These yellow-flowered trees are all over my neighborhood and on a sunny day they just seem to explode with color.
A little soju, a little kdrama.
Fifteen years and one lifetime ago, on a continent far, far away, before the world’s saddest day, and before Michael Cera would go on to play Alan, Justin and I watched Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist. We watched it in our cute apartment on the rue du Bois-Melly and we loved it. What I remember though, more than anything, is how the movie made me feel: it made me nostalgic for my college years and it made me miss New York. It made me feel the bittersweet joy of looking back on a well-spent youth that was truly over.
Today, Amazon’s Kindle deals included the book the movie is based on for $1.99, so I bought it for the memorie. But tonight I decided to rewatch the movie. And it produced the strangest sort of double nostalgia. It still made me feel nostalgic for my college years and it still made me miss New York. But it also made me deeply nostalgic for my life from fifteen years and one lifetime ago when Justin and I watched and loved this movie together. I sat here in 2023 and remembered myself watching this movie in 2008, remembering my life in 1996.
In 1996, I never imagined where I would be in 2008. And in 2008, I certainly never imagined where I would be in 2023. That the journey should take such unexpected twists is both the miracle and the curse of life. Who knows where I will be when I watch this movie again.
by Chuck Wendig
Published: 20 July 2021
Genres: Horror
Pages: 530
Goodreads
A family returns to their hometown—and to the dark past that haunts them still.
My Thoughts
This book is about Nate, Maddie and Oliver and their fight against the Demon. But it’s also about love, and pain, and cycles of violence, and families. And, ultimately, it is about hope. The Book of Accidents tells a riveting, engaging, hell-of-a-ride story, but what takes it from good to great is that is also has a huge heart. Big recommend from me.
Quotes
You get what you give. You also give what you get.
Life’s fucked up. It just is. It’s got ups and downs and I say it’s worse not appreciating the good things, because then what’s the point? It’s like the Native Americans used to say, right? Gotta use all of the buffalo. Life is a whole damn animal, and you can’t waste any part of it.
May we all wrestle with our demons and win.
Things like this had a way of living on, passed down and around from one person to the next. Love and pain, trauma and hope, light and dark. Around and around they go, some given as gifts, others as curses. The whole machine, whirling on its own axis. A cycle of something made, something broken, and hopefully something made again.
In horror’s wake, hope was a bountiful garden.
Dedication: Hell with it, this one’s for me.
by Stephen King
Published: 2006
Genres: Horror
Pages: 513
Goodreads
Lisey Debusher Landon lost her husband, Scott, two years ago, after a twenty-five year marriage of the most profound and sometimes frightening intimacy. Scott was an award-winning, bestselling novelist and a very complicated man. What begins as a widow's efforts to sort through her husband's becomes a nearly fatal journey into the darkness he inhabited. Perhaps King's most personal and powerful novel, Lisey's Story is about the wellsprings of creativity, the temptations of madness, and the secret language of love.
My Thoughts
I reread Lisey’s story this year. It’s maybe the third time I have read it and I still love it. I love Lisey, I love the language pool, I love everyone’s courage, especially that of scared little children, but mainly I love the love. I am not usually so hippy-dippy, but on this one, I have definitely drunk the Kool-Aid.
Quotes
God bless the language pool, where we all go down to drink.
What’s done can’t be undone, and what’s remembered must be lived with ever after.
There was a lot they didn’t tell you about death…and one of the biggies was how long it took the ones you loved the most to die in your heart.
I will holler you home.
