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.
Hello world. Imagine I’m interested in fountain pens but am a complete beginner. Where would you tell me to go to learn more? What would your advice be? How do I get started? ✒️🖋️
Reading STEAL LIKE AN ARTIST again and when Austin Kleon described Patti Smith pretending to be an artist I thought “Cool, I’ll pretend to be a writer” and now I’m doing a Google image search for writer. So far it’s mostly disembodied hands writing in notebooks, so I’m on track.
Finished: The Artist’s Way - Introduction by Julia Cameron. 📚
Cameron’s introduction is very introducey, setting a foundation for understanding the work of The Artist’s Way and explaining her own story. My favorite quote from this section is probably “Accumulate pages, not judgments.” (p. xv)
Cameron spends a fair amount of time here talking about her use of the term “God” in the book, and how it’s there because this is a spiritual path but you don’t need to be a theist to follow it. She suggests substituting something like “good orderly direction” or “flow” if “God” makes you uncomfortable.
I think I’m going to substitute “Cosmic Art Mom.”
I am agnostic, humanist, and a bit witchy. I haven’t identified as Christian for a very long time, and I’m no fan of the idea of a sky bully, but from a tiny age I believed in a Sky Mom, and I kind of still do.
My earth mom is a theologian by training, and taught me a lot about who God is supposed to be before I ever went to church. When I finally went to a church and they kept referring to God as “he,” I was outraged. I said, “No! God is a Mommy!” because everything my mom said - creation, unconditional love - these things were, in my mind, things moms did.
I didn’t know I was doing the toddler version of Goddess Spirituality, but I pretty much was. In spite of my agnosticism, I still fall pretty squarely somewhere on the Goddess movement spectrum. I have an intuitive sense that there is a Sky Mom - or maybe I’ll just stick with Cosmic Mom from now on - out there looking out for me. I can get a bit Deist about it at times because obviously stuff goes wrong for me specifically and the world at large - but especially now that I’m a mom, I kind of get it. Moms mess up. Our attention wanders sometimes.
Like many ancient deities, Cosmic Mom can bear a variety of epithets. I’ll probably imagine Cosmic Art Mom, who, for the record, is pretty much a deified Carrie Fisher, as I work through The Artist’s Way.
What do you think of when you see “God” in The Artist’s Way?