Super Opinionated!

(do I have to explain to you that a write-up about The Avengers might contain spoiler-y details about the movie?)

Yes I waited until The Avengers wasn’t #1 at the box office anymore to write about it, I like being contrary.

So! Because this is me, it’s time for some:

BACKSTORY
Joss Whedon is a person that exists, and he writes lots of stuff, some of which I have a very strong personal history with, and some of which is Dollhouse. He also sometimes directs things, most notably the Firefly movie, which felt exactly like two hours of television just on a really giant screen. Oh also he kept himself busy during the WGA strike by ensuring Neil Patrick Harris will be able to make money off of fan conventions for the rest of his life. He has a small army of self-identified Whedonites, and they’re very easy to identify because they assume any critical thinking applied to Whedon’s work means that you don’t like/understand it/him/them. I used to be one of them, so I probably have the lowest tolerance in the room for that kind of, “well, he’s not for everyone,” bullshit.

Whedon got together with the guy who wrote PCU and hashed out the story for an Avengers movie, and then Whedon wrote the screenplay.

Avengers? Yes, Avengers. (I’m not even going to try, you can fall down your own comic wiki rabbit hole.)

Meanwhile Back In Marvel Headquarters, someone had the idea about ten years ago to make solo films for a bunch of their characters and then make an ensemble movie with all of those characters in it. That is why there have been three goddamn Hulk movies in the last decade. And because this is Marvel doing it, it’s gone pretty well and made them enough money that the new Marvel Headquarters will be made of bricks of $20s. Also someone at DC is furiously weeping that they never managed to get the Whedon-penned Wonder Woman film off the ground. (Which yes, was a thing for a while, and yes really, Whedon was like, “yeah, I’d love to do it, I have a script, they won’t call me back.”) (The actual lesson here, as always, is that DC Hates Money.)

And so all of that culminated into The Avengers coming out and making near-literally All Of The Money. Which is cool, because we’re supposed to like it when things don’t actively suck, but is also probably going to be less cool in the long run, because we don’t like it when they make things like Daredevil or Elektra. I guess? And that seems inevitable now, because it’s been “proven” that superheroes are a profitable intellectual property (as MOVIES, obviously, nobody’s talking about effin’ COMICS here) and so they’re green-lighting mother fucking Ant Man, yes really. And they will keep green-lighting until we stop showing up, which means they’re going to put out a season of terrible, terrible superhero films, maybe two seasons, before they finally stop. Superman Returns, Spider-Man 3, and Green Lantern will look like Citizen Kane by the time this is over. I know we all know this, but still. (Also, Spider-Man 3 was the only one of that cycle I actually liked. AND YET I CALL MYSELF A FAN, HOW DARE I, SAM RAMI, BLAH BLAH, BLAH. Yes, I know, child. I know.)

BUT WHAT OF THE FILM?
What was this thing that we all paid hundreds of millions (h-half a billion? the last time I checked?) of dollars to stare at? Was it actually any good? Was it flawless?

…it was not flawless.

And that merits some discussion, because the shit we stare at and put into our minds does actually have some impact on us and our construction of ourselves and our world. Can we accept that as the lowest of low bars to pass over together, hand-in-hand, for the rest of our time together? The things we do and consume and celebrate carry some significance? Good! Glad you’re with me on this.

And what I find troubling (…well, ONE thing I find troubling) is that so many are describing The Avengers as a “perfect” superhero film. I mean, it’s really fun. There are explosions and various characters fight various other characters in a manner not unlike the way we used to crash our action figures of those characters into each other when we were children. There’s a sexy redhead who gets into fights the way the boys do. There’s a black dude who is less acting as a character and more just acting as his fame-persona, and that’s actually better. All of that, bee tee dubs, describes the modern masterpiece, GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra. (Which you should totally check out sometime. Take a drink every time you think an action sequence is about to end, and keep chugging until the action sequence is actually over. Try not to destroy your liver that way. Good luck, Joes.)

What I’m saying is that a lot of us find a lot of the shit in The Avengers, “cool”, but we like that stuff because we either saw some/most of the movies leading up to The Avengers (again: genius move, Marvel, I hope you promoted whoever thought that up), or because we grew up reading some/most of the comics about these characters, either solo or in teams. Or, if you’re me, you saw it because you knew the internet would have a lot of fun taking the movie (and the press surrounding its release) and shaking it up into a thousand different gifs, references, and memes. If you’ve never watched a movie or TV show because you wanted to keep up with Tumblr then I don’t know how to explain it to you, Gramps, but there it is.

…okay, okay, I also went because whenever The Hulk smashes up a bunch of stuff, some part of my brain turns into this baby.

But I was a Prime Audience; a lot of us were primed and set up to like this shit. Which is fine! It’s okay to like things! But it’s less okay to pretend that the things we like are magically blessed *because we like them*. The movie actually is not all that REMARKABLE. If anything, I’d say it barely edged by in the, “actually giving a shit about the people/events on screen,” category, and only then if you are truly unfamiliar with Whedon’s work and his relationship with character death. (Everyone who was surprised by the fact and style of Coulson’s death, go stand with your nose in the corner and think really hard about your failure. Try to do better next time.) I thought maybe Maria Hill might be the person to inevitably, suddenly die, but hey, they recast her character as a white Canadian, so I figured she was probably safe. (It’s a Whedon project, there can’t be more than one person of color around or else his (very, very white) fanbase might get nervous.)

I’m trying to balance “ahem, problem” things with nice things so here you go: I appreciated Whedon’s blatant obsession with reflections, I found it to be very appropriate for a comic book film, and far less tiresome than Ang Lee’s split-screens in The Hulk. (Note: I have not seen all of that version of The Hulk, just enough to be like, “whaaaaaa”.) I do think that movies about superpowered weirdos arguing with each other may be the sweetest of sweet spots for Whedon’s aesthetic, to the shock of nobody. Also, I would assume in part because he didn’t originate these characters, this is the first time in a long damn while I wasn’t able to be like, “the violent loner”, “the brooding sexy man”, “the ‘not pretty’ pretty girl who’s really smart”, “the tiny conventionally attractive badass woma–oh wait.”

OH WAIT.

There’s a whole snitfit about, “why is Black Widow even in this movie”, and (1) because she was in Iron Man 2 so they kind of had to use her and (2) due to that, why would you put ANOTHER WOMAN on the team, I mean god, this isn’t a chick flick, and (3) shut up let’s talk about her being in it instead of debating whether a different woman should even be on the team at all. THIS IS THE ONE WE GOT. Which is kind of the base of the problem…one of the bases of the problem. Here, I’ll take it in segments.

SEGMENT ONE OF THE PROBLEM
Women aren’t a monolith. (Yes, that’s my fucking catch phrase these days. Learn it, love it, live it.) There are lots of us. Having “the girl” on the team means that she gets the impossible, unenviable task of “representing” women. It means that her appearance and behavior become a message from the film to the viewer about “women” instead of “this one individual woman”. It’s not cool, I know! But that is what happens when you have a token minority instead of true diverse representation. Nick Fury kind of gets away with it due to his authority over the team and the fact that he’s Samuel L. Jackson, although I was disappointed that he had to report to a bunch of disapproving white people in the movie. It felt a little weird, but then I actively don’t pay attention to anything about SHIELD in the comics, so what do I know? My point is that when the only woman with more than four lines of dialog is running around with her costume half-unzipped*, it makes it hard to say that this movie is doing anything particularly different than um every other anything ever. Yawn.

SEGMENT TWO OF THE PROBLEM
Joss Whedon has never un-learned how to write Buffy, or he just won’t stop because people keep clapping their hands together and going, “Yaaaaaay you did that thing that time, let’s crown you King of Feminists!” and I’d imagine that feels pretty good, so he just keeps on beating that particular horse. I wish someone would point out to him that in the phrase, “strong female characters”, the word “strong” does not have to refer to literal physical strength, but eh, that would involve growing as a person, and why would we ever ask or expect that from a creative dude? Yeah, bro, we get it, there was a time when the idea of a tiny sexy lady fighting on TV was a revolutionary idea. That revolution has passed. Rejoin us on the front lines, please.

*
Because really, this is what she wears when she first shows up:

And then the rest of the time it’s this:
If your argument to this is, “But there’s not even *very much* cleavage!” then you, too, get to go stand in the corner with your nose against the wall and think for a while.

As a comparison, the rest of The Avengers:
Papa Kirk was commander of a starship for 12 minutes and saved 800 lives…and then he became Thor.

Even Hawkeye is like, “this CGI shirtless guy is not doing it for me.”

*Two buttons unbuttoned*, Banner? Slut alert. (PS a significant portion of Lady Internet has decided these two are boyfriends, dealwithitshades.gif everyone, never let it be said I didn’t keep you informed about the important things.)
[snerk]

what is that, a metal priest collar?

Look, even the bad guy is rather conservative in his realness:
(If you were ever like, “I wonder what it would look like if Harry Potter got sorted into Slytherin and grew up?”, well now you know.)

That’s like SO MANY DUDES, right? And then just this one fierce bitch:

So while each guy gets to rock his own look and that’s cool, lots of dudes in the audience can be like, “I’m more of a Thor than a Hawkeye, yay Thor!”, ladies in the crowd get to go, “I’m…nothing like that one lady on screen and oh, there doesn’t really appear to be much more in the way of ladies. Yeah, I got nothing. Maybe I’m the one working that one console, who got killed along with all the other people who clearly did not survive during the Hulk breakout/Loki escape/Bad Guy Invasion, even though the only death anyone mentioned was Agent Coulson? Maybe I look like Agent Coulson’s kinda-girlfriend, the cellist, who never appears on screen? WHO KNOWS.” …I guess you could also be Pepper Potts, who delivers all of her dialog while wearing short-shorts? (Which, to my utter amazement, I can’t find pictures of online right now.)

Also blah blah aspirational male bodies vs sexualized female bodies blah blah you know this already. (And if not, I’ve got a corner with your nose’s name on it.) (Or, maybe check out some of the Suggested Reading, link at the top of the page.)

So, MY POINT, like I ever have just one, is that while The Avengers was a super fun way to eat a bucket of popcorn, *I think we can do better*. I think that the tiniest veneer of feelings on top of the normal action hero bullshit is a far cry from “perfect”, and if it’s “perfect” for the source material, then IT IS TIME TO EXAMINE THE SOURCE MATERIAL AS WELL. It may come as a surprise to you, but comics kind of suck in a lot of ways, and many of those ways involve the comics themselves being alienating to people who are not grown up life-long comic fans. THERE IS NO MYSTERY, IT IS EXPLAINABLE. And when, “But that’s how Black Widow *always* dresses!”, is the argument I get, even from Respected Comic-y Type People Who In Theory Know Better Than Me, I have to roll my eyes and just yell, “REALLY?” a lot, because REALLY? Uuuuugh, laziest of lazy arguments. The way she’s always dressed is shitty, then. Ta-fucking-da.

Also, problematic (racist, sexist, mind-numbingly simplistic, pandering to white male anxieties and power fantasies, I could go on) source material just opens the door for problematic film execution, and that’s on Whedon. Nothing in the script demanded that Black Widow’s ass get reaction shots when she goes and talks with Loki, and yetttttttt. (Yes. Really.) It’s tiresome, it’s boring, and it’s not the best we can ever do.

One hopes.

“In fact, all my life in domestic service I’ve found that employers were always greatly concerned with your moral welfare. They couldn’t have cared less about your physical welfare; so long as you were able to do the work, it didn’t matter in the least to them whether you had back-ache, stomach-ache, or what ache, but anything to do with your morals they considered was their concern. That way they called it ‘looking after the servants’, taking an interest in those below. They didn’t worry about the long hours you put in, the lack of freedom and the poor wages, so long as you worked hard and knew that God was in Heaven and that He’d arranged for it that you lived down below and laboured, and that they lived upstairs in comfort and luxury, that was all right with them.”

–Margaret Powell in Below Stairs, her memoir about working in service as a kitchen maid and cook during the 1910s.

…but it might as well be about Mitt Romney and the GOP, really.

I went to GDC this year again and didn’t blog about it because occasionally I do feel like if you don’t have anything nice to say, you shouldn’t say anything at all. (Whatever, it was fine, mostly.) I will say though that I continue to see a lot of the same talk, which is some dude standing up on stage talking about how it’s possible to make “personal” games and still make money, and just…wow, you mean to say that you, an awkward straight white cisgender man made a game about your awkward straight white cisgender man life and managed to find a bunch of other awkward straight white cisgender men to sell your game to? Really??! Color me surprised. It’s not as if that’s the demographic of most games, or most indie games, or anything.

Whatever.

Anyway, so I am a terrible person who tends to assume that if a large number of players like something, it’s awful. (This is where I do that fake-sneeze thing and say “Mass Effect” instead of the sneeze…I don’t know now to write that elegantly, though. Actually, I have the GDC flu that was going around, so I don’t know how to do *anything* elegantly right now.) And I had heard that the new game from thatgamecompany, Journey, was good, and then I spent a lot of GDC hearing from people whose opinions I respect that it was really, really good. I think it was when Leigh Alexander insisted that I either buy a PS3 or come down to NYC to play the Journey on *her* PS3 that I felt myself start to be like, “oh, wow, so this game is probably kind of bullshit, huh?”

And it’s not bullshit or like well it is but it’s not Journey’s fault. It’s just that there are like three things to that game and they are:

1) Visuals
2) Story
3) Multiplayer

The visuals are actually great, really really great. I didn’t know sand could be so awesome, truly. But I’m pretty sure we’re all trying to get past the notion that games should be sold based on their graphics, right? Or do we just say that when we don’t actually like the game, I can never keep track. Anyway, the idea that the game is the bestest because it’s pretty feels a little thin to me, especially since I’m currently playing through Uncharted 1 right now and the facial expressions on everybody are blowing my mind and that game is like sooooo old. (Uncharted is also probably the most effective thing ever to convince people that jetskis suck. Which… they do, they pollute the air and the water and the vibrations kill coral and shit. Now that I write this, maybe Mass Effect’s shitty Mako is secretly a campaign to get people to stay away from 4-wheeler recreational vehicles?)

The story of Journey is straight up the hero’s journey or the monomyth or whatever you want to call it. For example, you could call it Star Wars, or Lord of the Rings, or Ender’s Game, or basically most science fiction, most fantasy, or just in general most stories told by and/or for awkward straight white cisgender men. I do think the story is an important part of why people seem to respond so well to Journey because, much like Portal before it, it’s the kind of story that makes you feel a bit like a smartypants and you “get” it and so then you feel understood by the game because the game told you a story you already know. It’s a basic idea that is paced well and fully executed in under three hours. It’s a movie plot, and a simple one, and hooray for you for figuring it out and finishing it in one sitting.

The actual thing that makes Journey different or new is the multiplayer, and this is where I just start saying, “really?!” over and over at you, the collective “you” of the game industry. The online multiplayer of Journey involves you playing with another person who like stands next to you and can whistle and like gives you energy to float when you need it. I guess. As far as I can tell, this limited interaction with another living human being makes the game unique and meaningful and personal for a lot of players? Despite the fact that um the last time I checked what is meaningful about connecting with another person is not their physical proximity (which the multiplayer relies on and rewards) but rather my ability to *communicate with them*, which Journey completely removes, short of the little whistle thing I mentioned already. Which means that people are flipping out over the fact that someone finally managed to make an online multiplayer experience that doesn’t guarantee a million new submissions to FatUglyorSlutty.com, basically. Not to go all old-meme on you, but don’t be afraid to to dream a little bigger, darlings. Fuck.

I really liked Journey, which I realize is not coming across here. But it’s one of those games that’s so focused on universal appeal, it’s very difficult to get any sort of personal meaning out of it (for me, speaking as one person). The only time I felt really connected to my little Jawa person (yes really, you’re a hipster Jawa, complete with leggings and oversized tunic) is during the cut scene where the Jawa gets hir little scarf for the first time, and as it was sort of glowy-forming around hir neck, the Jawa looks over hir shoulder like “the fuck is going on?” and that felt like (A) a realistic sentiment to have in that scenario and (B) what I was thinking already. So I had a nice little bonding moment with my gender-non-specific hipster Jawa there. Otherwise, you’re playing as a chess piece moving from set to set, and if you know what the monomyth is (or uh have consumed any popular nerd culture ever) then you know how the game is going to play out pretty quickly. It’s definitely a good advertisement for videogames, in that I think my mom would sit through a playthrough and find it to be nifty. And as I said, nobody can verbally harass each other, so gold star there? There was a singular moment where the pacing of the gameplay did have me holding my breath and then releasing it in a gasp, so it’s not as if there’s no “there” there. So yeah, play it, but I would ignore the people telling you it’s like proof that games are meaningful or whatever hyperbolic ridiculousness. They’re just blinded by the sand graphics.

Meanwhile, my spouse, because he knows me, was like, “have you played Anna Anthropy’s new game, dys4ia?” and when I said no, he just said, “oh, you should play it…I think you’ll like it.” This is all he ever says to me when he thinks a game is really great, because he knows how I get when games are overhyped to me. (Um see above for an example.) So I loaded up dys4ia not really knowing what to expect, and in some ways it’s actually very similar to Journey. It’s short, it’s about the experience of playing it, you can’t die or fuck it up. But rather than telling me a story I already know, or telling a story that “everyone” can relate to or understand, it tells a part of Anna’s story. Rather than feeling like the story is trying to make me feel understood, I came away with a better understanding of another person. *This* is what it looks like when you make a game that’s personal, in that it’s about a specific person, not “personal” because it’s boiling down a human experience into the narrative equivalent of baby food.

You should play it…I think you’ll like it.

Hey so remember that time Google made a great product and then ruined it and you realized that Google doesn’t actually care about you as a customer because you’re not actually their customer at all, you’re their product?

Yeah, me too!

I am not one for grudges but when you destroy the my social space with my closest friends, I start rocking the Scarlett O’Hara fist and telling the sunset that I Will Never Use Google Products Again. (Reference, for if you’re somehow not up on old movies that romanticized the antebellum South.)

And so with that in mind, here are the results of my experiments in washing the Google out of my hair over the last three months. (Additional reference. Apparently “explicitly racist US movies, 1939 – 1958” is the subplot of this post.)

Google Reader, you cut me deep
Eff you, Google Reader, I have NewsBlur to keep me warm at night now! This was by far the easiest transition, in part because NewsBlur actually imports your Reader feeds for you. I had everything ported over in less than 60 seconds and was back to reading my feeds. I am a strong NewsBlur convert in part because of the interface, but also because I get to be a paying customer. (There is a free version, for up to a certain number of feeds, I believe 60?) I believe there’s a sliding-scale payment structure on an annual basis. I’m sorry to be so vague on details, but I can’t find this information easily on the About, FAQ, or Blog. The developer of NewsBlur just quit his job and went full-time indie developer on the product, so I think we have more features to look forward to, fingers crossed! As it stands though, it’s still a great product already, and I recommend it highly to anyone looking to ditch Reader or just explore the big, beautiful world of RSS feeds in the first place.

Google Mail, you are tough to replace
I’ve tried a variety of web-based mail services over the last three months, with middling results. Again, I was looking for services where I get to be the customer, not the product, so that eliminated several “alternatives” (who still use the same “your information is our actual product” model as GMail). I stuck with Hushmail for a while, which presented me with a tiny Sophie’s Choice: their updated UI is a dramatic improvement over the old version (which is so hideous I can’t even), but the full feature set is only available on the old version (and the full feature set includes things like “manage folders”…pretty basic stuff). I ended up canceling and asking for my money back, because the product was unusable to me in its current form.

I’ve since switched over to Neomailbox, where the UI is acceptable (albeit based on MS Outlook, apparently), and the servers are kept in Switzerland (so I guess I never have to worry about my emails getting handed over to the FBI?). My only complaint is the complaint I have about all of these sites: they’re slower than GMail. Way slower. I also miss GMail’s habit of grouping emails with the same subject line into a dynamic thread, I won’t lie. Also, apparently nobody else has figured out how to auto-add to your contacts an email address you write to frequently so it auto-populates the To: line. And I had a nifty contact management service integrated into my GMail account (WriteThat.Name) which doesn’t work with Neomailbox. But mostly it’s the slowness that bugs me. It doesn’t bug me enough to hand over all of my correspondence back to Google, though.

Google Docs, you were an asshole anyway
My conclusion after exploring every free online document management service under the sun is: They all suck. So hard. GDocs even sucks (have you ever tried to make a non-basic Presentation? Or add a table to anything? Or just use Document like, AT ALL?) I’ve switched over to ThinkFree which is slow and kind of messy, but as far as I can tell, it only sucks as much as everything else. If someone knows of a for-pay service that is less terrible than everything currently out there, please let me know, because Jeez McCreez. Granted, the collaboration features on GDocs are really nifty, and it’s possible that a lot of people can’t live without those. I can, and so that’s what you’re hearing about. (One exception: the Form GDoc format, which is great and useful and one I have yet to find a good replacement for.)

Google Calendar, goddammit
I think I’m going to switch back to Google Calendar. The closest thing to a replacement I’ve found is 30Boxes, and that motherfucker doesn’t even have a “location” section for events you add to your schedule. I guess all of my meetings are the “of the mind” variety, eh 30Boxes? Also, while it’ll email me my daily agenda, it insists on doing it as if it’s coming from an actual 30Boxes employee, complete with a greeting and introducing themselves and a little sketch of their face. 30Boxes, you are not goddamn Lush Cosmetics, I don’t need to see the human face of your system, I just need you to shut up and give me my schedule for today. Also problematic: coordinating schedules with your spouse when one of you isn’t using GCal. I realize that my daily schedule is still a deeply personal data set, but right now it’s actively causing problems in my life, and it’s less personal than a lot of the other stuff about me that I was letting Google sell to advertisers.

Google! G’bye!
I rarely run searches through Google anymore; instead I use DuckDuckGo, which is better for reasons, because [handwave]. The times I find myself defaulting back to Google are when I need an image or video; DuckDuckGo isn’t nearly as good at refining search results in that way (or I’m bad at search. Which is possible!). But given the effort Google’s gone to recently to make its search simultaneously as insular and exposed as possible by integrating your Google Plus buddies’ data into your search results, I can at least say with confidence that DuckDuckGo will creep you the fuck out waaaay less when you use it.

So there you have it. “But what about ______?” you ask. I don’t use that. This is my post about Google services I use and the ones I ditched and how. Go spend three months of trial and error and figure out how to replace that product yourself. It is possible! Let this post live as a beacon of hope to guide you! (Also, yeah, I know, I run a blog, ergo Google Analytics. This is a WordPress.com-hosted blog, because I like to roll with as little technical knowledge as possible, so I get WordPress’s analytic thingjobs. However I just set up another site for an event and I’m totally using Google Apps and Google Analytics for it, and yes I feel dirty dirty dirty but What’s A Girl To Do. At least Google doesn’t get to make money off my mid-day “I NEED WINE OMG THIS DAY” emails to my friends anymore.)

I’m in one of those phases where everything is so in flux, and so many projects are either not complete or not YET complete or I will never be able to talk about them because [reasons] anyway…essentially, this is going to be one of those directionless, “oh my god Courtney just get a livejournal what is wrong with you,” posts. But I also don’t like when so much time passes between blog posts, and so today you get to read about the Middle bits of my life, instead of the exciting Beginning and End. (Also, most of my life is always going to be Middle. I suspect I’m not alone.)

- GDC is in less than a week, who let that happen? I was really excited to attend last year and my schedule was triple-booked the entire time and I met dozens of people that I genuinely liked (hey, for me that’s like…loving an entire nation’s population) and it was just fabulous. This year I think if given the option, I would like to stay home and curl up into a little ball and panic. Because!

- I’m in the middle of buying a house, and I’ve either been in the beginning or middle of buying a house since last summer I shit you not. This is the third? fourth? property my spouse and I have put an offer on, and the second one where we’ve gotten to this point…this point being “we are supposed to close this week but the lender still hasn’t delivered a mortgage commitment letter and I kind of have to assume we’re just not going to get this house ever.” Last time the deal fell apart horribly and expensively and soul-crushingly, and this time I can kind of FEEL the deal falling apart in real time, and I’ve started psychically checking my email just as the next upsetting missive from our bank shows up. I’ve had a blog post written in my head since last September with the title, “Home Ownership: Day Zero,” and I yearn to be able to write it and put a happy ending on this shittacular process. YEARN. (Downton Abbey, what have you done to my generation’s verbs.) Anyway, I’m trying to make my pain funny for you to read about, and I feel like the bourgiest asshole wah wah I can’t buy property the way I want to, but truth: This process is humiliating and terrible and fuck you, housing market, fuck you, banks, it is not at all a mystery to me why nobody is buying homes right now, given that the process is full of bullshit and lies. [sarcastic jazz hands]

- There is so much going on right now that I just can’t write about yet, because while they are events and problems that weigh on me a lot, they aren’t actually things that are happening to me directly, so it’d be the dickest of dick moves to blog about them. But the entire home purchasing waking nightmare situation is kind of cake in comparison. Or actually not, but whatever, the conclusion: there is lots of stuff across the spectrum happening that I have no control over, but which all impacts my life significantly. To the shock of everyone, I hate not being in control. I WAS AS SURPRISED AS YOU ARE.

- However, knowing all of this and being able to articulate, “oh yeah I’m really concerned about X, Y, and Z things,” has not prevented my body from doing it’s usual body thing and internalizing all of my stress and short version: Panic attacks sometimes! Slightly longer version is…boring, and involves going to the doctor and having a heart attack scare because the signs of stress and the signs of recent cardiac arrest are really similar, as I joked about on Twitter. I debated trying to blog about anxiety while in the throes of a panic attack, and I’m kind of sad I didn’t, since the mental math that you find yourself doing while freaking out is both OBVIOUSLY WEIRD and yet COMPLETELY UNAVOIDABLE. I had forgotten how freaking HARD life becomes when your brain is working against you. But accuracy in reporting: It took me um maybe five hours to go from realizing I should call my doctor to actually calling my doctor (her booking nurse was in a meeting and THEY MADE ME CALL BACK you have no idea maybe but omg I ALREADY PICKED UP THE PHONE ONCE AND THAT WAS SCARY ENOUGH GEEZ) and then when I found out my doctor was on vacation I needed another person (again hours later) to remind me that you can get appointments with another doctor in your doctor’s practice and just…it is so hard to take care of yourself when everything is scary and you don’t trust yourself to do anything. And I swear they may have given me sugar pills but it is really powerful to be able to tell yourself, “If I start to feel my grip on reality slipping, I can take this pill and I will be able to breathe normally again.” (Also I don’t think it’s a sugar pill. But who knows! Placebo effect I love you!)

- So since I’ve had to research therapists all of a sudden (my not-my-doctor doctor’s visit resulted in me getting what I can only call The Mom Look from not-my-doctor and a stern suggestion to go talk to someone while all this crap is going on…”all this crap” being my life I guess…sidebar: It’s a distancing thing, and I kind of need to tell myself that these events, even though it’s pretty much my whole day every day, are temporary. Is it healthier to say that your entire life is crap, or tell yourself your “actual” life doesn’t normally involve this kind of thing?) but anyway I was in the middle of a sentence…Researching therapists! Were You Aware: therapists mostly don’t take insurance now? Also they cost a lot. Those two facts together had me concluding, “Fuck this, I’m just joining a gym instead.” So I’ve started doing CrossFit! And by that I mean I did a class on Saturday and I still can’t stand or sit without pain. And yet it was fun, and mostly I interpret the pain as, “you sit at a computer too often; you are very weak.” So I assume it’ll get a little easier over time, and at least it’s a hard thing I have control over. (Also: muscles!)

- In the absence of an actual house to lose my mind over, I’ve started losing my mind over Pinterest. My spouse is mystified by the mechanic of Pinterest, because he says he’s not a person who enjoys collecting things. I find this borderline-insulting, since I live to get rid of stuff, not *keep* stuff…but I do totally have a physical file at home with inspiration photos, as well as a multi-tiered folder system on my laptop with digital photos I’ve saved over the years. It’s not a collection it’s PERSONAL REFERENCE. I have no idea how that’s a distinction. Pinterest is basically an open fire hydrant of pictures and ideas and in some respects it reminds me of Google Reader’s much-missed (by me) social functionality, which is the nicest thing I can say about anything on the internet. Check out my boards if you want.

Writing a conclusion for this post? Do you need that? This is basically like we just had coffee or something, but for free and not actually in person or anything.