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How to Look at Art, Arts & Architecture, Ad Reinhardt, January 1947
How to Look at Art, Arts & Architecture, Ad Reinhardt, January 1947

Super Opinionated Power Club

Things to Turn the Head


This is just going to be a list of things I've been doing to distract myself while recovering from surgery:

Reading
I recently stumbled into Brooke Bolander's work via the (exquisitely titled) The Tale of the Three Beautiful Raptor Sisters, and the Prince Who Was Made of Meat. If you want the feeling of anticipation in her stories to pay off in intense melancholy instead of, well, raptor violence, then No Flight Without the Shatter will probably do right by you.

Also if somehow you still haven't read Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience by Rebecca Roanhorse, go do that. Sometimes things win awards and I don't understand why, but not in this case.

(It could just be the painkillers I'm on right now, but I attempted to read Andrew Sean Greer's Less, because my local library spotlights books that have won the Pulitzer, and...actually, thinking more about it, it may just be that what most find comedic I find pathetic. Or maybe I continue to be exhausted by stories about cis white men. Regardless: I stopped reading after a few chapters, thoroughly unenchanted.)

Watching
The only film of 2018, ANNIHILATION, is available for rent in the US now. I try to only care deeply about things that won't actually have a material impact on the world (passion makes it difficult to empathize), but I feel personally harmed by how the new guard at Paramount dumped this film onto audiences and ignored it. I understand it not being for everyone, but most great sci-fi isn't. In a few decades, I hope the average media literacy skills of the public have come up enough to really dig into this movie, the way everyone has become savvy enough to pull meaning out of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, for example. In the meantime, I think it's brilliant and I'm wrestling with myself about whether to get a tattoo inspired by the film. (Am I THAT That Bitch? A question I chew on daily.)

I recently rewatched the entire first season of Friends, because when you're on narcotics and can't move your arms, your options for being engrossed by something narrow down to the union of "things I have done before" and "things that aren't particularly strong on plot continuity." Sitcoms fit this nicely, and for its (many) faults, Friends is still one of the finer examples.

Playing
I've come around on "video game" (vs "videogame") but I'll continue to refuse to call it "gaming" until they change the job title of Gaming Commissioner and other gambling-related organizations and roles. Anyway, I've started playing The Witcher 3 because (a) it was on sale and (b) it claimed to be a really good RPG (also (c) I needed something to distract me from boredom and game controllers don't require your arms to lift very much). Heterosexual culture is wild y'all. This is another one of those "I need to save my incredibly hot daughter" games that studios have been making for a few years now, but with the added bonus of banging various women who look to be about your daughter's age along the way. However, between the constantly having to manage stubble and having sex on the back of a stuffed unicorn, Geralt of Rivia is pretty obviously a trans woman (because if your game has no queer people in it, then the player character is the queer person, that's just how it works, I don't make the rules).

Also I continue to sink hundreds of hours into playing/modding The Sims 4, because it seems like it and Skyrim are the last great modding communities. I decided to build our house in The Sims and then proceeded to mildly rearrange the furniture in every room of the house, because that game is still at its core just architecture software. (They made a "real" Sims game once, it was called The Sims Medieval, and I miss it every day.)

Living
My instinct is to say "I have done fuck all this year!" but y'know, we sold our house in Boston, bought a house in Portland, I came out as a trans man, I started hormones, and I got top surgery. It's not climbing Everest or anything, but those do all count as changes. My problems are small, life is mostly fine, and I continue to succeed at my personal goal to hear Trump's voice as little as possible. (I think I'm at like, 3 minutes total, 2 years in. Not bad!) The biggest challenge in my life right now is that one of our cats (the bad one, Oliver), has figured out that if he pulls on the heating elements of our electric stove, they make an ungodly amount of noise, so he's taken to doing that around 4:00am every day and now we have to buy a ceramic convection-top stove so he won't have anything to clang around anymore. (This is still better than the period of time when, for no reason we ever determined, Oliver started shitting in the bathroom sink. He eventually stopped all on his own, and I've slowly stopped being afraid that he'll begin again at any moment.)
Copyright © 2018 Mr. Courtney Stanton, All rights reserved.


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