Week of Aug 24: Time travel, the first week of motherhood, and flies
August 24, 2026
There is so much stuff they (nurses, doctors, family, friends, strangers on the internet) say to prepare you for the newborn stage. But preparation here is only to become familiar. Maybe to manage expectations. It is not a game of memory. It is not monkey see monkey do.
When a baby cries there is a checklist of things to do, which seems straightforward. But in the thick of a tantrum, it feels like an escape room. Grasping at straws, thinking this clue will lead to a successful path. Sometimes it does and you feel wildly accomplished. And then sometimes it doesn’t and you feel defeated.
But at no point am I like “let me remember that webinar I watched at week 29,” or "oh yes, I remember the video the nurse made me watch before discharge.”
You are in the gauntlet babe.
[SPOILER ALERT: DARK, SEASON 1-3]
I wish I was fluent in time travel.
I think I’ve seen or read a dozen+ bodies of work that revolve around time travel and its tenants (including Tenent!). The rules are generally the same, like “don’t change your life,” but the basics are only the beginnings, and I frequently have to follow a complex path of the author’s imagination as the plot progresses, which is good for creativity and bad for retention.
An example of this is Season 3 of Dark.
Season 1 and 2 of Dark were very, very good. They were less garden-variety time travel and more flashbacks to other decades, in contrast to Season 3 where multi-dimensional time travel is introduced. I have to say, we’re one episode away from the finale and I couldn’t tell you what’s happening. Like, I cannot cobble a sentence together to explain a plot line to you.
The dual dimension is a challenge because I’m grasping for dear life at people’s physical traits to help explain when and where they are. Is the woman on the screen Martha-With-The-Cut-From-The-Other-Dimension-In-2020? Which is different from Martha-With-The-Cut-From-The-Other-Dimension-In-2022. So much of Season 3 is a narration of star crossed lovers and lives (I think) that aren’t answering any of my questions (or maybe they are?), rather than elucidating the Adam and Eva race to (?).
I’m desperate to return to simpler times when “Wo ist Mikkel?” was said like 90x per episode.
AND YET, I still push through because there’s inherent trust when something is crafted well. Like, I don’t actually know what’s happening, but the quality of production just makes me nod along like “oh right right for sure.” Compared to a hack job where I can lean on critiquing the output rather than my lack of understanding.
Furious
Furious was a tale of fragility. Where any and everything was on the verge of snapping so hard there’d be no repair, making characters perform grade-school level poor decision making as they try to piece things back together. Most times, it felt wrong to laugh, but moments like Choi’s “I just want to do my job” boy scout eagerness paired with Danny’s scrappy eye rolls were good to see.
But it’s harrowing to watch the crimes people will commit and the lengths they will go to turn a cheek to save their soul from damnation. The mental gymnastics they go through to justify their behavior, making it seem like their hands were tied the whole time. Woe is me, the enabler, the baker, the candlestick maker.
I finished Fruit Fly. Oddly, this is the second book I’ve read this year with “fly" in the title, the first being Time of the Flies by Claudia Piñeiro.
Fruit Fly was good. It got a few chuckles out of me. I don’t think I have many more thoughts on it though. Oh, other than the husband needs to be thrown off a cliff.
I started Next of Kin and I don’t think I will enjoy it. Staying for what’s to be uncovered rather than the writing.
