🔖 Read Feminist Death Work: A History.
🔖 Read Funerals are expensive, broken and exploitative. They have to change
I love what Sarah Chavez says:
Your death matters. You can choose something that will reflect the values and beliefs that you held in your life, and translate them into your death.
Currently reading: The Artist’s Way - Spiritual Electricity: The Basic Principles by Julia Cameron 📚
Big Kimberly Energy, according to W., is writing a full parody libretto for a musical.
Anybody else get a little Billy-Crystal-as-Miracle-Max vibe from Brent Spiner’s performance as very-old Dr. Noonian Soong? 🖖🏻📺
🖖🏻📺 Depression doesn't need a reason. (Star Trek Discovery 4x02 spoilers)
This post contains minor spoilers for Star Trek Discovery Season 4 Episode 2, “Anomaly.”
Near the end of the latest episode of Discovery, Lt. Tilly tells Dr. Culbert that something feels off about herself, and that she’d like to talk to him about it in a professional context sometime.
This feels to me like a clear indication that Tilly is dealing with depression, anxiety, or both, and I’m very interested in following where this goes, especially as I read Tilly as my own sort of Discovery-avatar.
Over at Keith R. A. DeCandido’s recap for Tor.com, a commenter says,
The best thread for later is Tilly. Does she miss her mother? Is it about all the stress and loss and responsibility they’ve had? Mental health is an all too often ignored issue, so I hope they do it justice.
I, too, hope they do it justice, but what I don’t need is for there to be something Tilly’s depression is “about.” There certainly are things that can trigger depression, but the depression itself isn’t always a response to trauma. Sometimes it just happens because your body isn’t producing the chemicals it needs to.
I would love to see Tilly work through identifying how she’s feeling, struggling to decide between treatment options (or whether to go beyond talk therapy at all), and dealing with the consequences of whatever treatment she chooses. I’d also just love to see what mental health care looks like in the 32nd century.
But I don’t need there to be a reason she’s depressed.
Because depression doesn’t require a reason to appear.
Information is my love language.
I want to mark Stephen Sondheim’s passing with a story about his influence in my life but there are too many little moments to sum it all up. What a joy to have had him in the world as long as we did.
Bless Linda Holmes and her holiday movie guides.