Some Info To Remember Later:

Rewatching YOU in anticipation of the final season, and season 1 is so damn good. The acting, the writing, the editing, the ACTING. Lail and Badgely are fucking phenomenal.

I'm definitely biased because I love the book so much but damn. There are so many bangers in this season.

"One day you won't need love anymore."

"It is EXHAUSTING being your friend."

"Get the batter off the ladle while it's wet."

"From every boy masquerading as a man that you let into your body, your heart, you learned you didn't have whatever magic turns a beast into a prince."

Anyway this show got real silly but the first season is amazing.

"I wonder if they ever ask themselves how they got here, and I wonder if any of them will ever feel shame."

I realize that there is nuance in individual beliefs and that politics is a spectrum. But do you think JKR ever looks at the headlines and sees what Trump is doing on the day to day and thinks yeah, that guy is batshit crazy (or insert British equivalent) but, you know, he's right about trans people.

Due to some ✨childhood trauma✨ I used to be so anxious about having political discussions. I've always been interested in politics and that autistic boner for social justice, and I believed that by "winning" "debates" I could change the way the other person and/or audience thought, and ideally make them agree with me.

As I've aged the goal has been more to correct misinformation because obviously they've been lied to and don't have the right data or they would already agree? Possibly because I myself have always been learning, gathering more context, adjusting my ideas and beliefs, etc. (For example, as a teenager I didn't understand affirmative action, so I didn't agree with it. That has thankfully changed.)

There's a lot wrong with this approach and this thinking, which I'm working on (thanks therapy). But one of those things that is almost relieving is that data doesn't convince people whose egos are on the line, because nothing does. Once you have determined that your sense of self relies and self-worth relies on an ideology, nothing will sway you, because you'd have to admit you were wrong, or that you caused harm. (For some people, admitting the former is harder than admitting the latter.)

Getting older is so fucking hard.

I'm going to be 35 in a couple months and it really sucks that I feel like I'm wasting my life, especially my 'good' years, the years I *should* have been happy, healthy, hot. My life hasn't materially changed since around 2019, which feels like yesterday and like a previous life. Of course I have done things, some of them really cool, and I've made memories and ticked things off my bucket list. And the world has gone through some shit and so have I, but in many ways I feel like I've stagnated. It feels like I'm too late to enjoy life, feel beautiful, be loved.

I look at the past through a rose-colored rear-view mirror so of course I think of college as my happiest time, even despite all the shit that happened during those first four years (the aftermath of both my grandfathers dying, being unhappily chronically single, my mom's drinking getting so bad she was hospitalized, being so socially anxious it took entire semesters to make friends, a handful of unrequited crushes culminating in a severe heartbreak, subsequent desperate dating escapades, a retail job I abhorred).

Then there were two huge shake-ups: I got a boyfriend and I got into grad school. The next couple years I also generally think of fondly--moving a few hours away from my family, moving in with my first boyfriend, going to school to study what I have always loved. Something about being far away from everyone we knew made those years feel like an extended honeymoon. It was far from perfect but it was something.

When I got my first "real" (full time with benefits and paid sick leave etc.) job, those six months of commuting were ROUGH, but honestly they were acutely rough, so different from how things would get the next year. Because 2017 was maybe the worst year of my adult life? (Still has nothing on my childhood/adolescence though.)

(there is a lot I could say about my ex but the highlights are that he was 13 years older than me, emotionally stunted, incapable of taking care of himself or anyone else, manipulative, selfish, used me, and ended up virtually cheating on me with some kind of cam girl.)

Perhaps the best illustration of how that relationship was and how it ended is that even now, over SEVEN years after I broke it off, I STILL have nightmares where we're back together. The relief I feel when I wake up and he's not in my life has not faded a bit.

In 2018-2019, I was doing great. I started taking care of my body, got my own place and a cat, met new friends, reconnected with my siblings. And then...2020 happened. I really can't complain about it--nobody I knew died, my job was fine, I got vaccinated for free as soon as I could. But something about it just sapped so much of my soul. I like to think I was doing better in the second half of 2021, when I was vaxxed and could see my friends and hug my siblings again.

But at the end of 2021, my grandma got sick. And I spent a lot of 2022 helping her and my sibling keep afloat. It was a rough year for all of us--Grandma needed a lot of help, my sibling was seriously struggling, and my own health/mental health took a back seat.

At the beginning of 2023, Grandma died. That was much worse. She was the closest thing to a mother I think I'll ever have. Then my sibling moved in with me and was struggling with mental health for a full year. We're 9 years apart and I often feel more like a parent than a sibling given what our childhoods were like, and let me tell you, parenting a 24-year-old is not fucking easy. It could be so much worse but damn. This kid will give me gray hairs.

Toward the end of 2023 we lost our foster kitten and I don't have words to express how hard that experience was. Our other sibling also moved about 90 minutes away which made things harder.

In several ways 2024 felt like progress-- sibling finally got a job and was in therapy, I got a new therapist and spent way more time with friends, I did some traveling and flew in a plane for the first time.

And then... The other bad thing happened. To top that off, before Inauguration Day, I found out my closest friend was moving to Colorado. These past three months have flown by and now she's gone and I'm not doing so hot.

I'm 34, I've been single for seven fucking years, I still don't own a house because I'm only halfway done paying off my student loans, I work for the same damn company I've worked for since 2016, I still haven't published a book, my health still isn't great, I have no friends nearby, I've been in therapy for years but I'm still dealing with the same bullshit, and I feel like an asshole for bitching this much about a soft and cushy, privileged life, especially given the state of the world.

Tldr; this sucks

When you're a giving person, who takes care of people and doles out emotional support like you're being paid, and you find yourself in a friendship where the other person doesn't reciprocate, do you push back? Do you demand support? Do you pull back and stop giving so much? Do you decide that this is how things are and you can either get used to it or walk away?

It's hard not to feel resentful when the friendship feels like there are different rules for different people. And (this is a me problem) I HATE having to ask to have my emotional needs met. It makes things feel artificial and forced. Again, me problem. If they cared, wouldn't they have asked or said something before? Or is that just the toxic 'mind-reading' bullshit my parents ingrained into me from birth?

Murmur, Cameron Barnett

Another thing I've realized is that debate "topics" are not and should not be viewed as existing in a vacuum, and I honestly think that conservatives/right-leaning thinkers push this idea because they know, unconsciously or otherwise, that their ideology is internally inconsistent.

For example, take the abortion debate and the antivax debate. In the latter conservatives will argue that people have the right to choose what happens to their bodies, that the safety of others should be considered secondary or not at all, that their autonomy should come first. And those same people will argue that the life of a fetus is more important than the life of its parent, that the fetus overwrites the autonomy of the parent and that the parent should have no right to end the pregnancy regardless of their feelings on it.

Obviously there are other arguments on both topics out there, but as an example, you can see how disingenuous the thinking is. Somehow the life of an unborn zygote is more important than the life of its creator and the right of its parents to make stupid medical decisions is more important than the safety of all the kids in its future daycare.

I haven't started s5 yet but I wanted to do a mini review for each season of YOU from someone who loved the first book and enjoyed the others:

S1: obvi most closely follows the books, but also is a great season of TV in general. Performances, music, visuals, story. It grasped some of the series' main themes, about terrible people and delusion and dedication vs dependence. Just excellent.

S2: big departure from the book but mostly pretty good. I actually loved Forty and Ellie and Delilah and Willie B. But this is where the series starts to lose something in the sense that because those characters are sympathetic, balancing them with the humanity of Joe gets tricky. I'm not crazy about the Love twist but at least the season is entertaining.

S3: woof. Possibly my least favorite season of the first four. It's just so sad, Love clinging to her marriage while Joe is Joe. I mean she is also coocoo banana pants but at least she admits it? And although a major departure from her book counterpart, Marianne is amazing. Same problem with S2 though in that many of the supporting characters, at least IMO (Theo, Shary and Cary, Dante) are really compelling and so the portrayal of Joe is flattened.

S4: Honestly kind of a return to form while also being a giant "what the fuck." The supporting characters other than Phoebe, Nadia, and Kate are awful people (cartoonishly so) and while the twist is both a huge cliche and a middle finger to actual psychology, it is fun. Ed Speelers is fucking fantastic. And by this point, at least for me, the show has lost all pretence that Joe is anything but an unredeemable serial killer and they're leaning in. Which is like not really the point of the original story but it was inevitable given the nature of TV, especially in the streaming age.

Tldr; excited for S5 and ready for some justice.

Whenever Haymitch insulted Effie's outfits during the main triology, it wasn't his fault, he was being possesed by Maysilee's ghost