Weekly Thoughts...

Contemplative, indecisive, gittery and lazy. That's how the week has been going for me. But, there are a couple of things that have been going on that got me thinking... 

Let's begin!

᯽ Literacy Crisis!

Who are we supposed to call for this? I've commented in this post that I've been trying to get back to romance books, but that every time I get into the genre, I just end up disappointed. The books that are deemed as the epitome of romance, and all other popular words of the moments flowing around social media, just don't hit it right for me. The prose, the writing, the simplicity, the already established character arcs. Everything leaves me  with a feeling of half-achieved satisfaction.

Is it just that, or is it something about how books are being written today in general? 

I wish I had the brainpower to go deep into this and make another endless post like my Odyssey one (I know it's long! I don't care!), but as I said above, my week has been sort of... wobbly. So I'm not in the right headspace for it. I'll leave this here anyway, because I have been thinking about it lately.

Star ★Note: Sort of connected, and perhaps not that much, but I can actually pinpoint when I went back to reading contemporary romance and, for the love of everything, just couldn't connect with it anymore. 

    A couple of years ago, after going through a rampage of romance novels to fill the void left by a loss in my family, I went back to everything that gave me comfort when I needed it most. So I rewatched The X-Files (we get it, you're obsessed), only this time I kind of fell into the show's extensive fanfic archives and basically drowned in novel-length Mulder and Scully fanfics that were so well written I wanted to get inside the minds of those 90s writers and see what they read, what they listened to, just to understand what was feeding their minds while they wrote these masterpieces.

Naturally, when I got back to paperback romance novels, they felt a bit... flat.

Anyway, long live fanfic writers. You're the backbone of every fandom.

᯽ The intricacies of an adult student

I don't remember if I mentioned it before, but I'm studying psychology. I woke up one day at twenty-eight and decided that what my life needed was to get back to exams, group projects, presentations, and the ever-youthful tag of being a student once more.

I don't know how it is where you're from, but in my country it's quite common to have people of all different ages studying for a degree. Most of them are twenty-year-olds, yes, but then you have the bunch of thirty-somethings, the forty-to-fifty powerhouse women, mothers, lawyers. You have twenty-five-year-olds who decided youth is passing by and things are getting seriously real. You go to class and you see twenty-year-old kids who don't know what to do with their lives, so they might as well do something in the humanities department, and the other side of that same coin, kids who believe they were born for this and want to fly through the whole four years so they can start working in the field their parents put so much money into. You get people like me, finally, finally landing somewhere that feels right and true to who they are, and seventy-seven-year-olds who need to feel they can still absorb knowledge, who need a purpose to keep them from just staying at home.

It's a beautiful, messy place, college.

But this subtitle is not about that particularly, lol. Or it is. I don't know, we'll see.

It's about studying psychology and learning so much about yourself through it. I've been thinking about that a lot this week. Maybe because I've been having such a hard time sitting down and studying for midterms.

Professionals always remind you not to major in psychology just because you need to understand things about your own life. There needs to be a serious purpose behind it, something that will drive you to become a good professional yourself, someone who can be trusted with people's mental health. But... but, the truth is, it helps. This is what my therapist told me. "I shouldn't say that to you, but I cannot tell you it won't help you particularly. I think you'll benefit so much more." And she was right. I don't go around excusing my family dynamics or my own misbehaviors, but there's a certain understanding of it all that allows me to look at things from such a different perspective. In most classes, everyone ends up learning more about themselves as well as everyone else.

Now... to study!

᯽ Re-establishing my Kindle uses

I'm a paper girl. I always will be. There's nothing I love more than buying books and perhaps not reading them for like a year, yes, but always having one to read, pages to turn, lines to underline.

Some years ago, I was reading so much and spending so much time away from my country that I figured I should invest in something that wouldn't have me traveling back and forth with a million books in my suitcase, and so I bought a Kindle. I used it a lot, but when I returned home and stopped spending so much time outside my country, I went back to buying books because I figured it was more me. 

This, being from South America, comes with some difficulties. Most of the books I want to read are not available in English, and usually, if a book was originally written in English, I will want to read it in its original language. However, I still somehow manage to get my hands on all sorts of other books, or whatever is available.

I could never connect with my Kindle, I'll be honest. I didn't like the settings, I didn't like that it was slow (10th generation), that sometimes the screen would freeze, that I couldn't personalize it with my own background or something instead of having it show me Kindle Unlimited promos. Plus, I got an iPad mini and completely forgot that the whole point of using a Kindle was basically so I wouldn't fuck up my vision staring at other types of screens. My mind got comfortable reading ebooks on my iPad. But recently, my best friend got herself a Kindle, and it seems the spies in my phone were paying attention because they started showing me TikTok content about e-readers and which one I should get, blah, blah.

My little old Kindle was revived just so I could check what condition I'd left it in. We'll see how it goes. I figured that for certain types of books, it might be worth it. 

᯽ Girl, stop watching stuff.

I talked about how I started watching Everwood, and it has been great. In fact, it was so great that my sister decided to join me and ended up getting really hooked on it. But since she's been away on a trip, I feel bad about keeping going without her, so I've been finding other ways to distract myself. Dawson's Creek rewatch ensues.

Watching and rewatching these late 90s, early 00s tv shows makes me think a lot about how media changes over the years. I've talked about it a lot in other posts I've made, but I see it so clearly with Dawson's Creek. It's the type of show I've seen people call boring by today's standards, but when I watch it, I just feel so relaxed. It operates on a completely different, quieter wavelength that it doesn't seem to exist anymore (Not just Dawson's Creek, every show from that time) 

Back then, DC was considered overly dramatic and foolish for making teenagers speak so wittily and eloquently, so articulately, and, in a very valid criticism, very unrealistically. But personally, watching it much, much later when I was a teenager myself, I always thought it was a cool thing they were doing, crediting young people with the ability to have deep thoughts, form deep connections, and basically use big words. I thought it was far more interesting than having millennials write scripts filled with Gen Z slang that, considering how quickly those words fall out of fashion, ends up feeling dated almost immediately, and often fails miserably anyway.

Rushed Random thoughts before leaving:

ཐི༏ཋྀ  Joey was so difficult sometimes. Girl, just be friends with Jen and stop feeling so superior.

ཐི༏ཋྀ  Onigiris.

ཐི༏ཋྀ Pacey was truly that character. 

ཐི༏ཋྀ  Dumb mind. I really haven't been thinking about much.

ཐི༏ཋྀ  Oh wait. Shoes. I need shoes for a wedding.

ཐི༏ཋྀ  Fruity drinks.

ཐི༏ཋྀ Gonna watch Practical Magic 2 tomorrow. Trying to be positive, but I have so many questions about it, none of them are particularly optimistic.

ཐི༏ཋྀ  I'm this close 👌 to start writing Charlie x Carlisle fanfiction. I need those edits to stop showing up.