Author: gabsroman

Being creative when you’d rather do anything else

Life is kind of…a lot right now. (Understatement of the year.)

It’s been so unbelievably difficult to scrape together the motivation to do anything. Even the stuff that has to be done. Life admin and dishes are sucking up every last ounce of energy I have.

And that’s presented itself as a bit of a problem for me. And maybe for some of you!

Because being creative in some form or fashion helps keep my head screwed on straight. But given the current state of politics, ongoing burnout, personal responsibilities, and work stress, when I get to the end of the day, I mostly want to bury my head under a pillow and not move.

I have been trying to embrace methods to get less offline and open myself to more free time. But it’s been a bit of a struggle.

Trying to build free time into your schedule while you’re working and parenting two children is definitely more “life hack” territory than anything else. What would really give me more free time? Maybe a system that supported parents more fully and made it less exhausting to exist.

But I also know that I waste a fair amount of my time doing things that are not helpful for my mental wellbeing. (Or is it that these periods where I scroll or what TV the only time of the day I am allowed to have a smooth brain and so are absolutely necessary for decompression purposes?)

So, I posed myself the question: is there a way to be creative and build on your happiness even when everything feels like way too much?

And then I thought about what that would look like and how I could write a post about it.

And then I thought about it some more.

And then two months passed.

As it turns out, I have not solved the problem of how to be creative when you’d rather be rotting on your couch. But I have (unevenly) applied a couple techniques that have (sort of) worked (for a limited amount of time).

If you are looking for an actual life hack here, I’m sorry. I don’t have any.

I thought about listing some of the things I’ve tried and the level of success I’ve had doing those things. And maybe it would be a useful exercise for reflection? But then I decided that I don’t really want to talk about whether the focus setting on my phone helps me spend less time on Instagram. (It does, by the way.)

This image is supposed to represent creativity. But it also is a good metaphor for the inside of my brain on most days. (Photo by NIKHIL on Unsplash)

Instead I want to think about what it means to be bone tired to your very core and still have the desire to make something. Even when that desire is barely more than a spark.

While I think the tortured writer stereotype isn’t entirely accurate, there is something there. Even well-adjusted people are a little tortured sometimes. Even if your personal life is okay, sometimes the circumstances surrounding you are…decidedly not.

Do we create art to help us deal with the hard times around us? When you have reached your limit, does creating something beautiful (or ugly or difficult or messy) help you process it and work through it?

Is the act of creation when you’d rather be doing anything else somehow one of the most amazing accomplishments you can achieve?

That’s maybe putting it too strongly, but at the same time, it is amazing!

There’s the bit inside of us that wants to roll over and stop. That wants to turn on the television. Or go to sleep. Or play the video game.

And listen, there is nothing wrong with doing any of those things. Sometimes doing one of those things is exactly the right thing to do.

But when you hack away again at the creative thing, the thing that puts your vulnerability on display, the thing that you have to do even if every bit of you is screaming every time you actually sit down to do it, then that is something.

It really is.

I have written several books in my life. None of them are published (yet), but that’s fine. I don’t need them to be. I wrote those books because there was something in me that had to get them done. The ideas kept poking at me and I kept coming back to it. Sometimes I didn’t want to, but the act of finishing the first draft of something is such an accomplishment. I have rarely had a better feeling than finishing the first draft of a book. Something inside me was clawing to get out, and it made it out! Not in a polished or complete way. Not in the way I had dreamed up in my head. But there it was. And still is.

When my youngest was born at the end of 2020, I was too tired to try to write the next book. (I was too tired to do pretty much anything for a little while there.) But I missed writing. So in 2021, I started up this blog in attempt to write something on a semi-regular basis until I was ready to go back to books. That carefully laid out schedule lasted for less time than I would care to admit. Another chunk of time passed until the fall of 2023, when I started up my Shakespeare podcast. A different way to tackle the bit of creativity that I wanted to get out. Earlier this year, life intervened, and I’ve had to cut back on the podcast and other creative endeavors.

In all those times where I haven’t been working on projects, I’ve still thought about them. Sometimes I’ve thought about a particular idea every night for weeks, crafting it and refining it while making myself feel monumentally guilty for not having started it yet.

And then, I never did it. I never put the words to paper (digital or otherwise). And I started to tell myself that I had failed. That it was time to walk away. That maybe I didn’t have it in me to be a creative person anymore.

I haven’t written a book, a chapter of a book, or even a paragraph of a book in more than four years. I have been intending to write this very article for a couple of months. There is something inside me that wants to create but every time that act is about to happen, something stops me.

Sometimes that obstacle is bigger than myself. Sometimes it’s not. But beating myself up about not overcoming didn’t make the project get done. It just made me feel bad about myself.

Creativity doesn’t have to flow easily or consistently to still be there. And sometimes it disappears.

It’s a matter of fits and starts. And miniature successes and bigger failures and sometimes it means looking at the part of you that you used to consider one of your defining characteristics and wondering if it will ever come back.

Will I ever write another book again?

I think so. One day.

Will I want to write it every time I sit down to work on it?

Definitely not.

So, how do I make it happen when I’d almost rather be doing anything else?

Not sure yet.

But, hey. I did finally write this article.

So that’s a start.

June 3, 2025
What AI Can’t Do

What can AI do?

AI can tell you the best practices to apply to web content.

But it can’t fumble around in a new job after having earned a college degree that’s only tangentially related to your duties. It can’t try out these best practices with uneven application, see what the audience responds to, what the search engine responds to. It can’t organically become an expert on a niche subject matter after talking to an enthusiastic engineer growing in power until it understands the kind of article you need to write to reach people and have it matter.

AI can’t touch grass. But we probably need to all go out and do that. (Photo by Aleksander Fox on Unsplash)

AI can’t take that growth experience to its next job, where it’s already ahead of the game by knowing what to try and where to start and how to tell its younger coworkers that they don’t have to get it right away. That ultimately they just have to keep trying.

AI can’t go on a date and have a first kiss and find itself distracted in the following weeks after that magic moment, going through the motions of life and working on routine tasks only to drift back to that experience, that feeling in the pit of your stomach, the way your lips tingled and made it feel somehow real for the first time ever. It can’t wonder at a new experience, something that took you completely off guard when you thought you’d already had things all figured out.

AI can’t buy the new product that everyone’s been raving about and then discover that while it has ten functions you don’t need, it doesn’t have the one function you want. But you can’t seem to admit that to anybody else, so you end up with a piece of tech in your house that gets sparsely used until it ends up unplugged, without batteries, in a drawer somewhere. It wouldn’t find said abandoned object three years later in a fit of inspired spring cleaning, digging it out of the drawer and carting it off to the local thrift store while looking skeptically at the hot new gadget.

AI hasn’t tried typing increasingly specific searches into the search bar in an attempt to locate that one perfect tweet you saw years ago but neglected to download or screenshot. It hasn’t thrilled in the glory of saving a small piece of internet history from obscurity even though nobody else you know cares about this. The screenshot won’t sit in a digital folder somewhere only to pop up later and surprise you into loud, barking laughter. It can’t understand that weird form jokes on the internet take become a type of shared language and, in some ways, an odd form of emotional support in the modern age.

AI can’t get a bad cold and find both its nostrils stopped up and its throat aching and feel that post-nasal drip at the back of your throat that signals a lingering cough is imminent. That even after the other symptoms have disappeared, you’ll lie awake at night and not even the strongest dose of Nyquil will do anything to stop it but it also doesn’t feel like a big enough deal to go see the doctor.

AI can be funny in a programmed way, but it doesn’t know the feeling of being struck over the head by something so gut-bustingly hilarious that you and the person you’re with keep cackling until your stomachs hurt and your eyes are streaming and you both pull it together just enough to sigh but then you both sigh at the same time and that sets you off into fresh peals of laughter.

AI has never lain on a too small, not-quite-comfortable mattress, arm pinned under the body of a sleeping child, itself in a half doze in the dark, feeling the warmth and comfort of someone so small and vulnerable who trusts you so completely and loves you without any complication. It can’t wrestle with the question of whether you should just fall asleep or try to extract yourself to do the dishes. What the dishes worth anyway against that soft, even breathing?

AI doesn’t know the human experience. It hasn’t skinned its knee or held someone while they cried or felt a deep aching frustration at something not going the way it had planned. It doesn’t care if it gives you advice that hasn’t been fact checked or if you’re exhausted because your baby didn’t sleep or if you’re exhausted because your heart was broken or if you’re exhausted because you stayed up way too late reading a thrilling book.

AI doesn’t know the beauty of a sunrise or the sound of your breath in your ears as you go stubbornly run the next mile or a song you love but forgot about surfacing again on the radio.

It can’t do those things. But you can.

November 22, 2024
Hey, I’m back! Welcome back.

There’s a game my kids like to play, usually while they’re supposed to be eating dinner.

The first floor of our house forms a loop from our table to the play area to the front hallway to the kitchen and back again.

When they don’t want to eat dinner, they stand up and run away from the table as quickly as they can, careening into the front hallway, through the kitchen, and back out until they’ve reached the table again.

“Hey,” they say, adopting a tough guy attitude. “I’m back.”

“Hey!” their dad and I reply. “Welcome back.”

Then, as we try to invite them to sit down and have some dinner with us, they go running off again, leaving us to shout at their retreating backs, “Hey, where you going?”

They love it. They will run this loop a dozen times. Sometimes we try to get them to eat a bite of food every time they complete a loop. Sometimes we seize the opportunity to finish our own dinners before the next stage of the night begins.

But the pattern never varies. They always come back, and we always welcome them back. No hard feelings. We’re just glad they returned and want them to join us. Then they run away again, giggling madly.

Hey there! Long time, no see. (Photo by Vladislav Klapin on Unsplash)

I’ve had this game on my mind as I’ve been thinking about the changes I’ve experienced in my own life over the past several years. The projects I’ve started, and the ones I’ve been forced to abandon. The way I get too tired to carry on with something that I want to do. How I continue to think about that thing and how it eventually becomes so large and daunting that coming back to the project feels like an almost insurmountable obstacle.

I’ve thought about that with this blog, which I was initially so determined to maintain before everything else took up my time. How I’d reach the end of the day and couldn’t bear to write anything even though words were rattling around in my head. And how, after a while, it felt like I couldn’t write a new article because it had been too long.

But now I’m looking at it from a different perspective. Why abandon the thing you want to do to bring a little creativity back into your life? Why turn it into a point of stress by making it align to firm deadlines that at this stage of life are impossible to maintain?

What if you just…let it vibe?

So, hi, I’m back.

I can’t promise to a set schedule, but I don’t want to let the blog die. I sometimes still have interesting ideas or want to write about a book that I read, or just have something I want to say or try out. And I’m giving myself permission to do it on the schedule that makes sense for me. I know that’s not the way you’re supposed to do writing on the internet. Considering what I do for a living, I know that updating your content based on vibes is kind of the opposite of what you should do.

But nothing makes sense anyway, so why not embrace the chaos.

I’ll come back when it makes sense. I’ll write some stuff. Then I’ll go away. And I might come back soon, or I might stay away for a little longer. But you can rest easy with the knowledge that I’ll turn the corner at some point and come tearing out of the kitchen again with something to say.

I hope you’ll welcome me back each time I do. And maybe the irregularly timed missives can bring a little bit of interest to your inbox instead of becoming yet another thing that starts piling up that you haven’t read yet.

It’s good to be here. I hope you’re enjoying your meal.

October 28, 2024
Exhausted? Good news: It’s your fault
It seems like everyone is absolutely exhausted these days. Tired beyond reason. Like the kind of tired that sinks into your very bones and turns you into a depressed but sentient form of human goo that can do things like earn a wage but can’t do things like brush your teeth, shower, or make a phone call.

Luckily for you and for everyone else, I have a little secret. It’s called self-care. And if you do it, you will completely turn your life around, eradicate all your problems, become a more productive worker, a better partner, and a more involved parent. In fact, you could be a woman who has it all.

If you don’t do it? Well, everyone will resent you and talk about you behind your back for being such a complete and utter failure.

Isn’t this fun already?

Listen, we’ve all heard that systemic issues are to blame. And it sure can feel like it. Maybe you’re tired because healthcare is really expensive and so is housing and food and transportation but salaries absolutely have not grown to meet rising costs. Maybe you’re exhausted because you’re a parent and you just received notice that your child’s been exposed to COVID (again) and ebola (at least it’s new) and school will be closed 11 of the next 17 days and you have no backup childcare but somehow also still owe someone $1,000 for that. It could just be the daily grind of modern life, the 24 hour news cycle, everyone screaming at you from all directions no matter where you go.

I get where you’re coming from. But you’re wrong.

It’s all your fault! Isn’t that great?

If you are taking naps in your yard, that might also be why you’re tired. (Photo by nrd on Unsplash)

Okay, okay, hear me out. Maybe you have anxiety because climate change and job insecurity and the stress of parenting and just general mental illness stuff. So, do you have therapist? Oh, therapists are too expensive? Have you tried making more money? All therapists in the area are booked? Have to tried calling some more? You tried it and didn’t click with your first couple and aren’t quite ready to try another one? Have you considered that you’re a quitter?

Did you know that there’s probably a venture capitalist firm out there who would give you the money to create a therapist using AI that would almost definitely (probably) work really well and not lead to more long-term psychic pain for the population at large? Have you tried that?

Now, I’m not a doctor, but I did once have the idea of creating an app that someone could use to become a licensed physician, so trust me when I say that I have the advice you need. Exhaustion and that deep pervasive tiredness could have a lot of causes. Here are some reasons you might be tired:
- You aren’t drinking enough water
- You’re drinking too much water
- You don’t do enough yoga
- You weigh literally anything at all
- You didn’t take a nap
- You took too long of a nap
- You stayed up too late working
- You saw someone else yawn and it made you yawn
That list isn’t exhaustive, but the point is that these are all things you could absolutely fix. I understand you’re in a bind. You want to better yourself, but the amorphous blob you’ve become is really holding you back. That’s why I’m here to give you a few self-care tips:
- Turn yourself into a houseplant in the home of an extremely responsible plant owner. They will give you the correct amount of water to help you grow and thrive. Plus plenty of sunlight.
- Make enough in investments that you can retire early and then spend all your time traveling all over the world and learning how people live. Eventually you’re bound to stumble across someone who holds the secret to immortality. You’ve got to. One of us will find them.
- Don’t look at blue light too close to bed time. It’s a little known fact that blue light will actually turn those memory crystal balls in your head blue, which makes your memories sad, and that’s how people become depressed.
- Try to find a spinning wheel somewhere and prick your finger on it so you can enter a deep and enchanted sleep. Everyone else will be too tired and busy to come wake you up. Score!
- Kids waking you up at night? Spend a week or two waking them up at least two to three times during the night. Then they’ll understand that it makes them tired and they won’t want to do it to you anymore.
- Simply float away on a cloud and escape all your problems.
Once you discover that the key to your happiness all rests on you, I bet you’ll turn it around. You can turn it all around. You have to turn it all around. You just have to.

You’ve made it this far, which means you’re really invested in your health and wellbeing. Congratulations! I’m proud of you. And as a reward, I’ll let you know the really simple trick to being well rested: Go to bed in a quiet, dark room. Keep the temperature in your house low. Don’t look at screens an hour before bed, drink some herbal tea, do some meditation, journal a bit, express your gratitudes to yourself, have all your clothes laid out for the next day, have all your meals prepped for the next day, take a shower, and take deep breaths. Go to sleep exactly on time and fall asleep immediately. Sleep for at least eight restful hours in the exact right position without any children, dogs, or partners to wake you up. Don’t have insomnia or chronic pain. Don’t set an alarm but wake up naturally with the sun to a peaceful, quiet home with no immediate morning responsibilities.

If you do this, you’ll be so awake, it’ll be amazing.

And to think! The key to this whole thing was just you doing the right thing all along.

Don’t you feel better now?
January 31, 2023
Content is about more than immediate rewards

One of the things that is sometimes weird about being person who plans content within the context of SEO in the modern business world is that it doesn’t often fit within the expected frame of pumping out something as fast as possible to then show off the immediate and glorious benefits that made the company a gajillion dollars in five days.

(Not that any thoughtful and consideration marketing plans should really operate on the above structure, but you know how it goes.)

Quiet changes and small SEO endeavors are like the least sexy marketing on the planet.

You put out an article, then you develop some other articles over the course of six to nine months and decide those should really become a content pillar. You do some analytics and some optimizations and your keystone piece of content slowly and steadily amasses views and conversions until two years later you have a pretty cool case study and something that ranks high and performs well in organic search.

This is an exciting experience and can teach you a lot: Why is it performing best? Can you recreate it? Does it say something about what the audience wants or about how you crafted it? Is it worth optimizing again to get more traffic? How can it inform your content strategy in the long run?

A delight for the too involved and deeply nerdy content strategist.

Let’s all just take a second, breath and reflect on our choices.

But things can change fast in the business world and depending on the team you’re pitching to, it can be incredibly difficult to make the case for a thoughtful strategy that will take many hours to develop and then spend further time and money for careful crafting and building changes that you won’t be able to measure meaningful for a long time and a strategy that can only really be cohesively measured after a year. Maybe you work in house and you’re one of the only people who even knows what marketing is or the people at the top are calling the shots about where you should spend your time and who cares about content marketing. Maybe you work for an agency and your clients are more concerned about their next paid ad campaign and don’t want to invest time or money into the unsexy waters of SEO.

Launching a new website is fun, publishing a new article and obsessively checking how many clicks it gets is fun. But maintaining the website, continuously optimizing it and building the structure and groundwork for more articles? Not as fun. Realizing that all the clicks you got on that article were essentially meaningful traffic that didn’t do anything for you? Ugh, least fun of all.

It takes a lot of trial and error to figure out what works. And to figuring out which title is going to attract that most people. And what exactly you should be targeting to hit that first page of Google. And which CTA is going to convince people to buy.

Basically, you have a hundred elements to test and each time you change one of them you have to wait long enough for enough people to see the change (or to wait for the bots to reindex the page) to see if that change did anything.

Meanwhile, another team you work with created a viral TikTok.

Okay, but does everyone know that you did a full analysis of how metadata is performing and plugged it all into an updated spreadsheet?

Oh. Yeah, no. It’s fine.

Ultimately, despite the fact that the world is becoming increasingly filled with more content and noise, it’s interested how a thoughtful plan and actually creative and helpful output make a difference. Sure, your AI can now spit out fifty articles. But what do those articles say anything?

Careful planning and thoughtful work does something. Immediate returns are not the end all, be all (or at least, they shouldn’t be). What can we do to make an impact that can be measured over years and not hours?

June 15, 2022
Fictional relationships that have turned me to goo

You know how sometimes you become too invested in a fictional couple? That’s me, currently. And while I have wild ambitions to fill this blog with smart posts that closely analyze media and show that I am capable of deep and nuanced thinking…uh, instead here’s a list of some of my favorite fictional couples!

In case you were wondering, the cause of my current case of distraction is Our Flag Means Death on HBOMax. It’s a ten episode season of half hour episodes and is a goofy, funny little pirate show that somehow makes you really sad at the end? Give it a try and then harass HBO to renew it for a second season.

The ships are comin’ in, captain! The relationships, that is. (Photo by Raimond Klavins on Unsplash)

Or check out this very non-comprehensive list of some of my favorite fictional couples.

A quick aside: This list was mostly for what was top of mind, but I did decide to do a quick Google search for some all-time great couples just to see if I was forgetting anything glaring, and some of the results were wild. And proof that not enough people have actually read classic novels. (Listen, Scarlett and Rhett are a very interesting couple but they are not goals! Cathy and Heathcliffe is the weirdest relationship goal you could ever have, please don’t! Who included Pip and Estella from Great Expectations? That’s obscure and also wrong! Also, the correct ship from that book is clearly Miss Havisham and her old wedding dress. If you would like more classic novel relationship hot takes, let me know and I will provide.)

All right, with that out of the way, here is the list in question:

Television

David and Patrick – Schitt’s Creek

Have I had out of body experiences because this particular relationship on this particular show makes me so damn happy? I’m pretty sure I have.

In general, Schitt’s Creek is a show absolutely worth watching and anyone who has spent five seconds on the internet and been inundated with nonstop memes knows this already or is too annoyed to give the show a chance.

Almost every last character on this show is an absolute delight. But David might be my favorite? And his relationship with Patrick is one of my favorite things in the history of scripted television and on my initial watch definitely made me cry at least thrice.

Josh and Donna – The West Wing

Okay. I know this is kind of problematic. Josh is ~~sort of~~ a huge asshole and flirting with the person who works for you is complicated on a whole number of levels. BUT Bradley Whitford and Janel Moloney have a lot of chemistry and I was still happy they ended up together.

This is one of my early ships from middle school or something so my feelings about the The West Wing are considerably more complicated these days. Still! They are a formative fictional couple for me. I enjoy watching this emotionally constipated man realize he’s been in love with someone for like five years.

Leslie and Ben – Parks and Rec

Another workplace relationship but this one I still fully endorse. Leslie Knope is one of my favorite characters on television in general and Adam Scott is incredible? (If you haven’t seen Severance, you should. He is startlingly good in it.) I picked up this show when it was around season four, and I remember absolutely tearing through it at every free possible moment not just because it’s very good but also because I was dying to see the Leslie and Ben thing play out.

Impossible not to love a “they have so much chemistry and really want to get together but are trying not to because of other reasons but can’t stay apart” relationship. Inject it into my veins.

Books

Darcy and Elizabeth – Pride and Prejudice

This is my most basic opinion, but it’s not wrong. Also, all the classic literature lists that included Heathcliffe and Cathy as an iconic relationship but not Darcy and Elizabeth…huh?

I personally like Jane Austen (very brave, I know). Her sense of humor strikes me just right and her characters are so fun to watch bounce off each other. And that includes the main couple in this book. Darcy’s first proposal and Elizabeth’s subsequent rejection of him his an incredible scene that should be put in a museum. The scene at the end when Elizabeth tells Darcy’s aunt that she and Darcy are definitely NOT engaged but she will also not agree to never become engaged to him just because she’s pissed off? Chef’s kiss! I love a man who comes back to propose because he heard you told off his mean, rich aunt.

Also, yes, Colin Firth is the best Mr. Darcy and his smolder is very real.

Remus Lupin and Sirius Black – Harry Potter

My feelings toward this series have become pretty complicated in the past few years largely due to the author of said series being a mean person. In order to include the series, I felt it only fitting to push my favorite relationship of the series even though it has been explicitly rejected by the author. I don’t care. She can shut up because she is wrong.

Lupin and Sirius 4ever.

Yes, this still holds true if you are a Lupin and Tonks fan. People can be bisexual!

Just, come on, the friendship, the hiding, the betrayal, the reunion, the cohabitating, the joint Christmas present? I wrote a lot of fanfiction back in the day. Don’t fight me on this.

Achilles and Patroclus

I guess Achilles and Patroclus are technically a fandom ship because The Iliad never outright said they were a couple but um…I consider them canon. (And when it comes to Greek mythology, what really is canon, anyway? The Iliad is basically fanfiction.)

Because I am a History Nerd^TM and a School Nerd^TM, my support for these two as a couple started in high school when I read The Iliad for the first time in Latin class. (In case you were curious, the previous sentence is a good encapsulation of who I am as a person.) And I have been shipping them ever since.

Saying this makes me a bit of an Achilles/Patroclus hipster, since I was about them many years before Madeline Miller wrote The Song of Achilles, but I don’t judge. Also, The Song of Achilles? Good book.

I don’t really recommend reading The Iliad unless you want to read a lot of gruesome battle descriptions and lists of how people are related to each other. But I do recommend you consider that after Patroclus was killed by Hector, Achilles had an all out grief fest, hosted funeral games, killed like half the Greek army, and then murdered Hector and defiled his body because of how upset he was. Just consider it.

Also this:

A black cloud of grief came shrouding over Achilles.
Both hands clawing the ground for soot and filth,
he poured it over his head, fouled his handsome face
and black ashes settled onto his fresh clean war-shirt.
Overpowered in all his power, sprawled in the dust,
Achilles lay there, fallen . . .
tearing his hair, defiling it with his own hands.
Book 18 of The Iliad

It is worth mentioning Achilles and Patroclus both brutally murder their fair share of people on the field of battle. So, like, iconic couple, but also…it’s complicated.

Red and Blue – This is How You Lose the Time War

This book is extremely good. I listened to the audiobook and the narration was also extremely good. And it’s short! Now I love a long book, but a novella composed of love letters opponents write each other during an intergalatic war that involves time travel is one of the best ideas anyone has ever had.

There was a time when this book was getting recommended a lot and some people thought it was overhyped. But those people are wrong. I just love all the ways these characters find and consume letters to each other (sometimes literally consuming the letters in the process). It is somehow sweeping and epic and also deeply personal and just really lovely all around.

Movies

Danielle and Henry – Ever After

This movie has been a favorite of mine since I first saw it in theaters when I was in the third or fourth grade. And I have watched it so many times since that I basically have the entire thing memorized. And it is still so good! And so quotable.

Danielle and Henry first meet when she throws an apple at his head to stop him from stealing her father’s horse. Then, during their second meeting, she tells him off for being a rich boor. And he is about it. I love how this relationship centers around Danielle unabashedly speaking her mind, even when that involves insulting Henry, and he cannot get enough of it. I also like that he’s a rich brat and Danielle helps expand his worldview.

The actors have really good chemistry and the relationship is believable. And all the side characters are so fun! The entire move is gold.

Dido Belle and John Davinier – Belle (2013)

Anyone else other than me remember this movie? I own it on DVD and watch it at least once a year and I love it a lot. In fact, despite being an aforementioned History Nerd^TM, I refuse to read about the real history of Dido Belle because I like the movie world and I suspect history is not as good. (Sorry, history, you’re a real one.)

John Davinier is one of the most earnest men written into existence, and this movie is what helped me recognize that I am super into earnest men as characters and love interests. There’s a scene where he yells at Belle’s uncle in a carriage about how sincerely he loves her and every time my entire body threatens to explode with feeling.

Don’t know what this says about me, but I recommend checking it out.

Evie and Rick – The Mummy (and The Mummy Returns)

These movies are good. There I said it. And Evie and Rick are a perfect power couple. The squabbling and coming together in the first movie is good and then the married couple wild for each other in the second movie is great! I love to see happily married couples on the screen (side shoutout to Thin Man movies for this by the way), even if they are chaotic and horny in weird situations.

As a history nerd librarian, Evie is basically life goals and Rick is a perfect himbo. How can you not support the two of them?

It also does the fun one-two punch that the Alien movies do, where the first movie is a sort of horror (liberally sprinkled with clips) and the second is mostly just action adventure (also with many quips). On a related note, I refuse to acknowledge that the third movie exists.

Give me your opinions on these couples or share your own faves. Let me know if you would like some hot takes on classical literature. Let’s pretend the world is not terrifying and is instead gentle and comforting for a moment.

June 1, 2022
You are enough

Listen. You are enough. You don’t have to be more. Being you is enough.

You are valuable and your worth can’t solely be measured by what you produce. Or by what you achieve or fail to achieve. Or by what invisible standards you are trying to live up to.

Maybe you’ve been tired lately. Ditched your hobbies. Abandoned your side hustle. Given up on running. Stopped meal prepping.

Guess what? You’re still valuable. You are enough. You deserve care and support and empathy and love.

Maybe you’ve been intending to write a blog post for three weeks but a combination of childcare and full time work and generally bad news in the world has sapped your desire to actually sit down and write it. (Or you write it in your head a lot but writing it on the keyboard is somehow an impassable barrier. Anxiety is weird.)

Maybe you don’t have the job you want. And it doesn’t pay you enough. (Most likely it doesn’t pay you enough!) Or you spend days procrastinating instead of working toward your deadlines. Or you aren’t working in the evenings when you feel like you should to help you get ahead. All the email newsletters full of helpful tips and webinars you intend to attend are sitting neglected in your inbox.

Or maybe you work a service job where people are jerks and yell at you for no reason and criticize you for not smiling enough and your manager won’t give you a consistent schedule. Maybe everyone wants you to forget that a pandemic happened (and is still happening wtf) but you have to go work anyway to eke out a living only to have weirdos claim you don’t deserve a livable wage.

You still have value. You’re still enough. You’re still worth basic human compassion.

Maybe you used to have hobbies and you don’t have them anymore. Maybe all the motivation seems have to leached out of your body drop by drop and you can’t seem to do anything but scroll social media and promise yourself that you’ll wake up early tomorrow and do better. (A lesson I should have learned better by now but still haven’t.)

Believe in yourself as much as this puppy believes in you. This puppy knows you deserve all the kisses regardless of whether you got your taxes done on time. (Photo by PartTime Portraits on Unsplash)

Maybe you buy a lot of a groceries with the intent making lots of great meals but then you order takeout instead. Maybe you keep meaning to learn the guitar or start weightlifting or take an online class or watch that documentary.

Maybe you simply don’t care anymore and can’t force yourself to care and any plans for the future simply get swallowed up by dread.

You’re still doing enough. Even if it feels like falling behind.

Having goals is good. Intending to improve yourself is good. But you don’t actually have to achieve goals and become a perfect efficient glowing version of yourself to have value. The depressed version of you who spent the morning crying, who hasn’t showered in four days and is eating potato chips for breakfast while watching YouTube on your phone instead of doing the dishes has value too.

Plenty of people who are smarter than me and have analytical brains that haven’t become smooth as eggs have written about the BS surrounding hustle culture and how we are trying to life hack our way to perfect efficiency inside of a whole mess of broken systems. How this mindset is making us all feel like failures if we’re not becoming the picture of #lifegoals.

I can’t fix the broken systems. But I can tell you that even if you fail to live up to weird impossible standards or even realistic ones, you are still enough!

Try to extend this grace to yourself. And others. It’s hard out there. A bunch of bad stuff is happening and for some reason people in power are trying to punch down on people who need the most care, empathy and understanding.

It’s a good time to remember that other people are enough too. When we expect ourselves and others to fit the perfect portrait of what we expect to deserve empathy, we’re doing ourselves a disservice. Maybe someone is in a circumstance because they made a bad choice. Maybe things happened outside of their control. Probably it’s a complicated mix of both! Do we really need to demand of someone that they only make good choices to be worthy of help?

Do we really need to demand that of ourselves?

We all make bad choices. And some good ones. And some that are bad but were the best ones you had at the time. That’s okay! People are so endlessly complicated but being complicated is super exhausting so we look to simplify. And by simplifying sometimes we reach the conclusion that we (or others) are bad or unworthy.

But you’re not! The world is wild. You are a valuable piece of it. You don’t have to prove it.

Seriously. You have value. You are enough. You’re doing a lot.

Are you doing it all perfectly? No, but are you doing it good enough? Probably! Cut yourself some slack.

May 18, 2022
Don’t Look Up: Flawed, entertaining, too long

Kind of like The Power of the Dog was my third experience with Jane Campion, Don’t Look Up was my third foray into Adam McKay.

Or, rather, my third foray into Oscar-nominated Adam McKay films. I’ve also seen some of his work from before he was critically acclaimed including both Anchorman and Stepbrothers. (In a nutshell: Not a fan of the former but though the latter was pretty funny.)

When stacking the three Oscar nominated movies against each other, I thought Don’t Look Up was better than Vice but didn’t live up to the standard set by The Big Short. I learned recently that The Big Short is based on a book by Michael Lewis, and I think having some source material to rein him in probably did McKay some favors. Because his follow-ups to that first nominated movie have been…kind of annoying?

There are parts of Don’t Look Up I really enjoyed. There are parts that even made me laugh out loud. But this move is two and a half hours long and that is at least an hour too long. In general, I think satire is hard to maintain for a long story because it can get old fast. And if you’re doing really nice pointed commentary, you probably don’t need two and a half hours to do it. (Prove me wrong if you have a good counter example!)

This particular movie does not need to be two and a half hours long.

My spouse and I sat down to watch this and initially we had a pretty enjoyable time. The beginning is kind of a romp. There are some good jokes. Then, the story hit a point where we thought it was probably about over. I checked my phone to make sure.

I, for one, welcome our new overlord, the planet destroyer.

There was over an hour left in the movie.

We promptly turned the TV off and went to bed.

When we finished the movie the next night, my main complaint was that it was too long. Most of my favorite bits making digs were taking aim capitalism. I completely believe that if a planet destroying comet were streaking toward earth, some tech company would claim they could get minerals off it that would make people a lot of money. That completely tracked.

Afterward, I did some light reading on the movie and learned that the comet is a metaphor for climate change. I couldn’t tell if the fact that I hadn’t realized that made me dumb. Maybe. But one of the critics I listened to made me feel a little better on this front when he argued that the metaphor isn’t a particularly good one.

A comet hurtling toward the earth that will hit in six months and kill us all is a different kind of threat than slight changes in global temperature that are happening on a much longer timeframe. Plus the effects of climate change are much messier and more opaque. We’re seeing those effects now, but they’ve been happening for years and a lot of us are just starting to connect the dots. Plus, for a long time, people didn’t think they were going to have to deal with the fallout on climate change so there seemed to be no immediate incentive to prevent it. (Joke’s on us there.)

I think if I had known the intent was to comment on climate change going in, I might have had different opinions watching the movie. And, honestly, I think they would have initially been more critical.

After sitting with it for awhile, my opinions are not super favorable. Not because I actively dislike the movie but because I saw it a couple months ago and haven’t really thought about it since. (This is partially because some of the other nominees for Best Picture have taken up much more of my brain space.)

But I will give the movie credit for writing an original story and trying to say something. I do love it when original screenplays get made into films. (Exhibit A in this case being Knives Out.)

It’s just that maybe this one shouldn’t have been nominated for an Oscar.

April 12, 2022
The Power of the Dog: Throwing off vibes
I had heard about The Power of the Dog several times in passing before I saw it. Mostly what I heard was that it’s good, it’s on Netflix, and I should watch it before finding out too much about it.

So I decided one afternoon just to put it on. And, man! Was it weird!

This movie was my third brush with Jane Campion. I first experienced one of her films in 2015 when my husband and I decided to watch all the Best Picture nominees from 1994. We watched The Piano and spent most of the runtime in a state of confusion. We talked about it pretty extensively after it was over. And then I thought about it pretty much nonstop for days on end.

I think it’s pretty telling that after watching the ’94 Best Picture nominees, The Piano is the one that lodged itself the most firmly in my mind. This is the year of The Fugitive, Schindler’s List, and The Remains of the Day. These are good movies! And memorable ones too. But somehow a weird little film about a woman and her piano and New Zealand is what stuck with me. (Apologies to the last nominee from 1994, In the Name of the Father. For some reason, we never got around to watching it.)

A few months ago, I was looking for a movie to watch after having taken the day off work. A newsletter I like had recommended Bright Star, which had been on my Netflix queue for approximately five thousand years. So I popped it on.

Then I proceeded to think about nothing but Bright Star for about three days. This, of course, included in-depth Googling about John Keats and Fanny Brawne. (I learned that so many people in Keats’ family other than him also tied of tuberculosis. And that several people in Fanny’s family did as well. I now want to read a giant nonfiction tomb about the history of tuberculosis.)

Aside from the biographical reading, though, I also just kept thinking about the movie itself. It was gorgeous as hell and I highly recommend it.

Knowing that The Power of the Dog was made by the same woman who made both The Piano and Bright Star completely tracks for me. Bright Star isn’t quite as weird as the other two, but all three have an extremely strong voice. And they are all shot in a really specific way. And they all kind of…linger after they are done.

The movie is basically this. But at the same time deeply unsettling.

I found a lot to like about The Power of the Dog even though it was weirding me out at every juncture. The performances were very good (and what a delight to see Kirsten Dunst!). The strange menacing energy that Benedict Cumberbatch put off in this movie really worked for me. When I followed up watching this movie by listening to the episode of Pop Culture Happy Hour covering it, I loved that one of the panelists said a sense of imminent dread pervades the entire film. Yes! It definitely does.

I also did some Googling after watching because I can’t stop myself. I quickly discovered that this movie is actually an adaptation of a book with the same name. That book, by the way, is written by a man named Thomas Savage. This is incredibly fitting and I love that fact.

The fact that the move was an adaptation initially surprised me. But thinking it through, I do think it makes sense. Using all the information you can find in a book allowed Campion to sort of infuse the movie with this sense of being lived in. You can tell all the characters have a lot going on even if you don’t know what the hell that is. This might be laid out more explicitly in a narrative form that allows for things like that. But my guess is that the richness of the book allowed the film to do a lot while also having very little stated out loud.

For that reason, I do consider this movie to be more of a vibe than anything else. You’ll get that sense of dread, the weird malice coming off of Benedict Cumberbatch’s character, and then a whole lot of other uncomfortable moments that give The Power of the Dog a distinctive feel.

Also, I will say that I thought the pay off at the end of the movie was effective.

Will you like The Power of the Dog? Couple things to consider:
- Have you liked other Jane Campion films? If so, I think it’s likely you’ll be onboard for this one.
- Do you like a movie that has more vibes than plot? If you require a more straightforward plot structure, this one might not be for you.
- Do you like Westerns? Then you might like this movie depending on what you like about Westerns. A John Wayne movie, this is not. If you like a subversion of Westerns or something exploring the prototypical Western story, I’d say give it a try.
- Are you a Kirsten Dunst fan or Benedict Cumberbatch fan? Probably worth a watch, then. I’m actually not the world’s biggest Cumberbatch fan, but I don’t actively dislike him, and I thought he was good here. (Although I cannot state it strongly enough how deeply unsettling he is.)
I will also say that there has been some discussion and criticism of how sexuality is portrayed in this movie. I personally thought the film explored some of these ideas more in the exploration of what rigid masculinity and gender roles do to people who don’t fit within those boundaries and less as falling prey to the queer villain archetype. That being said, you might think differently! So just throwing it out there.

If you have the time and any of the above sounds intriguing to you, I’d say go for it. If nothing else, you’ll get two hours of vibes and some impressive shots of the gorgeous countryside.

(Go read more about my opinions on the Academy Awards if you want.)
March 12, 2022
Finding some value in the Academy Awards

It’s not really news that the Oscars are a hot mess this year. They’ve been a hot mess since, well, forever, as far as I can tell. There’s simply a baseline of pure nonsense associated with Hollywood’s most prestigious awards ceremony. Even now, when things are changing due to all the extremely valid criticism of the ceremony and the nominations process, things still tend to go sideways in unexpected ways.

This year there are some changes that I think are for the better. The pool of voters has expanded as has the number of Best Picture nominees. I liked when the change happened that allowed the Best Picture nominees to go up to ten. But in order to hit certain thresholds, it seemed like a lot of years it was more like seven or eight nominees. That while the expanded pool is supposed to help more unusual movies get nominated, that wasn’t always happening either. (Listen, will I be bitter about having to watch War Horse for the rest of my life? Yes.)

Why does this picture show up when I search for Academy Awards? I don’t know, but it’s neat, so I’m sharing. (Photo by Georg Eiermann on Unsplash)

I think it’s good to make it mandated that ten movies get the Best Picture nominee. While that does mean you probably have a weird or unworthy option creep in, it also allows for the less traditional choices. Would Drive My Car have been nominated without this rule change? I think it probably wouldn’t.

Of course, the system isn’t perfect. We had the perfection of Moonlight winning Best Picture, but you know, Green Book, also happened.

Awards shows in general seem to be in a state of peril. Ratings are falling. They all seem to be struggling to stay relevant. People are suggesting that they might not even exist in ten years. And if that happens, does it matter? Does a lack of Oscars in the world really cause some kind of void in the world?

Ultimately, probably not really. (Especially because films will still win awards even if the actual ceremonies stop happening.) But there is something that I still sort of love about the Oscars. And I think it stems from mostly this: It helps me get a good general big picture of what’s going on in the industry and it allows me to see some pretty interesting and culturally relevant movies.

Nobody is arguing that the Best Picture nominations are literally the best movies made in that year. Especially given that a certain brand of movie has a habit of getting nominated all the time and it’s extremely frustrating. But especially since the expansion of how many movies can get nominated for Best Picture, I’ve started seeing some really cool stuff.

I’m not a super involved moviegoer. Before the pandemic, I’d hit up the theater a couple times a year for a movie I was really interested in seeing, like Knives Out but I don’t really go to the movies just because. This means, starting in 2011, when I started attending the Best Picture showcase, I was basically seeing a whole bunch of brand new to me movies all in a row.

Imagine this for 24 hours. Except it smells funky and everyone is wrapped in a blanket and hopped up on 5 Hour Energy.

For the uninitiated, the Best Picture Showcase is put on by AMC Theaters and is an event where typically you watch all Best Picture nominees either in the course of two weekends or over the course of a very long day. (This has changed a little due to the pandemic, but it might come back!) Because I’m a bit of a glutton for punishment and love an endurance challenge, I would go to the one-day event. This meant showing up at the theater at around 9 in the morning and then stumbling out around 7 the next morning.

Some years the batch of movies is better than others but I always walked away from that event having seen at least one gem. Usually, as awards season rolls through, I have the best intentions of watching a lot of acclaimed movies, but I never quite get there. It’s hard to find the time and there’s so much to sort through. I’ve seen multiple rave reviews of Drive My Car, for example. Does this mean I’m guaranteed to watch it? No. Even if my favorite movie channel on YouTube names it their favorite film of the year, I’m still dumb enough to go watch Interview with the Vampire instead. (Which I don’t regret. It ruled.)

But the Best Picture nominees offers me a finite list and the Best Picture Showcase offers me a concrete way to go watch some of those movies catching buzz.

Over the years, this method has introduced me to movies like The Kids are All Right, Winter’s Bone, The Tree of Life, Amour, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Philomena, Brooklyn, Room, Hell or High Water, Moonlight, Parasite. Would I have seen some of these movies regardless of whether they were nominated for Best Picture? Maybe! But that’s honestly a big maybe.

Yes, I had to see War Horse and I reluctantly sat through The Wolf of Wall Street (no shade to anyone who likes that film, but really one of my most hated watches ever). But I really have seen some pretty gorgeous, funny, moving films I never would have otherwise. And I’m grateful for that.

Without the Best Picture Showcase in 2021 and being absolutely burnt out due to, you know, everything, I’m trying to recapture a little of that Oscars joy. I’m aiming for the modest goal of watching all 10 nominees before the ceremony happens at the end of March. I’m also hoping to do little write ups about those movies. I will let wiser people than me continue to call the Academy out for all their bad choices.

Meanwhile? I’m going to drum up some opinions about Don’t Look Up (too long) and The Power of the Dog (classic Campion weirdness).

Share your Oscars opinions, if you have ’em!

March 2, 2022