Oh damn, I'm so glad I wasn't the only one.

I've been trying to skew specifically towards nonfiction books that feel like they will be actively helpful or uplifting. Of course right now I am reading a very sad one but for the MOST part. :P Looking for things that feel generative and fortifying, rather than getting me stuck in despair, y'know?

We're currently reading a book called Making Good Neighbors: Civil Rights, Liberalism, and Integration in Postwar Philadelphia by Abigail Perkiss. I had no idea there were neighborhoods that very intentionally fought back against redlining and segregation and it has been FASCINATING to read.

A couple books I read/am reading with Morgan this year that have been really great...
We read a book called City Limits: Infrastructure, Inequality, and the Future of America's Highways by Megan Kimble that blew my mind, definitely really meaningfully shifted how I thought about roads.

I read the Three Body series this year and REALLY loved it. I also read a book this year called Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement by Barbara Ransby that I found so incredibly inspiring and fortifying. Really just an amazing woman.

Fair enough! In preparation for it I did get to watch both of the earlier Trons for the first time and I did really enjoy those so that was probably worth it

Nice! I also saw all of those things. I did not care for Tron: Ares unfortunately

We went to go see that last night! But yeah, it's a limited release, only playing at our local indie theater. I hope you make it! What else did you see?

So instead I will send it out to BlueSky.

Happy... Thanksgiving?

In exciting news, I was ACTUALLY so sad because my brutally emotionally abusive parents and all the churches I grew up in had actually kinda decimated my brain and I was lonely and extremely lost.
Anyway. I was tempted to respond to the email and tell him some of this... but there's no point.

They were good songs, certainly better than the CCM garbage that was popular at the time. But they were a part of how suicidal I was, how extremely miserable. Not the cause, but a greek chorus living in my head to always remind me I wasn't holy and that must be why I was so sad.

Like I remember sobbing in corners (we met in this beautiful old Lutheran church with stained glass windows) to almost all of these worship songs because I knew I would never actually be good enough. It's distant, almost like a different person, but it still popped up immediately.

the man ended up leaving the church. But he was predatory while there too! Doesn't count, I suppose, never a "true believer"
Anyway. It's just so weird to read this very fond and loving memory of a time that for me was so brutally dark and cold and that the church consistently made worse.

It's so weird to read, I believe he is still in the faith, in spite of everything with that church and everything with Mars Hill later. He's talking about his former roommates, including one who I consider in retrospect to have been predatory, to me at least, and I know he'd write that off because

Lol I mean, everyone is in love with Charlie, which one?

I know it is a lot because everything is existing IP right now but why's Springsteen in there?? Just his own IP I guess.

Anyway, Tron Ares is fun to watch stoned one time in a theater, but I can't imagine I'd revisit it like I almost certainly will the others.