“Wanna Chase You ‘round The Table, Wanna Touch Your Head”

ah man

Production art from Winnie the Pooh by Art Director Paul Felix

Buster Keaton in His Wedding Night (1917)

“Human beings appear to be the only mortal finite beings who wish to transcend their finitude. Thus they are the only emotional beings who wish not to be emotional, who wish to withhold these acknowledgments of neediness and to design for themselves a life in which these acknowledgments have no place. This means that they frequently learn to reject their own vulnerability and to suppress awareness of the attachments that entail it.”

— Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought

ok something about pen15 that they did really fantastically and I've never seen done before is how it showed young girl's first sexual experiences, even first kisses, as like.... upsetting. Like Anna has her first kiss and comes back to the room with her friends and starts tearing up and I found that soooo true to my own experience.

But especially the way Maya's first sexual experience is framed almost as a horror movie, and its something she just does.... and then feels shit about it.

And its the idea, and the reality, that young girls are just kind of carried along into sexual situations by boys (and men 🤢) who take advantage of their indecisiveness or unsureness, and the pressure that is on young girls and the idea that young girls don't even enjoy their sexual experiences is so fucked up!!! But it's true!! And it was brutal to watch this reflection back as an adult woman

East of Eden is a tale that is remarkably Stoic.

So far, I think this book is a masterwork. Just thinking about it makes me weep. It's a contemporary Stoicism story with a sprinkle of everything else tossed in for good measure: Nihilism, Absurdism, Existentialism, and so on. John Steinbeck has just become one of my favourite authors. At one point in the book, one of the characters fondly flips through Meditations. Some quotes: “You're going to pass something down no matter what you do or if you do nothing. Even if you let yourself go fallow, the weeds will grow and the brambles. Something will grow.”

“We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the neverending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal. Vice has always a new fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is.”

“I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one, that has frightened and inspired us so that we live in a Pearl White serial of continuing thought and wonder. Humans are caught - in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hunger and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too - in a net of good and evil. I think this is the only story we have and that it occurs on all levels of feeling and intelligence. Virtue and vice were warp and woof of our first consciousness, and they will be the fabric of our last, and this despite any changes we may impose on field and river and mountain, on economy and manners. There is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well - or ill?” “The Hebrew word, the word timshel - 'Thou mayest' - that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open... Why does that make a man great... He can choose his course and fight it through and win... I have a new love for that glittering instrument, the human soul. It is a lovely and unique thing in the universe. It is always attacked and never destroyed - because 'Thou mayest.”

PEN15 is such a brilliant show and the way that they were able to accurately depict a friendship between two preadolescent girls is so bizarre but also kind of sad because growing up i didn’t have that close of a relationship with any of the girls in my grade and i barely remember middle or high school and now I’m an adult wondering why i can’t foster a tight relationship with other women like did i do something wrong growing up? Time is scary, one day you’re sharing snacks during recess and then the next you’re finding out they got married through a week old Facebook post and you always thought that you’d be there for moments like that because you promised each other you would be when you were younger.

Indie sleaze revival