Tag: Evelyn Waugh

Hurts So Good

Ah, Monday morning back to work blog today. I have to leave early as I have a PT appointment at four today, but that’s okay. I also have to run errands, and I will already be uptown, which is terrific. (Mail and make a little groceries, for those who are unsure what I mean by errands.) I’m usually in a good mood when I finish PT (it’s the endorphins), so hopefully that will make running the errands in the cold a little easier. It should get up to the sixties by the time I leave the office today. Parades begin next weekend (not this coming one, but the next) and I am not even remotely in the slightest prepared to deal with all the aggravation, exhaustion and fun that comes from living inside the box1, as we call it here. While it does mean having easy access to parades and catching throws, it also makes navigating every day life incredibly difficult.

Sigh.

I feel very rested this morning, after a weekend spent feeling tired most of the time. I managed to do very little this weekend other than rest and cleaning and chores. Maybe the strength PT on Friday wore me out far more than I had originally suspected; after all, it’s the first taxing kind of exercise I’ve done in over a year. (I also have to leave work a little early today as well for a session later this afternoon.) I didn’t get much done this weekend, sadly, but I consider progress on the house to be progress of a kind at any rate. I also started reading Lina Chern’s Play the Fool, which I am enjoying; the voice is quite original and delightful. We also watched another episode of Lupin last night, which is also quite good.

I was struggling there for a moment to remember what precisely I did yesterday while Paul took calls and worked upstairs; I just remembered that I spent most of the day finishing the original BBC series of Brideshead Revisited. I can see why the show was so popular back when it originally aired and why it own so many Emmys–Americans have always thought British productions of anything to be vastly superior to anything produced here–and it did remind me a lot of Downtown Abbey, which also led me to wonder why Americans are so fascinated by the British upper class. I know I certainly used to be, but my lack of knowledge regarding Brideshead seemed like a missing cultural touchstone for me, and now that I’ve seen it–yes, I can see how influential it was. There would be no Downton without Brideshead, but the original is far less soapy than the later show….and of course, Upstairs Downstairs was truly the original Downton, a soapy show about a wealthy family’s ups and downs as well as their servants. I don’t imagine the occasional thoughts I would have while watching–deep criticisms of the class system and the disproportionate division of wealth in British society of the time; how it would have sucked to have been one of their servants–would have occurred to me had I watched when I was younger. I also felt that there was more to the relationship between Charles and Sebastian than mere friendship; which is another thing it has in common with Saltburn; an ambiguous love relationship between two men. I was also rather disappointed that Sebastian disappeared from the show about halfway through so it could focus on Charles and Julia, which I felt was giving Sebastian, whom the show really centered at first, very short shrift indeed. I will go ahead and read the book–my education in Evelyn Waugh was sorely neglected–but I feel that watching the series has given me enough grounding to explore Saltburn again through that experience.

It’s chilly again this morning but nothing terribly unbearable, thank the Lord. I do feel rather good this morning, and hope I can ride that feeling through the work day, into PT and making groceries again after work tonight. This is an actual full work week, of which there have been few for quite some time for me, so we’ll see how I feel when Friday rolls around again, shall we?

It’s been an interesting and slightly uneven January so far, bit of an up and down month, in all honesty. Life is always a rollercoaster, isn’t it? Ups and downs and never certain when the next curve or sudden drop is coming, all at great speeds that sometimes never give you a chance to catch your breath. There’s nothing life can give us that we can’t handle, as Scotty always says, it’s how you handle it that matters. I’ve always found that emotional responses or reactions are often counterproductive and exhausting, and if you can somehow switch the emotional component down or off or mute it so you can engage your logical brain and figure out how to handle it and what you need to do next to start the getting through it process might not be the absolute healthiest way to handle anything, but it has always worked for me and is why people always think I am so good in a crisis–I am very good at ignoring the macro while focusing on the micro. The problem with that, of course, is that you never go back and process the feelings and emotions; they’ve been securely buried for the moment and inevitably, that results in me thinking oh I don’t need to process that after all!

When in fact I really do need to.

That’s been happening a lot for me since the concurrent COVID pandemic/shutdown coupled with me turning sixty and eventually losing my mom. I’ve been thinking about things from my past a lot more than I ever allowed myself to, identifying the lessons I’ve taken from bad experiences and how I turned that into I don’t ever want to feel like this again s so I will never do that again which may not have been exactly healthy. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten over that sense of not belonging anywhere when I was a kid, which was partly being a gay kid (I didn’t know that specifically, but I also knew I was different from the other kids) as well as having some chemical issues in my brain (ADHD, anxiety, etc.), added to the sense of not belonging because I was from Alabama and living in Chicago. New Orleans was, in fact, the first place I’ve ever felt like I belonged, and that’s part of the reason I love it here so much. There wasn’t any single one thing to blame; I always thought it was this or that or the other, but rather the combination of everything that made my childhood so incredibly difficult for me (and pretty much my life until about thirty-three or so).

I think the real reason–I was asked this on the young adult panel this weekend–I write about teenagers is I am still trying to make sense of my own experiences. I also think that my past is also filled with very rich material for my writing. I learned that with both Bury Me in Shadows and #shedeservedit–writing about things that I have had trouble understanding in my own life fictionally has not only made my work better but also has helped me process things in a healthier way than I ever have before.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Monday, Constant Reader.

  1. “The box” means inside the parade route for Carnival; the box being formed by Canal, Napoleon, St. Charles and Tchoupitoulas. Once parades have started you cannot cross any of those streets, and yes, I live just inside the box on the St. Charles side of the rectangle. ↩︎

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It is very bright and sunny this morning; it was in the seventies yesterday but took an alarming dip over night. It is currently forty-three degrees outside, with a forecast of a high of merely fifty-six. The weather? She is bipolar in New Orleans in the winter, and we never really know what to expect from day to day. I’ve also realized that my mom also became obsessed with the weather when she was older, and I now check it every morning when I never really did before.

I had thought I had more to do today with the Bold Strokes Book-a-thon; but I was wrong–it’s next weekend that I have three panels on Saturday. Today is just a reading, and I’ll be reading from Mississippi River Mischief, of course, since it’s my most recent release from them. Other than that, I’ll be spending the day cleaning up and writing and doing things around here. I did get a lot accomplished yesterday–not as much as I had hoped or wanted, of course, that never happens–but I feel better about things around here now than I did before. I think I still haven’t gotten my stamina back yet, which is going to probably take a hot minute anyway right? I start strength PT on Monday, which should be exhausting. I did sleep really well last night, which was terrific; I really cannot get used to sleeping so well every night. I mean, I can, but feeling so rested when I get up every day rather than tired and groggy has been marvelous.

I spent some time with Tara Laskowski’s marvelous The Weekend Retreat last night and will definitely try to finish it today, if I can. It’s quite excellent, and is kind of a master class in both point of view and how to structure a novel. There are three point of view characters (four, if you count someone who is merely identified as “the weekend guest”), and the three women she uses are very different and the voices she’s created for them are distinct and unique. It’s very well done, and it also follows the structure of four that I’ve often noticed in novels–three that are in the same generation and whose lives are entwined, along with another who is not (Valley of the Dolls, Peyton Place, The Best of Everything, Class Reunion)–the list of books that follow that plot structure are countless, and something I’ve always wanted to write about. Anyway, Tara’s book is terrific and I am looking forward to spending more time with it this weekend.

We also watched this week’s Reacher last night, and we’re both a bit amazed at how different this season is from the first; but the books often were very different from each other. Sometimes they were intimate stories, sometimes they were action-adventure romps with very high stakes. Alan Ritchson is simply perfect as Reacher, and he has a very strong supporting cast in the season, but the dialogue is a bit hackneyed, cheesy, and clichéd at times. The action sequences are fantastically shot and choreographed, though, and the story is pretty good.

I also started watching the original BBC miniseries of Brideshead Revisted, which I’ve never seen, and I also got a copy of the book, which I’ve never read…but have become more interested in them both since watching Saltburn and seeing it compared to Brideshead. I’ve been sorting my thoughts on Saltburn since watching and enjoying it, which means it obviously had an impact on me and stimulated me intellectually. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a film that has engaged my mind and my knowledge of film and novels so thoroughly.

Sparky also wreaked havoc on the kitchen again last night while I slumbered, so there’s some picking up that needs to be done, and since the kitchen will again be the background for my reading, I should probably work on clearing the counters and the dishes and all that; of course, I imagine Sparky will make an appearance during the reading, too, since he is very determined and doesn’t take no for an answer (at least for the first five or six times he is told no).

I also need to run a couple of errands today so I won’t really have to leave the house again other than PT until Tuesday morning. I love when I don’t have to leave the house, seriously. To me, that’s the real appeal of retiring–not having to leave the house every day.

Hmmm.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a marvelous Saturday, Constant Reader, and check out the Bold Strokes Book-a-thon if you have time!