Hello friends. Oi vey. You’re doing so great, I can tell.

Good Shit to Watch

We are stuck inside for the foreseeable future, and you’ve given up on giving up TV for Lent because of *gestures wildly at all of this*, so here’s some stuff for you to watch.

+ Carly Usdin’s Misdirection is free and available and Heather Hogan says it’s very good and has magic!

+ After Misdirection maybe you want some more short films to binge? Try these eight short queer films.

+ Variety has 16 queer films they think you might like.

+ Have a visual look at the colors and fashions of the suffrage movement. Remember it’s Women’s History Month???

+ Space gays, there’s a Star Trek: DS9 documentary available for free viewing.

+ Feel Good is another show you might want to watch — Drew wrote all about it for you!

+ Carla and Trixie make dessert.

Feel Good Shit

+ Bad Bunny has gifted the entire world a month of Spotify Premium.

+ Antoni got a puppy to foster during the Crisis 😭

+ African photographers explore identity

+ Lizzo’s IG meditations

View this post on Instagram

A meditation and mantra to promote healing during this global crisis. Use at your own pace. Love you!

A post shared by Lizzo (@lizzobeeating) on Mar 13, 2020 at 10:42am PDT

+ Ezra Miller said, “sorry straights, we’re better”

+ “Lessons from My Grandma on Art, Sex and Life”

Mexico transformed my grandmother — or rather, it allowed her to become most fully herself. “She swung into the dining room with a mambo rhythm,” Anaïs Nin, my grandmother’s longtime friend, recalled in her published diaries of their first encounter at Acapulco’s Hotel Mirador in the winter of 1948. “When I met her she had become so international, so well-traveled, so multilingual, so at ease with all kinds of people, that no one could imagine her childhood, her origin.”

Good Shit To Look Forward To

+ If you read and loved T Kira Madden’s Long Live The Tribe of Fatherless Girls (and Vanessa’s review of it) then you can look forward to a film adaptation coming soon-ish.

+ Nia and Ness, who I find to be an adorable, powerful couple and even more powerful performers, will be part of the Staying Connected Virtual Festival

Dance Break

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6dXi8uMSKzDLxW6lMlBYM4?si=5qru09yySEmw2NALOsPe-Q

Oh my sweet friends. What a fucking world we are living in. It’s okay if you’re afraid — I’m scared all the time, every day. Fear is a totally normal and natural reaction to all the uncertainty we’re facing. I wish I could say more things, I wish I could give you more comfort, I wish I could tell you everything is going to be okay. This is changing everything. Nothing will be the same after this and that is scary. Uncertainty is not my fucking cup o’ tea, but it is where we are right now, and we shouldn’t push away from it.

Once, like four years ago, I checked myself into a day program at a behavioral health hospital because it felt like my world was ending and I was terrified of what I’d do if I kept spending my days alone. It was a time of uncertainty and was the first time I remember looking into my future and seeing nothing — just wide open, empty space — and it scared the fuck out of me. On my last day, the group counselor gave me a little note that I still have in a keepsake box next to my bed. It says, “Alaina, just when the caterpillar thought life was over she became a  butterfly.” Just because it’s dark does not mean it’s the end; in fact, this feels so much more like a new beginning than an end.

In the midst of everything, something new is being birthed. Flowers are still blooming, trees are still growing, baby brothers are still proposing to their girlfriends, babies are being born. We will be different, but “listen I love you joy is coming.”

Love you [so much], mean it.

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