Hey, @HeidiPriebe1 and I are running a writer's retreat just after the New Year. We'll talk about Zen, creativity, and maintaining the discipline and structure needed to keep a daily writing practice. We'd love to have you!

If, instead of ignoring them, you peel off the thought and stay with the feeling, you will eventually arrive at a face-to-face confrontation with your fear of death On the other side of that is real life

Feminism kills me because literally every time we discover a technology that enables women some freedom from the tyranny of nature, we also change society within a generation to make it happen. Men have never oppressed women. We love you! We're on your team! We always were!

Look at this sky

Something that seems true about the culture war is that the right has fully internalized the fact that America now has two cultures. The left hasn't, so they haven't figured out how to be liberal and humane toward their opponents, which hamstrings everything that makes them strong

Also, Billy is a great depiction of someone we'd call "sociopathic" but not, I think, personality disordered. In the culture he's from, he's behaving in a rational and defensible, even moral way, even though it looks narcissistic and awful from the outside. He is clearly selfish and controlling and also clearly a caring, protective husband and father who is responding badly to stress that Nathan is introducing with his own Oedipal shit. I did not like Billy at all but I found him more sympathetic than Nathan, if less than Liz. It is perhaps news to a lot of people watching that "narcissists" and "psychopaths" are human beings with rich, infinite interiority, just like everyone else! Elizabeth's personality is organized around dissociation, which makes her "autistic," in the current colloquial sense, not the proper medical understanding of it, and she is clearly "personality disordered", if you consider BPD a PD at all (let's not litigate this here.) She has the pseudo-hysterical dissociative relationship to psychopathy that you often see in trauma victims (pathological lying, in particular, is common in this set of people.) In order to have a stable personality, she has to conform to a rigid set of orientations that bends her about 15 degrees against the flow of reality. In order to conform to those orientations, she has to pretend that things in reality aren't connected, which actually are (this is dis-sociation properly understood.) So when she's speaking, I think what she's doing is intuiting at an almost superhuman level what the other person wants her to be, and then becoming that, and fully believing in the moment that she is in fact that. It could also be that in the moment that she's defending herself, she also fully believes that she's innocent, even if a part of her remains aware of it under the surface. The sheer volume of chirality in her facial expression - the constant mask of fear that lies under the supernormative transparency, the kindness of her giant eyes juxtaposed with the searching, strategic, hunter's precision, the frozen smile that stays in place when tears are streaming down her face - this is a person who absolutely can not allow herself to come in contact with what is happening internally, or she will fall into the disconnected pieces that actually make her up. I could write a thesis on this movie. Really fun and fantastic, disturbing all throughout but utterly fascinating. Oscar-worthy for sure.

Somehow this actually ended up being the most powerful weapon in the universe