song from it at the moment is, "Stars."

F.A.M.E. by Maluma- Apparently this was my most played album on Spotify for 2018. What can I say, I needed a poppy-bop for the summer?! It is a great album though. 

Be More Kind by Frank Turner- A meditation on the state of the world, including US politics and social climate by an Englishman. At times a bit dark but with an underlying vibe of hope. The title track is especially so beautiful and worth a listen. 

The High Low- Journalists Dolly and Pandora do the best round up of pop-culture, news, and books each week on this podcast. Each episode feels as if you are listening to your best friends tell you about the cool new things they've discovered. 

Quotes

"Do I believe in God? I don’t know. For me he is more a symbol and expression of the moral forces in which I believe. Despite everything, I believe the world was created for good and that there is nothing on earth so evil that a ray of light can’t seep through, or a pinch of good can’t be seen."-Hannah Senesh, Her Life and Diary 

“That's the way to live: to stick your hand into the world's infinite outside, turn the outside inside out, the world into a room and god into a little soul inside the infinite body.” -Yehuda Amichai, from the poem, My Son Was Drafted Today 

“What if the mightiest word is love? Love beyond marital, filial, national. Love that casts a widening pool of light.” -Elizabeth Alexander, from the poem, Praise Song for the Day 

[mst3kproject]

Attack of the Puppet People

This is the other movie Bert I. Gordon namedropped in Earth vs the Spider.  The screenplay was by John Worthing Yates, a guy who has a name that sounds like a Byronic poet but mostly wrote giant bug movies.  It stars June Kenney from that movie and Bloodlust!, John Hoyt from Lost Continent and The Time Travellers, and yep, John Agar.  The title is pretty much a lie, too – unless it refers to Agar tearing the head off a marionette.

Dolls Incorporated is a small toy company in Los Angeles.  The owner, Mr. Franz, needs a new secretary and hires Sally Reynolds, who is fresh out of college and has no family – an interesting choice, especially when we discover his previous secretary has vanished without a trace.  Sally soon notices that Mr. Franz has a weird habit of treating his dolls like real people, and comes to worry about his mental health.  When a salesman, Bob Wesley, asks her to marry him she is more than happy to leave the unnerving Mr. Franz behind, but Mr. Franz does not intend to let her.  With some technobabble and a contraption made out of photography equipment, he shrinks both Bob and Sally down to Barbie size to join his collection of human dolls! Somehow they must make their way back up to his office in order to un-shrink themselves, but it’s a very long way when you’re only a foot tall.

(The point of including clips from The Amazing Colossal Man, by the way, appears to have been a ham-fisted bit of foreshadowing with the line I’m not growing – you’re shrinking!  Which… okay, sure, if that made everybody feel better about the shameless self-promotion.)

The movie was made very quickly in order to capitalize on The Incredible Shrinking Man and I have to say, it puts significant effort into not being merely a ripoff. It’s not nearly as ambitious as its model in terms of special effects, but it has much more plot, being an actual story rather than a psychological study, although it does some of that, too.  I suspect that this was an idea that either Gordon or Yates had sitting around anyway and they welcomed the excuse to put it into production.

In terms of its story, this is actually one of Bert I. Gordon’s better efforts.  Like The Amazing Colossal Man, it tries to explore character a little rather than just being a monster rampage, and the character it’s interested in is Mr. Franz’.  He’s a deeply lonely man who feels everybody he cares about abandons him – starting with his wife, who ran off with a boyfriend long ago – and therefore goes to great lengths to keep them.  This obsession has grown worse and worse, until now people he’s only known a few weeks are subject to his captivity.  When he believes the police are on to him, he decides to commit suicide and take all his prisoners with him, because even in death he cannot bear to leave them behind.

The movie does occasionally waste our time, as in the sequence where one of the human dolls is commanded to sing, but not very often. Things like the tiny cat, or Sally’s efforts to go to the police, seem like sidelines but later turn out to be quite important.  My favourite part is when Franz is forced to leave his little people unsupervised when a friend drops in on him with a lengthy story to tell – he knows he can’t leave them alone for too long but he also doesn’t want to be rude to his buddy, so he keeps trying to make excuses and things get more and more awkward.  I’m pretty sure any introvert can identify with the situation, even those of us who are not mad scientists.

Attack of the Puppet People also has some of the better effects shots I’ve ever seen in Bert I. Gordon.  The dolls in their cases are nothing but paper cut-outs, always carefully held face-on to the camera in an attempt to preserve the illusion, and there are very visible seams around a miniature cat in Franz’ hands, but the images of tiny people interacting with oversized objects are actually pretty good.  There’s one of tiny Sally on a desk, with a telephone in front of her and Mr. Franz leaning in to talk to her, that’s almost seamless – the only place the illusion breaks is that he’s not quite actually looking at her. Quite a few of the oversized objects, like the telephone or coffee tin one woman uses as a bathtub, must have been specially made for the movie, and they’re detailed and convincing. The best is the oversize puppet the characters have to interact with. It really does look like something small, magnified.

The performances in the movie, on the other hand, are some of the worst I’ve seen even in a Bert I. Gordon film.  Everybody picks one note and sticks to it.  John Hoyt had been in Julius Caesar (although he’d also been in The Conqueror) and would go on to be in Spartacus (and Flesh Gordon), but here he just gives us the exact same Valium-laced smile throughout the whole movie.  Sometimes it’s creepy, lending credence to Sally’s early suspicion that Franz is a serial killer, but mostly it’s just annoying.  The long scene of technobabble while he explains how his shrinking machine works is insufferable.  June Kenney gives her usually slightly over-wrought reads that sound like a high school’s production of Shakespeare.

Then of course there’s John Agar.  His character is written as kind of a jerk, but in ways that were probably acceptable for white men in the 50’s.  His physical performance, on the other hand, makes you want to see Sally kick him repeatedly in the nuts.  He looms over her, follows a foot behind her when she is clearly uncomfortable with this, and touches her when she does not want to be touched.  Nowadays all this would earn him a restraining order but in this old movie it’s apparently supposed to be romantic.  Then there’s the way he laughs at her when she confesses that she’s slightly afraid of Mr. Franz.  How the hell did he ever persuade her to go out with him, let alone marry him?  And who fucking proposes in the middle of The Amazing Colossal Man?!

When Sally believes Bob has run off on her, she protests to Mr. Franz, “Bob wouldn’t treat me this way if he could help it!”  The audience just rolls their eyes, because they’ve already seen Bob treat her far worse.  We’ll see him do worse again, too, when he persuades Sally to abandon the others at the theatre even though they know that Franz will kill them if he finds them.

Besides Mr. Franz’ pathological fear of losing people close to him, the other place the movie goes in exploring its characters psychology is a form of Stockholm Syndrome.  When Bob and Sally meet the other ‘dolls’, they discover that their fellow prisoners have resigned themselves to their fate.  Mr. Franz mostly keeps them in jars and occasionally lets them out to party, and they’ve decided to look at it as if they’re on a sort of permanent vacation, just enjoying the party without worrying about things they don’t believe they can change.  The only rebellion apparent is the teenage girl, Lori, refusing to sing on command – and she changes her mind in a hurry when Franz threatens to put her back in her bottle.

They aren’t totally brainwashed, though.  When a chance to escape presents itself, they all pitch in to help.  The moral of the story, insofar as it seems to have one, is that freedom is better than slavery even when the slaves are well-treated and have everything taken care of for them.  The little people don’t need to work, they don’t need to pay taxes, and Mr. Franz sees to all their needs, but they are still prisoners.  Real life may be difficult and full of worries and responsibilities, but it’s better than being kept in a box!

Bert I. Gordon never used women as heroes, in the sense of actually doing anything to save the day, but it’s kind of interesting how frequently he used them as point-of-view characters.  Sally in Attack of the Puppet People joins Audrey Aimes in Beginning of the End and Joyce Manning in War of the Colossal Beast as a female lead through whose eyes we’re watching all this happen.  Male characters may be more active and heroic, but they are secondary in terms of screen time and audience identification.  I wonder if this were something intentional or not, and either way, what it might reveal about his storytelling.

Is it feminist?  I don’t think so.  In many of Gordon’s films, the characters feel helpless in the face of more powerful forces: the grasshoppers of Beginning of the End overrun the military easily, Joyce and her problem are handed around like a hot potato by people who don’t care, and even Glenn Manning is a powerless victim of his own growth.  Perhaps the choice of a passively watching woman rather than an actively heroic man as the main character is supposed to add to this.  Audrey Aimes might be the best example, in that her job, as a reporter, is to observe and record, rather than to intervene.  Consider The Magic Sword, in which Princess Helene watches her own rescue attempts in the magic mirror, while Sir George’s transition to manhood is represented by him leaving mere watching behind and actually getting involved in the events he has observed.  Or Necromancy, in which Lori Brandon is left watching herself in Mr. Cato’s thrall.  Heck with Manos, I could write a thesis on this.

If I had to pick a Stinger Moment for this movie, it would be the tiny people gathered around a huge telephone while Bob exclaims, “the police!  Does anyone know the number?”  At the time this wouldn’t have been a joke at all – 911 came into wide use only in the early 1960’s, but from a modern viewer it earns a snicker, and it would definitely have been funny in the UK, where 999 had been around since the 30’s. There’s your random fact for the day.

[nntodayblog]

A (Gross) Girl’s Guide To Personal Hygiene

Tallulah Pomeroy

400

I am a “gross girl,” and I’ve identified as such for as long as I can remember.

In part, I have my mother to thank. Although she dutifully applies a thick layer of lipstick before any and all activities, including bath time, she also adheres to the cardinal toilet flushing rule “If it’s yellow, let it mellow” and counts quickly flitting her wrist under a running faucet as washing her hands.

For my sisters and I, hygienic transgressions have always been badges of honor. When we were younger, we’d compete to see who could go the longest without showering, cackling together while we discussed which body parts itched the most. We built toilet paper castles in the mellow bowls our mother left behind, piling the paper like cotton clouds in the middle of a urine-filled moat.

As I got older, I remained gross.

During my freshman year of college, I wore the same leggings every day, deodorizing the crotch instead of washing them properly. My senior year, rather than walking all the way to the downstairs bathroom in my apartment, I took to peeing in a mason jar on my bedroom floor. When spillage occurred, I’d wipe it up with a rogue bit of laundry.

There are others like me, I know. I’ve seen evidence in listicles across the web. There’s BuzzFeed’s “49 Gross Things Most Girls Secretly Enjoy,” which includes “running your fingers through your pubes in a nonsexual way.” Bustle’s “19 Gross Things All Women Do in Private (Or At Least When We Think No One’s Watching)” exalts the fun of “examining your panty crust like you’re a scientist.” Cosmopolitan’s “13 Super-Gross Things Women Do That Men Don’t Know About” takes the cake with a description of cleaning yourself after a period-poop combo ― “the good ole PB&J wipe!”

The headlines make plain the fact that countless women indulge their grossest urges out of curiosity, laziness and pure fascination. Yet their bodily offenses, so counter to the image of a pristine and clean young lady reflected in etiquette books and American Girl Doll catalogues, are often kept secret ― or, at the very least, outside the purview of men.

Tallulah Pomeroy

Enter A Girl’s Guide to Personal Hygiene, a picture book illustrated by Bristol-based artist Tallulah Pomeroy that’s full of the kinds of gross girl confessions that trump even my and my sisters’ rituals.

Divided into chapters including "Picking & Squeezing," "Nooks & Crannies," "Periods," and "Tasty Snacks," Pomeroy’s book ― released on Feb. 13 by Soft Skull Press ― features anonymously submitted anecdotes detailing the nasty shit women do behind closed doors, from smelling their dirty underwear to free-bleeding in their pants.

The 112-page paperback is a celebration of everything feminine and dirty ― an homage to the women with a surplus of earwax, an abundance of gray pubes and far too many crimson-stained articles of clothing.

Pomeroy, the in-house illustrator at Catapult, started the project over two years ago. Inspiration struck after she overheard two women gossiping about a friend who’d drunkenly taken a shit in the sink. Utterly scandalized, they declared that anyone who could do such a thing was “not a girl.” This got Pomeroy, 25, thinking: Which of her own private habits would disqualify her from girlhood?

Around the same time, Pomeroy’s then-boyfriend lent her Charlotte Roche’s 2008 book Wetlands, which chronicles a sexually liberated and unabashedly grotesque 18-year-old’s hospital stint recovering from a botched ass shaving accident. No dirty details are spared as the protagonist, with time on her hands, takes stock of her sexual exploits and corporeal habits. “I love it when sperm dries on my skin, when it crusts and flakes off,” reads one relatively tame line.

Not enough for you? Here’s more (obviously NSFW):

When I jerk somebody off, I always make sure that some cum gets on my hand. I run my fingers through it and let it dry under my long nails. That way, later in the day, I can reminisce about my good fuck partner by biting my nails and getting bits of the hardened cum to play with in my mouth; I chew on it and, after tasting it and letting it slowly dissolve, I swallow it. It’s an intention I’m very proud of: the memorable sex bon-bon.

These are the sorts of passages that titillate a segment of readers and nauseate the rest. Pomeroy counts herself among the former group, enraptured by Roche’s ability to treat the body as both a site of sexual pleasure and grotesque glory. She endeavored to do the same with A Girl’s Guide to Personal Hygiene.

“She was so unashamed to the point of being proud,” Pomeroy said of the primary Wetlands character, Helen. “She loves that she’s gross. I think that’s what I identified with the most ― that I could feel positive about these things rather than ashamed of them.”

Tallulah Pomeroy

This combination of events ― reading Wetlands and overhearing the shit-in-the-sink story ― ultimately prompted Pomeroy to forge a space where women could share the nitty-gritty details of their nasty pastimes. In 2016 she created a private Facebook group cheekily titled “A Girl’s Guide to Personal Hygiene” and invited all her female friends to join. Before long, friends invited friends and the group went, as Pomeroy described, “mental.”

Right away, stories started rolling in, each woman playfully trying to out-gross the last. Pomeroy even created a submission form so some members could share their funkiest exploits anonymously if they so desired. The confessions achieved Roche-levels of nastiness. “I like to pick my nose while I masturbate. It helps,” one woman wrote. “I like to smell the contents of my Mooncup because someone once told me theirs smelled like beef,” wrote another.

Women even started using the Facebook group to seek advice about personal matters like IUD insertion and achieving multiple orgasms. It quickly became clear to Pomeroy that the space she carved out wasn’t just something women wanted ― it was something they needed.

From the beginning, Pomeroy said she had dreams of turning the confessions into a book ― an ironic etiquette guide that would “take the piss out of the idea that girls should be hygienic.” She had her doubts, though. Beyond a sense of gratification, the Facebook group had also awakened in Pomeroy a bubbling sense of humiliation she hadn’t even realized she possessed.

“A voice of shame,” she explained. “The voice you’ve heard since you were a child saying your body is dirty. Saying that women are clean and beautiful and don’t squeeze their spots.”

In an essay for The Atlantic, writer Leslie Jamison discussed a similar kind of humiliation that came with writing about matters of the flesh. “A certain shame,” she wrote, “like a faint body odor I couldn’t smell because it was mine: There was too much body, and this too-much-body risked banality and melodrama at once.”

Roche encountered it, too. Despite the fact that Wetlands became a cult obsession ― it was the best-selling book in the world in March of 2008, and was eventually translated from its native German into 27 languages ― some critics took issue with what they categorized as the novel’s cheap thrills, suggesting Roche’s work was not so much pioneering as “faux-outrageous.” In a 2009 review for The New York Times, Sallie Tisdale lambasted it, calling Roche’s descriptions “banal and repetitive,” her vocabulary “painfully limited.”

Of course, men have long been permitted to discuss their bathroom quirks and sexual secrets. “We’re very familiar with male toilet humor and the stereotype of a stinky man,” Pomeroy said. Yet when a woman wants to laugh about an ingrown hair or a particularly pungent flow she runs the risk of being perceived as “not funny, not moving, not provocative and certainly not titillating,” as The Guardian’s Nicola Barr wrote of Roche back in the day.

Pomeroy calls bullshit on this kind of literary criticism. “It’s much easier to call the book ‘clumsy’ and ‘banal’ than to call yourself a prude,” she said. She thinks Roche’s prose, written from the perspective of a teenager, feels exactly as it should ― intimate, unpretentious and imperfect.

“The language in Wetlands isn’t complicated,” she explained. “It isn’t trying to impress. The form of it is very frank and open and talkative. You feel like she’s right there with you.”

Tallulah Pomeroy

Pomeroy’s nagging voice of doubt didn’t linger for long. With the help of Soft Skull Press, she began compiling some of the standout anecdotes from Facebook into a book and illustrating them. Aside from some minor edits for typos, she preserved the original language of the Facebook group.

“These girls are often saying these things for the first time,” Pomeroy said. “They’ve thought about how they’re going to phrase it. I think it’s important to not make it sound more grand than it is. Let it be earthy.”

Deciding which anecdotes would make the cut was difficult. When it came to a story about a woman who, in advance of a threesome, whipped out her bloody tampon and stored it in a full teapot, which her boyfriend’s mother later discovered, editors assumed the anonymous story was fake. Pomeroy laughed; she actually knew all the people involved in the teapot debacle.

In the final book, juicy stories like this come to life thanks to Pomeroy’s illustrations, gangly line drawings splashed with watercolor that make a woman shitting herself look vaguely cool. Like the book’s language, its images do not attempt to sugarcoat their subject matter. Pomeroy draws clearly the most deliciously vile of moments ― poop emerging from a butt, discharge soaking panties, pus oozing from a zit.

“It’s kind of funny because it runs parallel with the book, me realizing actually I could be myself [in my drawings],” she said. “I didn’t have to clean things up. The drawings are very rough. They’re always the first drafts, that’s how I like it best. If I do multiple drafts, they lose that immediacy, and I wanted the drawings to have a real sense of freshness, in the same way the stories are honest and free. It was a real relief to realize my style is a good style, my own thing that I do is valuable, even if it’s rough and wonky.”

Because many of the book’s confessions were submitted anonymously, Pomeroy isn’t certain how many ― if any ― trans or gender-nonconforming women contributed. “My understanding of the term ‘girls’ refers to anyone who identifies as feminine, regardless of their gender,” she said. “Most of the stories relate to physically female bodies, but not all, there is still the underlying emphasis of pushing at the idea of femininity, which is relevant to trans and cis women alike.”

Pomeroy’s book has received praise from writers including Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties) and Alissa Nutting (Tampa, Made for Love), both of whom fearlessly write the feminine bodily experience into their work. The day it arrived in the HuffPost office, my coworkers and I swarmed around the pink paperback, pointing out which anecdotes we’ve participated in and which were completely baffling. Before long we were swapping our own stories of earwax and butt hair, tales unbeknownst to even our partners.

One of the main messages of the #MeToo movement currently sweeping our culture is that there is power in women’s stories. The subtext, however, is that to be taken seriously, these stories often revolve around personal experiences of trauma and pain, painstakingly rehashed to convince the public of a truth they should already have accepted.

“It’s really important to share these silly stories, too,” Pomeroy said. “They don’t diminish the power of the more serious ones. They still affirm that women’s bodies are our own.”

Perhaps the right to pop your own zits is not the ultimate feminist crusade of our time. But Pomeroy’s gross girl gang isn’t just stirring up shit for the fun of it. They are rebelling against long-held beliefs that women’s bodies are shameful, dirty and obscene ― at least without proper primping and powdering. They’re giving a glimpse into their hairiest, smelliest, stickiest parts in solidarity with women who just want to feel comfortable in their own skin.

“We’re not created for someone else’s pleasure,” Pomeroy said. “Our bodies aren’t for anybody else’s use. I’m not there to be groped and I’m also not there to be told that my body is disgusting or shameful. I think it’s all part of the same thing. If someone is horrified by the idea of girls picking their ingrown hairs then maybe they need to think about what they expect women to be. There might be a problem.”

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Reference source : A (Gross) Girl’s Guide To Personal Hygiene

[heleniad]

referring to my reblog...

i wonder if helen knew, when she sailed to troy with paris, that her actions would start a war. it seems reasonable for her to think so — menelaus, as all good men, is a man of honor. but regardless there is still that clouded judgement from aphrodite's influence which had pulled helen away from hermione so callously.

now if she knew that her elopement would start a war, attaining kleos might have been part of the reason for going in the first place — alongside desire for the freedom that seemed to come with paris, escape from an undoubtedly tedious life, aphrodite, the sort... i have always thought of helen as being different from other women of her time: for her, kleos is attainable. she is a daughter of zeus, and that has been apart of her identity for as long as her beauty has been. at the time of her elopement, she is still young, and i imagine she still prizes her beauty as something of a divine gift rather than a curse ( a beauty like that, i think, could never be hated by a woman of that time unless there is true reason for her to do so — as in euripides' helen ). it changes as the war wages on, of course.

even if she did not believe that her actions would start a war, i don't doubt there to lack a selfish motive behind helen's elopement. her life with menelaus was dull, monotonous, unexciting. it was wifely duty after wifely duty. in my interpretation, i imagine that helen did not love hermione immediately upon birth as most women seemed ( and still seem ) to. helen, who was most likely a teenager when she had hermione, felt a clear disconnection from her daughter at the start ( this hc is inspired by sylvia plath's poem morning song ). fondness only grew as the years passed by. things were not great for the young and idealistic helen, and paris provided a path that could bring her to an ambiguous but undoubtedly bright future. not in terms of kleos, perhaps, but for sure in terms of her own personal life. there was still that spark within helen that yearned and felt herself to be not undeserving of good things to come. she was a demigod, and even at the end of the war she did not deny the power that came with that status, however wretched.

regardless, helen's end is as she begins. she may still long, dream, and yearn of freedom or the pleasures that should have come with her divinity, but still she ends in domesticity. she still tries to grasp for her agency, as per my post earlier referring to the odyssey, but her fate is decided. her fire has doused. she is older now, and sadder, and stuck with a husband whom, i think, can never trust her as fully as he did in the beginning.

[dweemeister]

National Velvet (1944)

Elizabeth Taylor was born to British-American parents in London in 1932 and left with her family for California given the escalating hostilities in Europe. While in America, she auditioned for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) and Universal at the suggestion of her mother’s peers – her mother, initially hesitant, came to when she believed acting might help the young Elizabeth acclimate to the U.S. Terminated from her Universal contract after one film and picked up by MGM, she was soon credited in two animal movies that cemented her status as a rising child actor in Hollywood (she went uncredited in 1944′s Jane Eyre and The White Cliffs of Dover). Lassie Come Home (1943) was released first; the subject of this write-up, National Velvet, came second. Unlike Lassie Come Home, National Velvet puts Taylor front and center in the action – an agreeable, if not overdone and treacly movie about a young girl who loves horses and will never stop reminding everyone that she loves horses. Clarence Brown’s National Velvet is a film I have long procrastinated to watch – for no reason other than its scheduling on Turner Classic Movies (TCM) several times during the year (its super-availability made me prioritize other, less-available films) – and the returns are a mild disappointment.

Based on Enid Bagnold’s 1935 novel of the same name, National Velvet sees fourteen-year-old Velvet Brown (Taylor) living with her father Herbert (Donald Crisp) and mother Araminty (Anne Revere), as well as older sisters Edwina (Angela Lansbury; who looks too mature to be the schoolgirl age that the film depicts her character to be... this is the first and only time she plays a regular, boring teenager) and Malvolia (Juanita Quigley; “Mally”). Velvet has always been entranced by horses and meets someone who will foster that love – a down-on-his-luck wanderer named Mi Taylor (Mickey Rooney). Mi appears to have a connection to Mrs. Brown, but she says nothing about it early on. Soon after, Violet will win a horse she will name, “The Pie” in a raffle. Her sights set on the Grand National steeplechase, Mi offers to help take care of the horse and train Violet. Mrs. Brown is supportive and Mr. Brown, after lending his blustering opposition to the whole idea, relents. You probably have a good idea about what happens at the end; if you don’t, you obviously have never seen an animal or sports movie (or a hybrid of those two).

Screenwriter Helen Deutsch (1950′s King Solomon’s Mines and 1953′s Lili) really wants you to know that Velvet cannot stop thinking about horses. It’s obsessive and probably unhealthy. Even if a simple conversation is not even close to equestrian sports, Violet will insert something about horses in there. Even in quieter moments to herself, the audience knows the one subject she is thinking about. Yes, horses. Case in point: in the lead-up to the Grant National steeplechase, Violet takes a bit of time to deeply sniff a collection of decorative flowers. “Horses”, she dreamily exhales. One hopes there are dedicated sections of her heart unrelated to the race she is about to run and her love for The Pie. But damn it all, let the kid live out her dream as Mrs. Brown (who has lived a quiet life after garnering national acclaim for swimming the English Channel) puts so beautifully when speaking to Violet:

MRS. BROWN: We’re alike. I, too, believe that everyone should have a chance at a breathtaking piece of folly once in... life... Your dream has come early. But remember, Velvet, it will have to last you all the rest of your life.

For these fleeting accomplishments that make up so much of human desire, it is human memory that remains when the fanfare, the event or object of desire itself, and the celebrations have concluded. Deutsch does not emphasize this critical lesson as much as she could have in her screenplay, and that is to National Velvet’s detriment. The film, which could be presented as a children’s drama, could be more honest for the younger viewers who will watch. This is not to say that National Velvet should have adopted a darker tone – no, I’m not asking to kill any horses or have Violet fall into existential despair after the Grand National – but for films like this to better acknowledge how difficult it can be to reconcile our dreams with our future when our dreams have been realized. Through Mi’s decision after the Grand National, National Velvet touches upon this. But what about the decisions and troubles Violet might face? Violet, for all her equine fixations, is about to grow into her future self that hopefully will not be too hung up over the Grand National. That adjustment can be tricky, and the film’s resolution – given Violet’s characterization throughout – is unsatisfying in that respect.

Close to twelve years old upon the start of production, Elizabeth Taylor found herself entranced with the character of Violet just as much as Violet adores Pie. Taylor committed herself to working out by riding horses, swimming, and spine stretches. With Clarence Brown (1935′s Anna Karenina, 1943′s The Human Comedy) directing and bolstered by her own personal conviction to play this role, this is a solid child performance burdened by Deutsch’s lackluster screenplay and inability to invoke any sense of depth to Violet. Is it Taylor’s best child performance? I hesitate to commit to that, given my unfamiliarity with her earliest work. The other great performance in National Velvet is by Anne Revere (1943′s The Song of Bernadette, 1951′s A Place in the Sun) as Mrs. Brown. Revere’s character is the film’s sage – hackneyed fixtures for any animal or sports movie, but unusual in this case as it is a woman this time – and she only reveals herself incrementally. We know of her past glories, but her opinions towards Violet’s aspirations are not stated until shortly before the Grand National. Revere plays a mother curious about her child’s dreams, willing to stand aside and observe her daughter’s and her husband’s reactions, only wanting what is best for her child.

Mickey Rooney (Andy Hardy series and innumerable MGM movies, 1977′s Pete’s Dragon) is the only actor not attempting an accent and, goodness, is it distracting – if you think Dick Van Dyke’s failed Cockney accent in Mary Poppins (1964) is terrible, think again. Aside from his elocution, Rooney is serviceable in summoning Mi’s brokenness when he needs to. This is not vintage Rooney and fans of The Black Stallion (1979) will notice many similarities between Rooney’s performances in both films, but this is one of his better dramatic performances from his Studio System days if one ignores his antics during the Grand National scene – a drama-killing decision from Brown and Deutsch.

Less convincing is another veteran: Donald Crisp. Usually it is the mother or maternal figure that frowns upon their child’s love for animal. That is not the case in National Velvet, as Crisp (1941′s How Green Was My Valley, 1960′s Pollyanna) plays a smack-talking father unruly in his words and with seemingly no regard to his daughter’s feelings until the final half-hour (his catharsis is too abrupt, given all that he says). Crisp’s frustrating performance barely modulates, never breaking from the archetype of unsupportive father.

National Velvet reaches technical heights during the Grand National where Leonard Smith’s (Lassie Come Home, 1946′s The Yearling) cinematography and Robert Kern’s (1939′s The Women, 1952′s Plymouth Adventure) editing combine into one of the more thrilling race scenes captured for a Hollywood movie of that decade. Besides that, the Technicolor coastlines of Pebble Beach and Monterey, California might not be truly English, but the film always looks best during outdoor scenes away from the Brown household. Herbert Stothart’s (1940′s Waterloo Bridge, The Yearling) adaptation score works is overly reliant on British folk songs, particularly “Greensleeves”, to be of much musical interest.

Brown’s adaptation of National Velvet is remarkably disinterested in the details of how to take care of a racehorse and the training regimen involved for horse and jockey. However, its depiction of the Grand National is a precise recreation of the actual course. Beneath the film’s surface, Elizabeth Taylor wanted to keep the horse that played The Pie despite falling from him and breaking her back while filming the racing scene – this caused back problems for the rest of Taylor’s life. In his only film appearance, the horse, named King Charles, certainly had a racing pedigree. King Charles’ first cousin was Seabiscuit and his grandsire (equine lingo for paternal grandfather) was Man o’War, who won two Triple Crown races in 1920 – the Preakness and the Belmont Stakes (Man o’War did not race the Kentucky Derby).

For cinephiles and classic movie fans, National Velvet’s popularity and the presence of so many incredible actors (not necessarily their performances) is what makes it recommendable, if nothing more. Though it is not without considerable flaws, National Velvet is also an ideal film to introduce children to classic movies. It is wonderful, the film says, to have what others might deem to be follies, as long it does not harm oneself or others. Moving on, too, is just as important. For parents with young children, have a talk with your kids afterwards so that they might remember the film’s central message about going forth in life after completing a dream (because National Velvet does a poor job of discussing those ideas soon after the Grand National concludes). Be supportive of their healthy desires, and may they do what they want to do with all the enthusiasm Elizabeth Taylor (and Violet) put into this film.

My rating: 6.5/10

^ Based on my personal imdb rating. Half-points are always rounded down. My interpretation of that ratings system can be found here.

[the1975hqs]

He’s Matty Healy of art-pop heroes The 1975. She’s Heather Baron-Gracie of pop newcomers Pale Waves. The first time Matty heard Heather’s band he declared he needed to work with them. Two singles, a video and a mega US tour later, Pale Waves are on course to be your new favourite band. We meet the mentor and mentee in London.

The hub of The 1975’s empire is not, as you might expect, an airy, pink neon-lit, minimalist space with Rothkos hanging on the walls. It is, instead, a top-floor unit in a building on a courtyard trading estate in west London. The floor below has a place stocking Christmas supplies, and even on this humid September day, Santa’s grotto twinkles back at you through the open door.

Upstairs is the HQ of Dirty Hit, the record label founded by The 1975’s manager, Jamie Oborne, as a vehicle for the band he discovered as Cheshire teenagers. Now it’s home to some of the UK’s most exciting bands, from the established, such as Wolf Alice, to rising stars such as The Japanese House – whose ‘Pools To Bathe In’ EP was produced by 1975 frontman Matty Healy and drummer George Daniel – and new signing No Rome. There’s a particular up-and-coming band that Healy has really taken under his wing, taking them on tour in the States, co-producing their first two singles and directing the video for the second, ‘Television Romance’ – and that band is Pale Waves.

“I was just so excited to hear a band that was positioned in the left, an alternative band, that was so in tune with pop sensibilities,” says Healy, sat in Oborne’s office, the pungent smell of marijuana emanating from somewhere about his person. “It kind of reminded me of The Cure or The Primitives or bands like that – it’s the happy/sad thing loads of bands have thrived on. I saw them first at Dingwalls, and there was this truth in there. There’s a naivety and a purity to them and an honesty to them that kind of comes through in their music.”

Frontwoman Heather Baron-Gracie, who receives a warm, brotherly hug from Matty after plonking herself on the sofa next to him, puts it more succinctly: “I just love pop music, and when it makes you feel something, it’s even better.” Heather, 22, formed the band four years ago with her best mate Ciara Doran. Joining later were guitarist Hugo Silvani and bassist Charlie Wood. Two women, two men; two goths, two skinny indie boys – it’s a look that shouldn’t work, but it just does. “People say we’re like two sets of twins,” says Heather. “You couldn’t dress Hugo and Charlie up as goths because it just wouldn’t work. Well, we do the make-up sometimes and dress them up in my little skirts and things – but that’s just for us.”

Matty is at pains to point out the precise extent of his involvement in Pale Waves. “The songs were there, so my involvement in writing was only editing,” he says. “I always have a fear of being overbearing. I know what it’s like to be want to be prided on your own merits, and I would hate to be resented by an artist for feeling I’d strong-armed my involvement for my own personal gain.”

Mainly, the message is that Pale Waves are perfectly capable of writing songs on their own – Matty’s a facilitator, not a svengali. And what songs they are. The group’s two singles so far are the near-flawless sugar rush of 2016’s ‘There’s A Honey’ and the heart-melting crush of 2017 follow-up ‘Television Romance’.

The video for the latter was directed by Matty. What’s he like in director mode? “I’m very aggressive, but Heather gives as much as she gets so it’s all good,” he says. “We don’t do miming, we do have the track on at full volume. So I have to shout above the track, ‘LOOK SEXY!’ That’s pretty much the only thing that I shout: ‘LOOK AT THE CAMERA! LOOK F**KING SEXY!’”

The video sees Pale Waves performing in an Ashton-under-Lyne council flat in that looks like a hipster’s wet dream – all retro furnishings and kitsch collectables. It actually all belongs to the 92-year-old woman who lives there. “She had no clue what was going on but she was loving it, watching videos of The 1975 on people’s phones,” says Matty. “She didn’t actually believe it was me in the ‘Love Me’ video, because I was there with my Spielberg cap on taking it all very seriously.”

The first time Heather saw The 1975, it was accompanying her cousin, who’d won tickets to a gig. The last time, it was when Pale Waves were supporting the band on their two-month 2017 tour of huge US venues. “The first night was absolutely mental. I couldn’t even look up because I was like, ‘Oh my god’. We went from playing to about 10 people in Ireland to 7,000 people in Phoenix. It was a bit unreal.” Did Matty have any advice about that? “Yeah,” says Heather. “He said, ‘Just get on with it!’”

Though they’re friends, the tour didn’t provide much time to hang out. Matty was frazzled from the months on the road, and trying to get his head around his own band’s next album. “I was quite busy and quite down and quite emo – I’d been on tour for so f**king long,” he says. “We were pretty much doing a show every day and then when you have a day off you’re in your own little hotel and the lights are out. But it was great to watch Pale Waves grow as a band.”

Heather often writes songs with US coming-of-age films playing in the background for inspiration – her favourite being ‘Adventureland’. That sense of the apocalyptic emotion of teenage life lives in her lyrics too. “Those films set you up for going to America, but when I went I was kinda like, it isn’t what I expected. Like, we went to Hollywood at midnight and I was so scared because there’s a lot of mental people just roaming about. I was going all, ‘Take me home!’”

1975 fans have already embraced Pale Waves, and not just on Matty’s say-so. The bands share a mentality for finding romance in the everyday, and each group is formed around a creative core based on a tight friendship: Healy and best mate George, Heather and Ciara.

“That’s the thing I identify with most, the duality between them reminds me of the relationship between me and George,” says Matty, who, post-success, bought a house across the road from his bandmate to make sure he’s only ever a short skateboard ride away. “I did notice on tour that they never really did separate, never one without the other.”

Heather found Ciara on social media before starting university. “I saw a picture of her in this big group chat and I thought, ‘She’s the only one who really looks like someone I’ll get along with’. The first day we got there we met up and haven’t really been apart since then. I get scared thinking that she might not be a part of my life one day.”

Though they formed in Manchester, Heather’s home town is Preston, a no-nonsense city where the way she dresses – Robert Smith of The Cure by way of Robert Smith of The Cure – marks her out as someone different. “When I go back home to Preston, they do not take to it very well,” she says. Needless to say, her look isn’t as big a deal to her as it is to other people. “Everyone who meets me thinks I’m in a heavy metal band,” she says. “I never really call myself a goth, but others do. I’m like, maybe I am a goth?”

Matty – who adopted his own take on Heather and Ciara’s style for NME’s cameras – says their commitment to it is a mark of their authenticity. “The make-up, the hair, the whole thing, it’s not a set-up for the band. I can see those two girls being like that and needing to be in a band to express that, needing to find each other.”

Though she stands out, Heather says her teenage years were about “keeping a low profile. I didn’t really find people that I got along with,” she explains. “At school I would go to a room to play piano when everybody else was talking in the cafeteria. I’m not really into that – I’m not really a massive social person. Ciara’s always telling me off for being socially awkward but I’m just like, ‘I can’t’.”

Heather has been writing songs since the age of 11. As a teen, she would write “kind of Avril Lavigne pop”; more recently it was “folksy, emotional and stripped-back acoustic stuff like Ben Howard – not very cool music.” It changed when she met Ciara. “She said, ‘Lets try something different, because I want to make people dance at our shows and not kinda just cry: they can cry and dance.’”

Right from that first week at university, Pale Waves became Heather and Ciara’s sole focus. The band rehearse daily, and dedicate every minute of spare time to music. University was a slog she had to get through. Jobs were another unwelcome distraction. “My parents tried to get me into this job entering numbers into a computer-based system for the NHS in St Helens, and I was just not doing it,” she says. “I went to the interview looking like this, but they offered me the job anyway. It was Monday to Friday with some weekends and my brain would just be fried.”

Heather’s days of keeping a low profile may soon be over. Even now, and particularly in Manchester, she’s recognised on the street by a growing band of obsessed fans. “They always call me ‘queen’. It’s dead cute. Or ‘mum’, I get ‘mum’ a lot,” she says. “I keep seeing girls dressed like me. They ask me about make-up – I’m not even that good at make-up! It’s quite scary having people look up to you. I don’t want to mess anyone up.”

The adulation looks set to grow as Pale Waves make their careful, precise steps forward. Later today, Heather’s back with the rest of the band in the studio recording an EP. An album will follow, but not for at least a year. “With the album, I think we’re just going to show another side to us which is a lot more emotional and not as – I don’t know how to put it… Just, like, a bit more intense.”

Matty perks up. “You mean like emotionally intense?”

“Yeah.”

“Good. That’s what I’m hoping for.

[gaynasas]

GAYNASAS: 10 Romantic Opera Arias for St. Valentine's Day

Our pick of Romantic Operas

Roughly listed by accelerating degree of ...er... explicitness (ahem!) here are some exothermic opera songs to warm you up on the most romantic night of the year.

1. 'Ah! Leve-toi, soleil!' from Gounod's Roméo et Juliette: 

The story is of Romeo and Juliet, of course, with the French libretto very neatly translated from the famous balcony scene of the Shakespeare play. This is Romeo entreating for his beloved Juliet to appear on her balcony like a rising sun to shine a ray of love into his life. The hot headed man may not be ideal husband material, but his burning passion to live for the moment would require quite a lovelessly cold Juliet to resist! Romeo only goes up to Bb, but that is plenty high enough to precipitate a flock of fallen angels smitten by his sheer vocal virility, I think.

2. 'Quando m'en vo' (Musetta's waltz) from Puccini's La Bohème: 

Even though the opera is about the poor love birds Rodolfo and Mimi, it is Musetta, the cattily rich vamp who spends the opera flirting with their friend, Marcello, who has perhaps the catchiest (and flirtiest) tune in the show. It is the tune that keeps popping up at various points in the film, Moonstruck, to set up a romantic scene. An obviously apt use! Puccini was a wonderfully descriptive composer when it comes to exposing a character's personality in a song. And Musetta.... she is definitely the girl who is never lack of masculine attention!

3. 'La ci darem la mano' from Mozart's Don Giovanni:

 Don Giovanni (Don Juan) spends the last day of his amorous life suffering from a series of unsuccessful attempts to seduce various women... until he runs into young Zerlina, a peasant girl who is about to be married to her handsome young Masetto that very night. If you want to know how it all turns out, you'll have to rent a DVD of the opera or go catch a performance at your local opera company... Musically, though, I'm afraid no matter what does or doesn't happen on the stage, Zerlina comes away from this little duet a lot less innocent than she was going into it!

4. 'Mon coeur s'ouvre à ta voix' from Saint-Saëns' Samson et Dalila:

 There is love.... and then there is lust... and then there is something even more dangerous than both; a vengeful seduction. Dalila may have entertained some romantic feelings for the heman-ly strong Samson, but a young ingenue looking for love, she isn't. And so, our splendid hair-ed hero finds himself in the third act of the Biblical-theme opera mesmerized by a siren song of a woman seduced not by his look but also by the prospect of his destruction. Isn't it terrifying how a little danger can make a woman so ...irresistable?

5. 'O soave fanciulla' from Puccini's La Bohème: 

On the opposite of the scale from Dalila is Puccini's Mimi, a frail and kindhearted woman dying of consumption just as she finally meets her true love, Rodolfo. They are two youngsters with humble means who are looking for a long lasting romance rather than a quick fix to their passion... And that shows in the longevity of the popularity of this duet. Rodolfo is unexpectedly visited by this girl next door and invites her out... if you want to know how it resolves, click on the song title and find out! You won't even have to understand Italian to get it.

6. 'Glück, das mir Verblieb' (Mariettas Lied) from Korngold's Die tote Stadt:

 This is a rather haunting song in more ways than one... Paul moves to the dead city of Bruges because he loves his recently deceased Marie too much to move on with his life. Instead, he runs into Marietta, a dancer who resembles his wife to the very shade of her red hair. His obsession with 'Marie's incarnation in the flesh' reaches a most eerie note when Marietta starts to sing him a song... that turns out to be his dead wife's favorite. It triggers a hallucination sequence that boggles the mind of many audiences and stage directors alike when this opera is performed on the stage.

7. 'Au fond du temple saint' from Bizet's Les pecheurs de perle:

 Well... while there is no openly gay male character in opera that I know of (Billy Budd and Captain Vere not withstanding), there are many soaring tenor-baritone duets for our gay friends to revel about in opera. Nadir (the tenor) and Zurka (the baritone) are long lost friends who had fallen out with each other in their youth over a beautiful woman. Now that they've found each other once more, they resolve to never again let a woman come between their friendship. Anyone who have lived past his teenage years would know to take such a proposition with a (large) grain of salt, but Bizet's glorious music should make it easy to believe it if just for the moment.... until Leila shows up, that is...

8. 'Mira, o Norma' from Bellini's Norma: 

Is... practically to the gay gals among us what the Pearl Fishers duet (the previous number) is for the gay guys. Norma is so incensed that her lover, Pollione, had been shagging up with her protégée, Adalgisa, that she contemplates killing herself and the children she has in secret with Pollione. Luckily, mother instinct prevents her from harming her kids... and Norma slides to the floor a broken woman when Adalgisa turns up promising to be a good friend from now on (the libretto is really a bit more suggestive for the story, but that's flowery Italian poetry set to music for you... it sometimes bears unintended interpretation).

9. 'Dome êpais, le jasmin' (Flower Duet) from Délibes' Lakmé:

 Another womanly love tune between a mezzo and a soprano... Brahmin princess Lakmé and her slave, Malika, are out in the forest admiring their flowery environs, singing this song about following the river to its source. Even the non-opera fans will be familiar with this gorgeous and light as a feather tune... It is a favorite of car and luxury items commercials, and erotic scenes at the cinema... for obvious reason, I think.

10. 'Ce n'est qu'un rêve' from Offenbach's La belle Hélène:

Jacques Offenbach's operetta on the theme of 'how Helen of Sparta runs off with Paris of Troy' is a satiric commentary on the French upperclass of the 2nd Republic. Musically it is unabashly adorably x-rated (ahem!). Honestly.... the only rival for it in terms of graphic acoustic description of what lovers do on their Valentine night (while being covered in deceptively light-heartedly mild manner lyric) is Richard Strauss' overture to the opera, Der Rosenkavalier... (or, come to think of it, Salome's monologue to Jocanaan's head toward the end of his Salome). It really is a masterpiece of musical satire; so sexually explicit as to make the old fashioned listeners blush like pre-heated tomatoes, and yet so cute and light that it keeps even the most uptight of nuns and peres watching and listening. O well... how dull would a Sunday confession be if not for some guilty pleasures like this little duet to spike up your reverie with, ay?

So, these are a few samples of what loveable fun you and your significant other can have at the opera. Check out the local opera company near you and see if there isn't a good show to drop in on this month. Who knows? Maybe you've been an opera fan all these years without realizing it!

[roadswim-collective]

Three Times He Lied To Me  Lie 1.

I was twenty three when I met him. I was back at home, living with my mother, after three years in halls of residence. Here's a list of the places you'd be most likely to see me during the year I was twenty three:

on a train

in a library

at a railway station

in a corridor

at my tutor's office

in my bedroom.

I had literally no social life, unless you count going to the shop for tobacco. My best friend was my I, Claudius box set. On Friday nights when my mother was out with the girls from darts, I'd drink Prosecco in the bath. Sometimes I'd do that on Saturday nights too.

I did go other places sometimes. If the weather was nice you might see me in a castle. Caerphilly was my favourite. Or I might be at a Roman site like Caerleon. And now and again you might see me out of breath at the top of a hill somewhere looking at the remains of an Iron Age fort. I was always alone on these excursions. I'd end the day pretty much as I'd started it, lying in my bed, in my old bedroom, probably watching Gladiator.

I was halfway through a master's in history with archaeology, a two-year course, and I was completely broke. Amazingly I'd got a First in my degree, and my tutor recommended me for post-grad. It was all a bit overwhelming. I was the first in my family to go to uni, you see. Well, my father was accepted at some art college back in the day but he didn't finish the course, he dropped out. Other than that, though, I was the first to go on to higher education. It was quite a big deal at the time. Nerve-wracking. I more or less expected to crash and burn.

Everyone else seemed so confident, so talky, and loud. So English, I was about to say. But that's not fair. I just hadn't met many people like that back then, middle class people. A lot of them hardly bothered going to lectures and they were always incredibly insulting about the tutors. They were always on the piss too. Now me, for the first two years I just kept my head down and my mouth shut. I worked as hard as I possibly could, hoping to keep up. I read literally everything. When a lecturer praised my work, I'd carry that around with me for days like a little glow of fire to ward off the doubts.

Not that I was some kind of nun. My main indulgences were:

thin little roll ups in liquorice papers smoked on the library steps, about one every half hour

a bottle of vodka in my bottom drawer for winding down at the end of a long essay

the occasional lump of cheap hash to see me through the holidays

a boy from Norfolk with nice dark eyes, though that was more trouble than it was worth.

By the final year, though, I knew I was heading for at least a 2:1, possibly even a First. There didn't seem so many of the loud talky ones around by then. There were a lot of drop outs. On the one hand that made it hard, because the spotlight began to shine on me a bit more. I couldn't just hide in the back of the seminars anymore, I was invited to contribute. On the other hand, those little glows of praise from my lecturers had grown into a proper fire, burning day and night. And I started to see them as human, my tutors, not as untouchable gods or whatever but as people who were obsessed by the past, by trying to dig it up and see it as it was, just like me. It was hard to believe I'd made it to the end of the three years. And now they were encouraging me to take it further, to do an MA.

I mean, it was way beyond what I'd expected. That last year was just wonderful, I loved it.

The day I graduated, my mother cried and my brother puked. We were all in the union bar, toasting each other. I can drink my brother under the table, and I did that day. Uncle Lloyd was there too, wearing a blue suit that I won't forget too soon, putting away the cheap beer and chatting a bit too much to girls. My father hadn't turned up. He'd promised he would, but that's my father. I can't believe I really expected him to be there. Maybe I didn't, I can't quite remember now.

So anyway, yes. That was, nice, to be doing so well. And now I got to spend the next couple of years digging around in sub-Roman Britain, a time I'd been mildly obsessed with since I heard the stories of Saint David and Saint Dyfrig in RE at school. I always saw it as this mysterious realm full of saints and kings and warlords and clashing cosmologies, and all of it hidden in layers and layers of myth and dirt. It was like digging up a real life epic, it was kind of  a dream come true for me.

On the other hand, after three years as a student I was completely broke, massively in debt, and I hadn't made any friends. And now I was back at home, with my mother, in my old bedroom, commuting to Cardiff from Aberdare, an hour each way on the train, to do my studying. I was making a tiny bit of money working part-time in college libraries at different campuses all over the place, Merthyr, Treforest, all over. I read my Mary Beard books over lunch, and on station platforms in all weathers I listened to podcasts.

My mind was usually far off in the mist, tracing trade routes of lost empires, digging through dead cities, reading old epitaphs. I was starting to feel a bit sort of nothing about everything, or everything modern, everyday life, here and now. I'd even stopped watching reality TV. The only things I watched now were documentaries. Well, and Derren Brown, I loved his stuff.

Everyone I'd known, my uni friends, had all sort of evaporated. The same thing had happened when I left school, or whenever I changed jobs. It was happening again now. Helen and Julie, Rupinder, Jay, Alex and Steve, Danny, my sort of ex, they'd almost faded out, just a year after we all graduated and I promised to stay in touch. None of my friendships were ever strong enough to survive the transition, everyone just floated away. I couldn't say why.

I was happy enough though, don't get me wrong, I enjoyed my own company. To be honest, I couldn't really imagine looking round a historical site with someone else. Having to talk to them, listen to them, instead of just looking at the stuff. Or standing on an iron age site, a hill fort, looking down into the valley, no sound, only the wind whispering and the birds calling – and just because someone else is there you've got to ruin it all with small talk. I tried to see it in more positive terms but I failed to convince myself. I just couldn't imagine it. Very often, I paid for the audio guide tour, with the headphones.

Anyway, there was this librarian I was sort of obsessed with. His name was Will and he was twenty nine. He worked at the humanities library at Cardiff Uni. I did some shifts there, he was sort of my line manager, one of them anyway. He was slim and tall with thick hair and he talked a lot. The women all loved him. He was funny though not quite as funny as he thought. Well, they never are, are they? But he wore tight jeans and brown boots and they suited him, oh my god they suited him. His eyes were green and twinkly, his grin was cheeky. I didn't think he fancied me but I knew for sure that he knew I fancied him.

I sometimes got flustered when we were chatting in a corridor. I was full of pent-up lust. There were moments when literally all I wanted out of life was for Will to turn up at my door late one night and fuck me senseless. Preferably a Friday night, when my mother was out with the darts girls and I was all wet and alluring from my Prosecco bath.

Anyway it was no good, he had a girlfriend. Cerys. They lived together. No kids though. So there was always the chance they'd split up. I tried to gauge the likelihood. It seemed a pretty stormy relationship. He made lots of bad jokes about him and Cerys rowing all the time, her insane jealousy.

He turned up to work one day with his wrist in a splint. When we asked him about it, he said this: "A woman in a bar came up to ask where the toilets were, and the missus didn't like it so she broke my wrist, just as a friendly warning." It turned out later he was joking and he'd actually fallen over drunk. Everyone laughed. But the next day when we were getting cans from the machine Will confided to me that the reason he'd fallen was because Cerys pushed him over some bins on the way back from the pub. "We shouldn't drink together, me and her," he told me. "Only one of us should be drunk at a time. Or it goes bad."

So it all seemed quite volatile. Sometimes he looked miserable. There were phone calls from Cerys that sent him scuttling outside, scowling. He made lots of jokes about how unreasonable she was, how she flew into a rage, shouted and screamed. In dark moments I imagined that what he was leaving out from all these stories for the sake of decency was all the amazing, passionate, hot sex they were having when they weren't rowing. She probably shouted and screamed all the way through that too. Lucky bitch. I didn't have enough experience to make that assumption, really, but it crept up on me sometimes as a slightly depressing certainty.

All this drama seemed very distant from my own life. It was like watching I, Claudius, all that passion, the lust and the violence, Brian Blessed. And there was me, alone in my teenage bed at night, my hand wandering down, trying to visualise the exact lift and curvature of beautiful Will's tight bum. I was wondering if it was finally time I invested in a vibrator.

So then they did split up, Will and Cerys. It wasn't the first time but she'd gone back to Llanelli or Ammanford or wherever she was from, and apparently she'd never done that before. Will seemed pretty upset and he got a lot of sympathy at work, which he obviously enjoyed. I'd say the percentage male/female split at the humanities library was about 30/70 to the girls. Some of the men seemed a bit uncomfortable with this, with being out-numbered, but others blatantly loved being surrounded by women. Will was one of those.

He started going out for drinks after work. We'd all go, a big pack of us. Yes, me too. This sort of party gang developed. Friday nights mostly and usually around Cathays, in the Woodville or the Pen and Wig. There was boozing and there was bad behaviour. I got caught up in it a bit. I'm not really into that kind of thing, in general. I'm useless at small talk, it's just embarrassing, so I drink too much to compensate, and I talk a load of crap, wear myself out, and have to spend the next fortnight in bed. But it's funny how a change in just one colleague's relationship status can act as a catalyst on the pent up frustrations of the whole office.

And of course I always had to catch the last train back home. That was at ten to eleven so I was leaving early, baling out while the night was still young. They were all staying out, Will and everyone, they were going on somewhere else. And I'd be on the train, half-cut but not quite pissed, with all the sweaty bellowing valley boys, nodding-waking-dribbling all the way back to cold dark Aberdare.

There was nothing left for me at home really. The girls who'd stayed there were on their second or third kids. We had nothing in common now. All the boys were messing about with the same old things as before, cars and sports and booze, just with jowls now and already balding. Thinking about it, I don't suppose I had much in common with anyone in the first place.

So I started staying the night now and again with my new friend Abby who was doing a PhD and lived in Roath. Not every weekend, just if it was going to be a big night, someone's birthday or whatever excuse came up. I was quite good at drinking, still am, and I'd always be among the last standing. It was me who had to get Abby into a taxi and find her door key and let us in and, more than once, hold her hair back while she was sick. And when it came down to the last handful at the very end, Will was always there too. Will and me, Abby, Hannah, Chris, a few others. There until the bitter end. None of us had anything much to go home to really.

So one Friday night we ended up in this over-priced cocktail bar on City Road, six or seven of us I think, probably about 1am. Abby and I happened to be sitting opposite Will, the three of us leaning in close over a tiny glossy circle of table to be heard above the music. He was on great form that night, Will. He listened to the latest installment of Abby's catastrophic love life with great interest and had a lot to say about it all. He told Abby that none of it was her fault and she deserved much better. He said, "Look at me, after all this Cerys stuff – I'm bruised, sure, I'm bruised to holy fuck, but I'm not bleeding." I'd almost say he was cosying up her to her but I didn't get that feeling, it read more like a supportive friend thing. Also, I noticed that he was addressing quite a few of his comments on love and heartbreak and so on directly at me. As in, right into my eyes. So of course I began to feel ridiculously excited and kept insisting on more drinks all round.

When men try and chat you up, it's almost always boring, and forced, and makes you cringe. I mean, I suppose I'm partly to blame because I'm just no good at small talk. And chatting up is usually just a subset of small talk, really. You're not usually talking about anything in particular, there's nothing to cling on to, and it's all crappy, you're just wafting these threadbare festoons at each other in desperation. So I tend to just sort of clam up and that's the effect most blokes' efforts have on me, their intended target. Not Will. He was good.

Abby was talking to Hannah so now Will and I were just looking at each other over our tiny table. He grinned and beckoned me to lean in closer, so I did, and he said, "I'd like to try something out on you, if you don't mind." So I raised my eyebrows at him and said Um, okay..? To which Will did a mischievous little chuckle and told me it was a kind of personality test, and I said A test? O-kaaaay... "Don't be worried though", he said, "it's not serious, it's just a bit of buggering about, of no diagnostic value," so I said, Well that's a relief and he chuckled again.

And he was wearing this really nice aftershave and I could see the hairs on his chest poking over the top of his shirt. Plus I was half-cut. Plus it had been a bloody long while since I'd even been near a bloke. So you can imagine, can't you?

Will's idea turned out to be quite good. Basically, you've heard that thing – if you could have as your superpower either being able to fly or being able to make yourself invisible, which would you choose? Those crappy questions you get on Facebook that are meant to reveal some essential truth about your personality based on a seemingly throwaway choice you make. Well, Will said he hated it because it was an obvious fix, a swizz, the superpowers thing, because all the traits associated with flying were really good ones – success, confidence, flying high, reaching for the sky, freedom, the great beyond. And then you had invisibility, said Will, which was the choice of creeps. Think of the kinds of things being invisible would allow you, would invite you to do. It's nothing very noble, is it, Will said. It's sneaking around, it's hiding, not being upfront and honest. It's peeping toms, he said, it's sneaks and spies and saboteurs, it's eavesdroppers and shoplifters and pickpockets. Invisibility appeals to the voyeur, to the nosey parker and the perv. So it wasn't really much of a choice, he said, in fact it was a complete fix and he'd thought of his own, much better alternative.

I was laughing at all this, by the way, and reaching across to maul his arm from time to time. This was a good deal better than your average chat up, I was thinking, and even if it wasn't a chat up I was having fun with a silly man on a Friday night and and he was making me laugh so just go with it, just enjoy yourself for god's sake.

"Okay," says Will, "here's the thing. Some old fella down the road from you, mad professor type, he's built a time machine. It's in his garden shed and he's invited you to have a go."

"So this old man is trying to get me to go into his garden shed with him?" I say. "I don't think I believe he's got a time machine in there, to be honest. I think he might have other reasons."

"Fair point," says Will. "Make it your grandfather then. Someone you trust."

"How about my grandmother?"

Will says, "What's the matter, you don't trust your grandfather?"

"Very funny," I say. "Well, yes I did trust my grandfather and he did make things in his shed, but he's not alive now so..."

"Oh shit. Sorry," he says. "I haven't got any grandparents left, as of last month. Ah well, life's a shit, your grandmother it is then. Okay, so you go into the shed, there's the time machine, and your lovely old Nana is inviting you to be the first to have a go on it."

"First?"

"Yup. First ever trip, the maiden voyage. And she wants it to be you, her favourite grand-daughter."

"Her only grand-daughter, " I tell him. "So, I'm like a sort of guinea pig? My Nan wants me as a guinea pig?"

"Yeah, I suppose so," Will says. "But in a very loving way."

I did one of my stupid big honking snorting laughs all over him at this point. By now, fed up with shouting over the music, Will had come round the table and we were pretty much squeezed together. He seemed to enjoy it, this muffled explosion of me. We were laughing at my laugh. I called it my walrus call, he said it was a great, unashamed, life-affirming laugh, he said it was one of the great laughs. What a bloody charmer, eh? I was seriously starting to wonder if I'd be spending the night at Will's instead of holding Abby's hair as she puked. I was starting to feel pretty damn good about myself, doing all the sexy banter, all the flirty-flirty stuff. I'm a bit slow on the uptake sometimes, I don't always read the signals. This, though, with Will, this Friday night, I felt bloody fantastic about everything.

"Alright, forget about your Nan and the shed and everything," Will said. "You've just got hold of this time machine somehow, okay? But you can only use it once, I mean for one return trip. There and back, then that's it. So the question is – where would you choose to go, the future or the past?" Then he frowned. "Actually this might not work so well on you because you're an archaeology student, not a normal person."

Anyway, to speed things up a bit, that question of Will's led to a conversation between us that went on until we all got chucked out of the place at about two and then continued in the taxi heading for Abby's house. I told Will I'd choose to visit the past, of course, either to sub-Roman Britain to see what it was really like, or all the way back to the start, before agriculture, to when we were still nomads. We talked about that for a while, the distant past, then Will said if he had the one-trip time machine he'd definitely choose the future, no question at all. At least two thousand years, he said, either that or a few million, because he wanted to see how it all panned out. 

So then we talked about that for a while, the far future. It was all quite slurry and rambly and drunken, of course, but it just kept going, and we got on to what all this might for our respective personalities, and about the state of the world in general, whether things were getting better or worse, whether there was any hope for the human race and all that. 

And then, suddenly it seemed, we were outside Abby's house and she was getting out of the taxi, stumbling on her doorstep, trying to find her key, fiddling it into the lock, waving goodnight, and falling into her hallway, while I was staying in the taxi with Will, who was in the middle of saying that there never was a golden age, it was just a fantasy, there was never a time when everything was in harmony and everyone was happy, but that there could possibly be one at some point to come if we didn't blow ourselves up or make ourselves extinct through climate change, and also there was Paul the spotty Australian IT boy who was fast asleep and snoring and had to be shoved really hard to wake him and get him out at his place in Riverside while we went on to Will's flat, quite a nice one in Llandaf North.

And then, suddenly it seemed, it was a year a later and we were on holiday in Rome. It was my first ever visit and it was amazing, overwhelming, beautiful, and Will and I were celebrating the anniversary of that night when we got together, and we were walking around having what was basically a continuation of the same conversation that we'd started then, in that over-priced cocktail bar in Roath.

It was an odd match really, Will and I. We were different in lots and lots and lots of ways. We hardly agreed on anything. And at first, I think we were both kind of fascinated by how different we were, despite having quite a lot in common. Here are some of the things we had in common:

smallish working class valleys hometowns, Aberdare and Glynneath

stopped feeling that we fit in to our respective hometowns at around the same age, 14

each had an older brother who got married and moved away, his to England, mine to Monmouthshire, which amounts to the same thing

divorced parents, both our dads had left home, both of us were under 10 at the time, and neither of us really saw much of our fathers

both went to Welsh school but hadn't really kept up the language since

first in our family to get a degree, Will having achieved a 2:2 in psychology

we'd both been members of the Green Party at some point, although neither of us was now

similarly miserable teenage years, greasy depressions spent in cocoons of totemic books, music, films, art, clothes, comedy, metaphysics, magic, comics, etc, evolving into a dense and intricate personal para-reality to which the everyday world of bus stops and dog shit was merely a laughable and mundane annexe.

It felt as though we'd started off in roughly the same place but had headed in different directions. We kept coming back to the past/future thing, it was like some structuring principle we used in thinking about our differences. Here are some of differences we noticed:

Favourite films - me: Agora, with Rachel Weisz as Hypatia, Elizabeth, with Cate Blanchett, Mel Gibson's Mayan epic Apocalypto, and yes Gladiator. Will liked Bladerunner, Alien, Star Wars, the first Matrix, The Fifth Element, and Guardians of the Galaxy

Books/authors – On holidays from my study reading I liked Sarah Waters and Hilary Mantel. One of my favourites was Alan Garner, ever since I read The Owl Service when I was thirteen. As a kid I read and loved all of Tolkien to the point where it affected my dreams and I saw epic battles on my walk to school, raging in the morning clouds that cling to the scarp of Maerdy mountain. Will had never read any Tolkien but had an impressive number of multi-part space operas under his belt, his favourite being Iain M. Banks' Culture novels. He could quote huge chunks of Douglas Adams and he also loved William Gibson...or was it William Burroughs? One or the other anyway. He mostly read non-fiction now, a lot of pop science, Freakonomics, Malcolm Gladwell, Dawkins.

Music – I listened to Fairport Convention and Nina Simone. Will listened to German minimal techno

The state of the world today – we both agreed that everything was in a right mess, massive poverty, total exploitation, greed, capitalism, eco collapse, extinction event imminent, all caused by us. Not just Will and me. Humans. Where we differed was where we looked for possible solutions. It was the time machine again – he went forward, I went back. Will felt there was no way to fix all the things wrong with the world by going back, it was too late. Humans had caused damage to the world by being too clever – fossil fuels, international tourism etc – but it was only humans therefore who could fix it all, by being even more clever. He looked to a post-market utopia in which we've abolished scarcity, outgrown the lizard brain, conquered evil and greed with intelligence, and built a new world based on a new understanding. We'd first heal our planet with our incredible new machines, and then we'd move out beyond Earth in creative, peaceful waves, slowly evolving into children of the stars. I exaggerate, but only a bit. And me, I still do the same now, I dig back to older societies and pre-modern ways of life, tribal ways and folk narratives, non-profit motives, sustainability, to structures of feeling abandoned on the road to modernity, old medicines for our modern sickness. Will was never very open to any of this stuff. His closing flourish was always something about whatever the old days might have had going for them, it was basically a kind of blissful ignorance, hardly to be envied, and besides, no-one – not even you! - would genuinely want to live in any era of human history before reliable anaesthetics were invented.

As I say, we hardly agreed on anything. But in the early days that was part of what made it fun. We used to debate things a lot in the early days, it was what we did. And whatever we were talking about, at some level you could sense that same old past/present thing, his time machine thing. It really seemed to me he'd hit on something essential about his approach to life and mine, and the differences between them.

So we were in a cafe opposite the Colosseum having coffee, sat right in the bay window, watching the street life. I tried to order two double espressos but I messed up my pronunciation and the waiter brought us singles. Will beckoned the guy back over, and the waiter smiled and said, in English, "You want milk?" Will gave him half a grin, shook his head, and said, "Nessun latte – doppio – prego," and they both laughed, the waiter nodding and whisking off our tray. Then Will turned back to me and grinned his bloody adorable grin. I was thinking we might have this coffee then maybe pop back to the hotel room for an hour or so.

"Milk indeed," he said. "He must have taken us for a couple of weak ass English milk weeds."

I laughed.

"You know what you should do, Will? You should be a writer. You should write something."

"Ha, what?" he said. "I don't think so. I haven't got anything to say."

"You've always got something to say, you idiot."

"Well, yeah, but it's all bullshit really, when you come down to it."

"Well, yeah, but that needn't matter. Look at some of the crap that that sells."

"Mmm, Da Vinci Code, Fifty Shades, Jeremy Clarkson, fair point," he said. "But, no, no, I really don't think there's anything in my particular brand of bullshit that would sell."

"I don't know," I said. "What about your time machine? I'd say you could definitely make something out of that. It's good. It gets you thinking."

"Do you reckon?"

"I do, yes, I think you could make that into something, a story, something funny and clever," I said, "like you."

And he leaned across the table and kissed me. A big kiss, right there in the bay window, with everyone going by. When I opened my eyes again he was smiling at me, his eyes were so warm, he was so handsome, and golden autumnal Rome was glowing away behind him. I felt so good, so happy, more than happy. It was all so much more than I'd expected. I whispered a suggestion to him and, after our espressos, we popped back to the hotel for an hour.

Will often said he'd like to write but he never did. And the thing is, he already had a story about that time machine, an actual story with a beginning, a middle, and a funny but very bleak punchline. I couldn't see why he didn't write it up. Can we just skip just for a minute back to that first night I spent with Will, at his flat in Llandaf North? So it's stupid o'clock in the morning, we're both at the point where you drink yourselves sober, and we're out on his brown bolted balcony. I'm squinting at

glimpses of the Millennium Stadium and the BT building through the trees. A mile and half away, the city centre. The rain is falling but the air is warm and smells sweet. We're still not quite sure if we're going to do it. Will had a text from his ex earlier – at three in the morning! - and it sort of made the atmosphere between us a bit weird. So now we're on the balcony, talking. I remember telling him that all his Bladerunners and his Aliens and his cyberpunk whatever, all these futures he was into were all horrible. Mostly these were all dystopias. It was satire. The future in most of these things he loved was some crazy exaggerated version of today's world, with all our problems pushed to the limit. I remember him grinning as I pressed the point.  Well, he said, realistically, and whatever I'd prefer, it's probably more likely we'll fuck it all up and ruin the world. Realistically speaking, he said. That's funny, I told him, you love the future but you don't even believe in it really. Your best guess is it's going to be even worse than today.

And then he told me this story. There's this couple, he said, and she's like you, she loves the past. And he loves the future. And one day this time machine really does turn up, but you can only take one ride each in it. Just one return trip because human minds can only deal with the experience once in a lifetime, any more and you burn out your brain. So she goes first, heads into the past, and comes back a few seconds later in a state of deep depression and disillusionment. Then he has a go, into the future, and comes back a few seconds, depressed and disillusioned. They conclude from their experiences that the present is as good as it gets and enter into a suicide pact. As for living, they say, our spambots can do that for us. But then he remembers that he's already visited both their graves in the far future and the dates on their headstones made it clear they were going to live for several more decades so they don't bother and just split up. She later married a quantity surveyor and bought a big house near Chepstow, and he drank himself to death.  

So it was a funny little story with a bleak punchline. I kept telling him to write it up but he never did. I couldn't understand because he kept saying he wanted to write. I mean, I thought it would be a good little exercise to get him started. After all, he had the whole thing there, he just had to write it up. But he didn't write it. He didn't write anything. If he did, I never saw it.

This morning I looked through my bedroom window and the sky was turning a lighter and lighter blue as the sun came up over the motorway. Everything around was beginning to glow. By the time I got to work the clouds had come, colours went grey, and at lunchtime it started raining. It was pouring down as I drove home at five. I sat in a traffic jam on Cathedral Road, blowing the heaters to clear the windscreen, getting hot and prickly, opening the window and getting splashed, and thinking, well, how quickly it came and went, that early sun, and what a long time ago it seemed now.

There's a Welsh saying, Nid yn y bore mae canmol diwrnod teg. A rough translation would be something like, Morning is not the time to praise a fine day. In other words, it's very unwise to call it a nice day when it's still early and it might well piss down later. I love that. It's one of the cliches about the Welsh, that we're very pessimistic. All down to the rain, or the diet, or being conquered, or the Miners Strike. I can't speak for anyone else though, Welsh or otherwise. You might call it pessimism, fair enough - I just call it realism.

I've just got back from a conference in Rome. The paper I gave looked at some of the connections between Macsen Wledig of the Mabinogion and the real life Roman emperor Magnus Maximus. It was beautiful, of course, as it always is in the autumn, golden, and glowing. I walked down by the Tiber where all the plane trees had turned orange and were dropping their leaves into the river. Being the maudlin bitch I am, I made a point of walking pretty much the exact route I walked with Will, eleven years ago now, from the Circus to the Colosseum and up to the Capitoline Hill. It was dark by the time I got to the top and my legs were aching. I leaned on a railing, looking down at the spotlit Forum, and I thought about Will, and I thought about my father, who died six months ago next Tuesday, and I felt like crying to be honest. But I didn't, partly because it would have been pathetic and made me feel worse, but mainly because these anti-depressants I'm on seem to dry up my tear ducts. I get the trigger to cry but nothing comes. Probably for the best.

When I get home from these things I'm always exhausted. Even a short trip with no paper to give leaves me completely worn out. I know what it is. It's not the work, that's nothing. It's not even giving the paper, I've long since built my public speaking armour, I can climb into it whenever I need to. No, it's all the other stuff. The chatting and socialising. Relaxing, kicking back. Networking. All that side of it. I'm useless at it. Wears me out. Never been any good at that stuff.

So I tend to get home, lock myself in my house, set the phone to messages, and basically not talk to anyone for, well, for as long as I can get away with. Which is usually about 48 hours, then I go back to work. I always make sure to book time off for exactly this purpose. I call it my decompression period. If I don't get it, if I have to go straight back to work, I go a bit mad. Noticably so. Incredibly irritable, interspersed with moments of mild hysteria. To be fair to my colleagues, they're used to it by now, they've adapted, it's become 'a thing', an amusing thing everyone knows about me, Anna. Academia is a perfect trap for eccentrics. Everyone has their quirks, but actual, diagnosable personality disorders are no more or less common than in any other vocation.

I haven't really changed. Not really.

During decompression I can't even read anything. All my books stay on their shelves. I turn instead to the internet. Last night I watched a whole series of a forgotten ITV sitcom from the 80s called Me and My Girl, starring Richard O'Sullivan as a widower bringing up his now teenage daughter Sam, played by Emma Ridley. Don't ask me why, it's not very good. And this morning I looked up Will's Facebook. Don't ask me why. He's got his profile set to public so I can have a good look at all his family holidays, his wife's birthday, their anniversaries, their kids growing up. Not that I envy her, I can just imagine all the crap she has to put up with. She probably doesn't even know the half of it. She looks more and more hopeless in the pictures, to be quite honest, and a bit thinner every time. This – looking at Will's Facebook – this is no good. I realise that and I hardly ever do it. Why would I, really? I found out all about Will a long time ago, and that's why we're not together now. The main feeling I get when I think of how close I came to ending up with him is relief. I look around my cosy house and I think, wow, close escape. But when I'm in this state, post-conference, I end up doing it, peeking into Will's life, I don't know why.

I wondered if Will ever did rouse himself to write anything. If he ever made something of his time machine thing. By the look of his Facebook, he hadn't, he was still at the humanities library, head of department. When I was full of his family pictures I just sorted of drifted through various Google searches, all pretty desultory. I suppose I was vaguely wondering if anyone else had come up with a similar idea anywhere in the world. Turned out, someone had. My drifting led to a review of a book of short stories, called Minimum City, including one which sounded remarkably similar to Will's time machine story. It was just a synopsis really but it was enough to make me look up the short story collection and its author. It was an American author, a man, quite a big name but I'd never heard of him. Contemporary set fiction still isn't really my thing. From reading the Amazon reviews and all the rest of it, this is what I learned about Minimum City:

It was made up of 28 stories

They were all very short, some only a paragraph long

It was a very slim book, with big type and wide margins

All the stories were set in the modern world

They all tended to have some kind of twist / sting in the tail

The tone was cynical, darkly funny, etc etc

It didn't sound like my kind of thing but I could imagine Will enjoying it, at least Will as he was when I knew him, I can't speak for now obviously. I found the story. It had first been published in an online literature journal before being collected in the Minimum City collection. Its title was The Return Trip. It was very short. A couple come into possession of a time machine. All the rest follows exactly as in the story Will told me on the balcony of his flat in The Crescent at about four in the morning, twelve years ago. Right down to the spambots line. 

I'd already checked publication dates. The Return Trip by this American author whose name eludes me now was first published in an online magazine called Young Boasthard's four years and eight months before Will told me the story. It was collected in Minimum City and published by Harper Collins six months before Will told me that story and passed it off as his own, on the balcony of his flat.

And I started laughing and laughing, until I had to put my bowl down in case I got milky cornflakes over my t-shirt.