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Writing prompt

Daily writing prompt
How do significant life events or the passage of time influence your perspective on life?
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This was a good question because as my friends have gotten older and passed away, I reflect on the purpose of life and what happens after death. I definitely have gained a much deeper appreciation for life, and I have learned that from a lot of my friends who were older than me to live a fulfilling life and appreciate each day. It is easy for me to be jaded and cynical and to also think, “Forget it, I’m young, I have time.” But I think having that jaded and cynical perspective is no longer serving me well. It never served me well, but when I am in that place of “Forget life, I don’t care anymore about anything,” it’s easy to think that suffering is all there is to life when there is so much more. I think that is why I love religion and spirituality because it gives me something to look forward to everyday. I love waking up and chanting Nam-myoho-renge-kyo because it reminds me that my purpose in life is so profound, and it reminds me that I am deeply interconnected with everyone around me. As a solitary person, I tend to close myself off from others and get really consumed by my own shit and think I am the only one dealing with depression, anxiety, low self-worth, and other problems, but when I open up to someone, they might say, Wow, I am having the same problem! I thought I was the only one. I remember when we lost a lot of people during the pandemic, and it really forced me to face this deep anxiety I had about illness and dying, and also got me thinking about how we deal with the process of grief and healing from grief. I also volunteered at many memorial services for members of the Buddhist community I am part of, and each time I did it reminded me of the reality of life and death. It made me go back and reflect on what I am really living on this planet Earth for and what my purpose is. I think as I have continued to practice Buddhism, my perspective on life has changed. In 2016 I was miserable and thought my life was over and that I had no purpose. I had really bad depression and felt I was just going to stay in that place forever. Fast forward to 2024, and while I still struggle with my mental health, I am much better at finding ways to take better care of myself and I have gained so much more self-worth. Of course, self-confidence isn’t something I developed overnight. It took a lot of work, but I am happy that I went through this battle with my self-confidence because I had to get stronger and more resilient. Like in 2021, I fell in love with someone and my whole life revolved around him, and it pained me that this person was in a relationship already. But I was so madly in love that I wasn’t willing to face that reality. I think Buddhism and good friends and hobbies pretty much saved my life during this crucial period of recovering from heartbreak because I realized that I didn’t need to be with that person to feel loved or respected. I needed to love myself. I needed to be my own best partner. I am sure I will find someone someday but right now I really love being my own boyfriend/ girlfriend/ nonbinary partner. And I love myself so much more now.

Of course, I make mistakes and have slip ups and today, during lunch with my parents, I broke down and called myself a “terrible daughter” in front of them, and I could see the pain on their faces when I said that, and I immediately recognized that I was hating myself again like I had done so many times, and I realized at that moment, Hold up! That isn’t true. For so many years, I called myself worthless, stupid, ugly and trash, but over time I have learned that going deep in that abyss of self-hatred was hurting me and hurting the people around me, and so over time I have continued chanting Nam-myoho-renge-kyo, and I have been able to develop so much love for myself and also for others. I have learned over time that failures and mistakes are important for my growth, and it is still a lesson I am learning to accept, speaking as a recovering perfectionist. And I have learned from practicing Buddhism to create value from even the tough moments. It was really tough not getting into the professional orchestra I wanted, but it was tougher to remember how self-destructive and mean I was to myself during that time I was preparing for the audition. I often cry when I think of how mean I was to myself and to others, like, Where was the compassionate kid who loved nature and books and experienced awe and curiosity? What happened to that little girl? She was there all along, but I had to go through my own shit to find that little girl again, and she is still growing and learning about the world, but she will always be a part of me, even when I take my last breath.

My Thoughts on the Grammys

So it’s 10 pm here and technically the Grammys finish at 10:30 but I am very tired, so I am going to write up some quick thoughts on the Grammy Music Awards.

Honestly, it was a beautiful ceremony. Trevor Noah, who hosted The Daily Show on Comedy Central, was the host at the Grammys. He was a really great host tonight; I remember when he hosted the Grammys some time ago, and he was a really good host that time, too. I really loved Fantasia’s tribute to Tina Turner; she performed “Proud Mary,” and she did the Tina dancing and glittery outfit and heels and everything. And Fantasia can BELT a song, man. I haven’t listened to much of her music, but now I really want to see her in The Color Purple. Oprah also gave a really moving introduction to Fantasia’s performance of “Proud Mary,” and she talked about her friendship with Tina. She said that Tina always told Oprah that she should dress up even if she wasn’t going out anywhere, and that really encouraged me because Tina had this incredible confidence and that really taught me the importance of loving yourself and developing confidence in yourself. I remember watching a documentary called TINA, and in the documentary, she talks about her Buddhist practice of chanting Nam-myoho-renge-kyo, and how it helped her transform her life in so many ways. I always get so encouraged when I tell people about the practice, and they go, “Oh, yeah, Tina Turner chanted in that movie!” and I remember they are talking about What’s Love Got to Do With It? with Angela Bassett. The movie is still on my watch list and I feel bad saying I haven’t watched it yet even after all these years. I really loved her autobiography, I, Tina, though. I now just have so much appreciation for Tina inspiring so many people.

Miley Cyrus did a performance of “Flowers” and she also channeled that Tina Turner energy. She had a fringe dress and blown out hair, and at the end of her performance she did some dance moves like Tina Turner. They have segments where they introduce each artist, and the artist talks about their work and the inspirations, and Miley said she was inspired by artists like Tina Turner and Dolly Parton, and she wanted to channel their energy into her music. Speaking of legends, Stevie Wonder performed a very moving tribute to Tony Bennett, who passed away last year. He sang “For Once in My Life.” To be honest, I grew up with the Stevie Wonder version, and I didn’t grow up listening to Tony Bennett much, but I remember one day, I was like, I want to explore more of these legends like Barbara Streisand and Tony Bennett and Tina Turner, so I listened to an album Tony had produced with Lady Gaga where he collaborates with her (the album is called Cheek to Cheek.) When I listened to Cheek to Cheek, it was so beautiful and the collaboration between Tony and Lady Gaga’s voices was stunning. It must have been a huge treat to work with Tony Bennett. The In Memoriam part was very moving. I really loved Annie Lennox’s tribute to Sinead O’ Connor. Annie just has such a powerful voice and she put so much soul into her performance.

The Joy of Listening to Music (some ramblings)

I have always loved music. Since I was young, I remember listening to Celine Dion and many other artists in the car. Somehow Celine’s voice took me to another world, and I loved her vocal range. Some of my favorite songs were “Because You Loved Me,” “The Power of Love” and “Love Can Move Mountains.” I remember going on my way to school, listening in the car to her singing on the radio station. The soaring choir at the beginning of “Love Can Move Mountains” always gives me goosebumps because it is so powerful, and the song just has a beautiful and uplifting rhythm. It is hard to describe music in articulate words because there are so many feelings when I listen to music that I struggle to express. My music tastes have expanded over the years, and I remember when I was around eighth of ninth grade, I found a playlist station on Yahoo Music called “Coffeehouse Music,” and there were some notable songs I listened to on that station. One of them was Sia’s “Soon We’ll Be Found,” and it had a beautiful music video. It was my first time hearing Sia’s music, and after that I fell in love with her music and listened to her album Some People Have Real Problems. Another song on the Coffeehouse station came up, and it was Amy Winehouse’s “Rehab.” I really loved the music video that went with the song, too. Honestly, I miss Amy Winehouse. The day I found out that she passed away, I was heartbroken, and I can’t remember how many weeks I cried but it was painful. In middle and high school, Amy Winehouse was one of those artists whose music I really loved. In seventh grade, I struggled a lot with self-esteem and fitting in, so music was always a sort of refuge for me. I remember being young and when I was starting out with a bad Internet addiction, in particular to YouTube, I watched music videos from this artist named K.T. Tunstall. I listened to her album Eye of the Telescope, and absolutely loved it. I really loved her song “Other Side of the World” because it was so beautiful, and I love her voice. Somehow her music made me think of coffee shops and reading books. When I was in my freshman year of high school, I did a science experiment where I had people listen to music while they played cards and they had to memorize the cards, and I wanted to see if playing music helped with memorizing things. I am fuzzy about the particular details of the experiment, but I just remember it was just so much fun for me because I got to go to the library and check out all these CDs (I must have brought home at least twenty-five.) The ones I remember most was Snoop Dogg’s album Paid Tha Cost to Be Da Boss and The Very Best of Aretha Franklin- The ’60s. One of the songs I really loved on the Aretha Franklin album was “I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You).” I was listening to it today and I love it, especially the parts with the piano. Her voice is so powerful, and I love the piano parts, too. I love the rhythm and feel of the music. There is just something so powerful about Aretha Franklin’s music that I really love.

One of the songs from Snoop Dogg’s album that I held onto was “Beautiful,” by him and Pharrell. There is a very cool rhythm to it, and I didn’t listen to much hip-hop before that, other than what was played at middle school social events, but then I started listening to hip-hop more after listening to Snoop Dogg’s album. The summer before my ninth-grade year, I didn’t go to summer school and instead decided to watch MTV, eat waffles and knit scarves and hats. I loved watching MTV because they had a lot of great artists on the channel, and I loved the music videos.

I started to get more into hip-hop around college, because I took an African-American Studies class on Black culture, and one of the units in the class was on music. We listened to music from the 1960s to the present, and we listened to and analyzed songs such as Erykah Badu’s “Green Eyes” and “Orange Moon,” and “We Don’t Need It” by Lil’ Kim feat. Junior M.A.F.I.A. I remember when we listened to “We Don’t Need It,” everyone exchanged glances in the classroom and everyone’s eyes got big, like, Wait, they said what? (the song is very sexually explicit) I remember for my final project in the class I did research on the banjo in African-American music traditions, and I looked up information about Black country musicians. I told my professor that I was inspired to do this research after we had the music unit in the course, and because I saw the movie Last Holiday and there is a part where Queen Latifah’s character, Georgia, is calling her sister and her sister tells her that she is going to follow her dreams and become a country music singer. Georgia tells her “there is no such thing as a Black country music singer,” and at the time I thought it was funny, but then I remembered Black country musicians do exist, notably Darius Rucker of Hootie and the Blowfish. To be honest, I only listened to a few hits by Hootie and the Blowfish and I didn’t know that Darius Rucker is African-American. But then I started listening to more of his solo music and I really loved it. He has a song I ended up listening to a lot while studying in the library called “Alright” and it really cheered me up whenever I listened to it. It was like my music comfort food. I also discovered a band called the Carolina Chocolate Drops, and they perform a lot of bluegrass music. That sophomore year of college was seriously a year of musical exploration for me. I took a couple of music courses that year and both of them were on the same day in the morning, the first at 8 am and the second at 10 am. The first class was a classical music course on music history from the pre-Classical period to modern music. It mostly covered classical music and the professor had us listen to classical music from different time periods. My favorite period of classical music, to be honest, will always be the Romantic-era music. I love Tchaikovsky, Dvorak and Brahms, and one of the pieces I worked on during that year was a cello sonata by Johannes Brahms. I went to a summer camp one time in high school and I heard an undergraduate student play the Cello Sonata in E Minor by Brahms for a master class, and it immediately hooked me. It was such a beautiful piece and I love E minor because it’s such a stormy and powerful key. We had to check out CDs from the performing arts library and listen to them, and then we had to write papers analyzing the style, the tone and the other different elements of the piece.

I am going to be honest, I love music, but I have only taken a couple of music theory classes, so to get into the nitty-gritty of the music would take me some practice. In my senior year of high school, I took a class called AP (Advanced Placement) music theory. And I bombed the AP exam. I remember having to ask a lot of questions in class and it was quite challenging, and then years later during 2020 when I was in quarantine, I took an online course on music fundamentals. And I bombed that one, too. I remember after failing music theory in high school, I was scared to take a course in music fundamentals. In general, I have a really irrational fear of failure. But I think a class in music theory would have done me some good. I really loved the African Popular Music class I took (it was the 10 am class) because I hadn’t listened to a lot of music by artists from Africa, other than Angelique Kidjo. But we listened to Fela Kuti, E.T. Mensah, and many other artists. For the final project, I collaborated with a classmate, and we researched the music of this artist named K’Naan, who is a Somali-Canadian artist. During the summer I was watching MTV there was a music video by K’Naan called “Strugglin'” and I loved the flow and rhythm of the song. Doing research on K’Naan and listening to his music gave me a deeper appreciation for hip-hop, because it helped me understand that hip-hop can be used to create social change and raise awareness about issues such as global warming, civil war and poverty. I decided to go back and listen to K’Naan’s album Troubadour, and he has a song called “Fire in Freetown” that I really love. A couple of students did a presentation for the class on the music of Die Antwoord, a rap rave group from South Africa. It was a pretty intense music listening experience, and it took some getting used to when I listened to the songs. There was a music video for a song called “Evil Boy,” and I ended up closing my eyes during the video because the presenters warned us it was explicit, and I am pretty sensitive about what content I take in. But I guess that is part of the music experience, in retrospect. You might like different songs and others not so much, but it all exposes you to new styles of music and new ways of listening to music. When I was in the classical music course, we listened to 20th century composers such as Arnold Schoenberg and Pierre Boulez and it was a new music experience for me because I was so used to classical music having this linear structure where I could predict the time signatures, the rhythms and the style of the music, but there were a lot of experimental elements in the 20th century music and it was very new to my ears. I really loved the final project for the course because I ended up writing about Dmitri Shostakovich, who was a composer from the Soviet Union, and how he navigated being a composer during the era of Joseph Stalin, when music faced heavy government censorship. I listened to his String Quartet No. 8 in C minor, and it was very powerful.

In college I really loved listening to the music I grew up with, so that included Phil Collins and a lot of Weird Al. I remember very vividly one evening I was studying in the music library, and I was super homesick and stressed with finals. I broke down in tears, but I was listening to Genesis’ ‘Land of Confusion” and somehow listening to the song made me feel better. I really loved Genesis as a kid; they have a song called “In Too Deep” and it is a sad song but so beautiful. In the summer of 2013, I took a class at a local college and fell in love with a young man who was tall, had beautiful brown eyes and had gone to school in Uganda for three years. There was something so attractive about him and during the time we worked together as students we developed a nice platonic emotional bond, and I filled my journal with fantasies about us getting married and having beautiful children together. Of course, fantasies are just that: fantasies. When I ran into him a few months after the course, I found out he was dating someone else. I was both happy to meet his girlfriend and also heartbroken inside because I had waited for so many months for him to reply to my email (I didn’t have Facebook at the time, but he did) and just kept entertaining these ideas of us getting together and having children together. I often listened to the song “Follow You Follow Me” by Genesis whenever I thought about him. It is such a warm and tender song, and I remember I was still thinking about my crush on the guy, and one fall day during my sophomore year the song “Follow You Follow Me” came on the speaker in the CVS pharmacy store, and I found myself falling in love all over again in the middle of CVS while grabbing batteries/ toothpaste/ whatever the hell I was buying that day. I think I had listened to that song during my time in the college class, whenever I had a private moment in my room and was listening to music. I still love this song, even if I have long gotten over my crush on this young man.

TV Show Review: Succession (continued)

I haven’t finished watching the show Succession yet, but it is really good so far. I am currently on the second season. I was watching the Golden Globes and saw it had received a lot of awards and nominations, and so I became curious about the show. I was seeing it advertised on commercials for HBO, and so I finally decided to watch it a couple of weeks ago. And to be honest, I am hooked. The acting is so good. I also enjoy satire, so I really love this show. I was kind of nervous to begin watching it because I have a lot of anxiety around vomit scenes in movies and TV, and so I read some trigger warnings for the show and saw there was a vomit scene at the beginning of the first episode. However, because I had read about it beforehand, I knew when it was coming so I was able to close my eyes. And I am glad that my impending fear of this scene didn’t prevent me from watching the full show, because I would have missed out. I also really love the music in the show. I have heard Nicholas Britell’s music in movies, namely Moonlight and Vice, and especially the score for Moonlight was absolutely brilliant. I love the opening theme music for the show. It has these strings and the piano and I also love the percussive beats. It gives the show its theme, which is power, and a very Wall-Street New York City sort of mood (the show does take place in New York City).

I really love the acting in this show. I haven’t seen many of Brian Cox’s previous works, but he really acted the heck out of his role as Logan Roy. Even though the show is a drama, it incorporates elements of humor. And the dialogue is really witty. Greg Hirsch and Tom Wambsgans have an interesting dynamic. Tom is from the Midwest, but he marries into the Roy family and becomes wealthy. Greg, however, is always asking his mom for money and doesn’t have his own place to live. He also has a job being a mascot at a Waystar theme park (Waystar is the media conglomerate that the Roy family owns) but he does marijuana before his gig and then vomits, getting him fired from the park (if anyone is squeamish about vomit scenes, it is around the part where Greg is walking through the theme park in his mascot costume. I closed my eyes around that part.) His mom has him reach out to Logan, who is his great-uncle, and so he visits the Roy family. He is an outsider at first because even though his mom belongs to the Roy family, he sticks out like a sore thumb because he comes to the father’s birthday celebration wearing a baggy jacket and worn shoes and he has a very friendly personality. Tom gangs up on him and makes fun of him for being the new kid to join the party, and he continues to bully Greg. There was one scene in particular where he approaches Greg in the break room in the office building, and finds Greg stuffing cookies in a dog poop bag, and he insults him for wearing the wrong shoes and using a dog poop bag to put his snacks in. Greg is intimidated by Tom but in season 2 I really saw how Tom bottled up so many of his insecurities and that he was also dealing with a lot of his own personal stuff and needed someone to take it out on. There is a scene where Tom is having dinner with Shiv, Roman and Tabitha, and Tom talks about his work in the ATN news department and how he is digitizing its algorithm, and they all are happy for him, but Roman then pokes fun at Tom’s humble roots as a Midwesterner who grew up in the corn fields and how funny his suits look. Shiv also joins in on the fun, but Tom tells her to fuck off because he is really hurt that everyone is making fun of him. Tom wanted to show that he had moved up from being an average person and wanted to show people that he was an upper class person with status.

There is another scene that always sticks out for me, and it’s when Greg and Tom are talking in the office, and Greg says that he got his first paycheck and Tom congratulates him and says they should go out to eat. Greg is super happy, and he suggests that they go to California Pizza Kitchen. Tom snorts and giggles and tells him that California Pizza Kitchen isn’t great food, and Greg tries to reason that they make his favorite dish, cajun chicken linguine, and Tom makes fun of Greg for having what he calls an “undereducated palate,” and he tells Greg that he will take him out and teach him how to be rich. To be honest, my first reaction to Tom dissing California Pizza Kitchen was “WTF?!?” And as I was drafting this blog post and scribbling my thoughts on the first season, I wrote a long paragraph about how I would have loved to go with Greg to eat at California Pizza Kitchen. To be honest, I am lactose intolerant and vegan, so the last time I went to California Pizza Kitchen in 2019 I got a pizza that didn’t have cheese (it was pretty good, not going to lie, and the crust was slammin’. Also, I actually was in California eating at California Pizza Kitchen so it was pretty special and made me feel like a little kid again, which I loved. It was a dream come true.) As an ovo-lacto pescetarian kid, California Pizza Kitchen was my jam, and we went a lot when I was younger. The split pea soup was my favorite, as was the cheese pizza and the ice cream sundae for dessert (oh, and don’t forget the Shirley Temple!) So when Greg suggested California Pizza Kitchen, I was pretty pumped, and I kind of deflated when Tom dissed California Pizza Kitchen. Tom ends up taking Greg out to this fancy restaurant where they eat roast songbirds. Greg is really hesitant to eat the songbirds, but Tom has him put his napkin over his face as they eat. Early on, Greg’s grandpa, Ewan, takes Greg to get noodle soup at a restaurant downtown, and Ewan loads his son up on soup, so by the time Greg gets to the fancy restaurant with Tom, he is full and he tells Tom that his grandpa took him out to dinner already. There is another scene where Tom calls Greg and tells him he has an assignment for him to do over the Thanksgiving break, but Greg is driving in the car with Ewan. Greg tells Tom he is driving with his grandpa so he can’t come into the office to complete the assignment for Tom (Ewan lives in Canada, so Greg has to drive from Canada to New York for the Roy family Thanksgiving) and Tom insults Ewan over speakerphone. Ewan gives Greg a side-eye like “What did he just say to me?!?” and Greg is fumbling over his words, and Tom is telling him to hurry up. Ewan is not as enthused as Greg is to see the Roy family, and there is one scene that evening where Logan is showing off these veteran medals he collects, and Ewan points out that unlike him, Roy never served in the war. Ewan calls out the Roy family for being dishonest and corrupt people. Honestly, I gave the same side-eye that Ewan gave to Greg when Tom said, “Fuck your grandpa, Greg!” Like “Sir, you do not cuss out James Cromwell!” (James Cromwell is the actor who plays Ewan. I knew of him from the movie Babe: Pig in the City. Also, I just found out it’s James Cromwell’s birthday today.)

Greg is really inexperienced, and he wants to be part of the higher ups, but he hasn’t gotten there yet, and he still has to earn Logan Roy’s respect to get to the top. The Roy kids also pick on Greg and ignore him. When they are eating at the restaurant, Ewan warns Greg that he needs to steer clear of this family because they are a bunch of vipers who will eat him alive. However, Greg continues to get involved with the Roy family and curry favor with Logan so he can get out of working in the amusement parks division at Waystar Royco. But when he goes to Hungary with the family for one of Logan’s business deals, he almost gets in trouble because early in the episode he spoke with this biographer named Michelle Pantsil, who was planning to write a biography about the Roy family. Greg is nervous and tells her that he doesn’t want to disclose any information, but Michelle tells him he should have told her when he signed an agreement to meet with her that he wanted to remain an anonymous source. On the plane to Hungary, Logan is scouting out the person who spoke to Pantsil, and Tom is even scared of Logan at this point. During dinner, where everyone is eating the roast boars they hunted and killed, Logan forces everyone to play a cruel game called Boar on the Floor, where he has Greg, Tom and Karl fight each other for sausages and calls them “piggies.” He does this so that someone in the room will confess that they spoke to the biographer. I feel really bad, to be honest, that I initially thought the scene was funny, because when I read an article about the actors’ experiences with this scene, it was humiliating and stressful for all the actors to go through this Boar on the Floor scene. There have been times when I have laughed at someone for going through some problem, and then I go through my own experiences of humiliation and shame and realize, Wow, feeling these things isn’t fun for anyone. I really love reading Atlas of the Heart by Brene Brown because she unpacks a lot of these emotional experiences that humans can feel at any time, and it really has expanded my view on emotions beyond just sad, happy, mad, and glad. There is a part in the book where she talks about experiences we have when we fall short, and one of these experiences is the feeling of humiliation, which is defined as “the intensely painful feeling that we’ve been unjustly degraded, ridiculed, or put down and that our identity has been demeaned or devalued.” (Atlas of the Heart, page 147) Reading this entry on humiliation helped me understand why the Boar on the Floor game was so terrible for everyone, and why many viewers found the scene unsettling. The day after Logan forces them to play that game, Tom goes to breakfast and says good morning to some of the people at breakfast, as if he is hoping to leave that experience in the past, but people chuckle when he comes in and the room is really silent because everyone is thinking about how horrible that game was. One of the people there that night, Syd, says good morning to Tom and offers him some breakfast sausage but he quietly declines. Greg is sitting by himself, processing the humiliation he felt after having an old man throw sausages at him and call him a “piggie,” but Tom joins him for breakfast because he, too, is feeling humiliated after what he had to go through. Greg thanks him for not telling Logan about him meeting with Pantsil, and Tom quietly rubs his arm in a quiet gesture of sweetness. Of course, he doesn’t suddenly become nice to Greg after that and he continues to be mean to him, but it was that one scene that showed me that both of them went through that painful experience of humiliation, so now that Tom knew how it felt to be made fun of, he could understand how Greg felt.

TV Show Review: Succession season 1 (some thoughts, part 1)

Written a couple of weeks ago when I first started watching the show. I don’t remember when that was but it was probably the week of January 15th.

So I decided to watch the show Succession after hearing a lot of buzz about it. I wasn’t super hip to the show when it first came out, but I saw it advertised all the time. When I watched the Golden Globe Awards this past Sunday I saw it kept getting all these nominations and awards, and I was like, Wow, this show must be really, really good. And as stressful as these first few episodes have been, it is quite good.

To be honest, I was really nervous to watch the show at first because I was reading the parent’s guide on IMDB and they mentioned that there is a scene where a character vomits. I have emetophobia, so I am pretty sensitive to vomiting scenes in movies. But I read on some other sites that have trigger warnings, such as Does the Dog Die and a tumblr dedicated to emetophobia warnings in movies and TV shows, about the scene, and after a while, even though my heart was racing and I was getting pretty nervous about watching the scene, I thought, It is literally just one scene. I don’t want that to make me not watch the show. And thankfully, I knew that the minute Greg goes to the theme park I could close my eyes and not have to watch the scene, which didn’t last super long.

The first episode, titled “Celebration” opens up with an elderly man waking up and walking through the house. He urinates and has to get the assistance of the lady who is helping him. The show opens with an incredible theme song by Nicholas Britell. It conveyed a lot of the power and prestige that runs throughout the show, and I love how he uses the strings and piano. I really love Nicholas Britell’s music. I remember he composed the music for the movies Moonlight and Vice, both movies I really enjoyed watching. Seeing the footage of the Roy family was also really intriguing, just seeing them grow up in this wealthy lifestyle. I was also excited to see that actor Will Ferrell was one of the producers on the show.

There were a few scenes from the Celebration episode that stuck with me. One is when Greg meets the Roy family for the first time when he goes to Logan’s birthday celebration, and everyone pretty much ignores him. He is the only one not wearing a fancy suit; he is wearing baggy clothes and he stands out. Greg has a really unlucky gig at an amusement park when a bunch of kids jump all over him and he vomits. When he gets fired he has to contact his great-uncle Roy (Greg’s mom is connected to the Roy family) for a job, and when he arrives it’s like the family treats him with a cold distance. There is also another scene where Conner, who is the firstborn of Logan Roy, gets Logan a sourdough starter but Logan calls it “gunk” and dismisses it, which frustrates Conner because he just wanted to get his dad something to make him happy. There is another scene where someone gives Logan a really nice watch as a gift but then when they are playing ball in the park as a family, Logan gives the watch to a family that is nearby. I also saw how Roman’s character was, because Roman promises this kid in the park that he will give him one million dollars if he hits a home run, and when the kid doesn’t win the game, Roman acts cruel and tears up the one million dollar check he was going to make out to him, prompting his sister, Shiv, to knock it off. Throughout the show, Roman comes off as overconfident and thinks that when he becomes the Chief Operating Officer of Waystar Royco he is going to get this prestige but he is unaware that it is going to be much more than a job to him. He also does something wild. He goes into one of the offices, unzips his pants and starts jerking off against the window. He cleans up his mess, but it kind of showed me how this power and influence can go to people’s heads.

What books do I want to read?

Bloganuary writing prompt
What books do you want to read?
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Right now I am trying to finish a couple of books, one being Great Expectations by Charles Dickens and the other being Tom Lake by Ann Patchett. I haven’t made much progress but I am determined to finish them. I haven’t finished Bleak House by Charles Dickens but I may need to start over because I don’t really remember the plot very well. There are also some books by an author named Daisaku Ikeda where he has dialogues with different global figures, so I want to get around to reading those as well. There are still a lot of books I want to explore and read that have been sitting on my shelf unread. I have mostly been watching a lot of movies and TV shows, so my book reading has been taking a back seat. I have mostly been doing a lot of Buddhist study, so I have been reading The Writings of Nichiren Daishonin a lot each day (it’s a book of letters that a Buddhist reformer named Nichiren Daishonin wrote to his followers during the 1200s.) I also want to read Emma because I checked out the film from the library but I love reading the book before seeing the movie, but I might just watch the movie even if I haven’t read the book yet because it’s due back to the library soon.

Movie Review: You Hurt My Feelings and Some Personal Thoughts about Failure, Criticism and Self-Worth

Yesterday I watched a movie called You Hurt My Feelings. I really love movies distributed by a film company called A24, and I really loved the trailer, so I was excited to watch this movie. I haven’t seen much of Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s other work, to be honest, except for a sketch she did on Inside Amy Schumer called “Last Fuckable Day.” If you haven’t seen that sketch, by the way, it is absolutely hilarious and calls out a lot of ageism and sexism in Hollywood.

You Hurt My Feelings is about an author named Beth who is also a creative writing professor. Her husband, Don, is a therapist who struggles to connect with his patients, and her son, Eliot, works at a weed shop and is having a hard time moving forward in life. He is a writer like his mom but doesn’t believe in his work. Beth has a sister named Sarah who is an interior designer and volunteers with her at a local church by giving away clothing, and Sarah is married to Mark, a struggling actor. Beth is working on a novel and has written several drafts of her manuscript, and she is rightfully proud of herself, and her husband seems to think that her story is good. And on the surface, she is happy in her marriage with Don and they celebrate their anniversary on a happy note. She is encouraging to her students and celebrates their ideas for stories even if they don’t seem that great. But things go downhill when Beth meets with a publisher and the publisher tells her that her manuscript wasn’t that great, and this crushes Beth’s self-esteem. And the ultimate blow for Beth is when she and Sarah are out and about and they run into Mark and Don talking at a department store. Beth overhears Don telling Mark that he doesn’t actually like Beth’s novel, and she runs out of the store in a panic, feeling betrayed that Don lied to her face about liking her book. Sarah tries to calm Beth down, but Beth’s life and marriage is already shattered. The movie shows how Beth tries to regain her self-worth after finding out her husband, whose opinion she valued so highly, doesn’t actually like her book.

The movie shows how difficult it can be to give one’s honest opinion about something because you are worried about hurting the other person, but it can hurt worse when you lie about liking someone’s work and not give them your honest opinion from the get-go. The film explores how rejection and failure impact how the characters see themselves in relation to their work and careers. Mark is in a store with Don and someone approaches him and says he recognized Mark from this movie where he played a pumpkin. Mark is ecstatic that he got recognized for something, but when he asks the guy if he can take a selfie with him, the guy hesitates and they declines, leaving Mark feeling dejected. Mark reveals to Sarah one day that he is uncertain about why he is pursuing acting, and he realizes that he did it because he wanted to become famous. She encourages him to do it because he loves it, not because it brings him fame. I resonated with this because when I first started auditioning for professional orchestras and pursuing a music career, I had this idea that I was going to become famous and make a lot of money and that everyone was going to respect me. But I think as I dug deeper into my Buddhist practice, I saw over time how I based so much of my self-worth on having this prestigious career, so I had to take a step back and really ask myself why I wanted a career in music. I still love to play my cello, but I am realizing that whether I have a prestigious career in music or not, it doesn’t determine my worth as a human being. When I based my self-worth on my success as a musician, I think it became really hard to handle stuff like rejection and disappointment, and over time I had to understand that rejection, disappointment and failure are a part of any career, and that the important thing was to not give up on myself. I think that is why I love reading the Buddhist philosopher Daisaku Ikeda’s works because he reminds me that my life is a treasure and that I have inherent worth regardless of whether I am facing success or failure in life. It is still a daily struggle to believe in my worth, but as I continue this journey of awakening to my self-worth, I have become a much stronger person, and I am able to encourage other people who struggle with low self-worth.

The movie also reminded me of another film I saw called The Wife with Glenn Close and Jonathan Pryce. In the movie, they play a couple named Joan and Joe Castleman who are excited because Joe won the Nobel Prize in Literature. However, as the movie progresses, it is clear that there is a rather sinister backstory to Joe’s success as a writer, namely that his wife wrote most of his work and he didn’t give her credit for it. Joe is not a great character, and he basks in praise while his wife is just seen as, well, his wife. Their son, David, wants to become a writer, too, but when he asks his dad if he read his story, Joe hedges and doesn’t want to share his honest opinion about David’s story. It’s not until they meet at a bar that Joe shares his honest criticism about David’s story, but David wants to hear that he did a good job, not that the story was bad, and he gets angry with his father for not telling him that he did a good job. Joan encourages David because she believes that everyone needs validation, but Joe says that getting external validation won’t help David grow in his writing career, so he is hard on him. This leaves David feeling terrible about himself throughout the movie. In You Hurt My Feelings, after Beth finds out that Don didn’t like her book, she goes through each page of the manuscript saying “Shit for brains” over and over. The novel is based on her childhood and dealing with a lot of verbal abuse from her father, and in real life, Beth’s father would call her “Shit for brains” and “stupid” her whole life, so this made her feel very poorly about herself. Don told Beth for years that he loved her work, especially because she wrote about twenty drafts of the manuscript, but to hear that he actually didn’t like it, after years of lying to her and telling her that he did so that he wouldn’t hurt her feelings, took a blow to her self-worth as a writer.

This reminded me of a scene in The Wife when Joan is having a flashback to her 20s, when she was a student at Smith College in the 1950s and she fell in love with Joe, who was a married professor with kids. Joe has an affair with Joan and loses his job (and also his wife, who divorces him) and they are happy together at first. Joan is an aspiring writer and seeks advice from a famous female writer named Elaine Mozell. Joan thinks Elaine is going to tell her “Yeah, girl, go for your dreams! The sky’s the limit.” But Elaine gives her pessimistic advice on having a career as an author, telling her that her works, like Elaine’s, will end up on shelves unread because it was a male-dominated field where female authors often didn’t get their works recognized or published, so Joan is better off not pursuing a writing career so that she doesn’t have to deal with disappointment or rejection. Joan sees firsthand how rejection can really take a blow to someone’s self-esteem, in this case her husband’s. Joe has Joan read her manuscript, and even though he asks for her feedback, she tells him her honest opinion, that she doesn’t think it is that good. That is not the feedback he wants to hear. He wants her to validate that he is a good writer because he cannot handle the rejection that comes with it, and he gets angry and threatens to divorce her if she doesn’t tell him that he is a great writer. He projects so many of his deepest insecurities onto her at that moment, telling her that if he doesn’t make it as a writer, he is going to have to go back to being a professor at a “second rate college” and making brisket (at first I rolled my eyes and was like, Oh boo-hoo, but then I had to remember that this was the 1950s and women still had to follow these societal expectations that they would stay home and let the men become successful in their careers while they held onto their unfulfilled dreams.)

Honestly, as much as I loathed Joe’s character and how he treated his wife and his son and crushed every last ounce of their writing dreams so that he could fulfill his, I somehow could relate to his struggle with self-worth and this idea that your career defines your worth as a human being and that if you fail or fuck up, it means you are a failure for the rest of your life and you will never recover. I remember when I worked really hard for this one audition for a symphony orchestra, and when I got on the list of substitute cellists, I felt my ego take a boost. But then my sister and dad asked me to do chores, and I had to get off my high horse for a while, and that somehow made me mad, so I lashed out at them and threatened to kill myself (I was a real nut.) I continued to define my worth by having this prestigious career for years after that. I worked at Starbucks and thought that working there instead of playing for the symphony meant that I had failed, and so I felt really ashamed going into these classical music circles and academic circles and telling people I worked at Starbucks because I thought they would see me as less than. I would tell people at work that I was going to be this successful musician and then I auditioned for another professional orchestra, but I got rejected and I just broke down crying. I think holding onto these unrealistic ideas about success and inflated self-worth made it hard for me to do my best where I was, because I was always thinking, When I quit food service, when I get this music career, when I play with these famous musicians, then I will finally feel like I made it and I will finally feel good about myself and I will finally feel worthy. I felt like every time I faced rejection or disappointment, it took a blow to my self-worth and so I constantly vacillated about whether or not I could make it as a musician. There was one time I went to a professor’s house to audition for a spot in his advanced chamber music ensemble, and I was so nervous because I really wanted this person to like me. I wanted him to think highly of me, so I tried to avoid talking about how I was paying off my student loans and working at Starbucks. But I honestly couldn’t B.S. anything. At the end of the day, I was just me and I couldn’t meet this man’s expectations no matter how much I tried to put on airs or be someone I wasn’t. I just wasn’t at the skill level he wanted me to be at, and this really made it hard for me to feel good about myself. But after I chanted about it for a while (key word: a while. It wasn’t overnight) I realized I needed to stop worrying about being rejected by this guy and focus on my efforts to pay off my student loans and do my best work at Starbucks. I also had to appreciate that I was with a really good music teacher and he and I worked very well, and he helped me do a lot of inner transformation, or human revolution, in overcoming my arrogance. I really thought I was hot shit as a musician, but that is because my ego was so huge. I realized that I didn’t need to think less of myself, I just had to change the way I thought about this career. When I actually met with professional musicians, I began to realize that this career wasn’t just about me-me-me. I would still need to learn to work with others and acknowledge that there will always be people with more credentials than me, and that is an opportunity to learn from people. It took a really long time to get to that realization, though, because I had to do a lot of human revolution, or inner transformation, where I developed greater self-worth and started to focus on doing my best and making sincere efforts rather than solely focusing on winning the audition.

It is still a challenge for me to take criticism and feedback well, to be honest. An I think that is why You Hurt My Feelings resonated with me so much because it showed me that it can be really hard to face honest criticism from those closest to us. I still find myself getting defensive or upset when I receive negative feedback, or when I don’t get a response after sending in a job application. No matter how politely the rejection email is worded, the rejection still stings, but then it’s like I have to keep reminding myself to use the rejection as an opportunity to improve and get better. And I really resonated with Beth’s struggle with self-esteem. I grew up with supportive people in my life and I think I felt pretty comfortable in my skin, but then I went to a new school and I really struggled with low self-esteem because I struggled academically, and this was new to me because people always praised me as this smart kid. But my self-esteem took a real hit when they chose some of the smart kids for a Gifted and Talented program, and I wasn’t selected, and it really hurt. It’s silly to be thirty and still thinking about that stuff. It’s like, Get over it, that was twenty years ago! But at that point in my life I really suffered from low self-confidence. I often wrote in my notebook that I was stupid, that I was ugly, that I was worthless, that no one liked me. And the reality is, no one was calling me these things. But I often said those negative things about myself because I wanted people to tell me, No, no, that’s not true. You’re smart, you’re capable. It’s because I didn’t believe those things myself, so I was constantly wanting the people around me to affirm that I was worthy and beautiful and smart. Of course, wanting validation is totally normal and human, but when I started doing a lot of inner work on myself, I realized that it’s important to develop my own confidence. That was the hardest to do for so many years because I wanted people to affirm that I was enough because I didn’t want to believe myself that I was enough. I had really supportive family growing up, so I’m sure it was painful for them to hear me say these awful things about myself because they never called me stupid, ugly or weird. Looking back I also remember being around a lot of kids who also had low self-esteem even though they were talented and smart, but at the time it seemed that everyone else had it together on the surface. This perception of my environment carried on into middle school, high school, college and even after college, and it is still something I have to remind myself is just my perception. Because we are all human and we all struggle with something.

what makes me feel nostalgic?

Daily writing prompt
What makes you feel nostalgic?
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When I listen to music from the 1990s and early 2000s, I get really nostalgic. In fact, I have been listening to a lot of old Britney Spears and NSYNC as of late, and also a lot of Celine Dion and Seal because that is what I loved as a kid.

Movie Review: Parallel Mothers

I really wanted to watch this movie called Parallel Mothers, which was directed by Pedro Almodovar. I saw his 2007 film Volver, which stars Penelope Cruz, and I was so blown away by the acting that I wanted to watch another movie of his. I remember having a leftover ballot from the 2022 Academy Awards, and Parallel Mothers was on the list of nominations, specifically for Best Actress in a Leading Role (Penelope Cruz.) The movie is pretty intense like Volver, but the acting was incredible. Penelope Cruz is an amazing actress and I really liked Pedro Almodovar’s directing style because it is just so unique. As someone who is trying to improve my Spanish, watching this movie with English subtitles and hearing the dialogue really helped.

The movie takes place in Madrid, Spain and opens with a photo shoot. Janis is a professional photographer, and she is working closely with an archaeologist named Arturo. She is trying to dig deeper into her family history and so she enlists Arturo to help her. Many of her family members were killed during the regime of Nationalist leader Francisco Franco and she wants to uncover what happened to her relatives. Arturo agrees to help her out and they end up hooking up one day. The next scene cuts to when Janis is going into labor and she is in the same room as a young woman named Ana. They talk and find out they share a lot in common even though Janis is in her 40s and Ana is a teenager. The main thing they share is that they are both single and unmarried, but while Janis has no regrets about becoming pregnant and becoming a mom, Ana does have regrets, and we find out why when we meet her mother, Teresa, who is an accomplished actress. After they give birth and are recovering in the hospital, Janis and Ana exchange numbers and promise to stay in touch. Time passes and they are taking care of the babies and navigating the challenges of motherhood. However, when Janis meets with Arturo he tells her that he may not be the biological father of her baby, so Janis takes a paternity test and finds out that she in fact is not the biological mother of her newborn daughter, Cecilia. Meanwhile, Teresa is going on tour, and she has to leave Madrid, leaving Ana on her own for an extended period of time. Ana hears Teresa arguing over the phone about her father leaving Teresa to take care of Ana by herself, and she becomes even more resentful of her mother, which prompts her to leave home and start a new life by herself.

When Janis comes to the cafe that Ana is working at, they reconnect and agree to meet at Janis’s house. When they meet, they get to see Cecilia (Ana still doesn’t know about the paternity test results) and when Janis asks about Ana’s daughter, Anita, Ana tells her that Anita died from crib death and the two of them grieve the loss of Anita. Janis and Ana start to spend more time together as Janis and Arturo start to get farther apart, and they end up sleeping together after getting drunk to Janis Joplin, but Janis still carries a heavy burden from not telling Ana about how she (Janis) isn’t Cecilia’s biological mother. Janis starts to meet up more often with Arturo to talk about the excavation project and Arturo confesses that he separated from his wife after she recovered from cancer so he can be with Janis, but now Janis is not sure where she stands with Arturo and she’s not sure if she’s romantically interested in Ana, either. After asking Janis why she is becoming so distant from her, Janis finally lets Ana see the results of the maternity test and Ana finds out that she is Cecilia’s real mother and Janis’s daughter, Anita, died of crib death. (Long story short, their babies were switched at birth.) Ana walks out on Janis because she feels betrayed that Janis had her daughter and that she had to deal with this painful grief when in reality, her actual daughter was alive and well. However, they somehow end up patching things up and Arturo helps Janis excavate the remains of her family members and everyone has a memorial for them. The movie in a lot of ways reminded me of Volver because both films deal with grief and the consequences of keeping secrets from people. In Volver, two women, Raimunda and Sole, are grieving the loss of their parents in a fire that happened in a village a few years ago. But their neighbor, Agustina, suspects that their mother might actually be alive, and not only that but Agustina’s mom had an affair with Raimunda’s father. Sure enough, when Sole is driving her car home, she finds her mother, Irene, hiding in the trunk, alive and well. Sole, however, decides to not tell Raimunda that her daughter that Irene is still alive, so it’s not surprising that when Raimunda finds out that Irene is alive, she feels really hurt that her mother lied about her death and that Sole kept her mother’s real story from her for years, leaving Raimunda to carry a lot of unprocessed hurt and resentment towards her family for years. It’s not until Irene tells Raimunda everything about what happened to her and her father that Raimunda is able to heal from a lot of deep wounds and trauma that she carried for so many years. It was painful to learn that Raimunda’s father sexually abused her and got her pregnant with Isabella, it really showed me how deeply rooted a lot of this sexual abuse and trauma was in Raimunda and Sole’s family. Not only that, but it was painful for Raimunda at first to learn that her father was having an affair with Agustina’s mother, prompting Irene to set fire to the hut that they were sleeping in. Irene also carried a lot of emotional luggage and she also had not processed it, and the sad part is that she didn’t find out about Raimunda’s father’s sexual abuse until Aunt Paula told her, so Irene carried this guilt and shame for not doing something to stop the abuse and at the same time Raimunda was carrying around a lot of pain and shame in silence, so she wasn’t communicating with her family. Like Raimunda, Janis suffers in silence by keeping it a secret from Ana about their babies being switched, and Ana feels betrayed that Janis kept it a secret from her for so long. At the beginning, it seemed that Ana and Janis were becoming fast friends because they shared so much in common, especially because they were giving birth in the same room together, but they end up having a very complicated relationship later on the more they open up to each other and it really hurts Ana that Janis didn’t tell her that she wasn’t Cecilia’s biological mother and that Ana actually was. Ana doesn’t really have anyone she can lean on or trust. Her mother is away on tour, her father won’t communicate with her, and she opens up to Janis that at a high school party, a guy and her had sex and her classmates filmed in, and two of her male classmates raped her and she got pregnant by one of the guys at the party. Janis seems to empathize with what Ana is going through and especially when they are giving birth, it’s a lonely and painful experience so Ana feels like she doesn’t have to go through her painful labor alone because there is another woman going through it with her. But Janis still hadn’t resolved her situation with Arturo so she wasn’t able to commit to Ana in the way Ana wanted her to. There is a flashback to where Janis is telling Arturo that she is pregnant and Arturo is telling her she doesn’t have to have the baby and reveals that it wouldn’t be the best time to tell his wife that he was having an affair with Janis and got her pregnant, especially because his wife had cancer. However, Janis is in her 40s and has wanted to be a mom for a really long time, so she decides to have the baby and cut off contact with Arturo. But Arturo keeps popping back into Janis’s life, and even though he is her colleague and they are working on a project together, they still were interested in each other and Arturo decides to tell his wife about his affair and separate from her so that he can be with Janis, but by this point Janis and Ana have fallen in love, so Janis really isn’t sure who she truly loves and she doesn’t really want to commit. I think that is where the movie left me hanging, but maybe it wasn’t supposed to be neatly tied up. The ending of Almodovar’s movie Julieta didn’t end neatly, and neither did Volver. I was still left with a lot of burning questions after each film. But I think that is what I love about watching all these different films and getting to read more about them, is because each director has their own unique directing style. I think getting to watch Pedro Almodovar’s films has helped me appreciate his unique approach to making movies. I remember I wasn’t used to Yorgos Lanthimos’s directing style at first; the opening scene of The Lobster features a woman randomly shooting a donkey and killing it, and at first, I found this upsetting and found myself thinking, What the actual fuck?!? That poor donkey wasn’t hurting anybody. But then I got to know the struggles of each character in the film, and I started to feel connected to Colin Farrell’s character in the movie, who struggles to fit in in a society that doesn’t accept being single or unmarried. Seeing how single people were being poorly treated and discriminated against throughout the movie was pretty disturbing, but in real life single people do face a lot of stigma and often feel pressured to get married or have children. Probably not to the extent that there is an actual dystopian society where singles get turned into animals if they don’t find a life partner, but definitely enough to make single people feel like they are broken or incomplete for being themselves. Then I saw Yorgos’ other film, The Favourite, and I started to get slightly more familiar with his directing style, and watching the featurette at the end of the film helped me understand how the director worked with actors, what it was like directing different scenes, how the costume department made all the different clothes, and so many other elements of the movie that I wouldn’t have known based on my own interpretation of the movie alone. The Favourite was a bold film that, like Parallel Mothers, made it a point to explore sexual fluidity and love. At first it seems that Rachel Weisz’s character, Sarah, is the favorite of Queen Anne, and they are in love with each other. But then Emma Stone’s character, Abigail, who is Sarah’s cousin, comes to work as a servant for Queen Anne and she ends up being Queen Anne’s confidant and lover, pushing Sarah to the side. However, the movie shows how Queen Anne is really playing both of these ladies and pitting them against each other, making them compete for her approval and love. Olivia Coleman won an Academy Award for her role as Queen Anne and seriously, she deserved it because her acting was fierce and just so…incredible. Parallel Mothers also challenged my ideas about love and relationships, because Janis wasn’t committed to being with one person, and she was able to explore her feelings for Ana that went deeper than their first meeting in the hospital room. Even after they fight and Janis breaks her heart, Ana continues to be with her. This challenged this idea that I had about relationships, because as someone with very limited romantic relationship experience, it seemed that love and romance was very black and white. You fall in love at first sight, you commit to someone, you get married and you grow old and die together. And when you break up with someone, you just get over the person and find someone new. But watching this movie showed me that relationships are pretty complicated and messy and you never fully disentangle yourself from the person even after separating with them. Arturo continued to come back into Janis’ life even after she told him they needed to stop communicating, and even after Ana left Janis’s house, they still stayed close. Honestly it was really interesting seeing how these relationships were so deeply connected to one another.

One scene I found it hard to get through was the scene where Janis and Ana were giving birth. As someone who has never delivered babies or given birth, it was pretty painful to watch Janis and Ana deliver the babies because they were in so much pain. It reminded me of the episode in this show I am watching called Lessons in Chemistry because at the beginning, Elizabeth Zott gives birth to her daughter, Mad, and she is in so much pain even when they give her an epidural. She imagines her late husband, Calvin, encouraging her through the labor, but when she is actually giving birth, I had to remember that she is still pushing a full-sized human out of her body, and it is painful. I am not ruling out having children, but watching the scenes made me appreciate the women (and also people of other genders who conceive and have children) who go through the process of labor and childbirth, because it doesn’t look easy. I remember as a kid watching this series on Oxygen called Birth Stories, and it showed women going through labor and childbirth. It was fascinating to watch but also as a kid it was pretty intense to witness. I think that is what I appreciate about this movie, Parallel Mothers, because it challenged a lot of my perspective on motherhood. Like, how would I feel if I gave birth in the same room as a woman who I felt an emotional connection with, but it turned out that our babies got switched and I was raising her baby as my own? I am sure it has happened in real life, but it made for a very intriguing and emotionally charged film.

Parallel Mothers. 2021. Thriller/ Drama. Runtime: 2 hours. Rated R for some sexuality.