#he feels he has to retroactively conclude they weren’t close

[thestarsarecool]

“I suppose the story was that [John and I] were pretty close in the beginning when we were writing stuff together. We felt alot of sympathy for each other, although on a personal level, based on a lot of stuff that went down later, I obviously wasn’t that close to him. To me, he was a fella, and you don’t get that close to fellas. I felt very close to him, but from alot of what he said later, obviously, I was missing in the picture. But anyway, I felt very close to him then and when the Beatles started to feel the strain towards the last couple of years, it was getting to be a bit of a strain and we were drifting more apart. I think the kind of anchor that had held us together was still there.”

— Paul McCartney, Music Express, 1982

#my quotes #what a fucking MESS #he literally goes #yes we were close #but I guess based on the beatles breakup we weren’t actually close #well that’s just normal cause we’re fellas #but I actually did feel really close to him #but I guess it was all a lie based on what he said later #but I still felt very close to him #but we broke up #but we were still together #like holy FUCK the back and forth and internal contradiction here is INSANE #it’s almost as bad as that April 1970 rolling stone interview #where he literally says that he and john used to call each other and they never called each other in the same breath #anyways though #sometimes I actually doubt paul and john were that close and I think that paul has just been convincing himself otherwise since 1989ish #but quotes like this actually convince me otherwise #where paul 100% believed they were close but the breakup shattered this belief #and since he never understood why john left #he feels he has to retroactively conclude they weren’t close #but that’s a retroactive assessment #ANYWAY #the best paul interviews are from 1970-1971/1981-1984/1998-2001 #cause for some reason when something traumatic happens something switches in his brain and he forgets how to lie #this may be my favorite paul interview btw #paul mccartney #john lennon #the beatles #beatles

[darkestbefore]

Irreconcilable Reconciliation

Guess I have to retype the last paragraph. Tumblr seems to freeze so easily. I just turned off the wi-fi. There we go. 

So fastforward from the last post about two years. Covid-19 is here. I’m laid off from both jobs and I just signed up for a divorce workshop for April 14th next month. Will we be sheltered at home until then? Will this virus be over? Who knows. More importantly, how did we get here? How did -I- get here?

I’m typing on my Asus which is hanging on by a thread. If I unplug it, it turns off. Needs a new battery. Listening to In The Air Tonight by Phil Collins. Gonna go though my playlists after that. Drinking Makers here and there because I low-key want to get drunk. My upper back is both sore and tense. 

I think if life had gone on the way it was, I never would have taken that extra step. Have I pulled the trigger? Not quite. Not until those forms are filled out by both of us and the process is put in motion would I say the trigger has been pulled. But am I loading the gun? I think so. I think this is it. With Luther and both jobs, my mind had preoccupied with the day to day, week to week. But with this imposed break, I’ve been forced to pause and examine things. Most of what I thought about has been my ambitions past, present, and future. Is bartending the final frontier for me? Or even being a bar owner? Should I learn more about investing? Are there other careers out there that I would excel at? I pondered this a lot on top of thinking about what I could learn in the mean time. I so far have concluded that while I may not learn something new overnight, I could use this forced break to set myself up better so that I’d be able to grow more as a person coming out of this. Some of my ideas included drinking less to the point that I’d no longer wake with hangovers, limiting social outings with coworkers to once a week and even closer friends to also once a week so that at most, I’d be out only two nights a week if even that. I just want more nights where I take advantage and catch up on reading more or learning something new and more mornings where I wake up and get at the day. I want to tackle exercise earlier, first thing if possible, as an insurance for the possibilty that I won’t get it done in the afternoon or evening. And if I wanted to do more later I could. But I’m beginning to want to reset my sails so that I can pursue more endeavors and overall just accomplish more.

Somewhere within all of that I remind myself to start with first things first. Things in the mirror. Things that are immediate, so immediate that I may miss them in my attempt to search for personal development around the first corner I peek around. But maybe instead of turning that first corner, I stay put and look at myself, my situation. There are some obvious things. Seeing how much food I’ve been able to eat at home (given the generosity of others that supplied it), I realized how much time I was wasting to drive 15-20 minutes to Convoy to grab a meal by myself. I realize how much money, gas, and time I truly wasted. Looking at how I go through food now educates me on just how much I can live off of if I simply limit my options. I could save so much money if it weren’t for my being a creature of habit. I also realize I can go for runs more without the gym, do push ups at home, use that workout bar. 

I’ll sum it up this way- I realize how smart I am and just how efficiently I could live my life if only I allow it. Things like not eating out, not because of the money but because of the time it takes to travel to and fro. Things like pumping gas two stoplights closer because that left turn accomplishes more on your path than going further just to save a few cents. Eating wherever I happen to be. Going for a run or walk and grabbing coffee while doing so even if I was there to check out the bookstore but it was closed. Doing said run or walk with my purchase of coffee instead of just driving for coffee.

And then deep down, there is the stuff that’s unsettled. Ignored. Swept under the rug. Amy and I. We grow more distant each day, showing the relational equivalent of the least-common-denominator of love towards each other. We say the words “I love you so,” almost like a greeting as we come and go. At the core of it all, there is definitely love. But it is between parents, father and mother. It’s that admiration, respect, and familial support that we have for one another. Simply put, I will always love Amy because she is Luther’s mother. I don’t want to speak the same for her but that’s how it is for me. 

As husband and wife, however, there’s not a single atom of romance or love. This is a natural, I think. After all, I’ve gotten us both to admit that we married for the kid and not us. There has not yet been a rebuttal to this. There is no unconditional romance between us. One person shows/gives less love, the same happens on the other end until there’s no love at all. I think for a period of time, I tried to believe there was. Or that there was enough. I tried here and there to keep it together romantically but having the kid kind of makes that damn near impossible. And beyond that impossibility, I suppose some could go above and rise to the point of spicing things up and keeping that romance alive. But I couldn’t. Thing is, even when I couldn’t I tried to act as if I could. I pretended, I put on a happy face and went with things. I held her hand. It eventually got to a point where it became a splinter in my mind. It just grew bigger and deeper in me until I couldn’t pretend anymore. I wouldn’t say that opposed to the fake happiness I was becoming passive-aggressive. It’s more like...I was slowly, quietly becoming a more honest version of myself. And I wouldn’t speak it or say anything but you could tell by what I -wasn’t- saying. By the fact that I paid less attention, cared less, thought less of certain events like valentine’s and her birthday. 

That last time we had a big fight, I yelled that I wanted a divorce. That we couldn’t fix our issues and they kept resurfacing. And it’s true. This time, I see that I was right. There was a TED-talk I brought up last time, it was a video with a therapist urging couples to ask themselves certain questions to see if they truly wanted to go forward with divorce. One of the things she encouraged was giving it time, six months maybe. And rating every day of those six months on a scale of 1-10 in terms of happiness. If you consistently average a lower number then your initial decision to get divorce is true. If you find yourself in the happier range more consistently then maybe you just had a rough patch. Often I think on our best days together, they land at a 6. 6 sounds like it’s in the positive range but in my mind, it’s somewhere between a D and a C letter grade. I don’t much care or need to go lower than that. Perhaps it means I’m not in the worst of situations and that there are far more negative couples and scenarios out there, however that there is enough evidence to support the fact that we are clearly not happy together. 

Gene brought up a funny point. Without prompting, he said that Amy and I reminded him of his parents. That we were so obviously wrong for each other but seemingly stubborn enough to prove people wrong that we just stayed together. 

I’ve had so many thoughts regarding being alone, being away from Amy, just simply -not- being married to her. I’ve put them off over and over and over. It seems every time there was a big fight, it came up in conversation. And then I’d cool off. But I never stopped thinking that maybe I was right. I need to not be with her. Then I think of all the reasons that stopped me and it all comes back to Luther, the effect the divorce would have on his life. I think about how it takes a village to raise a kid and the fact that I would be tearing up that village for him. I think about how I’d see him less, how he wouldn’t have a loving father loving his loving mother. They would just be...two separate entities. Would he survive it? Probably. I know people who’s kids are fine after it. But still, nothing breaks my heart more than the thought of him realizing that we aren’t all together anymore, that mommy and daddy aren’t in love and aren’t together. It breaks my heart that I’d seem him less. I love him so much. I really do think that’s why I held out so long. 

But better now than...in his teens. Or even around ten. A toddler just needs to grasp the changes of his daily life and adapt to it, he doesn’t need to philosophically or psychologically come to grips with it the way a young adult would. I can’t deny the probability that his development will change because of it but it’s not like we had good odds. We married not out of love but for him. And marriages based on the premise of love even, fail at an alarming percentage. It’s as if Amy and I never had a chance. If we did, it was close to 1%. And we couldn’t make that work. I can’t blame us. I can, however, retroactively look back and say we shouldn’t have gotten married. We should have taken our time with the whole baby-daddy, baby-mama situation. Perhaps a truer, more organic relationship would have grown between Amy and I. Instead, high on our love for our newborn, we tied the knot. With more push from Amy than me. She did things, I remember, that she no longer does. Things to entice me into wanting to marry her. And then they fell by the wayside after marriage. 

I want to keep typing but my upper back is really sore and tightening up even more. Until that workshop date, I just need to hang tight. Either stay alone, or stay away. 

I don’t want there to be any coming back from this one. This -needs- to be the final straw. Because this time, it’s not out of resentment, it’s not out of hurt or sadness or anger. It’s just been a long time coming, this decision. Deep down, I feel neutral and unemotional about it. I don’t want to hurt, I don’t want to anger. But more than anything, I don’t want to let it go anymore.

This is it.

[i-just-like-commenting]

Star Wars rewatch, part 2: Episode V, The Empire Strikes Back

General Impressions, or the Movie on Its Own

Damn this is well-made movie. I mean it does have flaws, but it’s so well-directed, introduces great new characters, and it doesn’t matter how many times I’ve seen it, the moment where Vader tells Luke the truth hurts. That’s all because of Mark Hamill’s acting - he sells the horror and pain. I am really looking forward to him playing Luke again in episode VIII.

Overall, it’s a major step up from the first film, even though the first film is still great. They clearly had a bigger budget this time around, the set-pieces are mostly amazing, and again, Kushner directs it fantastically. The one moment that didn’t work so well for me was when the walkers collapse and blow-up in the snow. Something about the model scaling made it too obvious they were models rather than gigantic machines. Maybe something with the snow? I’m no expert.

Oh, and I did find the technical jargon hilarious. A hyperdrive motivator? an alluvial dampener? You guys just picked random worlds out of the dictionary, didn’t you?

The Special Edition Stuff

The additions to this movie work much better because they are much less obtrusive. I think they may have added a few shots early on, but nothing jumped out at me other than the new Emperor footage (to make it match ep VI) but especially Cloud City, which was an improvement. Kushner had apparently envisioned a much more open city, where you could see the outside, but they simply couldn’t manage it at the time. The simple switches in the background and a few shots of the city outside all look really good. This is probably because, as I mentioned last time, CGI at the time could handle buildings and robots but not people, and worked better in backgrounds than in the foreground. And again, it was something that Kushner had actually wanted rather than a retroactive decision.

Continuity, Part--actually, no, let’s talk about shipping instead

A while back io9 had an open thread for people to talk about their head canons, and someone gave one for Star Wars in regards to Han and Leia. There’s been a fair amount of justified criticism of Han seemingly to magically know that Leia likes him and pushing his interest on her. So, the person proposed, what if the reason he thinks Leia is interested in him is because they’ve already hooked up once? In their head canon, Han and Leia’s tension had already built to a one-night stand, and she’s been trying to brush it off as meaningless ever since then while Han insists it happened because she’s in love with him.

I decided to watch the film with that head canon in mind and holy crap does it work. From pretty much their first look, everything about them screams “We’ve already slept together.” Which, you know, the actors had, but I really like it as an in-universe theory. Han comes across as less of a dick, and Leia’s warming up to him works better too. And they do warm up - one of the really great things in this script is the steady, gradual change in their dialog as their romance develops, from always sniping at each other to being supportive and caring.

Now, I’m sure all of this made Luke and Leia shippers sad at the time, but I do like them a lot better as just-friends/siblings...and anyway, after this film I’d be less inclined to ship Luke and Leia and more towards shipping Luke and Han. Han risks his life to save Luke without a thought, and the long look they share as Luke is preparing to leave...it would be a pretty easy OT3 if two of the members weren’t related. Though as for me, I’ve read too much Homestuck and read them as a ♣ more than a true OT3 (Han and Chewie are ♦, of course).

Continuity, Part 2: Relation to the Prequel Trilogy

I will, of course, be jumping to episode II as my next installment (I already have it checked out from the library). Knowing that R2D2 knows who Yoda is, I found myself adding in “translations” of his beeping, since Luke doesn’t understand him without the ship’s computer. R2 is basically screwing with Yoda in their scenes, my friends, it’s hilarious. And Yoda knows who R2 is but doesn’t want to give anything away.

The reveal that Darth Vader is Anakin Skywalker was only partially foreshadowed in the first film, but heavily hinted at here. From the opening crawl, where Vader is “obsessed with finding young Skywalker,” to Yoda’s concern that Luke is too much like his father and sarcastic evaluation of Anakin as a great Jedi, to Vader’s persistence in keeping Luke alive, not to mention the vision in the cave, it all screams to the big reveal if you know it’s coming.

The prequel was an attempt to show how Anakin became Vader. Some of it worked, some of it didn’t, and I’ll be talking about it (plus the Clone Wars animated series, plural) over the next few months.

Knowing what happened in the prequels, it’s also impossible not to see Yoda and Obi-Wan as repeating the same mistakes they made with Anakin with Luke. They hide things from him, tell him to ignore his friends and repress his feelings - you do all realize that’s what made Anakin vulnerable to temptation from the dark side, right? Honesty, caring, and safe emotional expression need to be added to the Jedi code.

Continuity, Part 3: Relation to the New Films

“Some day you’re going to be wrong, and I just hope I’m there to see it.”

You have no idea how close I came to tearing up at this line. Because Han is wrong, but she’s not there to see it - she isn’t able to be with him when he dies and I have to stop now I’m having too many feels.

Rewatching this also reminded me again of how eminently awesome Lando Calrissian is as a character. He has one of the clearest character arcs with the most cheer-worthy culmination (blowing up the Death Star in the next film). I’ve got zero interest in learning the origins of Han Solo, but I am really looking forward to Donald Glover playing young Lando. Also, I want to know what Lando is up to now, where he is, in future episodes.

Update on the Droid Revolution

Okay, the change in behavior of C3PO between A New Hope and Empire Strikes Back is wild. He goes from being subservient and resigned to his fate as a perpetual slave to being the king of sass. He snarks at the humans around them, flinging around insults and backhanded compliments (”He’s quite clever, you know - for a human being.”)

What happened? Well, all I can conclude is that the rebel alliance, unlike both the Empire and the old Republican order (represented by the Organas) actually treat droids like sentient beings. They give them freedom, and with that freedom C3PO decided to passive-aggressively fire back at the privileged class that formerly oppressed him. The closeness between Poe and BB8 in the new episodes seems to bear out the idea that droids get more recognition and rights under the new order.

In fact, maybe C3PO and R2D2, their courage and their contributions, helped make that all possible. Made biological species realize that droids are people too.

And they are still the purest ship. “Do take good care of yourself” indeed. This is love, people. Pure ♥.

#star wars #the empire strikes back #spoilers for whole franchise #han x leia #homestuck #r2d2 and c3po