sleepyhead 'cause all the fucking foxes kept me awake last night (week notes 017)

Doing

I bought a new domain name — I’m not going to post it just yet — but I’m considering switching this site over to it. I love esotericbullshit, but I’m not sure it’s the energy I want to put out there. It makes the URL a little hard to share. But it also feels remarkably stupid when I just moved this over from another domain (which is incidentally quite similar to the new one…).¹

On Wednesday, I went to bar trivia with some friends. We had a good time! I used to go frequently, but it usually conflicts with my volleyball rec league, so it’s fallen by the wayside. The league is between seasons now though, and we liked the theme, so we made our triumphant² return.

I spent Saturday braving crowds at the mall³ in an attempt at holiday shopping. I think I ended up spending more on myself than on others. The holiday gift exchange has felt more and more ridiculous each of the last few years. Maybe I’m becoming more cynical and tired of capitalism as I age (I had thought the remedy there would be to shop local, and I did, but I still had folks on my list). Maybe it’s a natural shift in adulthood — all my friends and family members are adults with lives and houses (or apartments) and income to buy themselves what they want. Gift exchanges then become the trading of useless trinkets to which the recipient has the most tenuous of connections. I used to love buying gifts for people; it used to feel like an exhilarating challenge to find something charmingly specific to them. Now it just feels like a burden.

Reading

I’m continuing to read Woman Hollering Creek and other stories by Sandra Cisneros (from last week). I really loved “Never Marry a Mexican”; many of the early stories are told from the perspective of a child or a teen. Cisneros excels here (see Mango Street), but it becomes a little exhausting; “Never Marry” was a welcome break. Some of the stories run long, though, and can begin to feel repetitive — but then, I don’t think you’re meant to marathon through this but rather read stories here and there from the collection.

One of my purchases for myself while holiday shopping was a new paperback copy of Pride & Prejudice. In late high school, I read it for the first time, and I spent the next few years reading it again and again. My old copy is worn, an odd size, and technically stolen from my mother, so while I wait for Villette and The Dead Father to come into my local bookstore, I have started re-reading P&P for the first time in almost a decade. I’m quite early in, but I am glad to report that I love it still.⁴

Watching

I’ve convinced Joe to watch the 2009 Emma mini-series with me. I am hoping to leverage this into him consuming more Austen media with me, including Clueless, which he has never seen despite it being one of my favorite movies.

I also started watching Girls for reasons that I cannot fully explain. I think I’m just puzzled by it; I hear folks complain about how shamelessly self-centered and insipid it is and then in the same breath discuss it as a cultural touchstone. I suppose I wanted to see for myself. I’m not sure how far I will make it; the first few episodes have had little humor or draw for me.