Underwater is where she can finally breathe
Happy equinox! For the first day of autumn, I am bisexually visible and extremely tired.
I don't know if it was the tailoring of the vaccine or the preexisting stratum of the miserable cold, but this latest shot has flattened me: sweat-soaked fever, doubling cough, my shoulder hurting so much that I kept waking in the night from rolling onto it and a knot under my arm like it was rehearsing for another plague.![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch came back from running errands in the afternoon rain and curled himself very carefully around me, Hestia-fashion. To cover the evening shift, Autolycus has wriggled himself so far beneath the blankets of the couch that I can go nowhere without the approval of my chocolate-furred doctor who shows no signs of shifting himself any time soon.
Smart Girls Don't Talk (1948) is a well-shot crime melodrama whose set-up is much more interesting than its play-out, but I like all of its actors even when the script throws them more curveballs of morality than sharp lines like "You sound like the third paragraph of a ten-cent mystery thriller!" Richard Rober makes a decent romantically wistful cop on the other side of the investigation from Bruce Bennett's classily crooked nightclub owner, with Virginia Mayo's bereaved and calculating socialite between them—since the action is vectored through her perspective, I suppose the triangle is unavoidable as part of the standard package of women's interest. Neither of the movies in which I have so far encountered Helen Westcott has had the sense to give her a part as real as her face. I've seen Tom D'Andrea as so many salt-of-the-earth working joes, a slightly thuggish right-hand fixer makes a nice change.
I can't make it to the BLO's Madama Butterfly, but this review makes me wish there had at least been a livecast.
This summer disappeared so fast and so badly into illness, I am feeling unusually unstuck in time.
I don't know if it was the tailoring of the vaccine or the preexisting stratum of the miserable cold, but this latest shot has flattened me: sweat-soaked fever, doubling cough, my shoulder hurting so much that I kept waking in the night from rolling onto it and a knot under my arm like it was rehearsing for another plague.
spatch came back from running errands in the afternoon rain and curled himself very carefully around me, Hestia-fashion. To cover the evening shift, Autolycus has wriggled himself so far beneath the blankets of the couch that I can go nowhere without the approval of my chocolate-furred doctor who shows no signs of shifting himself any time soon.Smart Girls Don't Talk (1948) is a well-shot crime melodrama whose set-up is much more interesting than its play-out, but I like all of its actors even when the script throws them more curveballs of morality than sharp lines like "You sound like the third paragraph of a ten-cent mystery thriller!" Richard Rober makes a decent romantically wistful cop on the other side of the investigation from Bruce Bennett's classily crooked nightclub owner, with Virginia Mayo's bereaved and calculating socialite between them—since the action is vectored through her perspective, I suppose the triangle is unavoidable as part of the standard package of women's interest. Neither of the movies in which I have so far encountered Helen Westcott has had the sense to give her a part as real as her face. I've seen Tom D'Andrea as so many salt-of-the-earth working joes, a slightly thuggish right-hand fixer makes a nice change.
I can't make it to the BLO's Madama Butterfly, but this review makes me wish there had at least been a livecast.
This summer disappeared so fast and so badly into illness, I am feeling unusually unstuck in time.
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And many good wishes sent for feeling better.
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You are very visible and your eyes are particularly gorgeous! That said I kinda want to feed you.
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I'm working on feeding me! My family is working on it! I have not made up any of the weight that I lost with the twelve weeks of enteric infections, I've just arrested the free-fall. It has not been good for any of me. I appreciate the thought sincerely.
*hugs*
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Thank you!
*hugs*
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*hugs*
Thank you. I am so over being ill in any form. Maybe I do need a Mesopotamian exorcist.
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And many good wishes sent for feeling better.
Thank you!
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Thank you! --- [dashes provided by Autolycus, for emphasis, I assume, or he's getting into nineteenth-century novels]
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Thank you.
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I know you're working on it. and the soup offer is always open.
hugs you
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Thank you. I feel I look like a Roman lemur.
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Oh, that hurts...my favorite opera, and closing three weeks before I could get there, argh, argh, argh
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Thank you! At the moment my body mostly seems to be spending a surprising percentage of the day asleep and staring somewhat blankly when awake, so it had better be doing something I can't see.
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*hugs*
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Thank you!
Oh, that hurts...my favorite opera, and closing three weeks before I could get there, argh, argh, argh
I'm so sorry! See, this is why livecasts should have persisted beyond the national emergency phase of the pandemic. I would have loved to link you to one.
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(also, I think The Salt Grows Heavy by Cassandra Khaw might be relevant to your interests)
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Thank you!
(also, I think The Salt Grows Heavy by Cassandra Khaw might be relevant to your interests)
I had not heard of this book! Much appreciated.
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My heart broke when Boston Ballet stopped their live casts.
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Many sympathies. I'm still exhausted and my arm is still hurting more than two days later. I wasn't expecting it.
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V. glad you got the latest vaccine (I need to get on that myself ... ), and I'm glad Autolycus is making sure you rest up.
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Thank you!
V. glad you got the latest vaccine (I need to get on that myself ... ), and I'm glad Autolycus is making sure you rest up.
He is most attentive. And soft and furry. Good luck scheduling your own shots!
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It's a kind of ghost. The festival of Lemuria is named after them, when the head of the household must perform a ritual at midnight to placate the restless, wandering dead whom no one has given the proper rites of burial or remembrance. The words suggest that they may be forgotten ancestors, or perhaps it pacifies them to be named as such, acknowledged into someone's family. The household itself is bought safe with a thrown handful of black beans, but because the offerings which the lemures have been missing include salt, grain, and wine-soaked bread, it is not difficult to imagine these dispossessed ghosts as hungry.
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Also, how interesting that both Rome and Japan have a festival where you throw beans to protect the family. ... Then again, beans are good-sized seeds; perhaps it's natural.
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According to Ovid's Fasti, which is our only full description of the ritual, you go out barefoot at midnight; you draw water and wash your hands; you make an apotropaic sign with your fingers and throw black beans over your shoulder and you say, "Haec ego mitto, his redimo meque meosque fabis"—These I let go, with these beans I redeem me and mine—and you repeat these actions nine times without once looking back where the ghosts are following. Then you wash your hands again and bang pots and when you have said again nine times, "Manes exite paterni"—Ghosts of my family, go—then it is finally safe to look behind you, where the ghosts are satisfied and gone.
Also, how interesting that both Rome and Japan have a festival where you throw beans to protect the family. ... Then again, beans are good-sized seeds; perhaps it's natural.
I didn't know there were beans involved in Japanese apotropaic ritual! That's really neat.
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Re: Japan, yes! Setsubun, on February 3. You eat as many dried soybeans as your age, and then some in the family put on masks to be demons, and someone else flings beans (... the same soybeans? I'm not remembering right now. Probably?) and shouts "oni wa soto; fuku wa uchi!" (demons out, good fortune in!)
ETA (the beans are for pelting the demons--it helps drive them away)
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Please do! Ovid writing just slightly over two thousand years ago thought it was archaic even then.
Re: Japan, yes! Setsubun, on February 3. You eat as many dried soybeans as your age, and then some in the family put on masks to be demons, and someone else flings beans (... the same soybeans? I'm not remembering right now. Probably?) and shouts "oni wa soto; fuku wa uchi!" (demons out, good fortune in!)
Thank you for describing that to me! Man, while being neither ghost nor demon so far as I know, I really want some beans now.