Hi, beautiful humans! Welcome to this week’s dazzling Friday Open Thread! It’s May! Which means it’s almost the best time of the year: Gemini Season. I hope I have not immediately scared anyone away, but yes, I am a Gemini, and yes I am already ready to thrive and destroy in a few weeks time. Tell me all about your entire birth chart, please.
How was your week? Mine was full of sparkling water, Shonda Rhimes, and dark chocolate. In other words, IT WAS AN AMAZING WEEK. I just moved to New York from Chicago, and life has been crazy. I don’t exactly know where I’m living yet, which is scary (and exciting?! Nope, mostly just scary), but for now I’m staying with my girlfriend in Williamsburg. She has cable, so it’s working out very nicely.
My first several days in New York were spent exactly the same way I spent most of my days in Chicago (and my days in Los Angeles before that and my days in Ann Arbor before that): Writing, writing, writing. Specifically, I finished writing the second season of Sidetrack this week. Sidetrack is a queer webseries I co-created almost exactly a year ago. You can read more about it here! And if you have watched the show, please tell me what you think! Do you have a favorite character? Here’s a fun fact for viewers: The emoji list is a real thing that SOMEONE I know used to do. (Me. The someone is me.)
And with my shameless plug out of the way, I can now tell you about the other things I did this week! Hmm, in actuality, I didn’t do much other than write Sidetrack and work. I watched a lot of TV, because that’s sort of my job. Specifically, I watched The Catch, Jane The Virgin, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, The Good Wife, and Outlander. I also finally got around to watching the reunion episodes of Real Housewives Of Beverly Hills, and wow, Erika Jayne/Girardi and Yolanda Foster’s friendship is beautiful. Full disclosure: I watch a lot of Bravo programming. Stassi Schroeder of Vanderpump Rules is on my phone case. What did YOU watch this week and how did it make you feel?
Y’all,The Good Wife is ending forever this coming Sunday, and I’m very conflicted about it! For so long, it was my favorite shows on television. The fifth season is probably one of the best seasons of television I have ever seen. I’m still extremely bitter about where things went for Kalinda, but I’ve loved this show pretty steadfastly through the years. The past two seasons have been pretty awful though, so its time is definitely up. It’s hard for me when shows end, even when I’ve fallen somewhat out of love with them.
Thinking about The Good Wife this week made me very nostalgic, and then my nostalgia took a weird turn and led me to some of my old journals from elementary school. I’ve been thinking a lot recently about why I became a writer and if it’s the right path for me. I think moving to New York has unearthed these feelings again. So many people move to New York to ~be writers~. Is that who I am? In the not-too-distant past, I had lofty political ambitions, but I ended up abandoning those to jump into the nebulous and constantly changing world of culture writing and criticism. Well, friends, I don’t have any real answers to the Big Questions about my life and what the hell I’m doing here in New York, but my journals from elementary school very strongly confirmed that I was destined to write about film and television one day. For the first entry in my third grade journal, my teacher asked us to write a little bit about ourselves and what we did over the summer. I ended up just writing a very detailed plot synopsis of Mighty Joe Young. Instead of telling my teacher about myself, I told her all about Charlize Theron. It was my first celebrity profile. My journals also contained several reimaginings of the musical Grease, a poem about Jennifer Lopez, and Mary-Kate & Ashley fanfiction in which I essentially wrote myself in as their gay best friend. The next time a member of my family asks why I gave up a life of politics to write about fake lawyers and fake investigators and fake 1940s war nurses who accidentally travel back in time to 18th-century Scotland, I will point to my journals and say that they should have seen the signs.
What about you? Do you have journals or art from your past that still speak to you or make you realize things about yourself? Post excerpts from your journals and we can all appreciate them together! How do series finales make you feel? Where do you think Kalinda Sharma is RIGHT NOW? Don’t you think there should be a Shonda Rhimes amusement park? I do. Oh on that note, I decided I’m going to catch up on the seasons of Grey’s Anatomy I missed. AM I GOING TO REGRET IT?
How To Post A Photo In The Comments:
1. Find a photo! This is the easy part. Find a photo on the web, right click (on a Mac, control+click), hit “Copy Image URL” and then…
2. Code it in to your comment! Use the following code, and use a DIRECT LINK to the image. Your image link should end in .JPG or .GIF or .PNG or .CallMeWhateverYouWant even. I don’t care, but it should be an image suffix! KINDA LIKE THIS:
If you need to upload the photo you love from your computer, try using imgur. To learn more about posting photos, check out Ali’s step-by-step guide.
How To Post A Video In The Comments, Too:
1. Find a video on YouTube or Vimeo or WHATEVER and click “embed.” Copy that code, but first make sure it’s for 640 px wide or less. If your player is too large, it will not display properly.
2. Copy the code and paste it directly into your comment.
3. Go forth and jam.
