The year is half over. Cue wailing and hair pulling.

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This month’s lesson:  I’m taking a bit of a break and letting other people talk for me as I pass along some tidbits about writing, creativity, life, and so on, drawn from the notes I took during my self help and memoir binge read from about 2021 and 2023.  

It’ll give me an excuse to review everything.

I’m gearing up for my couple of big trips this summer. Staying out of the heat, trying to get work done in the meantime. I know this is the point where summer’s going to be over before I know it and I’ll wonder why I didn’t get done any of the stuff I thought I was going to do.

Craft Challenge #4. I don’t actually have Craft Challenge #4 yet, but I’m considering a “30 day challenge” for one of the many crafts/skills I never seem to have time to practice. (Sketching? Watercolor? Embroidery? Hmm.) I’ve heard good things about the idea of this kind of challenge, mindfully doing a thing every day for 30 days, to get in the habit, to develop skills, to commit to the practice. We’ll see. Maybe not in the same month I’m heading to Scotland…. Have you ever done a 30-day challenge for, well, anything? How did it go?

Media Consumption:

I’ve been dabbling in lots of things. I’ve seen a few movies. Under Paris:  sharks invade the Seine and the inevitable sequence of events destroys the city. I’m pretty sure it’s meant to be rather ridiculous. Innovations this time around include scuba divers wearing full-face regulator masks with comm abilities so we can hear their agonized screams as they’re devoured alive.

Divergent. (Seriously, so much of the stuff I’ve been watching is just because it comes up on the preview and my curiosity gets the better of me.) This is the unholy love child of Harry Potter and The Hunger Games. Very long voice over explains the whole thing. The “smart people” faction turns out to be the bad guys and I’m giving that detail a bit of a side-eye. Is this the film that killed the YA dystopia genre? Who knows. I’m assuming the book is better, I haven’t read it. Has anyone here read it?

Oppenheimer. Yeah, finally caught that one. It’s long, and about three movies squashed together. The more interesting one is in the second half, the scrutiny of Oppenheimer during the Red Scare and battle of wills between him, his supporters, and Strauss. But there’s a lot of other stuff going on. I’m once again grappling with the thread of misogyny that shows up in a lot of Nolan’s work (the women characters aren’t just props or accessories, they’re often obstacles, though they have little agency for themselves). (See my review of Inception for another example of this.)   And yet, as frustrating as they are, I keep watching his movies.

What the movie did do is bring back a lot of memories from that one summer my dad spent working at Los Alamos. We moved to the town for a couple of months, renting one of the original houses (not one of the original quickly-built plank board shacks, but one of those built when the lab was made permanent). That was a weird summer for me, 14, no friends, traveling around sight-seeing with the family while dad worked. I spent a lot of time at the library, and that was the summer I read Dune and Sherlock Holmes for the first time.

We never talked about Dad’s work back then. I mean, he couldn’t really talk about it. But I asked him about it now and got a lot of stories from him that I hadn’t heard before, and that was good. Dad said he liked the film.