Recommendations

People Places Things

This is a film about a break-up and parenting and adulting. It’s a beautiful, perfect gem of a movie; I LOVED it. It made me LOL, and also SAB.* The main character (played by Jemaine Clement) is a graphic novelist, and the artworks “he creates” (Gray Williams is the actual artist) are moving and gorgeous and complement the story perfectly. Did you notice I mentioned the word “perfect” twice? YEAH. Watch this film.

So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson

I read this book at the end of last year, but, even though months have since passed, it’s still the one I think of when people ask for a book recommendation (actually, it’s the one I think of until people ask me for a book recommendation, at which point I say, “Um… Oh, gosh… I know I had one… Let me think about it for a bit and see if it comes back to me”). It made me think and it also changed the way I think, and it was funny and gracious and fascinating in what appears to be a typically Ronson-y manner.

Dear Sugar Radio podcast

I ended up at this podcast after listening to a Magic Lessons episode featuring Cheryl Strayed, who, since I read and saw Wild, has become someone I’m interested in, in the same weird, not-stalkery-but-still-not-completely-normal way I feel about Jennifer Aniston. I love her writing (I’m currently reading her first novel, Torch), but I’d read only one Dear Sugar column in my life before hearing this podcast. I’ve since read many more and have filled my Quotes file with things like

She had to do more than hold on. She had to reach. She had to want it more than she’d ever wanted anything. She had to grab like a drowning girl for every good thing that came her way and she had to swim like fuck away from every bad thing. She had to count the years and let them roll by, to grow up and then run as far as she could in the direction of her best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by her own desire to heal. (From this column.)

and

I’ll never know and neither will you of the life you don’t choose. We’ll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn’t carry us. There’s nothing to do but salute it from the shore. (From this one.)

The podcast features Strayed and Steve Almond as agony aunts, answering letters about a range of topics with insight and love and optimism and wisdom. Listening always feels like therapy, even the episodes that don’t relate to me at all. My hope is that by absorbing every single one (some possibly numerous times), a bit of the grace that Strayed and Almond repeatedly extend to their letter-writers will rub off on me and I’ll learn to be kinder to myself and to others.

///

*Sniffle A Bit

Update #79

Icy poles on the back step

Our move went incredibly smoothly, and our new place is gorgeous. There’s a white picket fence out the front, which means we’ll now live happily ever after! (Right?) Alan’s in his element, repeatedly sweeping up the berries dropped by our prolific lilli pilli, and mowing the lawn at the slightest sign of grass growth. The kids running on the floorboards in the morning makes it sound like our house is being shot at and I’m still not used to the blue of the walls, but with a couple of carefully-positioned rugs and a lick of paint, I’d happily stay here forever. Also, I’d been wondering how annoying it would be to have to drive back to Kogarah library to pick up any holds that arrived for me, but I found out that my new local library is connected to my old library; I could simply change the pick-up location to Oatley and continue to search the same catalogue. This discovery was one of the highlights of my year so far. 

This morning was Mo’s second tear-free school drop-off in a row. If he gets through tomorrow as well, he’ll have set a new record. The other day he casually pointed out that the clouds looked like an archipelago, and the stunned response from Alan and me obviously helped him decide that going to school was a better use of his time than hanging out with ignorant doofuses like his parents. He still cried in the mornings after that conversation, but it was clear that his view of school had shifted from “torture chamber” to “the place where I learn stuff that seems to impress Mum and Dad.”

Hazel, on the other hand, has started crying at preschool drop-offs. I’m sure this is because she’s genuinely upset about it, and not because my children have a daily quota of drop-off-sadness that between them needs to be filled, but so far this year my experience suggests the latter. I wonder if they spend so much time together that their bodies just sense when it’s their morning to break down at drop-off time, like women whose menstrual cycles align after a while. The plus side of Hazel being the unhappy child is that preschool teachers are more inclined to offer cuddles, so I see her being comforted and therefore don’t feel like I’m leaving her on her own in the same way I did with Mo. (And yes, it takes a particularly icky kind of narcissism to make my child’s separation anxiety all about me; I realised this after writing last month’s Separation post. I agree: Ugh.)

As pour moi, my increased dose of medication hasn’t seemed to make much of a difference to my mood, and so I’m still in Depression Land, getting irritated over the fact that I have to eat (So. Much. Effort) and relate to people (whyyyyyyyyyyyy) and spending a lot of time wondering how it would be possible to disappear without hurting my children at all by doing so. So far I’ve crossed off suicide and running away, which leaves my list frustratingly empty, so here I remain. I’m currently learning about perception, which is doing my head in (I refuse to believe that colours don’t exist); I so desperately want to be able to put it in the “Things I will never understand no matter how hard I try” box and move on to something easier (like another episode of Nashville), but I need to understand it enough to sit a 20-question exam on the topic by the end of this week, so I’m discovering wavelengths and depth perception and marvelling at how my brain can be both SO AMAZING (I can see! I can recognise! I can react quickly to what’s going on around me!) and SO MEAN (maybe I’m not a complete failure, brain. Maybe you’re a fucking liar).

I remember seeing an episode of Rage late one night, many, MANY, years ago, and a Beatle – I think it was George Harrison – was reflecting on the past, and he said something like, “The time just goes so quickly.” He snapped his fingers: “Like that.” I’d heard other adults say similar things, but the holy Beatle-ness of the speaker made me pay attention for once. I’ve been thinking about that quote a bit lately; Friday’s always here before I’m ready for it, and then Monday again, and then my unit will be over and the break will be over and the next one will be flying by and then there’ll be another break, then my final class, and then I’ll graduate. Before I know it, 2016 will be done. *snap*