Tag: Timotheé Chalamet

Take a Message to Mary

Sunday!

I slept well again last night, which was lovely. I did get some things done yesterday, which was great–but making groceries yesterday wore me out. But I did get the dry cleaning dropped off, and made some terrific progress on the apartment. And of course, the LSU-South Carolina semi-final of the SEC baseball tournament…in which LSU fell behind 8-0 in the early innings, only to come back and win 12-11 in the tenth inning and earn a spot in the championship to play Tennessee. The game is on at one, and I’ll be there in my easy chair promptly at two to watch the game. Yesterday’s game was wild–one of the wilder LSU games I’ve seen–but served as yet another reminder of how exciting (and hard on the heart) being an LSU fan can be. I have to run an errand this morning, but I also want to do some writing before the game as well as some more cleaning.

Hilariously, yesterday as I left to run my errands I thought oh it’s pleasant outside today before getting into the car and seeing that “pleasant” in this instance meant 88 degrees! Utter madness, and another example of how we adjust to the heat here. I had some more thoughts about the writing yesterday, so even as I didn’t get any writing done yesterday, a lot was incubating in my head and goddamn it that counts! We also watched this week’s servings of Hacks, and the season finale of Abbott Elementary, and two episodes of Euphoria, and man those kids are seriously fucked up. I want to watch Dune today–Zendaya and Timothée Chalamet, woo hoo!–which is three hours long (and a challenge to not seem that long, for sure) after the baseball game, but we’ll see. I think Paul is planning on not doing much of anything today, so he’ll be napping occasionally on the couch all day once the game starts, and we’ll see how that all goes. I also have some cooking to do today–well, food prep anyway; I want to make watermelon soup and chicken salad for Paul to snack on–and later on today I think I’ll probably cook out, maybe even during the baseball game as “tailgate adjacent”–or I could order pizza and cook out tomorrow, as is traditional for Memorial Day. That’s a definite thought, and I do need to order some things from Office Depot; maybe I could do that and order the pizza, take the car and get both at the same time? That could be a bit fun, and a definite possibility. But pizza for a baseball game rather than burgers and hot dogs on the grill? Not entirely sure there…but tomorrow IS Memorial Day, and maybe U Pizza won’t be open tomorrow? Or–I could order it from Midway on Freret and go pick it up in the car? I just don’t know; decisions, decisions.

But I also think today is going to be my first day on the way back to physical strength and stamina and so forth. I am going to use my back massage roller thing today, and the massage gun I got for Christmas with the money Dad gave me; I may even stretch out and shave my head and everything before I get cleaned up this morning. It doesn’t, in fact, hurt anything to stretch every day, or do some crunches to get the blood pumping in the morning. I am going to the gym tomorrow with Paul–another reason for getting the pizza today–for the first time in weeks, and this will be the start of a new workout regimen for me, that I hope I can stick to despite the misery of a New Orleans summer–and this is really the perfect time to start writing another Scotty book that takes place over the summer, too; I can absolutely relate to the misery the boys will be experiencing in the book from the heat. I am also a bit excited, to tell you the truth, about writing another Scotty; I do love the characters a lot. I also think today is the day to sit down and make a writing plan for the rest of the year, so I can stay on track.

Excellent plan, Gregalicious. May this ambition I am feeling carry me through the rest of the day and the rest of the weekend. I also have some emails to answer, and some correspondence to take care of, which is peculiar to be sure; who writes letters anymore? But I am disputing charges and things with my insurance and some other nightmarish nonsense, and I have to write those things out. (Blue Cross Blue Shield of Louisiana is garbage, and with Janky Jeff Landry running Louisiana, they’ll probably get a lot worse now that all branches of state government are controlled by Christofascists, trying to take the state back to 1860.) On the other hand, being a writer comes in handy for these letters, as does have a mostly logical brain that isn’t swayed by emotion–when I can control it, and usually, in writing things like this I can be very coldly analytical and brutal at the same time. (I have yet to ever write a complaint letter that did not bear fruit; they usually surrender than trying to use corporate-speak to tell me I am wrong, because they can’t answer all of my questions.)

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Memorial Day Eve, Constant Reader, and I will check in with you again later.

You Surround Me

And here we are, on Saturday morning of the LSU-Mississippi game (GEAUX TIGERS!) and lots and lots to do, as always.

I slept in this morning, much later then I have done in a while. I feel rested, though, and not foggy in the least. It’s taking me longer to get over this procedure then I would have thought, actually–I assumed it would be over and the next day I ‘d be my normal self again, but that really wasn’t the case. I guess it has to do with being older, but also going a night without any sleep at all takes a much harsher toll on my body than it would have done ten or twenty years ago. I actually don’t mind getting older–it’s always a surprise that I have gotten this far, really–and I generally don’t think about it all that much until I notice something like this. I used to always bounce back very quickly, but that appears to no longer be the case.

Which shouldn’t come as a surprise, either. I’ve not lived the healthiest lifestyle for vast portions of my life, and I still don’t eat as healthily as I probably should. But I also tend to think that one should, in the limited time they have on this planet, enjoy themselves as much as possible, and denying myself things that I like and enjoy–well, life provides enough unhappiness and stress and misery on its own without me needing to make myself miserable, right?

As a reward for the procedure, I downloaded a book that I’ve really been enjoying–Dave Quinn’s oral history of the Real Housewives shows, Not All Diamonds and Rosé. I have talked in earlier blogs about my falling out of like for these shows recently; but I started reading this on Wednesday and got totally sucked into it and stayed up later reading every night since then I should have. It’s fascinating, but again, who knows if what they are saying is true, if the women are actually being themselves or if they are maintaining the characters they created on television. But it’s very addicting to have production staff actually commenting on the controversies and things that happened, the dynamics between the women and with production, and behavior on and off camera and the differences. There’s a lot of shade thrown–Carole Radziwell is particularly shady in the chapter on New York, as is Heather Thomsen; Teresa Giudice certainly goes to town on everyone in the chapter on New Jersey; and the production staff really have nothing nice to say about Lisa Vanderpump of Beverly Hills either. What’s interesting to me is how so many hang on to the feuds and fights, so many years later, with resentment and bitterness still; sometimes the behind-the-scenes stuff talked about is more interesting then what actually went on in front of the camera. How much of it is true, how much of is calculated, how much is actually just more promotion and advertising for the shows? Who knows? But it’s a lot of fun to read, and after all the difficulties I’ve been having reading fiction…it’s kind of nice to get sucked into something, even if it is just kind of fluff.

We watched Dune last night, which I also greatly enjoyed. I’m a fan of the books–although on a reread several years ago, I was a lot more critical of the writing then I’ve ever been before–and I even enjoyed the flawed David Lynch film from the 1980’s, which I saw in the theater. This was epic film-making, on the scale of David Lean masterpieces like Lawrence of Arabia and Dr. Zhivago; I kept thinking as I watched, awed, this would be stunning on a big screen. The scale of the film matched the scale of the book, which the Lynch version didn’t really; this was the film’s ultimate flaw, as was the Syfy mini-series that was produced earlier on this century (although I thought the sequel series, Children of Dune, was much better). It’s also very well cast. I wasn’t sure at first about Timotheé Chalamet, in all honesty. He’s a very attractive young twink of a man, and his career has certainly taken off to major stardom–too boyish for me, but I do concede he is pretty, and he really did a great job; much better at inhabiting the character then earlier actors in the part. They also managed to pick a terrific place to end the movie, cutting the story into two parts: I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that it ends with Paul and his mother, the Lady Jessica, escaping the betrayal by their enemies and the closing of the trap that sending the House Atreides to Arrakis set in motion and meeting up with, and being accepted by, the indigenous people of the planet, the Fremen.

I did spend some time yesterday organizing and cleaning and filing and trying to get my shit together; that will continue again today as I finish getting organized so I can focus on getting my book finished. I have to go over the first part of the final edit of #shedeservedit this morning to get it back to my editor; I made the corrections I noticed were needed yesterday afternoon, but I want to read it one more time to be certain I caught everything and/or didn’t miss anything else. I think it’s a good book, and it’s very different from the one before, Bury Me in Shadows, and probably very different from the next thing I am going to write–which I really need to work on this weekend. Time is slipping through my fingers, as it always does, and that deadline is looming just over the horizon and the world keeps turning towards it, bringing it closer and closer.

AIEEEE!!!!!

But my coffee is quite marvelous this morning, I am slowly coming to life, and I think I am going to go read for a moment before I get up and start working on finishing the cleaning/organizing project I started yesterday. So have a lovely Saturday, Constant Reader, and I will check in on you tomorrow.