Three things for Friday, Feb. 16
Three things for Friday, Feb. 16
Why care about stuff? The Green Ray, and intellectual marriage on the rocks
How was everyone’s week?? Let’s see what there is to talk about..
Why care about stuff??
Work for most of this month was just incredibly busy for me, and for reasons that aren’t worth explaining here, it all came to a head Thursday afternoon, everything kind of fell apart, and now my Friday is extremely calm and laidback. I don’t want to bore you with details, but the upshot is.. it’s been a long few weeks, and I’m tired.
One thing I did find myself reflecting on though as I was putting in a series of 10 and 12 hour days over the last few weeks.. it’s just really hard to care about work and to understand why we care about work, and it really doesn’t help to think about it too much. Like.. I can admire people who really have hustle — independent business owners, contractors, people who have to earn their pay one job or performance or work product at a time. That’s got to feel both exhilarating and also terrifying. But for those of us in regular old salaried email jobs, like.. how do you do it? I don’t think I’m dispositionally lazy or depressed, and so getting up and Doing My Job on a weekday isn’t an insurmountable struggle. But… I also don’t feel necessarily invested in it? Except… I obviously do feel invested, because there are times my work matters and I have a ton of shit to do, and I want to get it right, and I don’t want to turn in crappy, half-assed work product, and so 12-hour days end up being the natural end result of that.
Yes, it matters, and I care. But I’d prefer not to think about why it matters or why I care, because .. that line of thinking is just going to turn back in on itself and I’m not sure what would happen then. It’s like Wyle E Coyote running off the cliff and he’s totally fine as long as he doesn’t look down. Maybe there is no cliff at all? Maybe my entire job is not looking down? I don’t think that’s right, but.. I also can’t be sure!
Anyway. This is probably worth a longer essay, and I don’t want to go on at length without getting into specifics and stuff, so I’ll just leave it there. Work was crazy busy this week. I think it mattered, but, I’m also confronted with ways in which it clearly did not matter, and .. I’d rather not think too much about that. Because work just feels better when there’s a point to it.
The Green Ray
I admit, I’ve really fallen off my Oscar movie watching this season. I was all set to make sure that I saw Poor Things, and All of Us Strangers, and American Fiction, and probably half a dozen other movies. Hell, I even thought I’d make an effort to see The Zone of Interest at one point, notwithstanding that it’s .. y’know.. a Holocaust movie and just generally very ick (so I’ve heard). But I dropped the ball on all of it and just really lost interest in Oscar movies this year. Not really sure why.
So all of that is predicate to what I’m gonna say here, which is that I watched The Green Ray on Criterion this week and absolutely loved it. The Green Ray is a French movie by Eric Rohmer from 1986, and more than that it’s a hot, languid August movie about vacations and summertime sadness and there’s just NO REASON anyone should pick it out to watch in the middle of February, when there are current, relevant, important movies to watch AND it’s 20 degrees outside, but nevertheless here we are.
The movie is about a single 30s-ish woman named Delphine who lives in Paris. Being Parisian, she has a two-week (or maybe it’s three-week?) summer vacation set for August with her best friend (or maybe it’s her boyfriend? I think it’s unclear) (also, the European dedication to three-week vacations is both admirable and hard to grasp). Anyway, two weeks before they’re set to leave for Greece, her travel partner cancels on her and Delphine goes into a complete tailspin. She no longer knows what to do with her summer vacation, she doesn’t want to travel by herself, she doesn’t want to just go hang out with her family, she doesn’t want to be a tag-along with any of her friends who are going on vacation elsewhere… and so she just sorta spirals.
I love this movie because Delphine is SUCH a compelling, annoying, infuriating introvert to watch, and she’s simultaneously so relatable. She keeps going on and on about how she wants to meet people — get out there — do things — have lots of friends — and then whenever her friends suggest something to her, she immediately comes up with a reason why she can’t. She’s too busy, or it’s not the right time, or she’d rather it was this other way, or whatever — yes, thanks, but no thanks. She HATES being the person in a group of eight or ten people who only knows like one person, and she gets so completely in her head about it that she can’t break free and just chill the fuck out about anything. Then she tries just traveling by herself, but that’s even worse, because meeting people is hard, she’s deeply suspicious of anyone she does meet, and mostly she just comes up with excuses for why she needs to leave the situation and go somewhere else.
Anyway. Like I said.. it’s relatable because it’s SO infuriating to see this behavior play out in someone else, even though I know I’ve surely been guilty of exactly this kind of thing at other times in my life. Saying what you actually want is really hard. Actually following through and DOING things in a way that’s consistent with what you say you want is even harder. Eric Rohmer’s protagonists are always falling into this trap. I love it.
The Big D (and Don’t Mean Dallas)
It was Valentine’s Day this week, so I figured I’d share one sorta romance-related item that I came across and really liked. Keith Gessen is a favorite author of mine, and he’s also a Very Serious Intellectual Person. He was one of the founding editors of n+1, the literary magazine. He’s written for New York magazine and The New Yorker and is generally regarded as a super smart guy, I guess, by people who are into that sort of thing. I loved his novel, A Terrible Country, about living in Russia and how feeling a connection to one’s homeland can be such a complicated thing (Gessen himself was born there).
He’s also written a memoir about being a dad, called Raising Raffi — the First Five Years. I haven’t read this book yet, but I really want to. This review from when the book came out in 2022 makes it sound really worthwhile. Raffi sounds like a god-awful handful, and Gessen really takes pains not to sugarcoat how hard being a parent is, and how guilt-laden and morally heavy a lot of the decisions are that you make when parenting. Raffi in many ways made his parents’ lives miserable because he was just so difficult as a child, but .. I know this isn’t something I can actually relate to, not being a parent myself. It’s not an uplifting book, from what I can gather, but it sounds like an important book, if that makes sense.
Anyway, all of that is a setup for talking about this piece in the Cut from earlier this week, written by Keith Gessen’s wife, Emily Gould. Gould’s essay is titled The Lure of Divorce, and .. man. It’s a bit of a head spin. It turns out that while her husband was writing this memoir about how hard it is to be a parent, Gould herself was ….. deeply resenting her husband for not doing as much parenting as she was, while also spending all his time advancing his career by writing about it. The whole thing sounds terribly toxic. Gould is a fascinating character who absolutely cuts no corners in her attempt to see herself clearly and be honest with what was really going on. Their marriage sounds hard and unpleasant, and it honestly felt a little uncomfortable to be reading something so raw and personal. But I really think what she says is worth spending time with. This take by Phoebe Malz Bovy I thought was a good response to Gould’s piece. Gould’s essay is feminist, sure, but it’s a certain kind of feminism.. built around “the radical notion that women are people.” I liked it a lot.
That’s all this week! Here’s a good comic that I find all too relatable (yes, I’m the one on the left).