Back in the beginning of 2025 I decided to do dry January and then went from month to month still going dry. I slipped in my intentions in September and started my two drinks a night habit again, though "habit" seems way too innocuous a word for something that can cause so many serious problems. 

Last week I decided enough was enough and that I could kid myself all I wanted about alcohol not being that bad or alcohol probably not causing cancer if I made up for the bad in other areas of my life. I want to be healthy for my cat and I told him I would not be drinking any more and even though I know he doesn't understand my words I still find it works to be accountable to him. I love him more than anything and want to be able to take care of him. And he is the only being I know to whom I have never lied.

Another thing about drinking is that I managed to kid myself about what is heavy drinking and what isn't. I'm not going to say I thought two drinks a night was harmless, but I also never stopped to think that any more than 8 drinks a week for women is indeed heavy drinking. That woke me up and I'm hoping that this time sticks, even if I'm starting from scratch all over again.

I’m watching an old episode of Everybody loves Raymond and Marie has confessed that she likes Amy better than Debra because Amy is a virgin… Marie even goes as far as to say that Amy is “pure” and a “good girl.” (I think the writers were trying to show antiquated Marie’s thinking, but I’m not sure that was the point but if it was, the topic was kind of clumsily handled if you ask me.)

A woman’s goodness has absolutely nothing to do with whether she has had sex or not. I’m a virgin and I don’t consider myself pure at all. I’ve done things in my life I’m truly and deeply ashamed of, even if I definitely would change them if I could. 

Meanwhile, there are women who aren’t virgins who are good people. How on earth did we develop this mindset that a woman’s purity is dependent on whether she’s had sex or not and how come this isn’t applied to men?

Virginity is not a moral achievement. It’s a neutral state. A person who has had sex has not lost goodness; a virgin has not gained it. Morality is about how we treat others, with kindness, honesty and respect, not about what we do or don’t do with our own bodies.

The “purity” myth lets people confuse a lack of sexual experience with moral character, and it’s harmful to everyone, including the people it claims to “praise.”

I recently discovered a book written in 1890 called The Young Visiters. Daisy Ashford penned the novel as 9 year old and later, in her 20s, shared it for publication, through a rather complicated, but interesting series of circumstances. 

Part of the book's success in selling millions of copies had to do with a child’s bluntness in describing adult vulnerabilities.

What strikes me most is not the book itself (although it is uncannily mature for a child of her age to write, misspellings and all) but what the writer said years later:

 “I can never feel all the nice things that have been said about ‘The Young Visiters’ are really due to me at all, but to a Daisy Ashford of so long ago that she seems another person."

I am by no means a Jane Austen fan, yet I find this book fascinating and actually kind of funny:

from Kindle Highlights:

When I say “ruin,” I don’t mean the way you might, say, ruin a silk blouse by chasing a cat into a juniper bush. I mean the way you might ruin the song “Total Eclipse of the Heart” by telling someone that Bonnie Tyler originally meant it to be about vampires (this is true). I’ve now upended whatever uncomplicated associations you had with this song, and you’ll never be able to hear it without thinking of vampires again, but I’ve made it much more interesting. Anyway, English professors have lots of tools at our disposal for ruining your favorite books, and the way I prefer to ruin Pride and Prejudice is by pointing out how literature trains women to spend their time changing assholes into sensitive men instead of overthrowing the patriarchy.

.....>

my students like me even though I ruin it. They tell me I’m “relatable” and “super sweet and nerdy” (this was in an anonymous online review, and honestly, how very dare you). They also once said I was “the best birth control.” (That was when I was hugely, embarrassingly pregnant. Like, I texted a picture of myself to one of my best friends and instead of responding with “you’re glowing” or even “so excited,” she wrote back, “you look like a UFO.”) The birth control comment is not really related to my habit of ruining Pride and Prejudice, but I think it gives you a sense of what it’s like to study Jane Austen with me. That is, taking a class with me is all fun and games until you’re hugging your roommate in the English department lounge because you realized that you’ve been spending your time and energy and attention on taciturn or emotionally unavailable people, believing they are going to turn out to be slow-burn romantic heroes like Mr. Darcy—when really, they are often just assholes.

For one thing, as she points out, the silencing of women's voices is not exactly a new phenomenon. "If you think about Mary Shelley, how many women - even if they were, y'know, writing under their sewing, like the Brontes or something - could get published in the 19th century? Like, five?! I know there were more than five, but very, very few. That's also the motivation for me to make this, right? I have a lot of things to say, and so does the Bride, so does Jessie, so does Annette."

We accept the point, and we certainly wouldn't want anyone to think that the words

"A #MeToo Movie!" should be emblazoned above the title on the poster. But THE BRIDE! remains a political (with a small p) movie - at the same time as being exuberant fun. -from

SFX magazine

I recently saw Maggie Gyllenhaal's The Bride!, with Jessie Buckley and Christian Bale, set in 1930s Chicago, the "punk rock feminist reimagining" of Bride of Frankenstein . And I have to confess: I really, really liked it.

The trades have crunched the numbers. According to Deadline, this $80 million monster movie opened to a disastrous $7.3 million domestically and could lose $90 million . Variety called it a bomb. Reason magazine ran a scathing review declaring there's "not a single scene, line reading, or fleeting moment that lands" . The Daily Beast said it's "haphazardly stitched together" and "DOA" .

And yet. 

There I was, completely locked in watching Buckley's Bride, with her frizzed-out hair, that black bile stain on her face, that strange magnetic stillness, trying to figure out who she is in a world that didn't ask for her . There's a moment in the trailer where she asks, "Was I just the same before the accident?" and Bale's Monster replies, "There wasn't any accident. Everything we did, we did it on purpose" . 

Am I crazy? Or is The Bride! exactly the kind of movie that becomes a cult classic years later?

Maggie Gyllenhaal apparently had too many ideas: female empowerment movie, Bonnie & Clyde tragedy, punk rock monster musical, meta-commentary with Mary Shelley's ghost possessing the Bride . Testing indicated she needed to "strip back" the concepts. She didn't . The result? A movie one commenter on Deadline called "one of the worst movies I ever saw" while another in the same comment section said "I fully enjoyed every minute."

Christian Bale does a full "Puttin' on the Ritz" number—an homage to Young Frankenstein that apparently lands somewhere between "hysterically brilliant" and "completely baffling" depending on who you ask . Jessie Buckley is running on pure id, playing both the Bride and the ghost of Mary Shelley . Critics agree the acting is committed, the costumes are stunning, the cinematography is gorgeous . The movie looks like a cult classic, even if it doesn't always play like one.

The "Me Too" Climax. I have to mention this: the film's climax literally involves the Bride repeatedly shouting "Me too!" at no one in particular . Is that on-the-nose? Absolutely. Is that also the kind of moment that gets turned into a GIF, gets analyzed in film school essays, gets defended as "actually, it's deliberately Brechtian by fans in 2035? You bet it is.

The thing is, buried under all the "woke nonsense" criticism and the "this is the last vestige of pre-vibe-shift culture" hot takes, there are people who get what this movie was going for . The trailer descriptions emphasized a mix of "anarchy and melancholy," a sense that the Bride "wakes up angry. Awake. Entirely her own." . The Bonnie and Clyde framework, two disfigured outlaws on the run, testing whether love can survive when the world sees you as monsters, is genuinely compelling .

One fan on Celebitchy commented: "It looks wild and out there which isn't a bad thing so I wish it had done better. Female director and female lead role. I do want more of those" .

To be fair, The Bride! had terrible luck. It got pushed from its ideal October 2025 release (perfect for Halloween!) to early March, which is basically cinematic no-man's-land . It also came out soon enough after Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein hit Netflix that maybe audiences felt like they'd already gotten their monster-movie fix at home. 

Plus, there was that whole "Jessie Buckley hates cats" controversy that dominated discourse right when the film opened . (Long story: she allegedly made her husband rehome his cats, then had to do damage control on Fallon. As a huge cat lady, I absolutely despise that she did that, but I still find her acting simply amazing.)

Here's the thing about cult classics: they don't arrive fully formed, they get discovered. They get defended. They get re-evaluated when the cultural moment shifts and suddenly their "flaws" look like "vision."