Well, there you have it. I know shoulder surgery doesn’t always have the best outcomes, but I’m happy to at least have a clear thing to do now. Hopefully we get it scheduled for a couple weeks from now.
Subscriber writing post coming this week.
This Week’s Posts
Monday, May 30th - Yes, I Got That Reference. But Who Cares?
Referring to other movies or shows is not inherently interesting; there has to be some deeper meaning in the reference.
Wednesday, June 1st - It’s Time for YIMBYs to Stop Picking Low-Hanging Fruit
The YIMBY movement has to stop pretending that only white people are NIMBYs.
Thursday, June 2nd - Losing It
For my birthday, I wrote about losing my virginity.
From the Archives
REMINDER
Song of the Week
Book Recommendation
Girl, Interrupted, Susanna Kaysen, 1993
I have been asked on many occasions to write a mental health memoir. I have no interest in such a project, principally because the treatment of mental illness is existentially boring and the vast majority of the art created about it is a lie. Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted, published some 25 years after her ~18 month stay in an upscale mental hospital, is more honest than most. Kaysen is smart to focus on the affective questions of her young womanhood and how they were influenced by her strange circumstances, just as Elizabeth Wurtzel did with Prozac Nation. There’s no battles with Nurse Ratched here. Which makes it a bit boring, if I’m being honest - you can both understand why Hollywood was so eager to option this book, because Kaysen can be so compelling, and also why the movie doesn’t really work. (There really is no dramatic ending here and the manufactured one in the movie is the weakest thing about it.) But I recommend this book as a well-written and honest accounting of the mundane realities of life in serious mental health treatment. I will say that, as with the movie, the question of whether Kaysen ever really had a mental disorder is raised but not answered.
Non-Garbage Online Reading
That’s it. See you next week.
Good luck!
Best of luck with the surgery.