hello me again

hello to all my crumbs in the audience, its a pleasure to see you all here tonight!! i've been going thru some life changes that have thrown me into terror dread confusion disarray and many other things, so i did not post in april oopsie!! i also had lots of fun plans for april that all got cancelled bc of those aforementioned life changes, so i don't think i've done enough interesting things to warrant a full report(tm) this time around

HOWEVER

i do want to talk about some things i did manage this month!! 

i read a few more of my standard pretentious world literature books - we do not part by han kang, which took me a while to get through and didn't leave me with as much to remember as the vegetarian did, and lost souls meet under the full moon by mizuki tsujimura, which came nowhere near the emotions her last book gave me - but then i felt left out by all the fun art i was seeing online so i caved and read ummm the new hunger games book. i'm a bit of a snob about reading teen/YA stuff as an adult and i'm an even bigger snob about things that are trending, so i avoided the ballad of songbirds and snakes like the absolute PLAGUE when it came out. honestly, i felt the same about sunrise on the reaping, so i'm not really sure what prompted me to actually read it, but anyway. i'm glad i did! i ended up chewing through both books in about 3 days all in all, and they were very fun and interesting additions to the canon. i can't lie - i don't think these books are some revolutionary masterpieces. the political messages aren't unique to the series by any stretch of the imagination. they're pretty standard for the dystopia genre, and i don't think they're going to spark a mass gen z uprising or anything. that being said... man, they do kinda slap. the worldbuilding always reminds me of margaret atwood's madaddam series, with the little pinches of information about the setting that let the reader use context clues to expand for themselves - always my preferred method of delivery, instead of the reams of exposition and definitions of in-universe portmanteaus and slang that other YA novels seem to love. i ended up rereading the first novel in the original hunger games trilogy right after, and i'll admit to crying multiple times. sometimes nostalgia and some easy reading is a good treat, i guess!!

as well as easy reading, i've also gone in on easy watching this month. i'm still obsessed with severance and at first, i thought i wanted more prestige tv to keep the ball rolling, but i found that i couldn't watch more than one episode of the sopranos at a time before my brain felt like it was over-full of information and emotion. instead, i've gone for some proper good slop. yellowjackets season 3 was prime material for heckling the tv, and i loved-hated every minute of it. the show has absolutely lost its way since season 1, and it's not got the film buff bait that riverdale had in abundance, but my beloved james and i made a ritual (HaHa) out of watching it every week and. well. it sure was tv that we watched. to keep the slop ball rolling, i've now binged the entirety of high potential in about 4 days. once again, it sure is tv that i am watching. i'll always have a soft spot for crime shows, whether they're dark and brooding or stupid and tropey like this one is. i only wish that kaitlin olson hadn't been swept up by the evil ryan reynolds/blake lively hollywood industrial complex and had so much horrendous work done on her face. it seems like a waste for such a generational comedic actress to look like she's smelling a fart 90% of the time.

soooo whats da point in all this...

well ummm.... life kinda sucks sometimes! actually especially now! my new job has blown up my workload massively for an absolutely minimal payrise, and the explosion has completely eclipsed the social and creative habits that i'd just started to form this year. being a trans person seems to be a bigger and bigger burden every week. i try not to think about it too much, but it's inescapable at the moment. sometimes i worry that i've completely missed my chance to shore myself up against the rising cuts to our medical and personal wellbeing. i want to go and see james again, because our trip to new york was such genuine bliss, but it'll be at least four years before i'm not running the risk of being forced to squat and cough in front of a tsa agent before being deported for having a mullet and a twitter account where i retweet posts from stats for lefties. all of this stuff is entirely out of my hands, it turns out. i can do things to add my brushstrokes to the bigger picture, like protesting and donating to fundraisers, but nothing can change the immediate future. i have to suck up the fact that the next day, week, month - fuck, probably year - are all going to be at least a bit shit. so maybe i can have a stupid brain month for once. i'm still keeping up with all the news that i'm morally obliged to. i'm still following the bds boycott list. i'm still spending a small fortune on art and fundraisers for queer people in my community. but i've decided to let myself feed my brain some junk food this month. there's enough real suffering jostling for space in my skull right now - i'm happy to spare it the extra baggage for the moment.