blog posts

• Thirteen to Know Me

  @jamesmckz shared the following challenge on X earlier this month:

  No cheating - your Quietus style Bakers Dozen. 13 albums (off the top of your head) to know you by. Not looking for a perfect list, looking for a list that you instantly regret posting because you then remember something else.

  10 Mar 2024
• Coming Out

  I read a thread online recently about bisexuality: folks were discussing use of the label compared to something like pansexual. Many folks within the LGBTQ+ umbrella argue that pansexual is a more inclusive label than bisexual, as bi- upholds a binary view of gender.

  25 Feb 2024
• Early thoughts on Pokémon Unbound

  I downloaded Pokémon: Unbound the other day to play alongside my partner. We are both big Pokémon fans — like buy the new games every year fans — though my interest has waned over the last few years (I loved Legends Arceus and generally felt that Scarlet/Violet were slaps in the face¹). I have fond memories of the classic games, and I’ve read a lot of positive buzz about Unbound.

  23 Feb 2024
• Media Log (January 2024)

  TV

  • One Tree Hill, season six and seven - I’ve been marathoning One Tree Hill on a friend’s recommendation. By this season, we are well passed the “good” seasons, but it’s still entertaining enough to watch — if only to count how many more car crashes the writers will introduce as plot lines. I think the early (1-4) seasons are a decent watch, but at this point, I’m really just seeing it through to the end. Season seven has a novelty in seeing how a show pivots after losing its main character. I don’t think OTH did so gracefully; they elevated some, generously, background characters into the main act and lumped on bunch of new ones at that. Some work better than others, but at least I’m almost at the end.
  • Kitchen Nightmares (2023) - Years ago, I once came home to find my partner watching Kitchen Nightmares on YouTube. He’s generally not a fan of reality or competition shows, so I asked him why he was watching it. He giggled and said, “He [Gordon] just gets so mad.” That led to me also watching a bunch of the show. This month I watched a gabi belle video in which she talked about the reboot, so I dipped in too. Gordon does indeed still get mad. When watching Kitchen Nightmares, I am always thinking of how much fun the show must be to edit. The editors make liberal use of the most unhinged sound effects imaginable. It’s junk food TV, and who doesn’t love junk food?
  • Schitt’s Creek - I’ve been casually rewatching as my background noise / take a nap on the couch TV. Still hilarious and as good as the first time.
  • The Bachelor - Two of my friends are big fans, so I’m watching the current season with them. I’ve never seen any Bachelor properties before this; I’m mostly along for the ride. The show has yet to hit the reality TV highs that keep me looped in to shows like America’s Next Top Model or Survivor, and the whole concept still feels quite skeezy to me.

  Music

  • III, The Lumineers - I have liked some of The Lumineers’ hits for years, but a friend really loves them, so I thought I’d give III a shot. I understand it’s a concept album with stories and characters; I really haven’t delved into that. I’m unsure if that’s because I haven’t found it compelling or because I am trying to focus more on the sound rather than just the words (I’ve always been more for the latter). III sounds great; it reminds me of how much I love the piano. It’s the focal point of many songs on the album but also beautifully interspersed as a twinkly highlight or backdrop. Particular favorites are “Donna” and “My Cell.”

  4 Feb 2024
• hate for the island

  I was born and raised on Long Island in a hamlet that rests along the Great South Bay.¹ Known to most as a ferry town, this charming suburb lives and breathes the ocean. Most every resident has access to some kind of boat, whether through personal ownership or advantageous friendship. In the 90s, the town was voted the “friendliest town in America,” a slogan that still adorns the sign as you drive into town, by a mysterious group that awards such superlatives. That accolade, along with our yacht clubs, country clubs, lack of racial diversity, and generalized fear of anything outside the norm makes the town the near picture of 1950s suburban ideal.

  7 Jan 2024
• my year in lists

  I’m not a New Years Resolution person; listening to a lot of “My Year in Lists” by Los Campesinos! as a teen made me quite cynical about the whole thing.

  1 Jan 2024
• Intentional Listening

  A friend of mine is a big fan of Florence + the Machine. I confessed to only really knowing (but liking) her hits, “Dog Days” and “Cosmic Love.” I asked which album she would recommend I listen to; she said How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful (2015),¹ and I texted her about some of the songs on it. She asked if I was listening to the whole thing given the back to back messages; I said yes, and I started to consider how I like to consume music.

  28 Dec 2023
• LITR 308 Emily Dickinson & Queer Theory

  The lives of many literary greats remain a relative mystery; literary critics and historians are often left to piece together details from letters, documentation, and, sometimes controversially, the author’s work read for repeated motifs. They then draw what conclusions they can about the authors’ lives. One of the most prolific female poets in the English literary canon, Emily Dickinson’s life is preserved in letters and artifacts from her life. When examined as a body of work, Dickinson’s poetry reveals a pattern of focus on women’s interior lives and relationships that may be regarded as queer, especially with the added dimension of her close relationship with her sister-in-law. This essay examines a selection of her poems through a queer lens, highlighting the poems’ relationships to female love and Dickinson’s life and arguing against established patterns of erasing Dickinson’s queer identity.

  28 Dec 2023
• LITR 250 Close Reading 2E

  In the beginning of Chapter VIII in the third section of To the Lighthouse, pages 186-187, Virginia Woolf’s unique approach to perspective and introspection create a subjective presentation of reality and relationships, supported by extended metaphors of fluidity and stillness. On a boat trip mandated by Mr. Ramsay to the titular lighthouse, Cam and James anatomize and unfold their feelings towards their father. Cam evolves as the boat moves across the sea while James’s unflinching rage and violence towards the patriarch repeat in this section as the sailboat halts and space contracts to exacerbate his indignation. Woolf thus frames and explores the figure of Mr. Ramsay and the nominal motif of a journey through individual introspection and excurses. ¹

  19 Sep 2023
• Media Log (August 2023)

  Movies

  • Barbie - I was underwhelmed. There’s been lots of chatter, and I loved Lady Bird, but Barbie didn’t hit for me; too much Ken (to be the hundredth person to whine about it) and the ending felt unearned and thematically confused. This was more of an homage to Barbie as a product than it was an homage to womanhood, but it pretended to be the latter.

  Games

  • Vampire Survivors - I originally played Vampire Survivors for my video game podcast, Pitch & Play (on hiatus but will come back!); my friend and co-host Ross recommended it to me. I was pleasantly surprised by how much I got into it given that I don’t really have nostalgia for this sort of game, but I played several hours of it and then became distracted by life. While moving this month, I was without internet for quite a while and had not hooked up my consoles (or my PC, still). To kill some time while my body recovered from lifting boxes and scrubbing surfaces, I downloaded Vampire Survivors onto my phone and went deep into it. It’s a fantastic game that I’ll come to associate with my early days in the house.

  Books

  • Walk Two Moons by Sharon Creech - I read this book originally as a child in the fifth grade. I remember loving it but little else. I have been looking for a text to add to my curriculum and wanted to try Walk Two Moons out. I enjoyed reading it and was surprised by how much of it came back to me even though I am (nearly) twenty years out from reading it the first time. I do think the Native American set dressing might be problematic given that the author is not, by any account I’ve read, actually Native; the plot is also predictable, but perhaps that is because I’m an adult reading a book written for children and because I’ve read it before. I’m not sure it’s the book I’m looking for, but it’s not a bad read.
  31 Aug 2023