The Catch Up!

Tansi nitotemwak!

It is cool! It is rainy! It is beautiful after too long of scorching temperatures. This is perfect soup, slow cooker meal weather, and I am adoring every moment of it. I can wear a flannel to go outside and not die from the heat! I can curl up with a blanket or throw and revel in that. The grass, clover, lichen/moss (I don’t know which one) mixture that makes up the front lawn does not seem like it’s going to spontaneously combust. I am as happy as I can be.

It’s wild how time passes.

Today (the 13 if you’re reading this further in the future) is the four year anniversary of my Dad’s death. Some days I feel like I’ve sanded down the edges of who he was and our relationship. Other days the edges rise up like continental plates smashing into each other, forming mountain ranges, and I have to hold onto all the things I never said until they become a granite or gneiss or slate deposit. Earlier this month was the anniversary (a decade and some change) of a close friend of mine’s death. His death anniversary is different than my Dad’s. It feels like more people have ground down his edges into a smoothness rivalling a river stone or worry stone. Which is strange to me. I wonder if my edges will be ground down into a palatable memory. I wonder which parts are the least edible to those who will survive me.

Anyways, this is a getting a little dark. The Epsilon Perseids apparently peaked on the 9th but they’re here until the equinox. Maybe tomorrow I’ll go find some place to watch them, and reflect on how wild it is I get to exist in this moment in time. To set some intentions for this ‘new year’ month because I’m that kinda person where this is my year roll over point.

Also this year is turning out to be a tight one for which team I’m a member of: pumpkin spice or apple/apple cider-ish drinks. Maybe it might be neither. It could be a whole different flavour profile like black sesame (nutty) or licorice (I am a mutant who loves licorice & soap flavoured stuff). Are you having an unexpected flavour fall?

What I've Been Watching

Between my own school woes and other things not going according to plan, I’ve been feeling nostalgic. I like re-watching movies or series because I like figuring out how stuff comes together to make a mostly working narrative. Some of my friends have told me I’m so smart but it’s not that at all. I notice stuff, I look for colour hints, I listen for musical cues, and I know how story structure can be charted. Solving puzzles is fun to me. What’s a movie but an immersive puzzle to figure out?

Turbo Kid

I think the first time I watched this was at the indie/art house movie theatre and it was part of the horror programming. Something I love is how hard bad movies go in world-building and how they lean into the ridiculousness of it without flinching or cringing or trying to break the fourth wall to mock it. Turbo Kid is a Canadian post apocalyptic movie: it’s fun, it doesn’t take itself seriously, it’s lit, there’s colour (holy shit it’s not all monochrome browns) and the power of friendship is so important in this weird Canadian Mad Max-esque wasteland. There’s no prequels or sequels or multiverses or almost 3 hour long run time, it’s an hour and half of B-movie violence (which is ridiculous in its nature). The soundtrack is also pretty rad.

Kevin Can Fuck Himself

I’ve heard really neat things about this series. It’s sitcom sometimes and a more gritty realistic thriller maybe (it goes into the blue/green filter in the trailer) when it’s not. The whole premise seems really interesting to me and I am excited to see how this is pulled off.

VMA's and Chappell Roan

The VMA’s were this week.

Once again I bring you another french chateau with flames. This time this song is about relationship with a comphet woman who’s still not grasping that. I wonder if this was supposed to be a nod or inspired by a queering of Joan of Arc (who then is a lesbian or trans) history which seems to be up her alley. Anyways it’s a bop and wonderfully pulled off.

What I've Been Reading

I’m still on that physical book train (along with eBooks for academic things I’m trying to finish) and this week has been more of the same. I am still slowly inching myself through Helen Knott’s Becoming a Matriarch. It’s been neat. I also have Conor Kerr’s Prairie Edge I want to start, and Casey Plett’s A Safe Girl To Love. This week the only online thing I read really was a web comic.

Keeping Time

In the mid-2000s, Daniel returns to his hometown for the first time since his twin sister, Alex, died. Resigned to living his life in the colorless grief he’s accustomed to, he is unprepared for his estranged friend and former bandmate, Denver, to burst back into his life. Denver convinces Daniel to rejoin the band, and the act of creating music together brings them closer than they've ever been. Just as their band seems headed for brighter future, Denver and Daniel realize falling in love in the scar that Alex left behind might prove to be their undoing.

Kody Okamoto’s Keeping Time is back to posting twice a week (yay!). I am rejoicing.

Small Mammal Update

So for humans, teeth are our luxury bones. It turns out for cats teeth are also luxury bones. It’s also incredibly terrifying when suddenly your (my) 13 year old cat is missing a fang, with her lower fang being crooked. The Dread Empress -herself- Yaga has some how developed either a horrifying autoimmune cat disease or she’s developed record breaking periodontal disease (her teeth were great at her last vet visit) and she goes for a dental next week to see how many more teeth she’s gonna lose. Don’t search why is my cat losing teeth, none of the results are good from an over thinking, anxious point of view.

My bank account is already weeping.

One of the positives about random tooth loss is you can’t bite the humans who shove pills into you because you refuse to cooperate. One of the net negatives is suddenly your claws come out more, and you’re (she’s) smart enough to know the pills make you (her) feel better but they still taste bad, so resistance is on the table. She is feeling better enough to go return to bullying the other cat, small wins.

What I've Been Working On

Finishing that final paper. It is such a goddamn slog to write and I’m afraid I won’t be able to finish. It's my own personal purgatory that I'm wandering through but there's no cool people here. If Dante could write a self insert fan fiction with cool people wandering through hell, then I guess I could too. Hozier at the very minimum should be in this neo millennial purgatory of writing academic papers. I will finish. I must. Surely there isn't a re-imagining of the Divine Comedy based on academia as a hellscape. More on that after I emerge from the pit, free.

Also drafting a short story tentatively called ‘Magnolia City’. Here’s a playlist for it.

• 15 more Catch Ups until the end of 2024
• 2 posts about books I read and had feelings about
• A Working Skeleton variant of Bergamot and Bygones
• One Felix short story

Hopefully I see you sooner than the next Catch Up mes amis!