Like Hephaistion who died Alexander's lover

I seem to have celebrated Saint Patrick's Day with Haitian food and Italian film. Works for me.

(rushthatspeaks and I got takeout from Pikliz—fried goat with plantains and their levitatingly spicy jerk chicken—and caught the late show of James Ivory and Luca Guadagnino's Call Me by Your Name (2017) at the Somerville. I am making a note to write about this film, because I just really liked it: it's queer, it's Jewish, it has just the right amount of classical allusions, a simultaneously precise and dreamy sense of place and time and the same attention to the details of a loving and supportive family and an awkward and exhilarating summer of first love, avoiding clichés except for the ones that got that way from being true. I am fascinated by the differences between it and Maurice (1987), the generational shifts in queer film in Ivory's own lifetime and career. I think I owe other movies first.)

I don't recognize those old buildings that used to mean so much to me

Bertie Owen's keyboard is really breaking and I didn't fall asleep until well after eight this morning. I did not get much done today that was not work, but I did have post-holiday corned beef and soda bread with my parents in the evening. I did not have cabbage. I like cabbage in coleslaw and several other dishes—and I will eat it by itself if it's stir-fried—but when it's steamed or boiled I feel there is no safe ground between the raw food movement and sublimated into a fart.

1. In context of discussing the longstanding (and totally deserved) community argument with Michael Weingrad's "Why There Is No Jewish Narnia," my mother remarked that of course portal fantasy has Christian origins; Christianity has its other world into which you can be assumed or translated at any second right there in its conception of Heaven. On the one hand, C.S. Lewis himself presumed this link in his wraparound of Narnia into Aslan's Country. (Elizabeth Goudge made a similar connection in The Valley of Song (1951), though hers works much better for me on account of avoiding allegory and including Fairy.) On the other, I can't remember seeing anyone really write about it. Please point me toward articles to the contrary, if they exist? Otherwise I can tell my mother she just said something tremendously useful about twentieth-century fantasy.

2. Please enjoy a non-binary penned punk song about Claude Cahun: Worriers, "The Only Claude That Matters." rydra_wong, I thought you should know.

3. Everyone in general, I'm just really charmed by Madeline McGrane's "Vampire Horse."

4. Courtesy of moon_custafer: Brad Dourif in Fatal Beauty (1987). I will resist all efforts to explain to me that he is not playing the title role.

5. And then I made the mistake of clicking on an article about millennial millionnaire-billionaires:

I steer the conversation to the subject of how utterly detached from the real world elites seem to have become. "Elitism, the way I would define it, is obtainable," he replies. "All that stands between you and being elite is your own investment in yourself."

I tell Rosenthal that I've met many people in America who work as hard as him and his friends—harder, in fact—but struggle to make ends meet. He acknowledges that he's benefited from considerable advantage, but insists we now live in an era in which "the internet is the great equaliser".

"What are you doing to create the utility for yourself? Are you introducing people so they can collaborate?" he says. Struggling Americans, he adds, might want to "host a dinner. Invite 10 strangers. See what happens."

Rosenthal presses on with his thesis, telling me there are just not enough people in the world who will "excessively commit their lives to something. Journalism, cheese, automobiles, whatever. Rocket ships—perfect example. Everyone wants to work at SpaceX, no one wants to go to engineering school."

I believe the emotion I experienced at that moment is technically known as "eat the rich."

I am trying to convince myself to go to bed early; I have two doctor's appointments tomorrow and one of them is at eyebleed o'clock. This would be a more compelling argument if I didn't also want to read things.