Three good things:

1. The Amazing Spider-Man was mostly a great movie. It brought out a lot of feels in me, but otherwise it was a great distraction from the sadness miasma of my birthday weekend.

2. Silently and Very Fast is Valente at her best: weaving together recast fairy- and folk-tales—I especially liked the one about Alan Turing, particularly in light of a particular bad fairy-tale movie of late—into a cohesive but non-linear story about an artificial intelligence and its relationship to the history of a human family, as well as the nature of A.I.’s in general. The structure reminds me of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman run, interspersing side-stories with the main plot. It all works quite well.

3. Liu’s The Man Who Ended History is haunting: what if you could travel back in time to witness history as it’s being made, rather than relying on people who end up rewriting history in their own light? What if you decided to use this ability to observe a past atrocity that one side never acknowledges, while the other side hungers for substantive proof of the wrongs done to them? Man, this story can be heavy at times, but it’s an excellent tale—also somewhat non-linear in nature, though less so than Silently and Very Fast.

I’ll add one more:

4. NEW TEA NEW TEA NEW TEA NEW TEA NEW TEA!!!!!!!

Life thingies:

Well, I only managed to practice logic, a little bit of it, with the help of a close friend. I spent most of the weekend crying uncontrollably, grieving over all that happened to me. There wasn’t just grief; there was anger, too, which somehow led to more tears and more grief. Well, the grieving is a more normal reaction to all that happened—well, maybe the right word is healthier? Like, healthier than terror and intrusive memories? (Oh, little green pills, how much you’ve helped with the bipolar I.)

And in this context, anger doesn’t have much use. It had a use a long time ago, when I needed to get out of the situation with my insane parents, and anger allows one to overcome subjugation. But now, there are no legitimate targets left (unless you count the slim chance of my parents tracking me down), and that means the anger has a high probability of redirecting to the wrong conduit if I’m not very careful (i.e., thinking things through and applying logic). I’m not in the realm of anger management issues, but it might be that I’ll get there.