#94: Some personal, homosexual news......
If you read these emails while dreaming of marrying me, I have some bad news
Death by Consumption
3/17/26 - 3/23/26
I’m writing this from San Diego, where I’m spending the week with my family in the unseasonably hot weather that suggests we’re all going to die very very soon but is, for the moment, absolutely lovely. Might as well enjoy the warmth before we ChatGPT ourselves to extinction! As a result, this will be a shorter email, and honestly this week it’s mostly an excuse for me to brag about a good thing that happened to me.
This week: I got some bling, I watched two rather strange movies about how being a political prisoner can make you insane, and I jumped headfirst into a Danish literary sensation.
An engagement ring — on my finger
Some breaking news: two weeks ago I proposed to Justin! And unfortunately he said no, so now I am brokenhearted and single. :( No, no, I am only joking. He said yes, so I am now a fiancee, just like the women on Love Is Blind!!!!
I proposed on a beautiful 72-degree day at sunset on the Christopher Street Pier, an iconic gay cruising spot, while nearby a group of queers sexually harassed shirtless runners — so it was a very New York, very gay proposal. Later, we had dinner across from Jennifer Tilly, which was really just a perfect gay punctuation mark on this whole gay affair. “I’m so happy good things can still happen in the world!” my cousin said when I told him the news, and I agree! The Strait of Hormuz may be closed, but my heart is wide open……………
You might be asking why, after 9 years of dating, I finally proposed, and frankly I am asking myself that question, too, now that I had to purchase a ring at peak gold prices. I should have done this shit 6 years ago!!!! If nothing else, at least I have a fancy new object to pawn for cash when they reboot the Great Depression this summer.
Apologies for hiding this news from you the past couple weeks, my dear beloved subscriber, but I couldn’t say anything until we had surprised my family with it this week. I promise I won’t hide anything from you ever again. We are sisters, you and I, and we must hold no secrets from each other. Promise?
The thing I’ve learned, now that I am out of the engagement closet, is that you are immediately thrust into the terrifying world of post-engagement, pre-wedding questions. So, to get it all out of the way: no, I don’t know when or where the wedding will be happening. No, I don’t know how big it will be. Yes, our DJ will take requests, but there will be a list of banned songs (“Blurred Lines,” and anything by Justin Timberlake or Meghan Trainor). It’s a brave new world out here for me! Should I be subscribing to Brides magazine???
Kiss of the Spider Woman (2025) — on Delta
An absolutely delirious movie to watch at 30,000 feet. You’ve got Diego Luna and some actor named Tonatiuh playing political prisoners during the Argentinian dictatorship, who pass the time by telling the plot of a movie called Kiss of the Spider Woman, a fake movie musical starring Jennifer Lopez. So we cut back and forth from the two prisoners being tortured, basically, and then the bright, campy song-and-dance sequences of J.Lo’s fake musical. It’s… very strange! It’s also very obviously based on a stage play, one of those movies where the dialogue is overwritten and overacted, everything still played for the back rows even though the camera is tight on the actors. As a result, it all feels hammy and broad, which doesn’t work at all for the more serious prison scenes, but does work for J.Lo’s campy dance numbers.
As much as I resisted this often-stilted movie, the combo of altitude and J.Lo worked together to activate my homosexuality, and I found myself, against all odds, having a somewhat good time with this. Make fun of her all you want, but no one commits to anything more than Jennifer Lopez commits to everything, and she is genuinely a star in this (probably because she’s not asked to do much other than dance and show off her legs and smile, but still: a star is a star!). There is absolutely no way I’d make it through all two hours of this on the ground, but up in the air — with a little bit of help from airplane wine — I was soaring.
It Was Just An Accident (2025) — on Delta
I feel like I need to throat-clear a little, before I give my real feelings on this movie: this is obviously an important film, the biggest hit out of Iran in years, at a time when our country is committing untold war crimes over there. And the fact that it was made at all, let alone seen outside the country, is impressive, so all the accolades are worth it. But, as a film, I thought this was just… okay? I loved the simplicity of the story, and the way Panahi uses the framework to explore the different ways regular people have been brutalized by the Iranian regime, and I found many scenes and images particularly beautiful. And I also loved how surprisingly funny it was, and how well it balanced humor with drama. But the longer it went on, the more I felt like it had run out of things to say — the characters all have strong feelings, but no one ever really budges from their feelings, so there are many scenes of characters rehashing similar arguments with each other. And once the drama kicks into high gear, it switches from comedy into melodrama, in a way that doesn’t feel earned to me. I started the movie in the palm of its hand, and ended it feeling a little cold and distant. I’m sorry!
On The Calculation of Volume, books 1 and 2, by Solvej Balle (2024) — paperback
In a matter of days, I absolutely devoured the first two books in this seven(!) book series, which follows a woman, Tara, who gets trapped in the 18th of November, in a Northern European version of Groundhog Day. The books are short and efficient, each less than 200 pages while covering a year or two of Tara’s time loop, as she lives out November 18th over and over and over again.
I found Tara’s situation simultaneously soothing and panic-inducing. It’s repetitive, but never in a way that drags — often, when a book is described as “meditative,” I view it as a warning, but this is the rare “meditative” book that actually keeps me awake instead of putting me to sleep. The first book focuses more on Tara’s immediate situation, specifically how to deal with the fact that her husband wakes up and lives the same day out over and over with no memory of the day before, while she is still aging and moving forward. She’s forced to choose between explaining her situation again every morning to her husband, or forgoing that and instead living separate from him and everyone else she knows, completely alone.
In the second book, Tara has a little more fun living “outside of time”— she spends a year traveling around Europe, “chasing seasons,” finding snow in Sweden during the “January” of her internal calendar, and sun in Spain during her own summer. She spends another year doing exactly what I would do in this situation, doing almost nothing but deep-diving into Roman history, becoming an expert on Ancient Rome just because she has nothing but endless time. But often she finds it unbearably lonely, of course, and the series excels at bringing to life the many different ways loneliness can appear in the mundanities of life — feeling alone even though you’re at home with your husband, being surrounded by a crowd but feeling apart from everyone, or simply walking around and wondering if anyone can even notice you.
This is much more than another retread of a “time loop” story, and I’m only upset I’ve started it now, because the final 4 books have yet to be translated into English. I finished the second book and immediately went to a book store to pick up the next. So now I have the third on hand, but once I finish it I’ll be trapped in a time loop of my own, waiting for the fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh to be translated and published. But unlike Tara, I’m actually very happy to be trapped in November 18th for a while.