Dead Letter Department #85

things i have enjoyed lately

(am i writing this partially because my mood this morning is absolutely pitiful & I am trying to remind myself that there are, in fact, things I enjoy? maybe, but it’s very rude of you to point it out.)

Midsomnar

As previously discussed in several newsletters, I am a huge weenie when it comes to scary movies, but for some reason the other day, after having rewatched the beginning bit of Little Women, I thought it was time to try to take on Midsomnar. I guess I couldn’t get enough Florence Pugh? Anyway, if I’d known William Jackson Harper was in it, I might have gone for it sooner, since he is just excruciatingly handsome, & so fun to watch. It’s about a very sad girl who ends up going to visit her friend’s home in Sweden, which he describes as a commune, but we know, as the viewer, pretty much as soon as all of the smiling people in white dresses show up, that it’s a cult. No one else could possibly keep white clothes that clean while living on a farm: it has to be cultish laundry practices of some kind.

Watching it is an exercise in tension, in shaking your fist & yelling, “Why don’t you leave?” to the characters on the screen, and & I enjoyed it so much more than I expected: the costuming alone could be a whole essay. I kept thinking that I’m never going to accept anyone’s invitation to their Swedish off-grid home community, as though that’s something that happens to me routinely, and also that if I ever get anywhere that just happens to casually be keeping a full grown bear in a cage, I’m immediately turning on my heel & walking away.

The only thing I didn’t like, enough that it snapped my immersion, were the one or two shots of a prophet character with a facial disfigurement. I don’t watch enough horror or thrillers these days to know if the genre has moved past that trope, generally, but when I was younger, I feel like there was some heavy leaning on how supposedly frightening people with certain conditions or disabilities are to look at, and how ‘normal’ people should be scared of them. The character in Midsomnar’s appearance did end up being relevant to the plot, but I think using something like that as a jump scare is, essentially, boring.

A Spindle Splintered

Recommended by M., for gay & beautiful book club, I read this in an afternoon. I love a retelling, I love a fairytale, I love when you think you’ve spotted all the tropes & potential twists & the author immediately trips you into a pile of surprises. It’s about dying girls & best friends & sleeping beauties from one universe to another, & has vast advantage of being perfectly bite-sized. I read it in a single afternoon, whilst occasionally sniffling into my handkerchief, & I think you should too. Multi-verse stuff sometimes just annoys me, because it can feel like the stakes dissolve into a realm of endless iterations, but the stakes in this one were just the right size.

Dr. Jekyll & Mr Hyde - Ezra Furman

I’m slow when it comes to music: it usually takes me a couple times through an album before I can begin to grasp the lyrics, but this was in fairly steady rotation on my January playlist (also featured: Feist, Beyonce’s Dangerously in Love, the new Mountain Goats). A friend of mine got heavy into Ezra Furman a few years ago & started recommending her music, so I’ve been steadily adopting albums into my heart, and this one has got me good. The horns in the beginning hit me in just the right spot, to the point where I once drove around replaying the song just so I could get that blast in the beginning. Give the first ten seconds a listen & see if it hits you the same way. I know it came out ten years ago, but this is a pandemic song for me.

Haggen deli sandwiches

The number of times I have stumbled into the Haggen deli and wrested an enormous sub sandwich from the cold case for dinner in the past couple of months is, frankly, a little embarrassing. It’s a habit I got into last year when I was spending a lot of time with my friend S. while she was in hospice & I had run through the various fast food options. There’s just something so dispiriting about coming home from something that’s bone deep exhausting & having to pitifully piece together some sort of grazing dinner from your sad refrigerator because even turning the oven on or chopping up a salad is going to be too much work. One of these sandwiches & any kind of produce-based or vegetal side & I am good to go.

Green shoots

They’re here, friends. This is not a drill. The time I spent in the late fall hair-pinning myself into various uncomfortable postures to shove little brown bulbs into the ground is already paying off in the way I hoped it would, with dozens of tiny green heads just barely poking their head up above their brown winter blankets of soil and mulch. Something did come through the front yard and dig a bunch up, leaving bark scattered all over the sidewalk, and also munch the absolute heck out of the remaining decorative cabbage my friend gave me last year, but the back yard seems to be relatively untouched, at least so far, and every time I see those sprouts I can tell myself spring is coming, spring is coming.
I can’t tell yet if the little Japanese maple I planted last year lived through the severe cold snap—I investigated it the other day, but couldn’t tell if the little knobby bits on the branches were fresh buds announcing its survival or old ones where last year’s leaves fell, so that remains to be seen.

Fleur de sel caramel sauce from Trader Joe’s

A judicious scoop of this in hot coffee makes it taste so fancy & rich, thus preventing me from hauling myself into the car to go buy coffee to go when it is unnecessary. When it is necessary, you ask? Whenever I tell myself I require a reward for completing some relatively ordinary but somehow mind-straining task, such as going for bloodwork tomorrow for the second time this month, due to yet another mix up at my doctor’s office. Last time they missed the vein twice before getting a good stab in, so I’ll be showing up with that bruise on my arm when I go to get juiced again tomorrow, like the world’s hairiest orange.

Thank you for letting the Dead Letter Department fall into your inbox one more time. I’ll write again soon, and in the meantime, may all those things you did last fall to make your springtime a little more beautiful show you sometime soon that they have survived.