Fortaleza Week 3—Running in the Street

I’ve just returned from a three-day weekend spent at Jericoacoar, a small town on the coast that’s rumored to have one of the most beautiful beaches in the world. For three days I was transformed from a sweaty, commuting 9-5 student to a sunbathing, caiprinha-drinking tourist. The beach was indeed beautiful, the drinks tasty, and the tourist experience was about as awkward as I’d expected, but I don’t feel like writing about all that. (Except to say that I agree with David Foster Wallace when he compares being a tourist to being “an insect on a dead thing.”)

Instead I feel like writing about something that’s not particularly exotic or adventurous, yet has nonetheless fascinated me as a metaphor for my experience with Brazilian vs. U.S. society thus far. Last night I went running for the first time since my arrival in Fortaleza. In my homestay neighborhood, they have a distinct running practice that I can’t stop boggling at. We live adjacent to one of the main city interstates, a six-lane monolith affectionately known as the Leste Oeste. The median for this street, at its narrowest points, is wide enough to fit four skinny abreast. There are two lanes of sidewalk, and sometimes even gym equipment and mini-playgrounds between the lanes. Instead of using the sidewalks (which are usually occupied by tables from bars, people congregating, trash piles etc), everyone jogs on the median. People use the gym equipment, too, and take their kids to the playgrounds. All this while three lanes of traffic roar by on either side (and Fortaleza traffic is a terrifying and seemingly anarchic waltz on the best of days).

It’s impossible for me to imagine public gyms and playgrounds existing literally in the middle of a six-lane street in the U.S. Forget the safety concerns that would horrify us—we also have very specific exercise preferences. We prefer air-conditioned gyms or secluded, scenic pathways; running in the city is acceptable, but we discourage anyone but the fit and pretty from doing this through catcalls, jeering, etc. And above all alse, we exercise with our headphones firmly stuck in our ears, enveloping us in a comfy sonic bubble. I myself have a lovingly edited “Running” playlist on my iPhone, and back home I run on a sweet little nature trail which allows me to avoid campus traffic, uneven sidewalks, and the sorority sisters running in packs in Chapel Hill.

So the medians of Leste Oeste: not my ideal, but it was clear that this was the only part of the neighborhood that people used for jogging. And no headphones on the street—even if I felt comfortable taking an .mp3 player with me, most Brazilians seem to jog without them. I must confess that the reason it’s taken me two and a half weeks here to work up the desire to go running was that I hated the idea of going without my music, and was afraid that without a steady beat in my ears, I wouldn’t be able to mentally sustain myself for more than a few hundred yards at best.

Running on the median was fine, of course. Maybe even better, in terms of my speed and endurance, although there’s no way for me to know since I lack the handy little GPS trackers that I used back home. But it felt good. There was a lot of ducking under palm fronds and skipping over piles of broken bricks and navigating bicycles and motorcycles and cars, and I guess all this translated to a keener awareness of myself as a physical being in the world, or something. I was very interested in looking around at my unfamiliar surroundings, so maybe that had something to do with my lack of desire for headphones; maybe I’ll miss them more when the neighborhood becomes less new to me.

But to return to the larger metaphorical point, it seems to me that running in the middle of traffic transforms the act of running from a solitary act of “inner peace” to an embrace of chaos that somehow managed to be just as peaceful as the former. I think I like it. Aside from being an incredibly efficient and impressive use of public space, there’s something about the phenomenon that seems deeply representative of my own personal, narrow and almost-certainly-ignorant-and-clueless experience of Brazilian society so far. It’s not that every Brazilian is more extroverted and friendly than Americans, although I’ve already experienced friendliness and kindness from an extraordinary number of strangers here. It’s hard to describe, but being here makes the U.S. seem delicate—delicate in our psychological needs (for personal space, for ‘alone time,’ for exactness and timeliness), in our physical needs (orderly traffic, a greater emphasis on personal safety in general), and in our social needs (a desire to be more reserved in public, a need for politeness to supercede truth in most circumstances). There are many things in Fortaleza that seem stressful to me, such as running in the street or never really knowing when my bus is going to come, but somehow it doesn’t feel like a stressful place (to me, at least).

Unfortunately I have yet to take pictures of my new outdoor gym. I haven’t been taking many pictures in general because I left the chord connecting my camera to my computer in Chapel Hill. All I have to share visually so far is an iPhone snap of the parrot that lives in my house, and a picture of my host mother (Antônia) holding her extremely adorable two-month-old granddaughter (Marcicilha). Neither of these have anything to do with running, but here they are for your perusal.

Fortaleza Week 1

I may or may not have completely failed to mention that I’m studying abroad in Fortaleza, Brazil from now till the beginning of July. I arrived on Monday but haven’t felt much of an inclination to sit down and record things—I’m too busy staring wide-eyed at everything around me. I haven’t even seen much of the city so far (this first week has been almost all orientation before the academic program starts in earnest), but I feel like every latent drop of curiosity and childlike excitement has been fired up, leaving very little room for everything else.

I will do my best to write more about my experiences, but how do you find words to talk about something you’ve been working towards for six years? I remember being eighteen and airily proclaiming to my mother that I was going to save the money to go live in Brasil and find my long-lost relatives; naturally this terrified her and gave me A Death In Brazil by Peter Robb to dissuade me and scare me away. Of course it inspired an obsession instead. I have loved this country for so long and was so scared that when I arrived, I would find that it was nothing like the place I’ve been studying and daydreaming about for years. Instead, so far at least, I find that I’m in love with it in all sorts of surprising ways that I never could have predicted. Before I left, four months seemed like an eternity to be away from my home, but now that I’m here all I can think about is how short this time is and what I can do to ensure that I’m able to come back soon.

Tonight I meet my host family and go home to stay with them. I’m nervous to meet new people who don’t share my language, but it’s so exciting to already feel my Portuguese skills improving, and I hope that I’ll soon be cheerfully communicating with my Fortaleza mãe. I never felt confident in my Portuguese classes at my home university, but being here I can understand how people fall in love with learning languages. The occasional breakthroughs are intoxicating, and it makes me want to be outgoing and engage total strangers in the street in conversations. Figuring out how to connect with another human being when the cultural odds are stacked against you is such a special thing. It feels like a small miracle every time I manage it.

More to come later.

I Love ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank’

I’m still learning how to read short story collections. I don’t read short stories nearly as often as I read almost everything else (except poetry, all right, I’m a philistine who almost never thinks to read poetry), but I feel like I have a pretty good grasp of how to read a short story on its own—I usually give myself time to sit with it, mull it over, and read it all in one sitting. If it’s a literary New Yorker-esque short story in which nothing really happens except contemplation, then I can focus on the language (and if I’m reading it in the New Yorker, that helps because I’m already in the mood to be all high-minded and sophisticated and have patience with art that’s not immediately entertaining/satisfying). But I admit, a whole book of short stories is usually more than you can ask of me. Inevitably, the stories in the collection have all blurred together in my mind by the time I’ve finished all of them, and my brain tries to process them all at once instead of individually—basically I try to read story collections like novels, and so by the time I’m done with one, I almost always feel like I’m not “getting it.”

I’d like to read more short story collections, and Nathan Englander’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank is a very good place to start for a novice short story reader such as myself. Not because it’s easy, but—well, it’s easier to compliment by saying what it’s not: it is not the kind of writing that you can objectively acknowledge to be beautiful while secretly finding it kind of boring. If you have ever read a short story in The New Yorker, you know exactly what I mean. Although many of these stories are quiet and subtle, each one is suspenseful in its own way, and each story in the collection has branded itself upon my reading brain and remains there for good. I find myself remembering the actions of characters at odd times throughout the day, and sentences keep coming back to me. I can assure you that none of these blurred together by the time I was done with the book.

Yet as distinct and unique as each story is, there’s a clear through-line in the collection, and the theme is obvious in the title. There’s only one story in What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank that (seemingly at least) is not about Judaism, and most of them explicitly touch on the Holocaust, as well. The titular story features a more-or-less secular Jewish couple in Florida hosting another couple, who are Hasidic Israelis. In the span of one afternoon, the story touches on the meaning of marriage and partnership, the place of tradition, the chilling question of trust, and the weight of history, among other things. The language of “What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank” is modern and sardonic, distanced until the gut-punch finale requires closeness; in comparison, “Sister Hills” reads like a fable, timeless and somber and un-compromising in its harsh interpretation of human choices. “Sister Hills” and “Free Fruit For Young Widows” both take place mostly in Israel, and “Peep Show,” “How We Avenged the Blums,” and “Everything I Know About My Family on My Mother’s Side” all touch on religious traditions and lifestyles transplanted to modern America.

The exception to the theme is “The Reader,” which shows us an old, bitter author long after his halcyon days, interacting with his sole remaining fan. When I think about the plot of this story—a devoted reader dutifully follows his favorite has-been writer on his book tour, providing a one-man audience in every bookstore—I’m amazed that it doesn’t come off as syrupy, self-indulgent, or just embarrassing. But there’s a gruesomeness in “The Reader,” similar to the gruesomeness in the book’s other, more dark or violent stories. “The Reader” doesn’t tidy up its characters and their ugly impulses, and neither do any of its counterparts.

Nathan Englander seems to have figured out the strangeness at the core of the human species, and his insight permeates all eight stories in the collection. I couldn’t put it down because it was so weirdly recognizable, despite the fact that on the surface I have very little in common with any of the people he writes about. I only finished this a few days ago, yet I already want to go back and read each story again. It’s rare that I find a single short story whose world I can live in as fully as a novel’s, but Nathan Englander has given me eight of them.

I Love ‘The Orphan Master’s Son’

I just finished reading The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson, which chronicles the life and times of Pak Jun Do, a soldier in North Korea. Kim Jong Il’s recent death makes Johnson’s book feel highly relevant before you even start reading, and I freely admit that I first picked it up because I felt like I should be more knowledgeable about the DPRK. And the book is definitely relevant, with thoughtful explorations of authority, society, and the state, and its well-researched memorable portrait of life in a country that’s hidden from most of us. But Johnson is also an incredible story-teller, and it’s his characters and their fates that really drew me into his book.

I finished The Orphan Master’s Son at around one a.m. My eyes hurt they were so tired, but I was too wrecked to fall asleep right after I finished it. It’s not that it’s an unrelentingly grim or nihilistic book—I would categorize the ending more as “bittersweet” than “straight-up unhappy and awful”—but taken as a whole, it’s heartbreaking. Even the uplifting parts are heartbreaking. Louis graciously let me spoil him for the ending, despite the fact that he wants to read it eventually, because I needed to babble to someone about all the parts that got to me. After we stopped talking and hit the lights, scenes were still playing on a loop in front of me. Then I had dreams about North Korea, although thankfully I don’t remember any of them.

Every North Korean we meet in this story has been traumatized. Some of the trauma is physical and obvious—we meet prisoners of the state, women who’ve been assigned to abusive husbands, and numerous torture victims. (The torture scenes in Orphan Master’s Son are so pervasive and almost casual that it wasn’t until I reflected after finishing that I realized how numerous they were; in the world that Johnson creates, infliction of pain by the state is as normal a transaction as, say, paying taxes would be in the U.S.) But most of the trauma is subtler stuff: we meet an aging, blind couple whose senility has caused them to be constantly paranoid that the government is listening, so that in every conversation they have, the only emotion they’re willing to verbally express is patriotism and total support for the Dear Leader. Their son must constantly search their faces for any sign of the people they used to be, because they no longer let any real thoughts or emotions come out in what they say. Not only does authoritarian repression have the power to control your body, but it takes your mind as well, twisting the narrative of your life to suit its own purpose. You are not who you say you are, you are who they say you are.

The importance of narrative is a huge theme. Storytelling is a matter of survival: if the government likes the story that you tell them better than the truth of what happened, it’s the difference between life and death. Jun Do’s point-of-view chapters are broken up by transcriptions of propaganda radio broadcasts, which tell our hero’s story through the eyes of the state, as well as the point-of-view of a state interrogator, who tries to record Jun Do’s story for posterity. The concept of the “self” is fluid at best, when your story can be changed at any moment.

There are some daring escapes and defections in this book, but mostly we witness small rebellions. Although this is a story about authoritarian oppression, it’s even more focused on what the state can’t control. Although the way the book ended gave me a bleak and restless night, few stories have made me feel so lucky and alive the next day.

I Love Attack the Block

For some reason, I’ve been compelled to watch more movies than TV shows lately. Maybe it’s because I’ve just realized that I probably won’t have netflix access in Fortaleza, so all of those “I’d like to see this someday” picks in my queue suddenly seem more urgent. The best movie I’ve seen recently has been Attack the Block, and if I was going to be truly honest, this post would be nothing more than a series of exclamation points, enthusiastic emoticons, and pictures of me making ridiculously excited fluttery motions with my hands and arms. This is one of those movies that locked on to my inner child and didn’t let go till the end credits rolled. And by that, I don’t mean at all that it was childish, but that it was the kind of movie that’s enjoyable in such a pure way that you don’t even know how to talk about it—you know, it’s how you probably feel about The Princess Bride. It’s the kind of movie that entertained me so much that, much like all entertainment did for me when I was a child, it ignited my imagination and made me want to express my enjoyment by shouting and running around in circles like an insane person. The best entertainment is a simple transfer of joy and delight from one person to another, and like any energy transfer it provides fuel for movement and production.

But although it acted as a super concentrated shot of straight joy to my heart, Attack the Block does more than entertain. It’s probably one of the smartest movies I’ve ever seen, and definitely one of the smartest sci-fi movies I’ve ever seen. The tag line for the movie—“Inner City Meets Outer Space”—gives you an image of a gimmick that makes this film stand out from your average alien movie: instead of Aliens vs. Intrepid White People Or Will Smith, it’s Aliens vs. The Streets. Refreshingly different, but so far it’s still something we can kind of imagine Hollywood doing.

Give it a closer look, and it’s clear that this is no Hollywood film. Written by some of the same people who were behind Shaun of the Dead, Attack the Block takes place in a shitty neighborhood in London, and it opens with a mugging. We see Sam, a young white woman who’s recently graduated from nursing school, walking home through dark alleys at night. She is surrounded by a gang of teenaged boys (one is white, the rest look black). The leader is a dark-skinned black boy who wields a knife, wears a bandanna covering the lower half of his face, and demands that Sam give him her ring in addition to her wallet. His name is Moses, and he turns out to be the hero of the story.

We get to know Moses and his friends quite well as aliens invade their neighborhood and they take it upon themselves to fight back. They are, of course, thrown together with Sam, who lives in the same housing project (“The Block”) that they do. The movie never explains away or forgives their violence against Sam, but it gives them dimension, depth, and a wonderful humor. They’ve done bad things, but they’re not bad kids (and they are kids, the movie never lets us forget that).

For her part, Sam is no Nice White Lady, graciously forgiving their mugging before showing them the error of their ways and elevating them through the magic of her whiteness. No, she calls them “fucking monsters,” sics the police on them, and after she’s forced to join them in order to defend their home, Moses tries to apologize to her by saying that if he’d known they lived in The Block with them, they never would have mugged her. Sam sarcastically asks if it would have been just fine to mug her if she’d been from somewhere else.

There’s a lot of wonderful insights into class and race and gender in the movie, but I don’t want to spoil anything for those of you who haven’t seen it. To go back to the entertainment aspect, you should see this movie because it’s hilarious, scary, gory, exciting, poignant, and fun. It’s got great action scenes, wonderful acting and a killer soundtrack, and the way it utilizes slang is just awesome. The two hours spent watching it were some of the best two hours of my life as a fan, and I have no more coherent words left for this film, so I leave you with this: !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

(The above fanart is from here.)

I Love Shopping A Little Too Much

I love fashion and beauty and I love shopping. I don’t talk about these loves very often because I’m afraid of coming across as shallow, but I’m trying to own it more, because I don’t actually believe that expressing myself through what I wear or enjoying my femininity is shallow, and I don’t think anyone else should believe that. But lately, the part of me that adores shopping has been overwhelming the other aspects of my personality, and it’s gotten a little alarming. I’ve been spending so much of my time wanting things—so much more time is spent wanting than acquiring; the acquiring only lasts a minute (less if I’m shopping online), and then it’s back to wanting. More time, maybe, is then spent appreciating, but that amount still pales compared to the wanting. If I were to make a pie chart to document the time spent wanting vs. acquiring vs. appreciating, it would make me very uncomfortable to look at.

I can partly blame it on January, as I remember going through an obsessive money-spending phase this time in 2011, too. I get all excited about buying gifts for other people in December, and then naturally I move on to wanting stuff for myself, and of course this coincides with stores evilly putting everything on sale post-Christmas. Add a dash of January S.A.D. which in turn suggests retail therapy, and you have a recipe for spending.

But okay, after that dour introduction I’m feeling the need to defend my habits, because you know what? I’ve actually been having a blast. Because I’m leaving in March for Brazil (more on that later), I’m not in classes right now, and I wouldn’t say that I’m swimming in free time exactly, but… maybe wading in the free time kiddie pool. When I got back from my Christmas vacation a few weeks ago, I used all that glorious time to gorge myself on Youtube “beauty guru” videos. Beauty gurus are women that film makeup tutorials, makeup reviews, fashion videos, etc—there’s an endless number of these videos on Youtube, and the most popular videos get watched by hundreds of thousands of people. MissGlamorazzi, Pixi2Woo, and Amarixe are pretty good representations of this whole genre.

I never know how to talk about these videos because the weird thing is, I actually find them kind of inspiring. It’s like getting a window into how other women define their own femininity and personal style, and seeing all these people give virtual tours of their perfectly organized makeup stations and clean bedrooms inspired me to do a major overhaul of my own apartment, vowing that in 2012 I would take as much pride in my home as I did in my personal appearance.

But these women also film a lot of “haul” videos, in which they document their latest purchases (mostly clothes and makeup) and show them off for the camera. You can, of course, see how it might be dangerous to watch too many of these sorts of videos. After a while, it starts seeming like these ladies must go shopping all the time, which naturally begs the question of why can’t I go shopping all the time? And of course I don’t know what tax bracket any of these people fall into; I don’t know what they’re up to when they’re not on camera, I don’t know what they’re buying on credit vs. cash, but try telling that to the part of my brain that just wants and wants and then wants some more.

I’m probably not going to stop watching these videos or reading my fashion blogs, but I am going to try to arm myself with a better sense of perspective whenever I see other people on the internet show off the things they’ve bought. I’m going to try to redirect that obsessive part of my brain towards other pursuits, and hopefully fall in love with some other, different things that I can write about here.

I Love Weekend

Since Christmas, I have been getting the urge to write but not the attention span or motivation to stick with an idea for more than a few sentences. It’s maddening and I am frightened, as always, that a stalled period means I’ve lost all my ability to put words into sentences. So I’m trying to say fuck the perfectionism, fuck my desire to be as articulate and thorough as possible and get down all my precious thoughts on a subject in one long essay. Right.

I’ve seen a lot of good movies in the past week-ish (one of the major upsides of dating a film critic is I end up seeing soooo many more movies than I would on my lonesome), but the best one was Weekend, a 2011 film directed by Andrew Haigh. The plot is simple: one man meets another man at a gay club; their one-night stand turns into a weekend spent together. But yeah, of course there’s a lot more to it.

This is not just the best, most realistic movie about gay people I’ve ever seen, it’s also one of the best, most realistic movies about people I’ve ever seen. It’s a deeply personal, at times almost mundane film: we see the characters talking with their mouths full, masturbating alone in the bathtub, dithering over which emoticon to choose at the end of a text message. But as we start getting to know the central couple, the story brings in much larger themes without ever losing that intimacy (and of course the wonderful, most intimately realistic dialogue I’ve ever heard).

Most of the media about queer people (or at least, most of the stuff that I’ve seen) that touches on the closet treats it as a yes/no question, In or Out with no middle ground. Weekend explores the complicated gradient of one’s own comfort with their sexuality and self—your friends know you’re gay, but you never talk to them about the men you date; you feel just fine when you’re in your own private apartment, but uncomfortable in your own skin when you walk down the street. The double life is not the only possibility—there is also the triple life, the quadruple life, sometimes blending into one another, sometimes shattering. Comfort with one’s sexuality is not the only broader theme that the movie explores, but it’s the one that I identified with most. (I am actually bisexual, but see above re: boyfriend—one of the side effects of this is that people assume I’m straight every single day, and I don’t always have the energy to correct them.)

This is not to say that this is an “Issue Movie,” preaching politics with a narrative about people tacked on as an afterthought. Weekend is clever, romantic, sweet without being at all cloying, and so lovingly shot that it comes across as a quiet paean to humanity. (And the dialogue! Have I mentioned the dialogue? I have, but seriously, it felt like watching two friends having a conversation right in front of me, it felt more real than any documentary.) All in all it’s damn near perfect, and it’s streaming on Netflix, so please, go watch this movie right now so that I have more people to flail with about how great it is.

I Love Making Lists (My Top 10 Albums of 2011)

No, I haven’t forgotten this blog’s existence, I’ve just been buried in paper-writing and exams for the last three weeks. But now the semester is over and I’m conducting experiments on how many naps one person can fit into a single day. (My cat is acting as my research assistant.)

I’ve briefly come out of my hibernation because I do so love list-making at the end of the year. All of us have different criteria which we use to put together our top-10 lists; personally, I try to list the albums that I think of as my companions for the year, the ones that I’ve clung to on buses and planes, while writing papers and writing stories, while I was bummed and while I was happy. It’s not really objective at all.

Of course, if I were to actually calculate what I’ve listened to the most this year, it would be like: 20% Destroyer, 10% Rolling Stones, 30% Marvin Gaye & Otis Redding & Ann Peebles, and 40% Bruce Springsteen. (And like an extra 10% for the Run Lola Run soundtrack, since that’s what I’ve turned to almost exclusively for a running soundtrack.) If I’m really honest with myself the Springsteen percentage should probably be higher. I don’t always do a great job of keeping up with new music releases, and this year I did a worse job than usual because I was so distracted by music from decades past. But this was such a stupidly fantastic year for music that it was still difficult for me to contain my list to ten great albums, so I’ve thrown my honorable mentions in here just for kicks.

1. Destroyer—Kaputt. I’ve already raved about this album, and it’s still my number one pick by far. Nothing else comes close. I have listened to these songs hundreds of times, and I still find something new with each listen.
2. J. Mascis—Several Shades of Why. I ended up loving this so much more than I expected to. It’s a deceptively simple album: Mascis sings without any masks, just his creaky voice and his guitar and the shy melancholy woven throughout the record. The result is some of the best songwriting of 2011—minimal, expressive stuff that feels deeply true.
3. The Roots—Undun. The Roots haven’t made me feel this much in a very long time. Undun is a rich masterpiece, collecting unexpected and weird sounds with amazing pop hooks and some of the best verses that Black Thought has ever rapped. There is not a single lackluster track on this.
4. The Weeknd—House of Balloons. This is not an earnest album. Abel Tesfaye uses his voice to create a cold, nihilistic distance between himself and the boozy drugged-up subjects and environments in his songs. This is a very Cool album, but it’s so fucking good that I don’t care. Can you stop yourself from turning up the volume when the beat drops in “Glass Table Girls”? Neither can I.
5. Balam Acab—Wander/Wonder. Every lush, ambient track on this album makes me feel like a child getting hugged. That’s kind of the only explanation I’ve got, because I sure as hell don’t know what else to say about this kind of music.
6. Tune-yards—who kill. Merill Garbus sounds wonderfully unencumbered on every bounding track—it’s like you’re listening to the aural equivalent of a little girl playing dress-up, drawing on her face with her mom’s lipstick, and then destroying the rec room while she acts out her fantasies. When I listen to this album, it makes me want to dance along in the silliest manner possible.
7. Bon Iver—Bon Iver. I don’t think I connected to this album on an emotional level quite as much as I did with For Emma, Forever Ago—but the exact feelings one album inspires in you can’t always be replicated. And I can’t deny that Bon Iver is an amazing piece of music, even more ambitious and achey than its predecessor.
8. Drake—Take Care. This whole album is great, but I think the first track is my favorite. I’m not knocking the rest, but every time Drake adds his voice to those simple, echo-y piano chords, it bowls me over. Take Care features the most inspired hip-hop production of the year, along with some of the most hip-ly vulnerable, vulnerably hip verses.
9. Beyoncé—4. Another one where I keep getting stuck on the first track. 4 is filled with epic pop opuses that have deservedly been getting loads of attention and radio play, but the pared-down “1+1” is my favorite. Listen to her sing! How could it not be?
10. Fleet Foxes—Helplessness Blues. I really did not expect to like this—I found their debut album to be completely boring. But while Helplessness Blues is still folky, the lyrics have more bite, the instrumentation more depth, and everything comes together to create the kind of sweeping momentum that keeps me coming back to this album.

Honorable mentions, because I would feel remiss for failing to mention any of these: Yuck, Yuck. James Blake, James Blake. Junior Boys, It’s All True. Rihanna, Talk That Talk. M83, Hurry Up We’re Dreaming. Bill Callahan, Apocalypse. Birdy, Birdy. Wugazi, 13 Chambers. Best Coast, iTunes Sessions. Washed Out, Within & Without. War On Drugs, Slave Ambient. St. Vincent, Strange Mercy.

…Wow, that’s a fuck of a lot of albums. Dear 2011, thank you for all of this.

I Love The Mental Illness Happy Hour

It’s the time of year again when I start glancing over my shoulder for the first signs of S.A.D. I’m never sure, actually, if my seasonal funk is due more to the lack of sunlight or to the increase in school stress that hits in late November. When you’ve been in school for way too long, the rhythm of academic life seems more like the rhythm of life, period—if you still feel like the start of a new year comes in September, rather than January, you know what I mean.

I’m fine, better than fine now that my break has started and I can look forward to baking something ambitious and overeating and watching TV in my pajamas for the next several days. Thinking about all the turkey leftovers and football in my future puts me in quite the good mood. But for the past few weeks, it’s been just a bit harder to get up in the morning, and staying in bed all day seems a bit more appealing than maybe it should.

If you too have been fighting just a touch of the November blues, may I recommend a healthy dose of The Mental Illness Happy Hour? This perfectly-named podcast consists of comedian Paul Gilmartin interviewing his guests about whatever happens to be wrong with them: depression, anxiety, addiction, PTSD, or garden-variety insecurity. Sometimes it’s darkly funny, and sometimes it’s heartbreaking and disturbing, but it’s always absorbing.

We don’t have many places to talk publicly about mental health. Sometimes we can admit to others that we’re seeing therapists or taking pills, but there still isn’t much public discussion of our personal experiences with mental illness. Marc Maron has carved out a unique niche among comedy podcasts by creating a space where his guests can open up and talk about how fucked up they are, but his podcast usually focuses as much or more on comedy than mental health—the personal demons are a side dish to the comedy shop talk. Gilmartin bypasses all other subjects to go straight for the vein. At the beginning of every episode, he explains, “You give us an hour, we will give you one hot ladle of awkward and icky.”

I have tried to listen to this show while doing other things (riding the bus, washing dishes, etc), the same way I listen to most other podcasts, but every time have to stop what I’m doing and just sit there, giving the whole hour my undivided attention. Regardless of whether Gilmartin’s guests are discussing something as grim as abusive parents or the comparatively lighter topic of embarrassing failures with crushes, these stories suck me in. You know that scene in 30 Rock where Liz Lemon pretends to be an alcoholic so that she can listen to Floyd dish about his personal demons in the AA meeting? It’s that satisfying, except that you don’t have to feel like a terrible person for enjoying it.

For your first podcast, I would recommend the Teresa Strasser episode. She is honest, poignant, and often funny throughout the episode, but my favorite part comes at the end. Gilmartin often ends episodes with a “Fear Off,” in which he challenges his guests to rattle off their anxieties and pitt them against either his own fears, or listener-submitted fears. Strasser goes up against some listener-submitted fears, and wins handily, her list of fears outlasting those submitted by three different scared submitters. “Anxiety is to me what the 100 meter is to Usain Bolt. I own it,” Strasser boasts. (My personal favorite of her awe-inspiring list of fears: “I’m afraid that being mega-rich is actually super amazing, but I will never find out.”) Listening to this is both hilarious, amazingly cathartic, and offers a great sense of perspective on just how ridiculous our fears really are.

This might seem like an odd thing to recommend on a gratitude-oriented holiday, but as I mentioned before, it’s a weird time of year. Even if you happen to be surrounded by family right now, and even if your mental state isn’t ill at all, I’m guessing that tuning in to this show will make you feel less alone.

Last week our cat Bubba died. For most of his life he was my boyfriend’s cat; he only became our cat when I moved in a couple years ago. Two years isn’t an incredibly long time to know either an animal or a person, but I miss him so terribly. Losing someone that was in your life every single day and could always be counted on to give you comfort is very hard. I’ve lost loved ones before, but I’ve never lost someone who was in my life on a daily basis.

It’s been a rough, rough week in our house, and I can’t say that I’ve fallen head over heels in love with anything. My obsessions have taken a back seat. Nevertheless, there are things that have been giving me some joy and distraction. I don’t feel up to writing a whole post about any of these items (a book, a TV show, a genre of music), but I thought they deserved some mention.

Unseen Academicals by Terry Pratchett

I started reading Unseen Academicals right as Bubba’s health started declining—so a week and a half ago, roughly. It was the first book I read on my new Kindle, so it was a kind of test: I wanted something easy, funny, and enjoyable to see how I liked this new medium. When I had to mourn my cat, this funny and heartwarming book was a refuge.

While this is ostensibly about the development/gentrification of soccer in Discworld, Pratchett (as usual) uses the fantasy setting to raise issues of class, race, sexism, etc. If you’ve never read a Discworld book, you might feel skeptical when I say that some of the sharpest social commentary I’ve read can be found in these books. I don’t know that I’ve ever read anything funnier or more poignant about gentrification or the choices we make (and don’t make) about becoming upwardly mobile and leaving the old lower class culture behind. It’s very fun to read about how football works in Prathcett’s world of wizards, dwarves, trolls etc, but I enjoyed the social commentary even more.

Revenge

New this fall on ABC, Revenge is so delicious that I immediately assumed it couldn’t possibly have nutritional value—but there is some meat to this show once you get into it. The premise is our heroine, Amanda-cum-Emily, was cast out of Heaven (the Hamptons) as a child when her dad’s business pals double-crossed him. Now she’s back among the richy-rich and looking to ruin all the lives of those who ruined her dad’s life. (Variations on the phrase ‘ruin lives’ can be heard multiple times an episode.

So obviously, it’s all delightfully campy. There are characters pretending to be Ryan Atwood from the O.C. (they’re from the really rough parts of the Hamptons, I presume), the actors chew the scenery in the best way possible, Emily Van Camp spends a LOT of time brooding and everyone else is always scheming against everyone else. The soapiness is great, but there have also been some genuinely kind of disturbing moments in the past few episodes. The acting is consistently better than I initially expected (the actress who plays Amanda’s chief nemesis is wonderful), and they seem pretty committed to having Amanda be a character who does deeply shady things. The female anti-hero is a rare beast, but I think one might be developing in this show.

Oh, and there are bisexual dudes! Dudes, as in more than one! Not that they’re progressive enough to actually let two guys kiss onscreen (sigh), but still—bisexual men are like mythical unicorns in mainstream entertainment, so I was pretty excited to see this.

Soul Music

This really should get its own post, considering it’s been a pretty big fixture in my life for the past several weeks, but I don’t feel like I have anything to say about soul music that hasn’t been said by roughly a jillion people before me. I’m really not the slightest bit knowledgable in this area—it’s just that I’ve been listening to more of it lately.

I’ve always felt vaguely guilty about my ignorance regarding almost all music produced by black people between, say, 1960 and 1980. My education about white music from this time period is also filled with shameful holes, but you know how it is with white* people: we will feel guilty about anything. A few weeks ago, I watched Blues Brothers for the first time since childhood, and read chunks of Ben Sidran’s Black Talk for a class at the same time. It made me feel like there was this great wealth of music that I’d been missing out on, and I set out to educate myself.

Otis Redding, Sam Cooke, Wilson Pickett, Marvin Gaye, O.V. Wright, Bettye Lavette, Ann Peebles, etc etc. It’s all I’ve been listening to recently, and I’m kicking myself for not checking it out before. Oh well. When there’s no current releases firing me up (and there haven’t been, not for months), it’s good to know that there are mountains of new records here for me to explore.