School Spirits means more to me than I ever could have imagined. When I first saw the ad pop up on my Fire TV home screen it went right over my head. Then when I noticed Spencer MacPherson as one of the people in the promo I decided to give it a go. (Spencer MacPherson is also starring in the Hallmark show The Way Home, another current favorite of mine.)

One of the ghosts who haunts the high school (all of the spirits live on campus and cannot leave unless they cross over into the next life) is Charley, who died in the mid-1990s and has a gay backstory I can relate to all too well.

The show is just so genuinely good-hearted and tragic and yet still sometimes light-hearted and fun.I know I've already written about it before, but it resonates with me in a way that feels life-saving and less lonely.

I'm on a break at work and I just checked my pet cam to look in on my cat. I do this about three times a day over an eight hour period but I am not fanatical about it. I do so because I like to make sure my cat seems okay and I miss him. 

My cat has a human name so when I talk about him and someone happens to overhear who doesn't know Henry is a cat they can get a funny Mr.Furley expression on their face.

One time I was telling someone a few years ago I couldn't get Henry to join me in bed and someone else commented "is that appropriate conversation for work?" It was much funnier in the moment than it is in talking about it now, but anyone who knows me at all knows I don't talk about sex at work, much less anywhere else.

Anyway, I love Henry as much as I would a human and there are two people in my life for which this gives them great concern and a big need to tell me how misguided I am to love an animal so much.

If I am misguided, so be it. Animals, more than ever, often make better companions than a lot of humans do.

In three days it will be six weeks since I last drank wine and I'm surprised at how much I don't miss it. After all, I went for more than five years drinking it pretty much every day unless I were sick or recuperating from my broken wrist. 

Even going in the liquor store on my most indifferent days I still always felt a tiny bit of shame, the smells of the bottles hitting my nose obnoxiously even when I didn't think they were. And if I ever saw an adult accompanied with small children I would think back to my childhood, when my mom would take my sister and me with her to get wine.

I look back now as if it has been years instead of weeks without and I wonder what I was thinking and doing all that time and what I can do with the shame. I absolutely despised alcohol from an early age and never touched a drop until I was in my 40s, when I apparently began to make up for lost time.

Because my health has improved and I seem to be losing some weight, though not as much as I had hoped, I am determined to take dry January into all of 2025. I joked with some friends when Trump won that 2025 would be a terrible time to give up wine, but now I realize it really is the best time to do so. I have a feeling a lot of us are going to need all our wits about us.

In his book, The Cruelty Is the Point: Why Trump's America Endures, Adam Serwer, an award-winning journalist at The Atlantic, presents a compelling argument that the cruelty witnessed during Donald Trump's presidency is not an anomaly but a reflection of deeply entrenched dynamics in American history. Serwer's essays dissect the most devastating moments in recent memory, revealing patterns as old as the country itself.

One of the central themes of the book is that Trump is not the cause of America's issues but a symptom. This perspective is particularly relevant as we observe the ongoing political and social landscape since Trump began his second term as president The January 6 insurrection, anti-immigrant sentiment, and American authoritarianism all have historic roots that explain their continued power, with or without Trump.

Serwer's phrase "the cruelty is the point" resonates across centuries, encapsulating the intentional infliction of harm on political opponents that has become a hallmark of Trumpism. This cruelty is evident in Trump's handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, where his refusal to address the crisis adequately was seen as a racist act, sacrificing the lives of disproportionately Black and Brown workers to fuel the economy.

Since Trump's return to the presidency, his administration has continued to push policies that reflect this cruelty. From mass layoffs at the U.S. nuclear weapons agency to the controversial handling of immigration and tariffs on steel and aluminum, Trump's second term has been marked by actions that many see as harmful and divisive.

The relevance of Serwer's book today lies in its ability to connect past and present, urging readers to confront the brutal realities of American history and politics. As we navigate the complexities of Trump's second term, it becomes increasingly important to recognize the patterns of cruelty and injustice that have long been part of the American experience.

 

I just finished the first season of School Spirits and I am floored by both the plot twists and the emotions. The show is way, way, way better than I could ever capture here.

There are so many things about the show I could write about if I had the right words, but one thing I want to talk about briefly is how I see ghosts as being deeply connected to the theme of closure and the heartbreak of not finding it for decades, if ever.

One of the ghost characters deeply regrets how things ended up with the boy he loved in high school. 28 years later, he finds himself writing a letter to “the love of his life” and hopes that he can both forgive and be forgiven for things that transpired when they were students in the mid-1990s. It’s a credit to both the actors and the writing and the atmospheric feel of the scene that it is touching and heartbreaking instead of creepy.

Boy, did this hit hard, both personally and because the show is just so good at pulling on your heart strings. My own situation is completely different and obviously I’m not a ghost. But I see the theme of being haunted (by something you did years and years ago) as something that can happen to a person who is alive or not alive. It’s one reason I think having ghosts and high school connected works so well and beautifully in School Spirits.

Whether we’re invisible in high school or we’re an adult years later and are stuck on things that happened to us as teenagers, we don’t need to be an actual ghost to be haunted or haunting.