Sunday, January 19, 2025

Closing 2024: Resolutions Edition

Hi team,

2024 was a lot.

I don't know where to begin in trying to distill down everything this past year held.  Which probably means this is a valuable opportunity to take some time just to reflect on its events.


Personally, there was so much good in this year, including a lot of growth.  It is such an awe-inspiring delight to see my kids grow and for their personalities to emerge more and more.  I'm so proud of how our family is evolving, and I'm so grateful for the partnership I have with my husband.  My work, as always, is really rewarding.  Since our youngest child finally enrolled in daycare midway through the year, I've re-expanded my hours at work in a way that still feels sustainable, in part because I got to feel what it's like to do less than the maximum I'm capable of professionally for some time.  Our family got to take an absolutely incredible trip abroad, and I got to travel to see some of my favorite people.  It's been a really rich, fruitful year.

Globally, it's hard to feel anything other than heaviness.  I've been wrestling with this dichotomy between the micro and macro levels of my life, and I still don't really know how to hold it all at the same time, how to make sense of how one very different little world is nestled within the other.

This seems like as good an opening as any to look back at the resolutions I made for 2024, and to set goals for the new year.  My resolutions last year were:

1. Prioritize the things that make savoring life possible.
2. Watch at least 30 movies.

1. Prioritize the things that make savoring life possible.

My two-part version of what might be the most cringily-worded resolution I've ever made was to a) stay committed to recovery and self-care stuff, and b) prioritize my hobbies.  In all honesty, for the first half of the year, this was pretty much impossible.  Lack of childcare is just a crushingly immovable barrier for these kinds of endeavors, and unfortunately it took months longer than expected for a place to become available for our second child at the daycare our first child attends.

Once that was in place, it definitely made a lot of day-to-day life and work stuff easier, but it still wasn't enough for there to be space for any "bonus" stuff.  Recognizing that reality is what finally pushed me to find and commit to having a babysitter come for a few hours every weekend, long after a neighbor with young children recommended doing so.  Having guilt-free free time--self-determination time that doesn't come at the cost of my partner doing double duty for the duration--has made a huge difference in my overall mental health and the range of things I'm able to do on a semi-regular basis.  It's been such a life-changing gift.

And so, in the past 6 months or so, I've actually made significant progress toward this goal.  I've gone to see movies, met up with friends, started attending a book club with other parents in our neighborhood, read for fun, had quality time with Husband, and had some more time for writing.  I've also finally taken meaningful steps in deepening my recovery work and committed to doing that regularly, which feels so good.  There are still additional steps I want to take in that domain, but it's a huge relief, honestly, to finally start breaking through the emotional log jam that was stymieing my progress.

While I knew I desperately needed to fulfill this resolution when I made it, I wasn't confident I would actually be able to.  I'm so grateful to be able to say that I really did succeed with this resolution.  My life feels measurably brighter because of it--there have been many days when I've noticed that my ambient emotional state is just content, happy.  

Recently I've been recognizing that so much of that is a consequence of discipline; quiet, consistent, reasonably flexible yet generally unwavering commitment to doing what needs to be done, over and over.  Just as this is why there are flowers and wildlife to watch in my backyard, it's why I feel emotionally healthier now than I did just a few years ago.  It's why my kids are growing in all sorts of beautiful ways and my marriage is strong.  I'm just so genuinely grateful to feel the benefit of this routine, committed labor, and to know that that felt benefit is proof of not only my ability to improve my own life but also my interconnectedness with the greater world.

2. Watch at least 30 movies.

I'm pretty chagrined to say I *just* barely hit this target.  I saw some great movies this year, but I definitely did not have the stamina or time to watch one every week.  I'm glad I had the self-attunement and reality contact needed to set a movie-watching goal that was actually achievable, because I would have felt so crappy if I'd insisted on the usual 52 movies resolution and either fell way short or stressed myself out over something so ultimately arbitrary.  I do hope I'll be able to reinstate the one-movie-a-week goal at some point in the next few years, but I don't think that's going to happen soon.

I also didn't write nearly as much as I'd hoped.  In a way, the dramatic shift from writing the most posts I'd ever written in 2023 to the least in 2024 stings way more than the reduced number of movies I watched.  I never even finished writing the 2024 round-up post!  Even as I plan to retain the same movie-watching goal for the new year, I hope to write more in 2025.

So let's talk about goals for this year.


My resolutions for 2025 are:

1. Do sustainable, consistent, values-congruent things with my free time.

This includes doing things I enjoy, like building local friendships, connecting with long-distance friends, reading, writing, doing photography stuff, baking and cooking, taking walks, taking care of plants and animals, decorating our home, and I really do want to start playing VR again because I miss my cute minigolf game!  It also includes doing self-care and recovery work, including reading, attending meetings, meeting with other people involved in recovery, and hopefully beefing up my recovery work through further connecting with other people also involved in recovery.

Finally, I also want to take my own advice by participating in regular activism centered on the things I care most about using a collaborative approach and, where possible, continuing to engage in mutual aid.

Taken altogether, I know fulfilling this resolution will actively contribute to my overall wellbeing.

2. Watch at least 30 movies, and write at least 15 posts.

I think I would feel really good about meeting this resolution, which based on how this year went seems reasonable yet still like a bit of a reach.  Writing about movies is so grounding and enjoyable for me--I love being able to think deeply about what I've watched and share what I liked about them.  Doing even a little bit more of that would mean a lot to me.

And with that, as my oldest child busts into my office to blast me with my hair dryer (who knows why writing regularly is such a challenge??), I will sign off.


Happy New Year, dear friends.

{Heart}

Tuesday, December 31, 2024

The Arc of the Moral Universe: What's Next?

Hello beloveds, and Happy New Year,

Well things with the election have obviously turned out badly.  Let's talk about it, and what we do next.

I've heard a lot of reactions to the election, but a few are particularly dominant, in my little corner of the universe at least.  Most prominent of all is a numb, defeatist (or defeated?) apathy, bordering on dissociation and nihilism.  There's also grim acceptance and lack of surprise, especially among younger people whose whole conscious political life has been dominated by the election's victor.  It's pretty impossible to harbor any idealistic beliefs about what this country is when it has so consistently and clearly shown its true character for your whole adult life, after all.  Less often, there's the tinny and frankly clueless "we just have to get through the next 4 years" camp, so divorced from reality and/or loudly telegraphing privilege as to be offensive.  Of course there's a broad range of human reactions to such a calamitous turn of political events, so this isn't exhaustive--this is just what I'm hearing and observing in those around me.

To some degree or other, these are all understandable reactions.  To some degree or other, they're also all attempts--deeply faulty attempts, but still--to self-regulate in intentionally dysregulating times.  Evil can only achieve its aims with the consent, tacit or otherwise, of well-intentioned people.  Each of those three mindsets is offering consent to evil through its inaction.  They simply are not tenable.

I say this from a place of absolutely experiencing a lot of those feelings, especially the grim acceptance and numb dissociation-y bits.  I'm hardly up to speed on the developments in the incoming administration's appointments or whatever "policy" they've been drum-beating about (is it racist?  I'm guessing it's racist).  I'm not actively trying to picture what the next however many years will look like in this country, in part because I'm not interested in helping the incoming administration terrorize me but also because I can't really take the ramped-up cortisol.  I'm hardly coping or emotionally processing any of this perfectly, whatever that could possibly mean.

And, as I said in my last post, it is absolutely crucial, now more than ever, that we get off our asses, snap out of fatalism, despair, and defeat, and start fighting like hell, like the world depends on it, like every decent, beautiful thing we care about will not survive without it.  With relentless, deep, abiding love.

What does that look like?  Above all, it must be:

1) Sustainable
2) Important to you
3) Humble
4) With others, and
5) Imperfect

Sustainability is possibly the most important active ingredient.  With an incoming regime that is explicitly built to at a minimum psychologically terrorize you and demoralize you, our energy will be under constant undermining assault.  It might not be remotely realistic to do as much as you wish you could do, but better to consistently persist in whatever work you can do than to burn yourself out by doing too much in the first ~8 weeks of the next administration.  Consistent, reliable work is vitally necessary, so be realistic and self-attuned in asking yourself how much time and effort you can dedicate to taking action.

Personal importance is perhaps the trickiest ingredient, as we are tragically spoiled for choices in this moment.  You will not be able to contribute to every cause that matters to you without burning yourself out.  You won't.  Take some time to accept that.

No seriously.  Take a moment, at least, to take that in.  You can't help with everything that matters to you.

Instead, choose 1-3 things that matter the most to you.  What most grabs your heart?  That is your thing.  Those are the hills you stake your flag on.

But what of the other things you care about?  The reason sustainability is so crucial is that if we all do sustainable work, there will hopefully be enough of us to tackle everything.

Which brings us to humility.  We are not the heroes of this story, our movements are.  We are one little ant building a massive anthill, one little cog in a beautiful, messy, yet purposeful machine.  As individuals, we will likely not accomplish much that is visible or monumental.  Of course, that's because we're up against a lot, but also because it's hard to measure the catastrophes that don't occur because of communal effort.  If we are in this in a contingent way, only insofar as we're guaranteed clear and shining moments of victory, we are prioritizing our own egoistic needs to be rewarded or to feel special over the needs of the causes and communities that matter to us.  It's understandable to want to be the main character in the story, but as best we can we need to put that wish aside for the greater good.

We also need humility in order to collaborate with others who have been doing activism and organizing way longer than we have, with people who have wisdom, experience, and insight well beyond ours.  It is much more effective to join a pre-existing organization or group dedicated to the causes you care about than it is to build something from scratch, because the latter means duplicating and thereby wasting precious energy that could be more efficiently utilized elsewhere, doing work alone is isolating and more likely to lead to burnout, and it risks all the pitfalls of being an activist-turned-savior.  We all have such an exciting opportunity to learn from the people who have been organizing for years, and we must take it.  Our job is to place ourselves at the ready in community with like-minded, like-hearted people and go where we're pointed.

And finally, we must radically embrace that our work will be imperfect.  We can't accomplish everything we want to.  We can't do as much as we wish we could.  We'll get tired, distracted, and dragged into the demands of our personal and professional lives.  We'll get things wrong and need to learn to do things differently and better.  We'll have so much to learn.  We can't see the future, and we don't know exactly what the best next step is.  In accepting all of this, we are better prepared to nevertheless continue the beautiful, necessary, shared struggle.

So with all this in mind, what's next for you?  What grabs your heart, and how will you fight like hell for it, and with who?

I can't wait to hear all about it.  I'll see you out there in the fight.

Glad we're in it together.

{Heart}

Sunday, November 3, 2024

The Arc of the Moral Universe

Hi everyone,

I've found myself so much more irritable, emotional, and ill-at-ease as the election draws forebodingly nearer.  Despite dramatically reducing my consumption of the news and how much I'm even talking about it in recent months, even when it isn't in my conscious awareness it is a hulking omnipresence.

Honestly, we've lived through too much in the past decade or so.  From the nauseating and terrifying results of the 2016 election, to the endless indignities, abuses, and outrages of the years of Trump's presidency, to the unimaginable surreality, fear, and isolation of a years-long pandemic, to a now year-old US-funded social media-streamed genocide, all mercilessly back to back to back, it's too much.  It feels like we're all entitled to a bloodcurdling, lung-emptying existential scream no one has made space for.  It feels like that scream would never end if it ever started.

I used to be so comforted by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s statement about the arc of the moral universe.  It articulated my worldview for years, encapsulating my optimism and willingness to engage in ongoing, persistent struggle.

The trouble is, I was so naive about how long that struggle would take.  I thought Obama's election in 2008 and 2012 would naturally lead to the immediate election of our first woman President, that liberal political leadership would become more or less the norm in this country, and that steady progress would continue for the rest of my lifetime and beyond--with considerable labor, but also with heartening consistency.  It was so encouraging, so inspiring to imagine I would get to see the elegant unspooling of the moral universe toward a justice that would shine its light on everyone.  It seemed like such an easy roadmap to follow, just a gentle slope climbing ever upward.

In retrospect, I realize I almost felt a sense of unwitting entitlement to things just continuing in what seemed like a logical, relatively orderly direction.

At first, I saw the outcome of the 2016 election as an albeit gigantic bump in the road, or perhaps like the messiness and agony of childbirth; something beautiful and new coming into the world often necessitates pain, effort, strength, and a period of recovery.  I thought a bunch of dinosaurs were throwing one last racist, sexist, ableist, xenophobic temper tantrum before finally succumbing to their powerless irrelevancy, after which we could return to our steady progression toward a better world, perhaps further strengthened and emboldened because of what we'd just endured.

As time went on, however, it got harder and harder to hold onto my original assumptions about the world and the future.  The more horrific bullshit Trump did, and the more impunity with which he did that horrific bullshit--the more court cases and impeachments he evaded essentially scot-free, the more judges he appointed, the more people he got killed with his unconscionable anti-science nonsense, the more ugliness he said and did and thereby empowered his followers to say and do--the more my belief that the world was moving toward something better shriveled.  

By the time his followers faced hardly any commensurate consequences for launching an attempted coup and Trump himself fully evaded accountability for overtly attempting to upend American democracy, not to mention as people lost federal protection for abortion rights and the bloodthirsty war against trans people continued to escalate unabated despite having a Democrat for a President, I'd numbly accepted defeat.  Maybe pessimists are right: maybe history simply repeats itself, over and over, until the end of time.  Maybe what looks like "progress" is just a fleeting, ephemeral period of relief, an eye in the unending storm of inherently self-destructive human cruelty.  Maybe the moral universe isn't traveling on an arc at all, but instead it's simply stuck in place, spinning in a circle we're doomed to always be rotating around.

I don't want this to be the truth.  I don't really know how to make sense of living in a world in which that's the truth.  I certainly don't understand how to parent--like, big picture parent--in a world that's just going to get worse for my children and everyone around them.  I don't know how to square the deep joy I get from caring for my children and my home with the despair I feel for the world around us.  The dissonance feels impossible to resolve.  It's miserable.

In trying to work through all this, I've had conversations with people I trust, I've sought guidance through the words of thought leaders I respect, and I've done a lot of thinking.  I don't want to sacrifice my innate optimism for people and the world at large.  I don't want to give up on my belief in people's inherent goodness.  I also refuse to blind myself to the realities of what horrors people are capable of inflicting on others, and the evil that people perpetrate because they think no one will care or intervene.  I refuse to choose the narrow view of my little, happy life to the exclusion of the rest of the world, primarily because that is simply wrong and selfish, but also because one of the things I love most about humanity is our interdependence, and something that harms my neighbor will one day harm me, too.  There has to be a way to hold all these truths at once without becoming paralyzed by despair or denial.

Through all of this, I've come to the conclusion that neither of those two preceding worldviews are accurate, and neither of them are wrong.  Instead, I think we're on a circular path, but moving through space in a slow yet inexorable course toward justice.  There are still going to be periods where things get worse, but that doesn't determine our overall trajectory.  The journey is more circuitous than I wish it was, yet the destination remains the same.

Key in consolidating this view for me was a recent metaphor using the Shepard tone discussed in one of my favorite podcasts (around minute 6 of this episode, if you're curious to hear it for yourself).  The host used this tone to illustrate the reality that there are things that are getting better and worse all the time.  The getting-better and the getting-worse are always there, a part of the overall song of our world.  What comes through the loudest is what you focus on.

The message I hear in that metaphor is to recognize the combined realities of our world, and to choose your focus intentionally depending on what the moment requires.  If you find yourself lapsing into despair, as I very often have in the past few years, then focusing on the good in the world could bring you back from the brink.  If you instead lull yourself into an inaccurate sense of comfort and passivity, then focusing on where your energy and attention is still needed and taking action is necessary to avoid complicity in the cruelty and oppression that still exists in the world.

All that to say, I've found it's heartbreakingly easy to lose sight of the arc of the moral universe, because it's so very long.  Yet I believe Dr. King was, ultimately, right: it bends, ceaselessly, toward the light.  Because it has to.  Because we can make it so.

So that brings us to today, two days before the next election.  I don't pretend to be able to predict the outcome.  A lot of bad things may still happen.  But we've got each other and a future to fight for.  To reference another leader for justice, we must mourn the dead and fight like hell for the living.  At the end of the day, there's simply no other choice.

{Heart}

Thursday, October 31, 2024

A (Mini) Halloween Sampler for All Souls: 2024 Edition!

Happy Halloween, dear friends!


Given this year's reduced movie-watching goal, it perhaps follows that I have fewer scary movies to review for this year's spooky sampler.  Nevertheless, I'm excited to share a few films that might be fitting if you're in the mood to enhance this scary season with some cinematic creepiness.

As always, each of the movies below will be rated with the usual overall 1 - 5 rating scale, as well as a scary/intense rating of 1 - 5 exclamation points, to be interpreted as follows:

! = not at all scary
!!!!! = so scary!

Let's get to it!

"A Haunting in Venice" (2023)
Rating: 3.5  Scary Rating: !!!!

Having seen at least one of the campy previous generation of Detective Poirot movies, I didn't expect "A Haunting in Venice" to be as scary as it was.  The film uses its dark, foreboding setting in a decaying Venetian mansion with a hellish history to very strong effect, and is further enhanced by its willingness to toy with the line between the natural and supernatural world, especially because that seems to run counter to Poirot's typical refusal to believe that anything other than living human beings can be responsible for murder.  This detective-film-turned-ghost-story is definitely perfect for Halloween!


"Twisters" (2024)
Rating: 4  Scary Rating: !!!

Long-term readers of the blog know how much I love the original "Twister" (1996), so it should come as no surprise that I was PUMPED for this long, long-overdue sequel.  AND IT DID NOT DISAPPOINT.  It packs all the heart-pounding tornado-y action you know and love from the original with added themes of climate change, social media celebrity, grassroots mutual aid, and predatory capitalism to bring it into the future.  

Is it the most scientifically rigorous movie in the world?  No.  Are the characters super well-developed?  No.  Is it the universe's best script?  No.  We cannot demand the world from "Twisters", but we can sure as hell can demand a good time, and it absolutely delivers.  So if you're in the mood for something intense that is firmly rooted in the natural world, this is your movie.

I hope you enjoy a wonderful and optimally spooky Halloween!


{Heart}

Sunday, September 29, 2024

Getting to the "Bottoms" of "Wicked Little Letters": A Women Behaving Badly Double-Header

Hey everyone,

I am DELIGHTED to share two absolutely excellent movies I watched recently.  While by pure coincidence these films share some major thematic similarities, they also differ dramatically aesthetically.  Yet both fully deliver in enjoyment and emotional uplift.

The two movies are: 


"Bottoms" (2023) tells the story of Josie (played by Ayo Edebiri) and PJ (played by Rachel Sennott), high school best friends who are both gay.  They hatch an elaborate plan to start a girls-only fight club, which they tout as a self-defense/feminist self-empowerment group, with the ulterior motive of climbing their school's social hierarchy from the bottom of the barrel (hence the movie's title), and to thereby gain greater access and appeal to the two popular cheerleaders on whom they have crushes.

What follows feels like "Booksmart" (2019) meets "Kill Bill" (2003) with a hit of acid.  The world PJ and Josie live in is just surreal enough to feel like a weird parallel universe version of ours, in which rivalries between high schools turn literally bloodthirsty and hero worship of the football team's histrionic and entitled quarterback is unabashedly and in equal measures zealous and thirsty in an altogether different way.  The movie only barely acknowledges its own strangeness, which feels like a massive compliment to its audience; you feel cool for being along for the ride without needing it explained to you why Marshawn Lynch's history class is only 5 minutes long.

Thankfully, another way in which "Bottoms" leans into its surreality is through the relative cartoonishness of its violence.  While people do get bloodied and bruised--it needs to be clear that the blows these girls land hurt--the movie isn't all that graphic, which makes it easier to watch and also to not miss the point of the movie.

"Wicked Little Letters" (2023), on the other hand, is set in post-World War I suffragette-era England and centers on an opposites attract friendship gone awry in the wake of particularly vulgar poison pen letters.  Edith (played by Olivia Coleman) is an unmarried woman living with her elderly parents under extremely strict religious and gender role expectations imposed by her domineering, sexist, and humorless father.  Rose (played by Jessie Buckley) could not be more her opposite: she is an unrestrained and loud single mother who is fully at ease with a range of profanity and prioritizes playing darts, drinking, and sleeping with her devoted boyfriend over wasting her time with tedious housework and maintaining propriety simply to appease her nosy and uptight neighbors.  The trouble is, her neighbors are Edith and her parents.

When Edith receives the latest in a parade of libelous anonymous letters, her father finally decides to involve the police in pursuing Rose as their suspected author.  While at first she attempts to refuse to participate in the investigation for fear of taking the judging role she attributes only to her god, Edith eventually relents under her father's pressure and suddenly becomes the unintended victim-heroine in a highly publicized and swiftly escalating poison pen scandal.  As the stakes quickly rise for all concerned, it becomes increasingly clear that Rose might not be the actual culprit.

"Wicked Little Letters" matches the surreality of "Bottoms" with a comparative realism, down to the outhouses and shared washbasins that were typical of the era in the UK.  It is nevertheless leavened with a heightened silliness, often telegraphed through the highly communicative facial expressions of the group of women that form the heart of the film.

Taken together, these superficially different movies center on the same powerful core themes, including friendship and solidarity between women, the power and protection that can be drawn from found family, and the revelatory liberation that follows when women openly, even violently when necessary, flout restrictive gender and sexuality norms.  They're also both extremely funny, well-acted, and well-constructed movies that move along briskly and thrive in no small part because of their excellent scripts--and they're both directed by women: Emma Seligman directed "Bottoms", while Thea Sharrock directed "Wicked Little Letters".

I loved both of these movies so much, and I highly recommend them to anyone looking for a good time and affirmation for being a misbehaving woman.  I gave them both a 5.

{Heart}