#simply tragic

[tonightisforever]

let’s all have a moment of gratitude for those three seconds in The Firm where Tom wears those slutty little wire-rimmed glasses

also these

[aokuro-san]

THIS

[drvoizmogsna]

no offence but why did people on twitter realise how good bentancur is only now??? where have y'all been

[pineappletheatrekid]

Half a semester into high school and I have yet to be involved in a love pentagon nor have I been asked to sing an acoustic version of a pop song :(

[erregent]

                 gavin, sadly, has an incurable and serious case of RBF (resting bitch face.) it’s tragic. he default looks like he’s always having a bad time. 

[doyouknowhoyouare]

cant believe i’m not harry’s bestfriend and am being deprived of harry and his humor like that’s absolutely disgusting

[fluffycyclops]

Mimi doesn't like mango sorbet y'all😭

@gumballrightfoots @deviantaj

I'm so disappointed 😔

[roamingholiday]

Thursday, July 13th 2017

Our class had the discussion on Shadowlands today, and I did not sleep through it (pause for applause), because we didn’t watch much of the actual movie, and I am far more liable to stay awake when the lights are on and someone is talking to me.

Here are my updates about the movie: still hideously boring, though my professor seemed to think that the crying scene was beautifully tragic, and not like someone was attempting to give the Heimlich to a walrus. I suppose we can agree to disagree.

We also had a discussion about manic pixie dream girls, and how even in a movie based off of real life, if one boils down the only female character to a) how she directly helped the main male character and b) how she died, one can absolutely use the manic pixie dream girl trope, even if Joy Gresham can’t technically be a dream, given that she existed in real life. Nevertheless, male screenwriters and directors continue to persist, and make walking stereotypes out of every possible female lead.

After class, we prepared to go to our first play of the trip, which was tragically not Shakespeare.

Salome, at the National Theatre, was stunningly beautiful, despite it not being Shakespeare. The visual effects in particular were astonishing. At one point sand fell in sheets from a great height for a solid minute in the background of the set, set in a gold spotlight, while the two women who spent most of the play singing in the background entered and circled the stage. It was amazing.

I have to be honest, though, as I wasn’t part of the class that read Salome, and I hadn’t found a good summary of the play online, because this was a brand new production being staged, I was rather lost at some points. It was very beautiful, the staging and choreography were lovely, I really appreciated that one of the actors (John the Baptist, maybe?) spoke solely in Hebrew the entire time, but it was the sort of play that really requires some background knowledge to be understood, and all of my background knowledge was the wrong sort. Mostly I just listened to them announce John the Baptist as the most notorious criminal in the Roman Empire and thought about how, if this is the John the Baptist that I’m familiar with, and the time period that I think it is, then that is absolutely untrue. Romans didn’t actually care about Christianity until centuries later, really, and particularly at this time period (30-something CE, to be fairly imprecise) Rome itself was something of a dumpster fire, and the emperor Tiberius did not give one singular damn about what was going on in one of their weird far off districts because he was something like the eleventh choice for successor to Augustus and had no idea what he was doing and also was probably very aware at this point in time that Caligula was trying to assassinate him, so he didn’t care what happened with some new tiny rebellious religious group, he just wanted his governors to figure their problems out by themselves, because that’s why he hired them in the first place.

Which is to say that the only thing my background info does for me in this particular case is make it harder to suspend disbelief in any meaningful way.

The play was very nice, though, even if I had a bit of a hard time following it. Next play is Shakespeare, I’m a little more excited for that, I have to be hones.

Then I came home and made brownies at 11:00 pm, as one does. They were very nice brownies, the ovens here are perfectly functional, even if they are set in celsius. The entire tray was gone before morning, which I take as a compliment.