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Wishy Washy Wanda and the LinkedIn Profile

6:00 am. Wanda rubs her eyes of crust and with a grumpy growl turns off her alarm clock on her smartphone, which is blaring Coldplay’s “Viva La Vida” and lay in bed for a good ten minutes.

Breathe in, breathe out. She looks up at the ceiling, figuring out what she was going to do for the day. If only she didn’t make a stupid poor decision to leave her corporate job to take a mental health break. What a bullshit excuse.

One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi….

She feels the tightness leave her chest. Her shoulders relax. She picks up her phone and started scrolling.

Crap. There’s civil war in Sudan. COVID is (technically) not over. And anti-Semitism is alive and well. She continued scrolling, and had a thought. Hmmm, what is my crush and his girlfriend up to? Her heart skips a beat, and a voice in her head screams, No! Don’t check social media today! You’ll be heartbroken. They’re vacationing in fucking Bermuda, for crying out loud! Bermuda!

She doesn’t listen to her conscience, and instead logs into Facebook. She searches under his name. “Jasper Friedrich.” He pops up and his girlfriend, Vera, is kissing him on the cheek in front of a palm tree.

Wanda’s heart goes down with a thud. Her conscience tuts-tuts and shakes its head. Girl, see, I told you. But would you listen? Nooooo….

She shakily logs out, and then with a thump her head falls back onto the pillow. Maybe it’s not a great time to do stuff today. It’s early and clearly things aren’t working out with my life.

But she knows that chanting is going to help her stay motivated, so she resists the temptation to go back to sleep. Her body, emotionally worn down, screams, No! Life is pointless. Go back to Dreamland forever, and never wake up! But she needs to. Her hands clumsily fish for her little orange bottle of Zoloft pills. Dr. Greenberg told her to take one at the same time each day. 6:15 am it was. She trudges to the kitchen downstairs, and nearly trips and falls on old Sparky, her fluffy white little dog. Sparky gives a little yelp.

Ah, shit! Sorry. She picks up Sparky and brings him down the stairs with her as she trudges more carefully down the stairs.

She puts Sparky down, and he runs across the stained white carpet. When she was 12, Wanda’s mom held a birthday party and the adults all got tipsy, and Brenda Crawford, their next-door neighbor, accidentally spilled wine on the carpet. Brenda and her family packed up and moved to Montana for Dave’s job, but Wanda’s mom still bears a grudge. If she had her bearings, she would mail that stained rug all the way to Billings so that Brenda would never forget.

Wanda turns the tap on, careful not to wake her mom, who lies and snores on the couch so peacefully. She stayed up late completing an assignment for work, and is knocked out. Wanda shakes out one of the Zoloft pills from the bottle, and knocks it back with a gulp of water. They’re not magic pills, the Doc told her, but they work. She crosses her fingers and hopes for no more staying in bed all day, no more appetite fluctuations, and no more suicidal ideations.

She goes over to her wooden altar, which is framed by two beautiful purple vases of dying flowers. A single navel orange sits on the side as a dear gnat dances giddily around it, intoxicated by the zesty smell of the slowly maturing fruit. She opens the altar and sits back in her chair, and starts chanting the phrase Nam-myoho-renge-kyo.

Nam-myoho-renge-kyo, nam-myoho-renge-kyo, nam-myoho-renge-kyo, nam-myoho-renge-kyo, nam-myoho-renge-kyo…

She gets in rhythm with the sound of her voice, and it vibrates throughout her body. Sparky scampers over because he loves the sound of Wanda chanting. As Wanda chants, Sparky is calmed down and lies down, looking up at her with a yearning expression, Please pet me. With gentle fingers she strokes Sparky’s silky fur and continues chanting. She finishes reciting the second and sixteenth chapters of the Lotus Sutra and closes the altar. Her mom is still sleeping. Wanda goes back upstairs. Okay, now she feels a tad better. Still heartbroken but feeling okay enough to get through the day without a panic attack.

She opens her laptop and waits as it buffers for a good ten minutes. She got this laptop five years ago, and while it held up pretty well over the years, she didn’t get a laptop cooler for it, so it’s been overheating and it’s exhausted the battery. Too bad they don’t make the kinds of batteries for her laptop anymore, so now she has to save money she doesn’t have to buy a new laptop.

When the screensaver of Homer Simpson eating a doughnut pops up, she double clicks on the Google Chrome shortcut icon on her desktop. She opens the YouTube app on her phone’s home page, and types in the search engine, “Beyonce Love on Top” and clicks on the first search result.

Tired of having erectile dysfunction? Then take Viagra Plus, the only—

She clicks the black box at the bottom, “Skip ads.” Beyonce’s soulful voice jams out, and Wanda gets to work. She types in the search engine, LinkedIn.com. She attended a webinar yesterday for career development and listened to Marissa, the person who connects all the alums together for networking and social events, talk about the value of networking on LinkedIn. The minute Marissa mentioned networking, Wanda’s heart skipped a beat, even more than when she saw Jasper and Veda smooching in Bermuda this morning.

She closes her eyes and just lets Beyonce’s greatness wash over her, and then she feels sad. If only I had a love like Jasper, then I would be complete. If Vera wasn’t in the picture, then him and I would be happy together. She knows she shouldn’t be jealous, but ever since he told her about his girlfriend, all these painful insecurities have emerged from deep within her life, and sometimes they feel too overwhelming and painful to deal with. Jasper keeps my love on top, and as she thinks this she imagines being Beyonce and singing a corny rendition of “Love on Top,” black leotard and fishnet tights. Not that she would fit in a black leotard and fishnet tights, because she is twenty pounds overweight and her flesh would hang out of the fishnet tights. Very unflattering look.

She shakes herself out of her fantasy when Beyonce finishes the song with a #flawless bang, and her eyes open. Yep, her practically nonexistent LinkedIn profile is just sitting there, collecting dust for about two months. She hasn’t posted a thing, but her rich and successful connections sure have. She panicks. She remembers in the webinar, they talked about how to have a complete LinkedIn profile, summary, job titles, everything. How can she wax poetic about her three year part-time stint in college at the Tailfin, a fish joint known for their lobster rolls and snarky staff? Or her one month gig spinning cardboard arrow signs, sweating while dressed as the Statue of Liberty in 100 degree Texas heat?

She hears a knock.

“Come in.”

Layla, her older sister, pops in.

“Mom headed to work an hour ago. I’m going to class.”

“Okay.”

She looks at my computer screen.

“What are you doing?”

I give her a blank look.

“Nothing.”

She snorts.

“Weird.”

And leaves.

I don’t care though because I have all the time in the world to work on this. My About section is short. Maybe I should put some accomplishments? But, like, how do you talk about accomplishments if you haven’t accomplished anything major? I’m not a bestselling author, I’m not even paying paid gigs, so can I even call myself any of these things?

She types a short sentence in the section.

“I am a writer and musician.”

Bam! But oh crap, according to that LinkedIn profile experts page she needs to put more, sound more like she knows what she is talking about and knows her brand. But like, what is my brand? I’m not very self-promotional.

“You need to have a brand to market yourself. Everyone knows that!” Lucy told her as they sat a week ago at Brandy’s Cafe eating shrimp scampi and mimosas for brunch. Because Lucy was working, she paid for Wanda’s meal, even though Wanda told her she wasn’t going to eat because she felt ashamed for Lucy paying for her meal.

Wanda spirals into another almost panic attack. Okay, just breathe. It’s not that deep, kid…

Her mind spirals into another self-critical cycle.

You suck. Your profile sucks. You have no value.

Wanda does a quick Google search, “How to write a linkedin summary if you quit your job.” The first result is a generic post about how to write a linkedin summary. She finds another article with examples of LinkedIn summaries that attracted employers. As she scrolls through the list, instead of making her feel encouraged, she feels less confident that she can pull off a compelling summary with her work history in retail and office administration.

She goes under the experience section. The Tailfin, January 2018- January 2022. She looks at the bullet points. Ugh, so annoying, she has written about it like it’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Really girl, it’s just a fucking resume, not your autobiography.

She looks up the profile of Maggie Bergman, who graduated as valedictorian at her alma mater and has 500 connections. Maggie’s angelic face, framed by curly brown hair, touched up for a professional photo. Maggie Bergman, Executive Director at The Metropolitan Opera.

About

Experienced executive director with five years in the opera music industry….

After reading the 2,000 word summary, Wanda panics. She’s not following the rules of the articles she read about summaries. Hers isn’t long enough, so why not make it longer? Maggie’s summary clearly attracted the likes of recruiters because she has mad connections and is so popular.

She looks up. Two hours have passed and she still hasn’t written a word. So she panics and looks up another article. One of the tips reads, “Sound personable. You’re not just your job title!”

Okay, she relaxes a bit. I’m not my job title, I’m not my job title. Maybe to break the ice I could talk about me.

She is about to type something and her fingers hover over the keyboard in anticipation. But wait, what if some creepy stalker dude, like the guy who groped her that time she went to her friend’s twenty-first birthday party and has stalked her ever since. She feels another attack coming on. He will find you, her mind repeats, he will find you and hurt you. So don’t post anything.

She chants under her breath to calm down. Nam-myoho-renge-kyo, nam-myoho-renge-kyo….After a few minutes, she calms back down but still hasn’t written anything remotely interesting. Fuck it, she thinks, I’m going to spend ten minutes max on this. Whatever I don’t finish, I don’t finish.

Add a profile picture. That was the advice she heard on the webinar. It gets you more views. But I hate it when people can publicly see my picture. That dude at the party ruined shit for me. Thanks a lot, Bryan (or whatever your name is. It doesn’t matter. You were too drunk and disgusting to care.)

She clacks and clacks away at the keyboard. It’s not perfect but worth a shot, she shrugs. After an hour she has a summary:

Hello. I am a twenty-seven year old writer living in Dallas with my mom, sister and my dog Sparky. I am not sure what I want to do with my life, but I came in undeclared to college and after a lot of soul searching I majored in government and minored in Spanish. I was awarded a prize by the Grant Lewis Department of Political Science and got to represent an ambassador group at former President Barack Obama’s inauguration. I have worked a variety of jobs, mostly in retail and food service. I worked as a…..

It droned on and on. This will be a snorefest.

…I am not sure what career I want but by 2025 I want to write books full-time and release my first album on Spotify. My favorite books are Pride and Prejudice, The Secret Life of Bees, and anything by P.G. Wodehouse. My favorite music artists are Michael Jackson, Tyler the Creator and Johannes Brahms. My favorite movies are X-Men, Love in the Time of Cholera (ditto the book) and The Imitation Game.

Does anyone care if I’ve read P.G. Wodehouse? Do they care about any of this stuff? It’s a professional network, you dum-dum, not Facebook.

Wanda’s inner critic has a field day as she weighs whether to take down the summary or keep it. Five seconds later…

I’m deleting this. It sounds stupid and irrelevant. So for the third time I changed the summary back to “I’m an artist. Connect with me!” Desperate but short.

But you need a FULL SUMMARY. You’ve gotta rack up those views and connections, girl!

Her anger towards herself boils and she find herself feeling acid bubbling in her chest. She knows this happens in my body when she can’t make a decision. She grabs her water bottle and chugs. The cold elixir of life washes down her throat. She feel a little better now.

I have been at this for the past five hours, and haven’t gotten anything done. The only thing I can do… is just shut down my computer.

So Wanda shuts down the computer, angry at herself for going back and forth for an insignificant decision. She gets upset and pushes her pillow up to her face, and then lets out a painful loud blood-curdling scream. She feels the scream unleash itself from her body, releasing the pent up perfectionism, frustration, anxiety and insecurities she has held onto for years.

You’re perfectly imperfect, her old therapist told her. And she needs to hear that more than ever, because she just spent five hours working on something that nobody probably cared about in the first place. Worst of all, she couldn’t decide what to put. She kept going back and forth about her decision. Should I post this, should I not? And her decisions often carried the weight of other people’s expectations, or rather, what she thought other people’s expectations were of her.

Wanda goes to her Buddhist altar and cries, tears running down her face. I made such a stupid decision, wasting five hours working on a small thing like my LinkedIn summary. How could I have wasted so much time?!? I am falling behind in everything…

She continues to chant Nam-myoho-renge-kyo.

She feels better after thirty minutes.

I’m going to do some exercise.

Normally, Wanda can’t make up her mind whether to exercise on a given day. I’m too lazy, it’s too stressful, I don’t have time. But Wanda is running on empty and hasn’t worked out for a good while, so she turns on the pilates YouTube video that her friend sent her last month but that she didn’t open until now because she didn’t think she needed exercise. She does lunges, kicks, and punches, and twists her body in various directions. As she works out, her body releases stress and tension, and she feels in a better mood than she did before.

Random Playlist

These are a few songs I have listened to recently and loved:

  1. “Walking on Broken Glass” by Annie Lennox
  2. “Colour” by Seal
  3. “Show Me Love” by Robyn
  4. “Saturday Night Divas” by Spice Girls
  5. “Good Morning Gorgeous” by Mary J. Blige
  6. “You Made a Fool of Me” by Anthony Hamilton
  7. “Happier” by Marshmello and Bastille
  8. “Pick Up Your Feelings” by Jazmine Sullivan
  9. “Take Me Home” by Phil Collins
  10. “Let Me Breathe” by Joss Stone
  11. “December 1963 (Oh What a Night!)” by Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons
  12. “Borderline” by Madonna
  13. “The Less I Know The Better” by Tame Impala
  14. “Sad Songs (Say So Much)” by Elton John

My favorite restaurant

Daily writing prompt
What is your favorite restaurant?
View all responses

One of my favorite restaurants is Spiral Diner located in Fort Worth, Texas. They closed the Dallas location unfortunately, but I really enjoy taking a trip to the Fort Worth location on special occasions. It is a vegan diner and my favorite thing to get is the Spiral burger, which is a seitan patty (seitan is wheat gluten) topped with vegan cheddar cheese, lettuce, tomato, onion, vegan mayonnaise, ketchup and mustard. I usually get it with a side of vegan potato salad or corn chips. Often when going there I would get a slice of cake or a cookie, and sometimes the vegan ice cream shakes would end up being my dessert if they were sold out of desserts. Last time I went and was adventurous and got tofu migas. As a kid I would always love to go to Eatzi’s, a European-style market, and order migas, which were scrambled eggs with tortilla strips. But I became vegan around 2009 and cut out dairy and eggs from my diet, so I ended up eating a lot more scrambled tofu. The tofu migas I think came with a vegan sausage patty.

Another great vegan place I loved was called Native Foods Café in Chicago. Before I developed a mini-intolerance to gluten (I had a breakfast burrito with a huge wheat spinach tortilla and I’m wondering if the weird nausea and stomach pains is because my body is becoming more sensitive to wheat) I would get any vegan burger on the menu. It was a seitan patty with lots of melted vegan cheese and seitan bacon strips, and I got it with French fries. No wonder I had to often take the food home because I could barely finish it, it was just that delicious. And then for dessert I had an oatmeal cream cookie sandwich, and I often had to resist the temptation to eat it all in one sitting, to no avail because it was absolutely sweet, creamy and delicious. I’m bummed that my body can’t really tolerate a lot of sugar anymore, but it’s probably a good thing because I would have probably had one of those oatmeal cookie cream sandwiches once a week. I have learned to enjoy sugar in moderation. Yesterday I had some Lotus Biscoff cookies with some tea, and I haven’t had them in a while, but then my stomach started hurting for some weird reason. I also had a couple of Oreos. Maybe it’s because I didn’t drink enough water during the day and my body was playing catch up. But I digress.

Another restaurant I enjoy is any restaurant with Indian food. A few years ago, I used to go to a South Indian buffet that was delicious. They had lentil donuts, sambar, naan, rice, and so many other vegetarian dishes. As a vegan I really loved this place, and especially the dosas with potatoes and peas was delicious. I The little lentil donuts were one of my favorites because they were so crispy on the outside and fluffy on the inside, and I often dipped them in my sambar. Back then I enjoyed eating large portion sizes, so I would often go back to eat seconds or thirds, but then my stomach’s threshold for lots of food decreased, and today I would probably be able to eat a plate of food and call it a day. Eating too much now and especially eating too quickly often gives me indigestion. I was really sad when the restaurant closed down because I used to go there a lot when I was in high school and during summer breaks from college. When I was in college, we had two really delicious Indian restaurants, and one of them was near my dorm. I would often go down the street to this place called India Palace to grab some vegetable biryani and samosas, and in my senior year of college when I permitted myself to loosen up and drink a little wine I would order a glass of red wine at the restaurant. Wine has an interesting and strong taste but somehow it went really well with the food. I learned though that I’m not super accustomed to drinking a lot of alcohol, and the few times I did have alcohol were when I was on a cruise ship in 2019 and had some Caribbean beer and some of the red wine in the mini fridge in my room. I think I just stopped drinking so much because I thought I needed alcohol to be social, but realized later I didn’t. I still enjoy the taste of wine and beer though, even though I haven’t had it in a few years. Again, I keep digressing.

I also really love any great restaurant with pho. There was a delicious banh mi place during my time in college and they had an epic tofu pho and tofu banh mi sandwich. I loved the taste of the breaded tofu swimming around amongst the noodles, carrot rounds, and scallions, and the hot steam rising from the pho in that large porcelain white bowl. Since moving back I have continued to enjoy tofu pho and banh mi. For the banh mi, I love the crispy toasted-ness of the sub sandwich bread, and the sauce and sriracha as they blend in with the breaded tofu. Delicious.

5 everyday things that bring me happiness

Daily writing prompt
What are 5 everyday things that bring you happiness?
View all responses

5 everyday things that bring me happiness:

  1. Food. I love food. I can’t eat meat or dairy but I love anything vegan. I just made myself a scrambled tofu this weekend that was really good. Well Your World has a great recipe. I used to make tofu scramble on the stove, and it was good but there is always the issue with cleaning out the pan afterwards. This one is delicious, and for a while I was putting the potatoes in with the rest of the ingredients when I put them in with the oven, but someone taught me a good tip and that is to boil the potatoes in an Insta-pot first so that when I combine them with the tofu, vegetables and other ingredients the potatoes aren’t super hard. I would bake the tofu scramble for twenty minutes, but would always have to put it in longer since the diced potatoes were still pretty hard to chew. Boiling the potatoes made them softer, but of course, I made sure to dice the potatoes before putting them in the Insta-pot.

2. Spending time outside. Before the COVID-19 pandemic I would often take my outside time for granted, but when I spent a lot of time in quarantine my attitude towards going outside changed. I think I gained a deeper appreciation for spending time walking in the park and around the neighborhood, and I burned some calories and got my body moving. Yesterday I didn’t walk too long but I spent some time walking around the park and around the neighborhood and I saw the neighborhood cat walking around outside. The other day I saw a woodpecker and it was just really beautiful to watch. And a couple of weeks ago I went to someone’s garden to admire their beautiful abundant display of freshly budding irises. And of course, the bluebonnets are in season and I love walking in the field of bluebonnets. I also love seeing the chickens in a farm located across the street. And the squirrels racing each other around the thick tree trunks.

3. Reading books. I love going to the library and have loved libraries and bookstores since I was small. Something about the smell of the pages, the feel of the pages, and how the writing of each word blends so well together entices me about books. Every time I go to the library I end up checking out loads and loads of books, and sometimes I don’t get to finish them all. I mostly enjoy fiction but have read some good non fiction lately.

4. Spending time with loved ones. I enjoy spending time with the people in my life I love and connecting with others. I took a lot of my friendships with others for granted but when I went into quarantine I started to appreciate the connections I made with people.

5. Honestly, life. It may sound cheesy but life itself is an everyday thing that makes me feel appreciation. It’s easy for me to take a lot of things for granted, but it wasn’t until I faced a lot of my own inner struggles that I started to gain more perspective on life. It’s still a challenge sometimes to see the larger picture but I have seen over time how practicing gratitude has helped me become happier and more fulfilled. Of course, I still have big dreams I want to strive towards, but this past decade of facing all these challenges and victories has taught me to appreciate the journey instead of only focusing on the outcome of the situation. Even just something as simple as waking up out of bed I have started to appreciate more.

Romance in India

I lay on your lap

Under a myriad of stars

Mosquitoes buzz in our ears

And we sit in each others’ embrace

Intoxicated by kisses and the warmth

Of our bodies on one another

Music blares from the vehicles

Below the roof upon which we sit

And I kiss you and say your name

Again and again

My Australian love

I know we are leaving each other in a week

To go back to our homes

But I will always keep you in my heart

Until death do us part.

Your blonde shaggy hair

And cerulean eyes

Peer down into my face

And my heart rushes ferociously

Beating rapidly against my chest

Until I cannot take a breath

Because you sucked it all away

With your tender kisses.

When you danced with me

Until the wee hours

Us alone

It was magic

My first real romance

Happening right before my eyes

Heartbreak is a killer

But I go through the grief

Of not being in your proximity

And eventually I make peace

With the love we once shared

And find closure.

Thank you for a beautiful moment

Of love.

Abbott Elementary season 1, episodes 10 (Open House) and 11 (Desking)

These episodes were pretty hilarious but also really touching. In episode 10, Janine and the other teachers get ready for open house at Abbott Elementary. Janine thinks it is going to be this big thing, but the other teachers, from experience, know that it’s not going to be as big a deal as Janine wants it to be. Janine prepares the classroom to meet the student’s mom but then she also gets in this situation where she meets Barbara’s daughter, Taylor. Barbara is disappointed in her daughter because she works at an alcohol company and didn’t go into teaching like she did. Janine tries to intervene and deescalate the situation but that just makes Barbara and Taylor’s interaction more intense. Gregory, meanwhile, finds out how Ava got the principal position, which he always wanted but didn’t get, because Ava found the superintendent cheating on his wife. Ava is gleeful that she gets to rub this in the superintendent’s face, but then later the superintendent, after a lot of letting Ava rub her success in his face, informs her that the woman Ava thought he was sleeping with was his wife after all, and that he had just divorced and remarried her. This puts Ava in hot water and she is at risk of losing her job. Meanwhile, Janine waits and waits for the student’s parent to arrive, and after 8:30 a woman finally walks in and apologizes for being late, and Janine goes off on her for being late. The parent tries to explain but Janine doesn’t want to hear her explain, but then the parent takes her jacket off and Janine sees she is wearing an ER nurse uniform and the parent tells her she was doing a surgery on a man with a bullet wound. Janine reflects and then apologizes for reacting the way she did, and the parent forgives her.

The desking episode was hilarious. First I got to meet Jacob’s boyfriend, Zach, and we get to meet him because the teachers are figuring out who is jumping on the desks and Zach, who is an expert in shoes, does research on the footprints of the shoes to see who the potential culprits could be. The students are jumping from desk to desk as part of a social media trend, but it is annoying the hell out of the teachers and the custodian, Mr. Johnson. It gets to the point where Mr. Johnson goes with Gregory on a stakeout in the custodian’s closet to see who is desking. They end up having a good discussion where Mr. Johnson informs Gregory that he has had many jobs before being a custodian at Abbott Elementary. Gregory is disappointed in not getting the principal job because that’s what he wanted to be for a long time, but Mr. Johnson tells him that as a young man himself he went through many different careers instead of settling with one, and that he may even leave his job as a custodian one day and find new work. But his message to Gregory was to basically not put all his eggs in one basket and get so down on himself for not getting the principal position. I really appreciate Mr. Johnson’s perspective because it’s easy to put your eggs in one basket and stake your life on one career position, but when you don’t get the position, it can feel soul-crushing. Mr. Johnson helped Gregory take a more long-term view of a career since he is older than him and has experienced more in the workforce.

It kind of reminded me of when I went to a symphony orchestra performance, and it felt as if I was meeting all these movie stars because I had wanted to be in a professional orchestra and wanted to know how to get in. Up until then I had auditioned for only a few professional orchestras and was feeling dejected for getting rejected from them. But then I got to meet one of the cellists in the orchestra after the performance, and she told me to not put all my eggs in one basket, meaning to not be so hung up on the results of the audition. I’m really glad she said that though, even though at the time she told me that I kind of deflated inside because all I thought of before that was, How can I get into a professional orchestra? And when I didn’t get the results I wanted, I got really discouraged. But looking back, I’m glad I had those jobs in food service and law because I learned about new industries and gained valuable work experience. After a lot of reflection, I had to really think, Am I going to stake my whole life on this career? What does a career even look like to me? Sometimes my ego gets so caught up in this one-dimensional idea of what a career should look like that I block out other possibilities and opportunities that could actually help me grow. I still find myself in the position of basing so much of my self-worth on being a musician even though deep down I probably understand that my self-worth isn’t based on the career I have. But when I was working jobs unrelated to music, I really based so much of my self-worth on having a successful music career so I didn’t think that the jobs I had to support my career could be fulfilling in their own unique way. Over time though as I gained more experience at these jobs, I felt more confident and I ended up creating value at these jobs.

Abbott Elementary, Season 1 episodes 5-9

I am currently watching this really great show called Abbott Elementary. It is really good, and I can see why it won so many awards at this year’s award shows. It was created by Quinta Brunson and it also stars Quinta Brunson as Janine, an elementary school teacher working with other teachers at a Philadelphia public school. It’s also really cool because Lisa Ann Walter is one of the teachers in the show, and she was in one of my favorite movies as a kid called The Parent Trap. At first I didn’t recognize it was her but then I read the credits and I was like, Oh my gosh, she was in The Parent Trap with Lindsay Lohan!

So in the last episode I watched, episode 9, Janine leads a step team but enlists Ava to join. If you haven’t seen the show, Ava is a hoot. She is always getting into shenanigans and is always hitting on one of the teachers, Gregory. She makes fun of Janine’s optimism and in the first episode she spent most of the school funding on a new billboard with her image imprinted on it. Janine thinks Ava is going to follow her routine and that she and Ava are going to perfectly get along, but one day during step class practice Ava comes in with burritos and a slushy, disrupting Janine from teaching the students. Instead of rehearsing the routine, the students sit with Ava and eat their food and gossip. When Janine was teaching the class and trying to be engaging, none of the students were engaged and none of them talked. Janine thought her routine was perfectly coordinated, but Ava thinks it’s boring and instead has the girls dance to a new routine to the song “Up” by Cardi B. Janine thinks that Ava’s routine isn’t traditional dance and gets upset. Meanwhile, the other teachers (Melissa, Jacob, and Barbara are bonding over their love of Philadelphia’s pizza over lunch) and when they ask Gregory about his favorite pizza, he doesn’t know what to say because he actually doesn’t like pizza. But to fit in with the group, he says that his hometown of Baltimore, has a distinct kind of pizza that is wet. Jacob actually goes out of his way to get Gregory the pizza he wants (seeing the soggy wet pizza grossed me out. Before I became vegan I was a Chicago deep-dish pizza kind of gal, and to this day even though I cannot eat it I still have fond memories.) but then Gregory admits that he doesn’t like pizza and everyone thinks he is out of his mind for not liking pizza. Gregory spends the rest of lunch alone in his car eating his boiled chicken sandwich, and the other teachers tell him that they were just joking and that it’s not a big deal that he doesn’t like pizza. On the day that the step team performs, Ava leaves the auditorium and Janine can’t find her, but then Ava tells her that she had a family emergency and her grandmother had an episode so she had to check in with her. Earlier, Janine was angry with Ava for leaving without telling her but then she apologizes for being angry with Ava and they agree to go with Ava’s routine. The show ends up being a success and while Ava and Janine don’t become best friends after this, it was really cool when at the end of the episode, Ava sees Janine step-dancing alone in the classroom and challenges her to a step dance-off.

Another episode I watched was one where Barbara and Jacob start a garden out in the school parking lot because they are dissatisfied with the quality of the school cafeteria food. They ask the cafeteria workers if they can improve the quality of the food, but the workers refuse and tell them they are doing the best with the resources that the school gave them. Barbara and Jacob bond over gardening and try to persuade Gregory to come garden with them, but he politely declines. He admits to the viewer (this show is in the style of a mockumentary) that he has not had a good history of gardening because his dad made him do intense yard work for most of his life and it wasn’t fun. When a little zucchini finally sprouts in the garden, Barbara and Jacob are overjoyed but then they show the cafeteria worker and the employee seems overjoyed but instead he throws the little zucchini in the trash and says he can’t feed all these children at the school with a little zucchini. Barbara soon regrets Jacob’s idealistic idea of starting this garden but then Jacob comes in the next day and shows Barbara sliced zucchini that he grilled and marinated by himself the night before, and so they excitedly show the cafeteria worker the aluminum pans of sliced zucchini that Jacob prepared, but then the cafeteria worker tells them that it’s a health code violation to use food that people made at home and not in the school cafeteria, and throws it in the trash right before Jacob and Barbara’s eyes. The cafeteria worker has Barbara try one of the chicken nuggets he made for the school cafeteria meals, and Barbara ends up not liking it but pretends like she does because she doesn’t want to hurt his feelings.

Another great part in that episode with the gardening is when Janine’s best friend from college, Sahar, is hired as a new volunteer art teacher at the school. At first Janine is super excited because her and Sahar did a lot of fun things together in college: they went to parties, hung out, everything that best friends do. But everything goes South when Melissa buys several copies of Peter Rabbit for the kids to read because this is their tradition every school year, and also it is the tradition to make paper plate bunnies, but Sahar thinks that is boring and moreover that Peter Rabbit is a tale about capitalism and she wants to have an installation that goes against the grain and breaks with tradition. Melissa is not having it, however, and tells Janine to not let Sahar do the installation. Janine reminds Sahar that they had to ask Melissa’s permission first before doing the installation but Sahar insists that her idea is better than Melissa’s and does the installation anyway. At first it seems perfectly innocent and it seems that Sahar listened to Melissa after all; the kids all made paper plate bunnies and Sahar created a fairy tale installation that looks beautiful. But when Melissa looks closer, she finds that Sahar tore apart the books and made the installation out of the pages of the books and she is, rightfully, furious because she bought those books with her own money. Melissa confronts Sahar and Janine tries to break the two of them up, and Janine confronts Sahar and tells her that what she did wasn’t okay, but Sahar gets defensive and accuses Janine of conforming with the school’s tradition. She quits the job and leaves the school. Janine feels guilty that she didn’t stop Sahar from doing what she did and apologizes to Melissa but Melissa forgives her and Janine repays her by buying new copies of the Peter Rabbit books for the kids with her own money.

Another episode is when Melissa has a student in her class transfer to Janine’s class. The student is named Courtney, and Janine thinks she can handle Courtney since on the surface Courtney seems sweet and innocent but then she finds out that Courtney loves giving the teachers a hard time. Ava lets Janine see Courtney’s records and finds that even Melissa, who is a tough-as-nails, no-nonsense teacher, wrote that Courtney was out of control and even wrote in the evaluation of Courtney that Courtney could have been a cult leader. In the class, Courtney pretends to be polite and nice, but then when the kids recite the Pledge of Allegiance they end up reciting a different version where “God” and the “America” in the United States of America are replaced with Courtney’s name. Courtney gets into other shenanigans like putting a mean note on the back of one of the students and, in what is the final straw for Janine, writes a swear word on the board in permanent marker for the students to read. Janine tells Melissa that she is really stressed out over trying to get Courtney to behave, and even though Melissa makes fun of Janine at first for not being able to handle Courtney, she gives Janine grace and lets her know that Courtney was difficult to handle even for her. At the beginning, Janine gets a C in a performance review she read online about her teaching and reads that the person writing the review thought Janine was inexperienced, and Melissa makes fun of her for it, so Janine tries to prove to Melissa that she didn’t deserve to get that C grade and that she is a better teacher than people think. But later she realizes that she is never going to be a perfect teacher, and Melissa reminds her that everyone is just doing their best at the school and that Janine can’t let one bad review affect her self-esteem.

I can kind of relate to this because even though I am no longer a teacher, I remember when I worked with preschoolers and when I first got there I lacked prior teaching experience (other than being a reading tutor for a month during high school to two boys from Korea) and it was really challenging. At first I got along well with the students but then I stopped going to work as much because every time I encountered a challenge I started to think I wasn’t a capable teacher. That same year I was also adjusting to the demands of college, burnout, and depression. I started calling out sick from work under the excuse that I had to study for my classes. What was really going on though, looking back, was that I didn’t feel like a capable teacher. When students fought with each other I felt I had no control over the situation. When students would act out, I felt I couldn’t do anything about it, so the more experienced teachers had to step in and handle the situation. While that was in the past of course, looking back this situation taught me that every workplace has its challenges and I cannot expect every day to be sunshine and rainbows. I also realized that confidence is something you build with experience. It’s not something you gain overnight. I am sure that I could have learned from the mistakes I made on the job and treated them as valuable lessons, but I think because I was so focused on wanting to be the perfect teacher I got really hard on myself whenever I made mistakes at work or didn’t meet my expectations.

Another episode I watched was about the gifted program that the teachers start at the school. This one really resonated with me because when I went to a new elementary school there was a gifted and talented program and I felt really bad that I didn’t get into the program and felt like I wasn’t smart compared to the gifted and talented students. This really had an impact on my self-esteem and of course, I am at a better place where I am working on not defining my worth by my achievements but looking back I still can’t believe I let not being in the gifted and talented program bring down my confidence. In this episode, a really smart kid transfers from another school to Abbott Elementary and Ava is praising his giftedness and constantly talking about how smart the kid is. Janine decides to start a gifted program and Jacob, who was in the gifted program when he was younger, decides to lead it, too. At first things are going well; Jacob brings a chicken to school to show the kids who got admitted to the gifted program how chickens hatch eggs. However, the students who aren’t in the gifted program feel left out, and Janine tries to remedy the situation by bringing the ones not in the gifted and talented program a display where they think there is a chicken hatching eggs inside the container. However, Janine and the students find out that what hatched from the eggs were snakes and everyone panics. Melissa admits to the camera that when she was picking up the chickens she called the person who supplied snakes instead of chickens. Janine thinks that it was a disaster and tries to clean up the situation, but Gregory suggests that they get rid of the gifted program because it made some the students feel left out. He explains from his own personal experience that when he was in school they had a gifted program but he didn’t get admitted into the program and it made him feel left out and made him feel that he wasn’t as smart as the gifted kids. He reminds Janine that everyone if gifted in some way, not just a few kids. Meanwhile, Barbara and Melissa are in the teacher’s lounge and the guy who restocks the vending machine asks Melissa out on a date. Melissa is still not over her divorce, though, and she politely declines and says she is busy. Even when she tells Barbara that she’s not ready, Melissa still thinks about the vending machine owner and how cute he is, and after talking with Barbara, she regains the confidence to take up the guy’s offer on taking her out on a date.

Movie Review: Women Talking (content warning: descriptions of rape)

March 11, 2023

I watched this movie yesterday because again, it’s one of the Oscar nominees. I didn’t really know anything much about the movie other than watching the trailer, and it looked really interesting. This actress I really liked from this series called The Crown, Claire Foy, is one of the characters in the movie and so is Rooney Mara from another movie I loved called Carol. Honestly the movie left me shook. It was a deep movie with a story that left me up at night. It’s based on a novel about an isolated Mennonite community where several men drug the women with cow tranquilizer and rape them, and the women in the community meet in secret to discuss whether to leave the colony or fight against their attackers. It is based on a real story about an ultraconservative Mennonite community called Manitoba Colony in Bolivia where between 2005 and 2009 a group of colony men sedated 151 colony women and girls with animal anesthetic and raped them in their homes. The victims reported being bloodied and bruised but these reports were dismissed as false. Eventually, the men got put on trial and sentenced to prison, but with anything trauma-related, you can’t just move on because the body stores trauma.

It made me think of a book I read called Room by Emma Donoghue, which is about a young woman and her son who are held captive by a rapist and they are figuring out how to escape the room. It was similar to Women Talking because it grapples with how the abused navigate their trauma after they leave their circumstances. It takes Ma many years before she and her son escape from the abuser, but even after she finds freedom Ma battles severe distress and ends up overdosing because she is constantly reliving the trauma she dealt with being captive in that room. Honestly, when I read the book I broke down in tears because it haunted me like no other book ever did. I couldn’t imagine what Ma and Jack had to go through to get out of such a horrific situation. Both of them were surviving in this situation, and even with the childlike innocence of the book’s cover (the letters “Room” are written in crayon), it is anything but a children’s book. It literally has sat with me since the time I read it, and it scared me. But I understand that Ma’s experience isn’t an isolated incident and sexual assault and trauma is a painful reality for many women.

The film Women Talking doesn’t show the sexual assault, but rather the distress they feel when they recount how this violence against women has gone on for so many years under the guise of morals and religious obligations. In one scene, one of the women at the meeting, Mejal, is smoking a cigarette and suffers a sudden panic attack after the conversation triggers a flashback where she is remembering the sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of the men in the colony. Mariche, played by Jessie Buckley, says that Mejal’s episode wasn’t that bad because they have all faced sexual trauma in the colony, not just her. However, Mariche also faces her own past trauma when she goes back to the house to retrieve her daughter when everyone plans to leave the colony. She and her daughter leave the house very badly bruised because her husband beat them. August is a teacher in the colony who takes the minutes during the women’s meetings is August, and he had a strong female role model in his life who spoke her mind and encouraged him to speak his mind, too.

The film also talks about religion and the role it plays in gender norms. The women still pray at the meeting and one of the women says that leaving the colony is an act of faith. It’s interesting because when I was growing up the only idea of fundamentalism was a magazine cover of an Iranian woman with her nose cut off by the Taliban, but this movie showed that religious fundamentalism can happen anywhere, even in a country like the United States of America where we talk about freedom of religion and freedom of speech. When I was watching this movie with my friends, they made a point during a scene in the film where a man rides around in a truck and calls out for the women to leave their homes because they are taking the 2010 U.S. census. I thought the men were actually taking the census but then someone I was watching the movie with interpreted the U.S. census truck as a setup by one of the men in the colony, and that when the two girls approached the man in the truck and told them their ages, they were being set up. When the older women hear the truck blasting “Daydream Believer” by The Monkees, they don’t open the doors and don’t go outside in order to protect themselves from potentially being attacked. Another issue they talk about is what would happen if the women fought back against their abusers. It reminded me of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. In the book Lisbeth Salander gets revenge on her rapist in the most violent way possible, and earlier in Women Talking Salome (played by Claire Foy) is shown getting revenge on one of the attackers. Salome stands by her decision to stay and fight, while others talk about forgiving the men and leaving the colony. The discussion leaves a lot of food for thought, like what would the movie had been like if the women stayed in the colony and fought against their attackers?

It was also pretty powerful because Salome has August keep the minutes he took during the meetings so that he could share them with his students, who are all boys. So that they can learn about the repeated trauma these women faced in this colony, and so that they can unlearn these toxic ideas of masculinity and how to treat women. It reminded me of a couple of PSAs I saw from the Ad Council. These commercials came out in the early 2000s but I think they are still relevant today. There was one I saw a while ago, in which a boy and his father are out eating at a diner with the boy’s friends and they are having fun at first, but then they hear the couple behind them arguing, and the man screams at his wife and starts beating her in the restaurant. The father finds himself conflicted in that moment about whether to intervene or do nothing, and sits in pained silence while the man beats his wife. The scene cuts to the son’s pained expression after witnessing what just happened, and the screen reads that now is the time for men to teach their sons that violence against women is wrong. Because if the men don’t teach their sons this, then the men may grow up to be like the man in the restaurant beating the woman. The commercial left me with chills. Another powerful ad showed young boys going up to grown men and asking the grown men if they could teach them how to respect women. The first boy approaches a mailman and tells him he needs clarification since he has been getting mixed messages about violence against women. The second boy asks his uncle how he can grow up to respect women if he has such lousy male role models who don’t teach him to respect women. The last boy approaches a middle-aged man on the basketball court and asks him if he can reshape his attitude towards women.

I reflected on these commercials because around the time the #MeToo movement was gaining more traction on social media, an ad by Gillette, a famous men’s shaving razor and personal care company, kicked off a campaign addressing toxic ideas around manhood that have been perpetuated in society for years, and how men can unlearn these ideas and take action to treat women with respect and teach their sons how to respect women. It was in response to multiple allegations of sexual harassment against influential male figures in the media, and how sexual harassment also happens in daily life as well, and how men can change the narrative of masculinity by unlearning traditional ideas of manhood. The ad, titled “We Believe: The Best Men Can Be,” opens with grown men each looking in the mirror as the voices of news reporters talk about bullying, the #Me Too movement and sexual harassment. The screen cuts to an older Gillette ad where the slogan was “The Best a Man Can Get” and suddenly it shows a group of boys breaking through the screen and chasing after another boy, and then a distressed mom is hugging her son as his texts blow up with demeaning messages from the bullies calling him “freak,” “loser” and other derogatory names, and as the other boys continue to chase the boy through their living room. The scene cuts to a group of boys watching shows where men catcall and sexually harass women, showing how these young men are getting mixed messages about sexual violence from the media they consume and may think it’s a joke for a man in a sitcom to grab a woman’s butt without her consent. The audience watching these sitcoms, many of them men, are laughing and thinking it’s funny to watch, and then it cuts to an executive at a corporation speaking over his female colleague and her hurt expression. Then it shows boys fighting each other at a barbeque and instead of breaking the boys up, the dads all keep grilling their meats and chuckling as they all say in unison “Boys will be boys.” Then the tone changes, when several reporters report on allegations of sexual harassment and abuse against women. The audience stops laughing and watches silently and then the ad shows men who take action to teach their friends how sexual harassment is wrong. It shows men preventing their male friends from catcalling women and real-life videos of men, young and old, learning respect and tolerance not just for women but for each other. A dad runs over with his young son when he sees the earlier mentioned boy running from school bullies, and intervenes, and one of the dads at the barbeque intervenes and breaks up the two boys fighting. The ad ends when the boy sees his dad asking the boy being bullied if he is ok, and then it shows different boys looking into the camera as the narrator says that the boys watching today will be the men of tomorrow. The ads ends with a caption saying that only when we challenge ourselves to do more that we can get closer to our best, meaning that when men hold each other accountable for perpetuating violence against women or outdated gender norms that keep women oppressed, society will get better. This ad was similar to the Ad Council ones because it showed that men need to teach their sons to respect and value women and others and unlearn a lot of their own biases against gender. It reminded me again of when I was watching the movie 42 and there is a scene where Jackie Robinson (played by the late Chadwick Boseman) is about to hit the ball and a white man is with his son, and he starts yelling racial epithets at Jackie from the bleachers. The son pauses and doesn’t know what to do but then because he sees his dad doing it, he thinks that he needs to shout the N-word at Jackie too, so he joins his dad in screaming racial epithets at Jackie. I had a very surface-level perception of the scene, which was that it was shocking, but then my professor explained that it wasn’t shocking because white children at the time were taught that racism and discrimination against Black people was okay, so it took work for white people to unlearn this racist ideology they grew up with. In short, they weren’t born racist, they were taught to be racist. Similarly, the boys in the Mennonite community could have learned from their fathers that inflicting sexual violence on the colony women was okay, but August took responsibility for his role as a man in the community and decided to teach his young male students about the importance of consent and respect for women. One of the issues the women debate about is whether to just take their daughters with them when they leave the colony or to take their sons as well. One thing I had to remember is that the boys in the colony also experienced severe psychological trauma from learning about the ongoing sexual violence against these women, and so I would be curious to know how they navigated this trauma in their later years, because what happened in the colony was horrific and traumatic and it left scars on pretty much everyone who lived in it.

This film definitely impacted me in so many ways, and it has stuck with me well after watching it. When Sarah Polley, the film’s director, won the Academy Award this year for Best Adapted Screenplay for Women Talking, my family and I celebrated because we thought the movie was so powerful. It would have been a shame if it didn’t go home with any awards because it is definitely worth a watch.

Women Talking. 2022. Directed by Sarah Polley. 1h 44 m. Rated PG-13 for mature thematic content including sexual assault, bloody images, and some strong language.

my thoughts on loneliness, technology and the COVID-19 pandemic

It’s ironic that I’m writing this online but I had lately been thinking about my relationship with my smartphone and the Internet, and the ways in which I use it. Yesterday I finished a really good book called How to Break Up With Your Phone by Catherine Price, and in the book she talks about the impact of smartphone use on our brains and our mental and physical health. While the statistics of phone use were disturbing, it was refreshing to read a book about how I could get my smartphone use under control. She provides a 30-day plan for spending less time on our phones and being more intentional with our phone use. I read another book by another author named Cal Newport called Digital Minimalism, but reading Catherine Price’s book was a good reminder about how, while technology has its benefits, it’s also a good idea to be aware of how much time we spend on our electronic devices. I have definitely noticed since I left my job last year to take care of my mental health, my phone use has gone up. During the COVID-19 pandemic, many of us spent time in isolation during quarantine, while many others had to work on the frontlines to deliver groceries and take care of patients dying of COVID-19, and as I reflected on my own challenges with loneliness I realized that human beings are wired for connection. Which is why quarantine was so challenging for a lot of people, even though in reality I can’t actually speak for everyone. As an introvert, going into quarantine at first seemed like no big deal since I usually recharge by spending time alone or with a few people. But I also realized that it was hard not being able to visit my family and friends in other parts of the country and the world, and that even though I was safely ensconced in my house with my books and computer and phone, people around the world were dying at rapid unprecedented rates and I found myself anxiously checking the statistics for how many people were being hospitalized and how many people were dying. All this doom-scrolling had a serious impact on my mental and emotional health, because when I came back into the office for work after having the unexpected fortune of working remotely for over a year, I viewed everything and everyone in my environment from the lens of my own fear and anxiety.

When the rates went down at one point during 2021 I tentatively walked around without my mask on, thinking, “I guess we’re safe since we’re not wearing masks anymore and the vaccines are coming out and rates are going down.” Then the numbers shot back up again with delta and omicron and once again, I found myself in a serious panic mode. Every day at work, I don’t know if I can honestly diagnose myself as having anxiety or panic attacks because I’m not a doctor but it felt like every day I sat in my cubicle I felt a deep tightness in my whole body and my thoughts were racing and even just little stuff set me off. I guess you could say I was having a serious nervous breakdown while trying my best to keep it all together. But then someone did something I didn’t like, a small thing that was really no big deal, they told me to take a breath and calm down, and I exploded at them. I ended up taking a day off, but I still continued to wrestle with my own little mental health crisis. I struggled with loneliness early on as someone with depression, but I didn’t give it much thought until my music teacher and I had a conversation about the pandemic and he mentioned how so many people suffered from loneliness during the pandemic. I found myself isolating from my coworkers during lunchtime often and while I normally love my alone time, I felt so disconnected from everything and everyone in my life. I think that’s what I realized about loneliness; it’s not the same thing as solitude, because there are many people who enjoy solitude, but loneliness is a painful experience and it made me feel disconnected from everyone and everything. It reminded me of when I was in college; I had met a lot of people and connected with a lot of people, but I got burned out within the first few months of my first year of college and started isolating myself from people, eating alone because I didn’t feel genuinely connected to the other people I interacted with. Even when some of my peers encouraged me to join their group for meals, I would ignore their text messages and sit alone by myself. While I need to move on from the past, as I’m grappling with loneliness in 2023 it brought up a lot of past memories and events in which I also struggled with loneliness. Being lonely has brought up some really destructive and unproductive and potentially toxic behaviors, but it has also given me a chance to think about my purpose in life and what I am bringing to my connections with other people.

Checking my smartphone all the time has been one of those unhealthy coping mechanisms, and I’m pretty relieved that I read the book about breaking up with your phone because it reminded me that checking our phones is something people often do when they are bored, lonely, anxious or dealing with other uncomfortable emotions and they want to self-soothe. When I was in the depths of depression a couple of years ago, I would stress-eat as a coping mechanism. I couldn’t be bored, I couldn’t be alone with my thoughts. I couldn’t be uncomfortable, so I ate and ate and ate to numb this discomfort. I went to the break room for snacks as many times as I spent checking Gmail, YouTube and text messages on my phone (which is a lot of times.) I wasn’t even eating because the food tasted good; I was eating because I didn’t know how to deal with my stress in a healthy way, so self-soothing with food became my way of handling stress. I nibbled on vegan Hippeas cheese puffs, MadeGood granola bars, fruit, kettle-cooked chips, pretzels, vegan rice-krispy treats, anything that had salt and sugar. I normally don’t drink a lot of Starbucks, but I was running off to get Frappuccinos and lattes every week. I wasn’t even drinking it for the taste; I was just drinking it because I felt stressed. I wasn’t even appreciating the taste of the food; again, because I was using it as a coping mechanism to get through the day, I was numbing myself, so I didn’t even appreciate the taste of the food because I had accustomed myself to eating this kind of food in serious moments of stress. Thankfully I had a meditation practice of chanting that helped me stay afloat even in my darkest moments, even when I didn’t want to get out of bed, even when I felt hopeless. I also was part of a great Buddhist community and continued to participate in Zoom meetings with them as we gradually began to open our community centers back up again. I am still thankfully part of this community and while I am still grappling with loneliness, I am reminded that I don’t have to grapple with it alone.

I think what this experience of loneliness has taught me is the value of asking for help. In 2016, I was reluctant to seek help but then it got to the point where I actually needed to see a professional about my mental health. It ended up being one of the best decisions I have made in my life. But then time passed, I got busy, and stopped going for a couple of years when things went smoothly. Then the pandemic hit, and I gradually without knowing or understanding it, grew overwhelmed with everything but I still wasn’t seeking professional help because I thought I felt fine. But gradually as I started getting lonelier and this loneliness and depression started to affect my daily functioning, it became clear that asking for help wasn’t weak but was rather the best thing I could do to take care of myself. Even though I didn’t see my therapist every week, when I did see her I felt better. She really helped me make sense of my emotions and how to manage them better, and seeing therapy was a reminder that working on my emotional health, showing up for myself, and asking for help is a daily effort. I think that’s why reading Brene Brown’s books during these past few years has helped me a lot because I didn’t understand why I felt this huge range of emotions and also the root cause of why I felt anxious, sad, lonely, and confused but also grateful and happy.

*I know a lot of articles on mental health I read about typically put this in at the end of the article, but if you or a loved one needs help this is the new Suicide and Crisis Lifeline: call or text 988 or chat 988lifeline.org

Movie Review: The Killing of a Sacred Deer

Last week I watched a movie called The Killing of a Sacred Deer. I had been meaning to watch it for a while and saw the trailer, and it looked really good. I also love A24 movies and this one is an A24 film. It reminded me of this previous movie I watched that was directed by Yorgos Lanthimos called The Lobster. For those who haven’t seen it yet, The Lobster is about a dystopian society where single people need to find a partner within a specific period of time or else be turned into an animal of their choice. It’s really bleak and sad but it made a really good social commentary about how society has stigmatized being single. In The Lobster, Colin Farrell stars as the main character, who needs to find a companion before he gets turned into an animal. I really wanted to watch The Killing of a Sacred Deer because a week ago I watched The Banshees of Inishirin, which stars the same actors Colin Farrell and Barry Keoghan, and I really loved their acting in The Banshees of Inishirin so I was excited to find out they were in a previous movie together.

The Killing of a Sacred Deer is disturbing, but the acting was incredible and I really loved the music score. The music score gives the movie its intensity. The movie is about a cardiologist named Steven who performs open-heart surgery at the beginning of the movie. Word of advice: if you are not squeamish, keep your eyes open. If you are, keep them closed for the first minute of the movie. To be honest, I closed my eyes at first but then somehow I opened them and was able to stomach watching the surgery. It was hard to watch, but then again, many people have had to get open heart surgery so this probably won’t be the last time I see a movie with an open-heart surgery scene or have to even witness an open-heart surgery myself in real life. Over the course of the movie, Steven gets to know a teenage boy named Martin, whose father died while Steven was performing heart surgery on him, but he realizes that Martin’s behavior towards him and the family is off and as the movie progresses it becomes clear that Martin is out to avenge his father’s death. At first he gives nice gifts to Steven’s children, Bob and Kim, and has casual conversations with them. He even invites Steven over to meet his mom, but soon Steven realizes that Martin and his mom lack boundaries. This is seen when Steven is at Martin and his mom’s house, and they are watching Groundhog Day. Even though Steven insists he needs to go home to his family because it is getting late, Martin and his mother insist on him staying to watch the movie with them. When Martin goes into his bedroom, Steven and Martin’s mother are alone, and Martin’s mother comments on how smooth and beautiful Steven’s hands look, and then she suddenly grabs his hands and starts touching them inappropriately. He leaves and even though Martin’s mother wants him to stay, Steven abruptly leaves because Martin’s mother crossed the line by initiating that kind of inappropriate contact.

Martin shows up unexpectedly to Steven’s office and tells Steven he has a pain in his heart, and that it’s the same heart pain that his father suffered with before he died during surgery. He is very upfront with Steven about his father’s death, that his father’s life could have been saved during the surgery because he was healthy, but that Steven didn’t save him. He says all this in a very calm collected tone, which I think is what makes the film so disturbing to watch. None of the characters in the film, except for Steven, who loses his shit rightfully so because his family is falling apart all because one kid is getting revenge on all of them, show much emotion. It’s like they are hypnotized to be numb and not show emotion. This is how viewing The Lobster felt for me. The characters show little to no emotion and they pretty much resign themselves to their fate and are really depressed and emotionally numb, even when the people around them are suffering. It was also pretty scary to watch Kim and Bob suffer the symptoms Martin told Steven they would suffer because Steven killed Martin’s dad in the surgery. Kim and Bob lose mobility in their legs, they lose their appetites and they bleed from their eyes. (I thought the bleeding was going to be gratuitous blood, but it wasn’t super scary. Then again, we all have different levels of comfort. I may not be able to stand supernatural horror film levels of blood but somehow I could stand this movie) When Anna, Steven’s wife, tries to give Bob something to eat (a donut) at the hospital, Bob refuses it and Steven, who is freaking out about what is happening to his son, tries to force Bob to eat the donut, but because Bob is experiencing the symptom of losing his appetite, he spits it out and complains he isn’t hungry. Because they lost mobility in their limbs, Kim and Bob have to crawl on their stomachs through the house on their elbows. At the hospital, when Steven tries to lift Bob and get him to stand up, Bob collapses again, and Steven threatens him and tells him to cut out all his nonsense, but Bob insists that he is not playing around and that he literally cannot stand up on his own because he is paralyzed in his limbs.

The music was pretty nerve-wracking because it sounded like a helicopter crashing overhead and it kept getting louder and softer, softer and louder, and each time it built my heart raced because it was building up to one disturbing scene after the next. I also thought about the theme of revenge and forgiveness. Martin had such a rough time after his father died, and so I can see why he found it incredibly hard to forgive Steven for what he did. But also Steven’s family suffered immensely and it’s like Martin was bringing up in the family all these deeply held insecurities that they wanted to keep hidden under their perfect suburban family life. When he meets with Steven, Martin tells him he needs to sacrifice one of his family members or else the kids will be cursed with the symptoms of paralysis, loss of appetite, eyes bleeding and death. He delivered it pretty quickly to Steven, and of course Steven is thinking, This kid is nuts, but as the movie continues it becomes clear how Martin is pretty dead serious about getting revenge on Steven’s family.

To be honest, this reached my threshold of scary. I don’t normally watch scary movies, and the only ones I have seen are Get Out and It Comes at Night, yet for some reason I could sit through this movie and not have to close my eyes multiple times. I closed my eyes during a few scenes but for the most part I felt more disturbed and depressed than jumpy and excited, which I would feel after watching a scary movie that involved things like killer clowns, possessed dolls/ children or exorcisms (which is why I steer clear of those films because I don’t want nightmares.) I don’t typically watch scary stuff because I don’t enjoy jump scares, but there weren’t any jump scares in this movie, just a slowly building suspense and disturbing story. I think that’s why it’s so scary and why it was so scary for me to watch. I had a rehearsal to go to after watching the movie, and it was a pretty heavy movie so it sat with me and I ended up not talking and just being quiet for the next thirty minutes while I drove to the rehearsal because I couldn’t stop thinking about how disturbing the movie was. But honestly, what I loved most was the visuals and the acting. The way the camera focuses in and out was somehow very masterful and unique. It was the same camera focus I saw in The Lobster and somehow it just really appealed to me as I was watching the film. Also I really loved Barry Keoghan and Colin Firth’s acting. It’s really cool that they starred in The Banshees of Inishirin together.

The Killing of a Sacred Deer. 2017. Rated R for disturbing violent and sexual content, some graphic nudity and language.