Classes are A Splurge For Me...

 sometimes I think it's sad that even at my most indulgent...still kind of a geek. But to be fair, there's not a lot of "Make Adaptive Love Better Than A Sex Worker" kinds of Zoom content out there, probably.  So maybe it's about what falls into my lap, at least a little.(Which suddenly sounds a bit more provocative than I intended, itself.)

Obviously, updating this blog on a Saturday should tell you I do care about writing, though I was at the bookstore this week and didn't try to track the spot where my book might go. Maybe it has lost a bit of luster as a Reason To Live and stuff, which is probably the right thing, but I'm not always clear on what should fill in instead: I can't really respond with the conventional answers. Unless I want to be a weirdo "pet parent" and proud that my cat catches flies above grade level, or some shit like that, though she is good at it and has my eyes.

That said, writing is an excellent way to figure out what you really think about life and maybe how you might have wanted things to unfold.  I just finished a workshop from One Story  since I got money for Christmas, and it was my first workshop in a few years. It was a good experience, but my inner eleven-year-old with the early-onset meet-cute poisoning is somewhat disappointed that I couldn't convert it into some kind of winter fling as they might do in the million hours of TV she watched.(Some of us might keep in touch, though.)

-If anything, I drove a guy away in this class by pointing out his old-timey ableism and asking, spiritually, if not literally, "Do you even disabled, bro?" which seemed fun and feisty till he pouted and did not come back to class again.  Which I don't get: I fight my way in, not out, which is why the whole generational "slacker" tag didn't resonate the first time I encountered it.(Lucky me--having so much time to reconsider.)

Sometimes I still wonder if I should have let him have "hit a nerve" for the group, but that whole "Maybe you need OT, anti-depressants/ Jesus/ a strong male influence/" thing is so boring for me at this point that I could probably not pretend to be nice about it, anyway.  Bet he cried "woke mob" and got his money back. 

Didn't expect to really like "Sick Girl"

 but I was pretty impressed by watching this movie this week.  I have to confess that these depictions of this kind of illness/ disability...fabulism leave me confused, not because of the flouting of a huge moral boundary--though, of course, lying about cancer is appalling, but, okay, as a person who has been the recipient of pity-as-attention or attention-as-pity(whichever) off and on throughout my life, I wonder why anyone might want that.

(Is that another opportunity I failed to make the most of, looking for respect that I...kind of never got either? About the only place I ever got "Lucky!"-style attention that I was allowed to accept was at Disneyland, I think, which kind of loses its potency as your friends start pairing off and having sex.)

I could really relate to the main character's feelings about not keeping up as everything changed for her friends at the same time feeling that she wouldn't trade, exactly. Also, trying too hard to keep your group together, though suddenly dominating message board threads doesn't look as weird anymore.

"Thanks Again For A Weird Night!"

 is kind of what I would say if "In The Dark" were a person right now. Maybe not being worried about it retaining some kind of "Golden Age" quality kind of works in its favor, instead of against it as we lurch from the guide-dog school being a front for money-laundering, to being a stash house of a sort, to actual gunplay.(That whole storyline doesn't really work for me, but it did give Jess a chance to be calm and competent for a change by using her vet skills to help an unexpected human target.  So I liked that part.

Also sorry we found out so much bad stuff about Dean the cop last season, though his corruption does take on a Jean ValJean quality once we know he got into it all to pay for care for Chloe, who is again a bright spot in Season 2--Murphy is, however reluctantly, a mentor this season, and it is like looking into a mirror, except, again, my hair never looks so good, and it seems that people take her advice, a hurdle I never quite cleared in my few adventures in Peer Support.