Newsletter for Myself #1: week of 4/13/25
Thoughts on the thoughts I've been thinking this week
It seems unlikely anyone would want this, but maybe I can justify it as a way of recording all the random shit I think about in case one day I run out of new stuff, or something. This is, of course, a diary, but I think framing it as something that could potentially get me attention really increases my odds of actually writing anything in it.1 So right now, like right this very moment, I’m thinking about writing a weekly newsletter about myself, and at 11 pm on a Saturday night while my husband is out of town, let me tell you…this idea rips. Maybe if I commit myself to just one more irl minigame, the boulder will become satisfying to push up the mountain. Keyboards kind of have a haptic feedback to them, which may really encourage my engagement with this. That being said, I think if I had a podcast, that would do me just as well, but I think I would take it more personally when no one listened to it. No one is going to read this, but that stings less somehow. Writing is something you do that’s good for you, no matter what you write, but talking doesn’t count for that…They’re like morning pages. I think if I frame it that way, I can start to see this, ultimately, as a sign that I’m growing as a person rather than seeing it as evidence that my self-absorption has been previously underestimated.
Is this a recession indicator?
I’m thinking this can be like a regular column on here.
Vampires are back, baby.2 I’ve been thinking about this for a cumulative total of, like, 5 minutes, and gosh, wracking my brain for the why on this one, but I think this does intuitively3 make sense. Twilight had its big moment in the mid-late 2000s, definitely just before the collapse of the market, etc. because that’s just about all I remember from middle school (except, like, 5 of my top 10 worst memories). True Blood, The Vampire Diaries,4 and so on…Buffy did beat them to it, though, so maybe this isn’t panning out. I’m suspicious that this might have more to do with cycles of sexuality discourse, which is obvious, but I guess the real question is how those two things are tied.
Marriage/divorce is less common during times of economic downturn, if I’m remembering correctly, so it makes sense that Twilight especially, but any and all vampire fiction which specifically refers to some kind of soul mating and/or blood bonding between partners would coincide with any kind of renewed “respect” for marriage that comes along with a supply/demand-type shift. The vows of richer/poorer and ‘til death do you part take on new meaning when they become actually applicable. And then obviously a religious element exists. Twilight has its roots in Mormonism, which was in an odd position in the mid 2000s. Mitt Romney was normalizing but Warren Jeffs was demonizing. The FLDS was making the LDS look like they were comparatively normal. Right now, we’re really seeing the Catholic Church come back in a big way. I guess 20ish years was considered a full scandal cycle on the whole “rampant sexual abuse which appears to be caused by literally becoming a priest for some large percentage of men” thing. The Jesuits helped to fund The Popes’s Exorcist a couple years ago, and that movie goes wild, but certainly presents the church favorably.5 When I finished it, I was, like, “I have to make everyone I know watch this right now, and also, maybe the Catholic Church is pretty ok on certain things,” which is more credit than I think anyone would’ve given them like 15 years ago. The libs funneled their ever flowing stream of shallow hopefulness into the Pope with Conclave this last year.6 Interview with the Vampire, having resurrected as a tv show (it’s really good) has more ties to the Catholics than anything resembling Mormonism or Evangelical Christianity. Unsure about Sinners, which I haven’t seen quite yet (as of 4/19/25), but it clearly gestures towards religiosity. Anyways, they’re way gayer this time too, thank god, back to their true roots. Straight, prudish vampires were so scary. Twilight is the only vampire media I can think of that overrides any of its feminine empowerment with traditional patriarchal values and then of course sidesteps any question of homosexuality.7 This should be a capital crime.
TV Shows I’m Watching Hypothetically in My Head
There is a universe in which I’m finally getting around to watching all of Girls, but the knowledge that Marnie sings Stronger in season two prevents me from doing this with Aidan,8 so basically that’s impossible. Not to be a wife like that, it’s just as my roommate, technically, we share a television and living room, and watching something without him seems unwieldy logistically. We still need to finish Severance but whenever we watch it, I become extremely sad about my actual job, so that’s really been slowing us down. Mad Men is always there waiting in the wings, you know, I can feel it’s presence at all times. The Sopranos comes to mind but then again, like, it slips right on through. I don’t think I’ve ever seriously considered watching The Sopranos because I don’t need that kind of clout, you know? Like…as a girl so unlike many other girls (this is categorically true),9 I feel like watching The Sopranos is like a hat on a hat. The Righteous Gemstones is one that I think I should probably be watching. I don’t have a good reason to skip that one, I just didn’t love the first episode. After we move, I WILL rewatch Twin Peaks and finally get to The Return, but I need Aidan out of the house for that because the ambiance requires something larger than a computer monitor, but Aidan gets too bored.
Gender thoughts for the week:
My own, not the news cycle or internet discourse.
There’s this mental flowchart you can see men go through when they talk to you as a woman where they’re deciding how to treat you based on a number of factors.10 This was most apparent when I was regularly attending parties at my roommates’ male friends’ houses with all the roommates there, where I had kind of a wing-man role to fill as the resident long term, long distance GF. Men treat you so weird when you’re not sexually available to them in those situations. They are on this mission to get laid, and you’re clearly a source of strife for them. Like they wanted to fuck my roommate, so they knew they didn’t want to totally alienate me, but they did want me out of the way so they could try to talk to her. Some try to be nicer in this situation so maybe you help them out, some freeze you out, pretend you’re not even there, on rare occasion I would talk to a guy and get the sense he saw me as an actual person, but then the suspicion would kick in, they’d thought maybe I’d cheat on my bf. Maybe I’m being unfair, but something about the specific kind of guys my friend was seeing in this time period leads me to believe I’m right.
Sometimes the only guy I would get along with would be the jester figure of the group. And I’m not talking about the guy who’s, like, funny and likable, a class clown, if you will. I’m talking about the guy everyone kind of hates, but he is actually funny, so they keep him around. He’s probably got something else going for him, like money or drugs or he’s someone’s cousin, but that info was never available to me. This was always so disheartening. Like the person I have the most in common with is the worst guy here, but does the fact that I’m a girl change the very nature of the personality? Like is it charming and subversive to the form? The way I perform gender could be camp because I’m reminiscent of the kind of guy whose friends preemptively apologize for when you first arrive. If you think about it, I’m kind of like an immune system copying viral RNA. I’m like a hero, an Osmosis Jones perhaps.
Health conditions I think I might have
I’m a hypochondriac
Teeth definitely have something going on, but I cannot think about that for very long without spiraling.
I’m getting kidney pain, which I got with covid when I had that, but I didn’t have covid this last week (though I was sick), so maybe long covid and kidney damage? or that’s, like, something that I’m going to notice with most illnesses moving forwards.
Tongue tie/lip ties are confirmed by the dentist like 18 months ago, who would’ve charged me like $1000 to cut them, so mostly it’s that I’ve been daydreaming about getting them cut, like getting my tongue tie cut will mean I don’t have insomnia anymore and actually I’m healthy, we just had to cut that tongue tie. I haven’t looked into who can do that, but I’m hoping Aidan or someone can get overconfident with a scalpel sometime during residency, and they can just go ahead and do that on a whim.
Spotlight review:
This week, I went to go see Pride & Prejudice (2005) for the re-release. I saw it in theaters the first time it came out, with my mom actually, which did cause me to experience a moment of extreme turmoil in the first, like, 2 minutes, but it’s fine, it wore off. Anyways, this lead me to appreciate it some more and I wrote about that here.
Events of note for my future reference aka Context Clues:
Aidan is out of town for the weekend with Patrick’s wedding party
Had a cold at the beginning of the week, had to miss Tuesday for work
Migraine on Saturday
Scheduled optician interview for May in NYC
Actually extremely fun exercise, I hope I do this ever again. Attention is sure to help so…that’s always an option.
yikes (I should think of a symbol which when applied to the end of a sentence signifies: “yikes, yes I am aware this is cause for concern, perhaps I should seek mental health advice”)
Nosferatu, IWTV tv show, Sinners
word you use when you’re 70% sure of something based on circumstantial evidence alone, a hill you won’t die on
the books for both of these pre-dated the twilight books but thats fine, they blew up alongside Twilight, so the fad aspect applies
no ok so this movie does the following: gives Russel Crowe a Super Mario Bros Italian accent, puts his ass on a vespa, has him do basic horror movie possession stuff; the pope projectile vomits across the frame because the devil is getting to him via a portal in the ground where demons are LITERALLY buried, and are defeated by these priests in scenes straight out of Diablo III; suggests a potential 200 sequel run in a comic book movie style end scene; suggests that the Spanish Inquisition (and their sins) are actually because a priest got possessed and then the devil pushed for the inquisition through him, so that one was actually on the devil. and much more, you should watch it, actually, if you like to have a good time.
a movie about democrats having their cake and eating it too if I’ve ever seen one
feminine empowerment is inextricably linked to homosexuality, in both cases it is the potential for submissive or feminized men that really scares them, along with any celebration of values or traits considered typically feminine. And then when women are dominant they’re also often gay. this a big subject but I felt like it read like a non-sequitur, but it, in fact, was not.
he would cringe so hard he would create a black hole and he would resent the show itself for making him feel that way
not the case
namely relationship status, pretty/hot/cute (the difference matters), race, size, wealth, age, etc.