I’ve got to admit that it’s been tough to write here lately, what with the societal implosion around us. But I honestly don’t really want to read about that (an exception is Sarah Kendzior’s recent essay The Craftsman, which really resonated with me). So I’m not going to write about it. In fact, I came up with more ideas for my Coping Mechanism Game, but I’m just going to update that post whenever that happens, so you won’t have to read about it unless you’re looking for it.
So, what else is going on? The extremely adorable Cute W made me some flowers for Valentine’s Day. We both find it pretty irritating that our cats are extremely intrigued by flower arrangements and want to eat them. It’s really decreased our flower consumption.
But these flowers are not only lovely; they hearken back to our very first Valentine’s Day, when Cute W painstakingly made a dozen tissue paper roses for me. I still have the roses, but as you might expect for tissue paper that’s more than 30 years old, they are not very cute anymore. Many years ago, when I was a graduate student with a part-time job at Columbiana, the library and museum of Columbia, I asked my fantastic boss, an old woman who was a specialist in archival preservation, what I could do to preserve them. She basically shrugged and said I was S.O.L. (Incidentally, it looks like this place no longer exists, which is too bad. Back when I worked there, there was a main reading room, plus you could access a locked room that housed, among other things, a pistol from the Hamilton-Burr duel back before that would have caused a tourist torrent).
Last night, a few members of my DocuMamas documentary group met up at Simone’s Kitchen for dinner, where we were able to sample this year’s Schenectady Soup Stroll champion, a Moroccan carrot with apple-cashew cream and hazelnut crunch.
Then we headed to Proctors, where we watched this year’s Oscar-nominated Documentary Shorts. When I suggested this, it sounded like nobody had heard about this event, and so please allow me to give it a little plug for future. Every year before the Oscars, Proctors has three different shows made up of Oscar-nominated short films. There’s one for live-action films, one for animated films, and one for short documentaries. For each of the shows, there’s typically two showings, one on a weekday afternoon, and one on a weekend evening. Literally for years, I’ve said, “Oh, I’d like to do that. I should go to one of these,” and then either I’d have a conflict or I’d just forget about it entirely. And I finally made it to documentaries, I’ll see if Cute W wants to see the animation one, and now I’m marking my calendar in January to check the schedule so I can go to more of them in the future.
Also, I was surprised by the sparse attendance at the show. I remember that way back when Bowtie was coming into town, they’d made promises about how they’d supply some of the kind of artsy and independent films that we typically can only see if we schlep to Spectrum 8 in Albany. And then they totally didn’t show any of those movies, and I’ve been lowkey bitter about it ever since. However, I’ve basically slept on the fact that Proctors offers some of these movies in their GE Theatre (if you’ve never attended anything in this theater, it’s basically to the left if you’re standing in line at the box office). And it occurs to me that if we all went to more of the films that they are showing now, they’d start showing more films, and then eventually we would have a good source of films in downtown Schenectady. Now, I’m not gonna lie: it’s not the most comfortable theater ever. The seats are all connected so that if someone’s moving down the row from you, you basically start bouncing. But you could always move! Coming attractions include a Thursday night series of movies by women directors for Women’s History Month, plus you can still catch the Oscars animation shorts showing on March 1st.
Oh, and another update: back in December I decided that I was going to start actually posting to Instagram, except that instead of doing personal updates and social posts, I was going to use it as a little record of my hobbies, like embroidery and gardening and houseplants and general craftiness. Then I went into a bit of an Existential Crisis because I didn’t want to share anything with Mark Zuckerberg and Meta. So I froze on Instagram, I fully deleted Threads, and I took a big step back from Facebook, limiting my time there and posting there. But Instagram is such a nice little mental health break that I’ve decided I’m not quitting, and instead I’ve just decided that I absolutely can’t interact with any of the ads (which is pretty rough for me, because when that Etsy carousel of 20 of the cutest, most highly-targeted crafts come across my feed, I really want to go shopping!). And, also for my general joy, I’ve decided to relent and go ahead and post the crafty stuff, after all. There’s not much there yet, but if you’re interested in following, I’m here.
