#welp. add this to the mental chart

[goldensunset]

‘kieran changed a whole lot after he decided to mix up his look. his personality took a nose dive, but he looked darn cute… don’t you think?’ LACEY??? ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR MIND?

[chicassht]

MY CORONA CONTRIBUTION

Last night my mister and I were FaceTiming with some friends and they asked for TV show recommendations. For those of you who know me (which let’s be honest, is all four of you), you know that there are very few things in life that make me light up more than the opportunity to talk about TV.  

I jumped into action straight away.

“So what do you want to watch? You want Drama? Something light? Dark? Dark light?”

They wanted light so I started rattling off my top picks. When I listed something they had watched already, our friend said, “Oh I’ve seen that, but you’re in exactly the right territory. That’s what we want.”

I smiled smugly. “Oh. I know.”

Adam observed and finally muttered, “You should charge for this shit.”

Which got me thinking. Obvs not to charge. That wouldn’t be chic. But, maybe this can be my corona contribution. The countless number of hours I have put into Netflix, Amazon Prime, BBC… . it’s all been in preparation for this moment. To allow me to help you. If you’re stuck at home (which I know you are) and are wondering what to watch, let me be your guide. There’s SOO much good content out there, just waiting to be consumed. Amazing, quality stuff that can help get you through this new normal of nothing to do. No matter what you want to feel, TV can deliver.

And that brings me swiftly onto what I started racing through my brain next. How to categorize. There are obvious genres like Light Comedy, Dark Comedy, Dark Drama, but then what about the sub categories? Like, Things To Watch With Your Significant Other or Shows You Missed the First Time Around. But of course there could be a light comedy that you could watch with your significant other and that came out 10 years ago. Then I started to think about colour coding and excel charts and my head exploded. This was followed quickly by the realization that I am not Netflix. I don’t have algorithms or links or ways to mass personalize. So you’ll have to be happy with some good old fashioned lists. This first post is my list of light-hearted, not too dark and stressful, GET YOU THROUGH CORONA WITH A SMILE SERIES. I have eliminated the super obvious ones, but don’t think for second that I’ve somehow missed the blockbusters! Another post, for you more twisted at heart, will contain my more disturbing choices. And man are there some DOOZIES, but more on that in the coming weeks.

For now here are my top picks for light, but clever and well written shows that won’t disturb your sleep!

GLOW - Netflix 

This is 30 minutes of sheer viewing pleasure. It depicts the making of a women’s wrestling show in the ‘80s, so you know the costumes, makeup, hair and music alone are enough to keep you well entertained. Then you add in the GENIUS script by Liz Flahive (think Homeland and Nurse Jackie) and the talent of Alison Brie (of Community and Mad Men fame) and an all star cast, and it’s a TOTAL KNOCK OUT!

Mozart in The Jungle - Amazon Prime

Gael Garcia Bernal. Nuff said. But also, dreamy dynamic between Gael as the Maestro of The New York Philharmonic, and his musicians, dreams and patrons. It’s an ode to music, New York City and romance. Can’t watch an episode without smiling.

I Love Dick – Amazon Prime

Unfortunately, there was only one season of this show (plus side it’s not a big commitment), but I absolutely loved it!  It’s based on the critically acclaimed book of the same name and stars Kevin Bacon and Kathryn Hahn. Such a dream to see Kathryn in a lead role. Her kind of neurotic-feminist-best-friend vibe (seen in movies/TV you know like Transparent and How To Lose a Guy in 10 Days), is perfect in this role as a filmmaker New Yorker spending a year in the elitist art community of Marfa Texas. The show is funny and always entertaining, but also makes you feel like you’re getting a bit of culture and sophistication in too. #Smug.

This Way Up – On Demand Channel 4 (in American not sure, but FIND IT)

A friend recommended this show to me and I couldn’t be more grateful! Aisling Bea wrote it and stars in it (she’s my new OBESSION) as a twenty something Londoner trying to find her way back to normal life after a mental breakdown. It’s the perfect blend of laugh out loud funny with genuine heart-warming moments. A true British comedy, it also stars Sharon Horgan and falls in the same category as Catastrophe and Flea Bag. Meaning it has that distinct appeal of extreme dry wit mixed with self-deprecation and a dash of darkness that makes it gritty and real. If I was doing subcategories (which I’m not) this would definitely fall under Hidden Gems and MUST SEE.

Dead to Me - Netflix

This was a real unexpected treat! I think it popped up in a suggested watches email from Netflix. I saw Christina Applegate was in it, decided to give it a shot and I’m so glad I did! Christina stars as a recently widowed mom who finds an unlikely friend in Linda Cardellini (of Freaks and Geeks greatness) at a grief counselling group. It’s very well written with lots of funny one liners mixed with surprising, punchy plot twists and dark moments. A great exploration of friendship, obsession, desperation and the human response to those motivations. Really loved it and can’t wait for the next season!

Working Moms – Netflix

Canada! Who knew? This Canadian show about new working moms just GETS IT! It’s so well written, so funny, so cringey and relatable! It was definitely one of my fave shows to discover this year on Netflix and, jackpot, they’ve already uploaded three seasons!

Community – Amazon Prime

Somehow I completely missed this show the first time around (2009-2015.) But what a treat to now have 6 season of pure delight to make my way through! Based in a community college, we follow a motley crew of friends whose funny daily exchanges are the epitome of no stress, keeping things light, perfect COVID19 tv viewing. It’s clever, it’s funny and you really fall in love with the characters, especially the bromance between Troy and Abed. Also, Alison Brie is in it and I just love me some Alison Brie (see Glow).

Sex Education – Netflix

I pray that you guys have already discovered the two seasons of what I deem one of the best things on television at the moment! Gillian Anderson is SPECTUACULAR. Her acting obvi, but more importantly she is KILLING IT in her ‘70s vibe jumpsuits and Meryl Streep a la The Devil Wears Prada hair cut. The whole thing is beautifully shot and gives off a trendy-right-now mutli-decade vibe, sitting neatly between the 70s to 90s. The high school story lines are a treat and I especially love the girl power, feminist plotline it brought, particularly in season 2. LOVE IT LOVE IT LOVE IT! I can’t EVEN!

Love – Netflix

Judd Apatow wrote and produced this show, so that should be reason enough to give it a shot! It’s charming and funny and just a light-hearted relatable show about two twenty-somethings in LA who fall in love. It stars Gillian Jacobs (see Community), Paul Rust and Iris Apatow (Judd’s daughter), who is surprisingly great in it! A good one to watch with a significant other.

Call My Agent – Netlfix

I’m not one to usually gravitate towards subtitles, but something drew me to this French comedy and I wound up sticking around for all three seasons. It’s very French, very funny and very chic with the premise all around a Parisian based celebrity agency. I got the impression it was full of French movie star cameos too, which made it very cool and inner circle. Highly recommend.

WELP. That’s all I can muster for now. Other top (most of them obvious) choices in this genre are...

The Good Place - Netflix

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel - Amazon Prime

Atypical - Netflix

The Politician = Netflix

Kominsky Method - Netflix

The Goop Lab - Netflix

Love Is Blind - Netflix

Cheer - Netflix

Casual - Amazon Prime

Stay tuned for the darkly diturbing list up next!

[seyaryminamoto]

Seeing as you've already given your opinion on who are the most overrated characters of atla, who do you think are the most underrated?

Heh, well…

I wasn’t sure whether to feature Sokka as #1 or #2 but alas, I love him so he gets #1. He’s terribly underrated and it angers me. There was a time when my blog wasn’t an exclusively Sokkla blog with a few things on the side, I used to reblog general Avatar things (yes, that was A LONG time ago xD), and yet every single time I saw “Team Avatar” posts without Sokka I would literally scroll past them as if they didn’t exist. Because ffs, I don’t care if he’s not a bender, if the other four are the perfect symbolization of the four elements in harmony, HE’S PART OF TEAM AVATAR TOO!… so yes. Sokka. The guy who gets simplified, as I recently said, as “he was sexist and now he’s not” by posts of 100K notes, or even shrugged off by some people as “the funny one”, even gets hated by some people with terrible taste who think he’s useless just because he can’t bend. Yep, those who hate him because of this aren’t even worth talking to, in my experience. Clear as day they can’t see the true worth of anything even if it’s right in front of their eyes.Alas, Sokka, the boy who grew up into a man by putting other people’s needs ahead of his own, who stood his moral code even in the worst circumstances (such as shown in Jet), who opened his mind to new experiences and became a remarkable warrior because of this. He’s humble, but his heart is stronger than that of any other character in the franchise. He has seen so much tragedy and such darkness weighs inside him, but he doesn’t allow those tragedies to shape him. His strength is seriously admirable.… And I’d dare say half the fandom, if not more, just think he’s the funny guy. He’s the definition of an underrated character.

Ironically, I think Aang is very underrated. Yes, he’s not my favorite character either, but the strength this boy showed in the face of his many tragedies, and the evolution from fleeing from his problems to being able to face his responsibilities was pretty great. Also, Aang, unlike some other characters, usually faced consequences when he did something wrong.Perhaps the only exception I can think for that is his emo phase during Book 2, which is justified plenty, but the show doesn’t try to make you think he’s being nice. It’s shown that he’s very affected by the loss of his bison, but his treatment of his friends isn’t sweetened. The others show a lot of strength and understanding, knowing Aang can’t be his usual self when this is weighing on him. It was a bad time for everyone, yet I feel it was handled well enough as something that was hurting Aang really badly, one last straw for him after he had undergone so much pain already.Other than that specific part of the show, Aang often was forced to grow and change whenever he made mistakes, and had to face many uncomfortable truths about his past lives and the world he lived in. He showed a lot of integrity and human qualities and never degenerated into a tropey shonen anime protagonist, for instance. So while I’m not a huge Aang fan, I figured the rest of the fandom would appreciate him more. No doubt he has his fans, but a ton of the hate he gets is undeserved and often hypocritical, not to mention it’s mostly done to simplify his character when he was pretty great, as a character and hero, as he was.

Ahahahahaaa… Ozai! Yes, I don’t blame most people for underestimating and despising Ozai: let’s be fair, this man was supposed to be the final boss and he was built from the start to be the kind of villain people hated. He wasn’t meant to be relatable or nice or emotional or anything of the sort, even if a handful of people did grow to like him. But the show clearly wanted him to be a bad guy, THE bad guy, and he played his part well enough.But the thing that bugs me with Ozai is: for one thing, so many people underestimate his bending skills. No lie, we only saw him fighting in Sozin’s Comet, but even so, the kind of mad skills he showed there were off the charts. The legion of people claiming Iroh is stronger than Ozai and that he would’ve handed his ass to him is honestly laughable, considering that IROH HIMSELF SAYS HE DOESN’T KNOW THAT HE CAN GO UP AGAINST HIS BROTHER. Ozai is the strongest firebender in ATLA, PERIOD. He did things no other firebenders were shown doing. He was supposed to be that powerful BECAUSE he’s the final boss. Yes, the fight between him and Aang falls short compared to the Last Agni Kai because the emotional investment and conflict isn’t as strong here as it was over there, but for people to actually claim Ozai was weak at all? That he wasn’t that big a deal? Excuse you, but that’s just spite talking. I love Azula with all my heart, and even I can see she still wasn’t on the same power level scale as her father during the finale. And that’s fact. (I think she has the potential to surpass him, yes, but she hadn’t done it by the time of the finale).And then there’s the other reason why Ozai is underrated: yes, he wasn’t developed, he wasn’t explored, he fell flat many times. But honest to gods, it’s not that hard to draw the parallels between him and Zuko when you consider: 1. Ozai was designed to look like an older version of Zuko 2. Ozai is stated to have traveled looking for the Avatar, just like Zuko 3. Ozai gets passed over by his father and punished beyond proportion for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. Seriously, can we not see these parallels, right there? And that’s without getting into the similarity of Zuko and Ozai’s personalities, because both of them seemed to feel entitled to the throne that, originally, wasn’t supposed to be theirs (as a reminder, if we go by what the Wikia says, Zuko is 11 when Lu Ten dies, which means he spent 11 years of his life without being a Crown Prince or expecting to take the throne because, by all logic, it should have been Lu Ten’s... yet he slides into the “that throne will be mine” mentality within a few years). Both of them are brash, hot-headed and impulsive. Both of them have bad tempers, both of them spent years trying to please fathers who could never be pleased at all.Point being? OZAI IS A MIRROR FOR ZUKO. OZAI IS “BAD ENDING ZUKO”. OZAI IS WHAT ZUKO COULD HAVE BEEN IF AANG NEVER SHOWED UP, IF IROH WASN’T AROUND TO GUIDE HIM. And that, my friends, adds a fuckton of complexity to Ozai that the majority of the fandom is happy to overlook. Hate him all you want, he’s supposed to be hated. But this guy is waaaaay more than what meets the eye if you only stop for ten minutes to ponder his character, his possible motivations and his relationships. It’s especially clear that he’s very much complex when you factor in the resemblance with Zuko.

And this time I guess I’ll cut it short at 3 because I can’t think of anyone else who’s underrated or even criticized relentlessly without much basis. While there’s some people who undermine characters like Suki, she also has a fairly big and solid group of fans who are very much devoted to bringing up her character and who will always begrudge Bryke for not revealing anything about her future, so she’s not THAT underrated...?

Welp, I feel the fandom is a little more balanced with the rest of the characters, there’s enough love and hate to go for everyone. So I guess I’ll keep it as a top 3 this time, if you don’t mind, Anon.

[ilovemytransgenderchild]

Hey you. Yes, YOU

IF YOU ARE STRUGGLING IF YOU ARE OVERWHELMED

PLEASE

REACH OUT

DON’T SELF ISOLATE

YOU DON’T HAVE TO HANDLE THIS ALONE.

WE WANT YOU WE NEED YOU WE LOVE YOU

So this is gonna be a bit long, and personal, but this is a direct message to some of my followers. I’d appreciate a few minutes of your time.

I have a hard time asking for help. Since I was small, I’ve always curled around my pain and kept it close. I’ve always felt ashamed of personal weakness in myself. I really love people, love caring for them, love them whether their emotions were messy or dark or whatever. I’ve always admired people who talk about personal challenges. But, for myself, I guarded my weak side with a sword. I could not COULD NOT admit to anyone that I struggled. I was the one who helps, not the one who needs help. That was my longstanding position before therapy, rather.

But. I had a rough time a couple years ago, and as much as I wanted and needed help, IT WAS SO DIFFICULT TO REACH OUT. I thought, welp, I’ve tried and tried to handle this, but nothing works, it’s just not solvable, so I’m done for. I also thought: don’t be a burden, you can’t burden people. Life is hard all over, don’t add to that.

I knew that if I told friends, told my doc, that I was a mess, they’d say, of course you’re a mess, I mean my god, look at you, we’ve known all along, apparently you’re the last to know, you crazy bitch.

I knew if I ever unscrewed the top of my head and poured out the evidence of my particular brain stew, it would be irrefutable, unredeemable proof of my inhumanity and fuckery, that I was one of those people who crash through life never figuring anything out, making life messier for people around me. You know what I’m talking about. I just knew a therapist would throw up their hands and think, my god, this woman is so pitiful, just a WRONG person. Like the therapist would say, ‘Actually, you’re much worse than you feared. You thought there were spiders in your head but it’s worse than that, there are venomous snakes, and more. We all suspected you were monstrous and now we’ve got solid proof so fuck off back to your hole in the ground.’

But things became intolerable finally, and I told my doc I kind of wanted to die, that I couldn’t stand feeling nothing at all and only feeling wretched when I did feel anything. I told her that all I could see, when I looked toward the future, was blank, empty pain.

She didnt lock me up, didn’t call me crazy, didn’t tell me that life was pain and I should have figured that out already. No. What she did was put a heated blanket around my shoulders, and then THANKED ME.

I asked for help. Help was given.

It was an important transitional moment, and an enormous learning experience for me. It was like being lost in the woods, being so cold for so long that you just want to lie down and sleep, the kind of unrelenting chill that can start to feel normal, even as frostbite sets in, and you’re looking for a place to lie down, because this is it, it’s the woods forever for you…but while you’re looking for a place to leave what’s left of yourself, you see faint smoke above the trees. So you drag yourself over, just to see, knowing there’s almost certainly nothing there, but you force yourself through this last motion, and follow the firesign to arrive at a glowing cottage. Using bloody fingertips to push the door open and being dazed with sudden light and warmth. Shelter. Againt all odds. You know that Wallace Stegner book, Crossing To Safety? I love that phrase. It was like crossing to safety. Coming in from the cold. Safe.

I think about that doctor, that small room, that blanket, those warm hands on my shoulders, the woman crouching in front of me, looking into my eyes, gently telling me how grateful she was, how privileged she felt that I came to her. She said thank you, thank you, over and over. Thank you for reaching out. Thank you.

That moment was and is a big deal for me. The educated compassion, the sincerely offered expertise, the kindhearted woman, that intimate human connection…I’ve talked about it once before here, when it first happened, and I still don’t have the words to illustrate how it felt to be so lost, how it felt to be found.

It wasn’t fast, the crawl back out. I started meds, I got a therapist, but I didn’t want to talk about feelings, I wanted a map, I wanted a gameplan, I wanted to know what to DO, I wanted a list of things to check off. I wanted to stoic my way through to the other side. I kept treating the depression like a blip, an embarrassing wobble, out of character and temporary. I didn’t feel so alone, I was doing the right things, food, sleep, therapy, exercise. But I wanted the meds to instantly cure me and I just wanted the therapist to freakin tell me what to do, to quit talking about feelings, to SOLVE this.

My whole life I’ve been a different and slow learner. It’s like I have to test all the ways something DOESNT work, to do everything wrong first. It’s not wildly efficient. I know this about myself (after taking years to figure it out, natch) and I work with it in my adult life, but for my little wanting to die problem, once my damn fool self realized it didn’t have to be this way, I wanted it solved pronto, straightaway, no more suffering please, now.

I had to learn how to identify what I was feeling, had to learn new vocabulary, had to learn so much. While I was (slowly) learning that I could talk about bad things in a safe place, that it was, to quote Patton Oswald, awful but not fatal. The therapist did teach me practical stuff, like the Seven Yellow Things game, like the circular breathing (the breathing stuff sounds like such bullshit, or rather, it did, to me at the time, but IT HELPS, HONESTLY IT DOES. I have an offline, very simple breathing app on my phone, and it’s terrific. Occasionally someone will see what I’m doing and ask about it, sometimes they’ll open up about their own anxiety and challenges, and sometimes they offer up their own techniques).

Week after week the therapist would say, How are things? And I’d say, It’s ok, I’m doing all the things I’m supposed to. And she’d say, What are you feeling right now? And I’d say, I’m ok. And she’d say, You have one hand tearing at your hair and the other hand is clenched. Your shoulders are up around your ears and you’re holding your breath in between sentences. So I’d forcibly unwind and sit forward and say, Tell me what to DO, and she’d say, it seems like you’re angry right now. And I’d say, no no, not angry. And she’d ask questions about my week and then she’d say, That one thing? Gosh that’s upsetting, that’s not great, I’d feel angry, too. And I’d say, huh, I guess I am a little pissed off about that. I didn’t know that I was. And then she’d show me a coping technique, she’d talk about reprogramming outgrown techniques, she’d say, that worked for you then, let’s figure out what works now.

Like a preschool teacher holding up a color chart and saying, This is green, this is blue, this is what you get when you combine them. Baby steps.

She saw that I responded to the idea of a mental toolbox, a thing I could access for specific ‘fixes’ so she’d say, that breathing thing? Put that tool in the box. It’s there for you when you need it. You know where it is, you know you can take it out and use it wherever, whenever. It really empowered me, to have her use a visual technique, to help me feel viscerally that I was rebuilding, recalibrating, making discernable progress. Combining the intangible with practical application, that worked for me.

I read a thing here where someone compared therapy like being stranded on a back road with a broken down car. Your therapist can’t pop the hood and start wrenching, but they can stand next to you and talk you through it. That perspective, that approach, I get that, it makes sense to me.

Someone else said they deal with the voice in their head, the one that predicts hatred and disaster, the one that tells you you’re worthless, you know that voice, that specific fucking fucker? They said they treat the voice like a jerky ten year old in the backseat of a car, they tell it to pipe down, to fuck off. That technique works for me, too.

I started reaching out more regularly, practicing opening up. I felt exposed and burdensome, even when people responded positively. And mostly, people responded incredibly positively. Those relationships improved because we were more in balance with each other; I wasn’t doing the stoic thing as much. I was WITH people when I was with them, there was give and take on both sides, and I realized that they genuinely wanted to know how things were with me, just like I wanted to know with them.

I didn’t realize how debilitating self imposed isolation was, until I started opening up and reaching out more often. Reaching out helps me do fact checks, gut checks, reality checks. Reaching out is a tool.

I feel stronger and smarter. I don’t feel like I can be blown away in a storm. I don’t want to die. I still struggle, I still have moments where I have to pull out every damn tool in the box, and sometimes throw them back and just get some sleep or a long walk.

The important thing is that I know I have resources now, I know how to use them. And I can see and feel, very tangibly, that practice helps. I’m better at getting over, because I’m working those muscles all the time. I’ll have a Thing, and I’ll stop breathing and start tightening up and start horriblizing, and then the therapeutic education kicks in and then I’m rummaging around for some tools. While I’m using them I’m aware that even though I’m feeling crappy at that moment, or worse, that there will eventually be a lessening, that it will ease off, eventually. I’m rebuilding a new normal. I can see it, it’s real. Like any other skill, you get better with practice. I know I can do this, because I did it before. That positive experience really helps.

I’ve had to switch some meds, had to fire a few therapists until I found someone who fit. Sometimes I get frustrated that things aren’t just SOLVED already dammit. I frequently get tired of basic housekeeping type emotional maintenance. I’ll have moments of, what the hell, shouldn’t this be finished by now? But that’s just a human irritation, like needing to re-clean your teeth everyday. Has to be done, helps with a lotta important things, prevents some bad things from settling in, all that.

Not all resources are equal, not all doctors are like the woman I lucked out with. Not all meds work, not all the time. Not all therapists are in the right business.

Modern life is fraught with logical fears and genuine suffering. Life is capricious and often terrifying. Not all friends will be happy to open their hearts, not all family are willing to patiently offer long term support. People can have good intentions and still harm with ignorance and impatience. Because as we all know, people are the WORST. Just crap people doing crap things, making life crap everywhere they go.

But that’s them, we know about that group already. When you’re in a bad way, it’s easy to forget the other kind of people, the ones who are the BEST, the absolute best. This kind of person knows that depression and anxiety are epidemic, they are informed or open to education. They understand the whole 'marathon not a sprint’ nature of recovery and maintenance. They know that different things work for different people. They are empathetic. Their eyes are kind, their arms are open, their hands are extended. They aren’t afraid. They want to work, want to help.

Reaching out, ending isolation, is so hard and so important. Reaching out to the right person or people, screening your resources, putting in the research, can be critical.

You have to ask for help. I know it feels like you can’t do anything, that there’s nothing left of you but scars and hollow bones. But this thing, the reaching out thing? That’s yours. You can have it whenever you want. No one can take it from you. If you’re struggling through your days, if you’re starting to think of self harm as, if not THE solution, then at least A solution… please reach out. This life is so weird and hard. Bodies and brains can suffer so much. If you lived a long time ago, you’d have to accept your lot. But this is now. We have better tools, we have everything better now. You deserve some peace.

You are wanted. You are loved. You are inportant. You matter.

The only way we can manage is by helping each other, standing up for each other on this damn rock. Loneliness doesn’t work. Isolation doesn’t work. Hurting yourself doesn’t work. Not for long, anyway.

Please say something, please. Please. As a mother, as a human, as someone who is also chronically headfucked and heartfucked, I’m begging you. If you’re in a bad way, you can message me for my phone number or email. I’m here.

And, hey, look around, do you see them? All those good people, the ones who are best? They’re here, too. They want good things for you. They understand. They get it. They know about the void, the darkness. They arent scared or burdened. You can see it in their eyes. Look at them. Look at all those hands reaching for you, ready to catch you if you fall. They’re so glad you’re here. Stay with us. We need you. We want you. Yes, YOU.