All Up In My Feelings...

 wishing for guarantees that I can't ask for. Some make sense, like wishing I could get up in the morning with minimal fuss and drama for the next(30-ish) years, or maybe that I drop like a rock before I have to think about the clownish misery of 2024 for real---I don't know which I'd request.  Not that it's up to me exactly.  At least, not in an "Add To Cart" sense, or a "Believe, then Achieve" sense; there are choices that might lead me one way or the other, but...

Some are ridiculous, as if were hoping I could get someone good to sing at  Mom's 100th birthday.  (Although Grandma did live to be ninety+ so it could happen...would that be good?)
I wish I'd lived more, not losing time to Getting Better All The Time, depression when that didn't work, and wrangling the five-paragraph essay.

Sometimes it seems too late to have any kind of life I want, though it's not that I can't survive...it's just that I'd like to know what "thriving" felt like. Was joking with a bunkie about my state meeting, as we often do, because they are ridiculous on their faces, and because they exist to catch us, in some sense or other. As if I hear them coming up(of all things to return to pre-pandemic status) and hop back into my wheelchair saying "Psych!" or that we love talking to social workers so much(high school me says "not!") that we'd just forget the money tree in the courtyard.  You could tell we didn't need you from the *parade*. For real.

Unlike what I sardonically messaged my bunkie, though, I think they are surprised when we make it through another quarter on crumbs and fairy dust. I think we are supposed to *fail*, whatever other message they send out with that kitty poster from the seventies, or whatever they say when the tarter side of my personality bleeds through and I accidentally say something they think is negative.
They check all the time because they can't believe anyone could do so much with so little.  So there must be something crooked about it. But It's like that country-rook hit from the '80s: Looking For Scum In All The Wrong Places.Although usually I do end up feeling as though they found some here, by the end of it.  

Usually just because nobody wants to grow up, kiss ass in school, including more worry about one's permanent record than is wholesome, just to be...well, this. Along with adding in a side of "Nobody wants to work anymore" when we try to get the meager protection the system promises. Yep, midlife with a disability is a real kick. Almost gives me a deeper reason to be jealous of all the Make-A-Wish kids I grew up with. Even if I wouldn't  take Disney World gift-wrapped, now(even if I didn't know about the counselor at Disneyland.)

Bohemian Crip Watches Movies: How About You

 

Your mind won’t be blown by “How About You.” It’s not even a towering piece of representation.Although some very talented English and Irish character actors do seem to bring what they know about getting older to the table, and that is nice to watch as I’m here, closing out my forties in a body that never got to be Young Invincible.  It ticks along like a battered Timex, though at times all of that seems redundant.  The story is a simple, human one about a family-run elder-care home and what happens when the flaky sister has to hold down the fort over Christmas break, from source material from women’s fiction mainstay Maeve Binchy.  I have to admit, since my group-living situation was about being pushed around, if not full-on abused, I enjoyed the residents giving staffers some grief.  Community is probably better, though. I miss human scale movies like this.

Prematurely Mourning The Red-Envelope Era, And Other Stories...

 -Yes, I'll pick one(or two, maybe) places to stream, but I can't hop around chasing exclusives and being nickel and dimed by everyone. Will always miss the film library of the Netflix glory years--maybe the only thing I can really say I "hit hard" that isn't a book or a stomach remedy. I'll always be grateful it was there when I needed it, for a lot of reasons. Streaming show I want to see most right now: The Bear.(I kind of crushed on that actor from American Shameless, but then I found out I could be his Teen Mom if I were doing other stuff in high school than taking finals about Hamlet, which is what I was doing that spring day he was working his way on the planet.  Now there is something familial about him around his grey-blue eyes that I can't unsee.).  At least one of my sons would have been cute, though.

-Apparently, the "few weeks," I needed off "Wedded Twist" last year, was about...fifty-four.  Which is more than I expected, but I'm getting back to it, as Chuck Wendig says, "finshing my shit," It's not terrible, and after a year full of some tumult, editing it feels a bit like reading fanfic of myself, which is making it somewhat easier to correct and edit things, somewhat ironically.

Martha, My Dear... my Feelings About "Gaslit"

 

In some ways, I think Martha Mitchell died of being under-appreciated, whatever obscure cancer might have been the actual diagnosis.  Of course, the part of me that got all those A’s and always did her summer reading that left her brimming with questions is still in here to insist that maybe what Martha needed was for the corridors of power to be pink enough that she could be Attorney General, too, loopy candor or no.  I’m older now, though, and in my own way, sort of filling in the ranks of my generation’s underappreciated, albeit without the same hostess expectations or quick hand with a rouge puff. All the same, even if I’d hit every mark with full-on Girls-Can-Be-Anything-Energy, there can only be one Attorney General, anyway. Mitchell, at least as played by Julia Roberts in “Gaslit”, was something of a marvel of self-invention, something my own grandmothers both aimed for with more limited success.   Now I wish we could live in a culture where being something of a party girl with an eye for a good story might end up enough for some people, especially since  the point of being at the top of one’s profession means there can be only one. I feel like jobs in this country are too consuming, both the actual working and as a way of ranking one’s acquaintances—indeed, we’d be in a better place if  John Mitchell had been more of a washout.

I think America needs to decide if we really want people to be able to do that or not. Sometimes it seems like another thing we have built up a legend about, like the classless society.  In practice, I think a lot of people end up in a slot quite early.

It’s weird that I’ve had time enough to be a Watergate geek that Martha went from seeming really, really old(The First First Lady’s name didn’t help her much here in my imagination) to someone that one of my generation’s “America’s Sweetheart” actresses could play. Have to wonder if that compelled a stronger performance from  Ms.  Roberts, who has seen the bright and dark in that ride by now.) Not sure whether our generation does the late forties and fifties differently---a couple of years ago, I was the same age as Maude at the beginning of her show, but we could not be more different--or whether that is a reflection of  my status as sort of an antisocialite.