This month: treading water, not that successfully. Let's just say I'm very glad that I have a bit of a buffer of posts, and decided to only post one per month. However, I'm writing this from the past so that I don't need to worry about posting while I'm on my sweet vacation road trip as you read this (or don't read it, but whatev), so maybe when I return I'll be all fixed. Unlikely.
Watching
I managed to see a couple of movies in the theatre this month.
The first was The Heat, which was decent but not amazing. What I mean is that I didn't like it as much as I liked Bridesmaids. In fact, I think both movies made one major misstep each, which was the oddly graphic scenes where Sandra Bullock attempts a tracheotomy and all the women get food poisoning, respectively. I feel like these were attempts to be like "ladies can be gross, too!" but mostly they were just gross, and blood is intrinsically less funny than shit apparently. Anyway, I've just been wanting to get that off my chest.
The second was Pacific Rim, which I haven't seen yet. I will fill in this blank when I have:
_____OMFG SO AMAZING_____.
Listening
ALL THE PODCASTS. Chiefly How Did This Get Made?, which is about so-bad-they're-good movies, and makes me lolirl. I can't stop listening to it. They did an episode on The Room featuring SESTOSTERONE himself, which is enlightening and also a great way to psych yourself up for reading his upcoming book, The Disaster Artist.
Reading
I continue to procrastinate on the List books, although I swear I'll read The House of Mirth after my vacation. I'm still reading other stuff as usual, though. Most intriguing from July was The Fifty Year Sword, by Mark Z. Danielewski. I think House of Leaves is still by far my preferred work by him, but The Fifty Year Sword is a great atmospheric scary story with beautiful illustrations that I definitely see myself digging out on multiple Halloweens from now on.
Mourning
I left the most important thing for last. My Pépé (grandpa, that is) died on July 6. He hadn't been well for a long time, but it was still unexpected. My Pépé was a complicated man, but a good one, and I have a lot of fond memories of riding in combines with him, or going out checking crops and looking for wild animals, singing "A-Hunting We Will Go." And speaking of singing, he loved music and song especially, and I think my best memories are of his voice: joyful harmonies and forceful solos at Midnight Mass for so many years. He will be missed.
This isn't really the place for me to wax poetic about anything, though. I feel strange grouping it in the same post as my thoughts on gross-out scenes in funny movies and a spooky book, except that death doesn't care much where it shows up, so I suppose it fits here as well as anywhere.
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