I AM BORED!
Hi Girls,
Everything is boring. I feel the creep of the ennui.Or maybe it’s a skoach of burnout? I’ve been living like a hermit the past few weeks because I’ve just been so. very. tired. But this self induced isolation has had the opposite effect! I don’t feel rested at all, I feel like I’m missing out and I still have so much to do. Between work, remembering to feed myself, the 900 loads of laundry I must do, looking for an apartment – I feel like I can never just be still!! The follow up to this is that I am so so bored with everything I am consuming.
Nothing is striking me. Where is the deeply entertaining media!!! I am easily entertained (as I loudly proclaimed last week) but it’s so short lived. I need something like Peaky Blinders to capture my interest and have six seasons I can binge watch.
I need a movie like Nope to enthrall me and make my head spin. I need a book series to sink its teeth into my brain the way that Throne of Glass did. Maybe I need to go to Six Flags and just ride a bunch of roller coasters?
Perhaps it’s because I am lacking a new sitcom to watch as my wind down evening show. I just finished the Mindy Project for the fourth time. It’s getting to the point where I think I’m dreaming the plots. I’ve also been reading more nonfiction, which while I truly believe is necessary, is also boring.
Help me break out of this rut. Give me something entertaining. Help my brain take a break from analyzing apartment floor plans. Drop your recs!!!
Very truly yours,
Julianne
Hello Julianne,
Every time I write your name I want to add two L’s Jullianne, I am sorry to hear that you are reading non-fiction.
You need something to experience! Summer, though my least favorite season, evokes some of my favorite pieces of media ever! For books, I recommend Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels—the first of which is the greatly (and rightly) lauded My Brilliant Friend. For a shorter read, I recommend Annie Ernaux’s A Girl’s Story, which is the sharpest, most candid portrait of girlhood I have ever read. It does not lose any of its specificity or vividness to generalities, identity or symbol. Actually, I can say similar things about Ferrante’s works. These books are the top of their class.
Seamus Heany’s Blackberry Picking is my favorite summer poem. It sums up my thoughts about the season well. Too much. Rot. We read this poem in Mrs. Merryman’s AP Lit class senior year I believe… I can’t quite remember, but I can see the words stark on a white piece of paper on my desk near the back windows of the classroom. The room was usually set up so that our desks faced each other in a circle, but in this memory we were all free-floating, so it must’ve been an exam of some sort.
For movies, I recommend American Honey, The Before Trilogy (many people stop at Before Sunrise, but my favorite is the last: Before Midnight), and Thirteen. The three-season, German-language, time-travel masterpiece Dark is also on Netflix and it recently hypnotized myself and co and will forever haunt me. A new season of The Bear on Hulu is coming out, so if you haven’t seen it already, get on it.
There’s something about a cool, dark cineplex in the pupil of a hot and shiny summer day that makes me feel expansive. I myself am also excited to watch Twisters starring Glen Powell (in a cowboy hat) and Daisy Edgar-Jones once it comes out in theaters, as well as the new horror film, Longlegs starring Nicholas Cage.
May you soon be enthralled!
Love,
Mackenzie
Hello,
KENZIE we are like 🤞 today!!!
Everything you recommended I have been thinking about recently. I have been meaning to get into My Brilliant Friend for a while now. My lovely friend Lillian recommended Ferrante's Neapolitan series to me, and as she and you have capital taste I will have to indulge. Also I need to see Longlegs immediately!! And TWISTER?? I’m sat and chomping at the bit.
Julianne, on the topic of your ennui: I have lately been feeling a bit the same, but this week I have been back on the famed Pendulum, swinging between extreme anxiety for the future and struck with intense wonder at the soothing promise of possibility that summer always seems to bring.
Something about simmering sidewalks sizzling out into cicada soundtracked evenings makes me feel limitless and blanketed in sleepy comfort.
Last night Michelle and I met up with some of our friends in Prospect Park around 7 and we stayed talking about anything and everything until nearly 11 o’clock. With the sky fading to a smoked out navy, fireflies winking, and bugs biting the shit out of me, we reveled in the delicious charge in the atmosphere when stars align and gift you a perfectly imperfect moment.
Maybe you need to go somewhere with a cinematic Americana background, pretend you are Lana, let a bug bite you and think about the pleasure of a simple, ephemeral moment. Even if it doesn’t enthrall you, at least it will instill you with a sense of whimsy and nostalgia.
As far as a recommendation, I started watching doctor who again as a comfort show and I have to say it really holds up!
Much love,
Avery
Dear Julianne,
I think maybe you’re just too fabulous to be caught in the 9-5 of it all??? Maybe you need to go to grad school, or start dancing again - take up some all consuming hobby (no shade on your gorgeous needlepoint, but maybe you need something that cannot be paired with evening television).
I hope you find something to capture you soon! Should we watch and read outlander?? It has worked as an escape for many a middle aged mother. Why not us?
Love always,
Sydney
