#sunny overshares | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

maude-ivory · 3 months

Text

last thoughts on Exit Strategy

i was talking with a friend the other day and was struck by the notion i’ve never had a dream about anyone i know (unless you count pets)

but a couple days ago i woke up from a nightmare and realized that wasn’t true. i have nightmares about people i know all the time, but they aren’t really nightmares, they’re more like flashbacks, in them current me is waking up to discover my escape and starting to build a life for myself was the dream and i am back where i started from, which is usually enough to jar me awake for real, thank goodness

but i have a very hard time with waking up from those specific kinds of nightmares, for the first couple minutes (and boy is that whole objective/subjective time thing Spot On) i don’t know where i am. i don’t recognize my room, i don’t feel anything but a sort of vague rejection of everything

potential spoilers under the cut

i found the extended time it took Murderbot to basically rebuild its brain was incredibly emotionally fulfilling and made me actually cry, not just my theatrical reaction memes.

when you come out of any trauma, emotional or physical, there is this really long period of time where you feel just sort of blank. i dunno if it’s shock, i don’t have the educational background to say that’s what it is actually but just calling it shock as a placeholder

you’re aware, sort of, you might even be semi-functioning, but the shock doesn’t wear off overnight. you sleep a lot, and the time you’re awake you don’t feel awake, you have these sort of fits and starts of the world coming into focus again, but they don’t last and that can be really frustrating, and i really liked how Murderbot was sort of tracking those milestones, x hours this happened, y cycles this happened, finally at z, I was able to do this.

i hear a lot about therapists talking about journaling, but i wasn’t really able to do that because when i sit down to try to think about how i feel i start spiraling negatively and just Feel Bad, and i wind up with a hundred pages of variations on the theme of I Hate Everything over and over again with no actual progress

what i found helpful for me, when i decided i wanted to track my progress because i didn’t feel like i was getting better but sometimes it seemed like i was (i was experiencing curiosity anyway, that was new!) was to have a big 1 year wall calendar (it was like 8 years old but it had the full 365 days on it that was the important part) i could quickly grab a marker and mark off moments when i felt… anything not horrible. And at first it was just not horrible, then slightly more alert, then more or less okay, then kinda better, then pretty alright. Hey yesterday my knee hurt but today it doesn’t. Enjoying my cup of coffee. Like the color of this sweater. It rained and the air smells good. I didn’t say what was what, just a little x in the box for the day for anything not horrible.

it’s one big thing that lets you actually see the overall picture

and gradually i noticed that some days had no x’s, but some days did, and then some days had more than one, and i could see the clusters were getting closer together.

it helped.

the other thing that made me cry for realizes was the way Murderbot’s humans treated it while it was recovering.

growing up, and then throughout my marriage, i was not allowed to have negative emotions—when i slipped (and I’m not talking about blowing up (which isn’t to say i never did) i’m talking about things like not smiling quickly enough or enthusiastically enough—i had to convince a very skeptical audience how happy/thankful/excited i was all the time), or else there was always always always a backlash and that backlash lasted days at the minimum.

Murderbot is cranky, and rude, and hostile at them—swearing at Gurathin, snapping at all of them, no thank you or even recognition for saving it in return (and this after it specifically noted it liked being recognized/thanked for when it was doing the saving), or continuing to protect it; I’m not your pet robot, I don’t want to be a human, I don’t like planets

—and they let it get away with that behavior. it wasn’t punished, or disciplined, or corrected, there were no consequences, even Pin Lee never paired the we’re trying to help you card with the so don’t talk to us like that card.

that just

physically hurt to get through

but in a good way!

anyway.

this series has been so high stakes back to back (and I have loved every second of it but) I’m looking forward to what I hear is a slightly slower pace in Fugitive Telemetry.

#wow this got long #sorry #sunny personal #sunny liveblogs #depression #anxiety #nightmares #tagging for the people who need to block #trauma #abuse #the murderbot diaries #murderbot #exit strategy #sunny overshares

13 notes · View notes

ratguy-nico · 5 months

Text

This is a more new one, I think I started on early december. I think the inspiration is obvious.

I love Bob's Burgers Movie and this is my second fav song of the film. It just so well done for every character. 4 diferent songs in one, what else could you pssible want?

And also since my first draw I had the intention to make a new wallpaper for my celphone, Hate to have the same wallpaper for too long. Like a year is my limit.

this one for a strange reason doesn't have the blob, don't know if I accidentally erased or what.

#bob's burgers #my art #...#i dunno #I love Sunny Side of Summer #I sing it every time it pop up on youtube #and you don't understand when I say sing Im not just huming or singalong #I literally perform #you should see it my family totally hated it #I even dance a little #well is more like me moving my arms weirdly #but hey le pongo sason #sorry for oversharing again #hehe

114 notes · View notes

stuckinapril · 4 months

Text

It’s a sunny day during winter… I am going to study outdoors at the library for hours I am going to devour the material I am going to hit the gym in the cutest fit w all my flash cards I am going to burgeon thrive flourish

#it’s a toss up WHICH library bc I’m going to be on campus at the med school here today #bc I have to get something done for my upcoming neurology internship #so I might just study there even tho I’ve never been and even tho it feels weird to study amongst actual med students lowkey #or I might j go to my local library which I luv #but it will be outdoors in a sunny spot and it will be at a library #milky pink manicure salted caramel rhode lip balm bare face w only mascara on ysl libre intense. and ofc curls out.#and my morning started off so good bc I danced to purr by kyle dion for a solid hour. and was on time w my vitamins.#she is the ceo of oversharing in the tags I fear #p

55 notes · View notes

somekindofsentience · 3 months

Text

Omori and its parallels with OCD, or my personal connection to this game

SPOILER WARNING: AS USUAL, MAJOR OMORI SPOILERS FOR MOST ENDINGS AND THINGS.

CONTENT WARNING: MENTIONS OF SELF-HARM, SUICIDE, SEVERE MENTAL ILLNESS, DEATH, LOSS AND OMORI-TYPICAL CONTENT. I will also be referring to my own intrusive thoughts a lot, so please take caution if it might trigger you to spiral.

DISCLAIMER: I AM BY NO MEANS A MENTAL HEALTH PROFESSIONAL. I am in the process of seeking a diagnosis (we're getting there :) ), but it has been otherwise confirmed by professionals that I experience OCD. This post is about my personal experience with OCD and trauma, and the way I believe these feeling manifest in the game. I don't believe Sunny or Basil experience OCD, but I want to compare my experiences with obsession, compulsions and trauma-related OCD. Other people may have completely different experiences, and those are valid!

You could call this catharsis, some form of healing. Really I'm doing this for myself, which was kind of why I started writing Omori analysis in the first place (???). and im a nerd for this game

Guilt

Guilt has always been one of my biggest hurdles, and it's also a very relevant theme in Omori.

For the longest time, my brain and I have been actively trying to develop compulsions to cope with guilt, and it seems to consistently fail. I've tried singing songs on repeat, extreme self-harm, distraction, avoidance ect, and nothing seems to work. Sure, I've never committed recital day, but even small things can make me feel horrifically guilty, as my intrusive thoughts tell me I'm a horrible person or a liar.

I see this in Sunny, too. For the longest time, his mind has been trying to cope with the guilt, and it chose to delve deep into repression. But no matter how much he represses, the truth is still there, and so that guilt is still there.

The Fear Polaroids in the Omori Route are also a representation of guilt, as is the mirror during the Truth segment, both depicting Sunny has a hideous demon. My intrusive thoughts depict me as a demon, too, doing horrific things to myself and others. The images of mutilated, demonic Sunny capture the... inhumanity that my mind makes me feel.

I get it, Sunny. I don't feel human either.

Mewo's Death as an Intrusive Thought

Cat Dissection is an interesting area of Black Space, in that its immediate relevance to the truth is less obvious. It's also one of the more horrifying ones - on my first playthrough, I was running blind, and I figured you'd have to kill Mewo for the key. You do not. my biggest regret

Mewo is obviously linked to Mari, but at the time, we'd only ever seen this slightly mentioned in the real world photo album. At that point in Black Space, Mewo was closely tied to Sunny and Omori, being an essential part of White Space.

The player can stab themselves to get out, or cut open Mewo and suffer the regret. This room feels very reminiscent of a gruesome intrusive thought that just won't go away, those days where you see yourself murdering all your friends, or violently injuring yourself. Much of Sunny's hallucinations, or creatures like Something, also mimic this kind of thing.

That room has far deeper analysis to dive into, but this is as far as I'll go for this segment.

Compulsive Behaviour - Repetition

Basil is probably the first character that comes to mind when I think of compulsive behaviour. His most iconic line...

This sort of repetitive action is the root of a compulsion - an attempt to relieve anxiety. Whether or not Basil fits the criteria of needing repeat those words otherwise something bad might happen is unknown, but this sort of behaviour is very relatable in my experience.

I have a tendency to not be consciously aware, but others notice that I'll mumble things to myself. Typically this is me trying to talk back to my intrusive thoughts, as far as I know, and trying to confirm to myself that they're wrong. This will often end in asking someone else or doing research to confirm.

By repeating these things, Basil is trying to ward off the reality, which is that everything isn't okay at all, and likely won't be. But the specific framing is future-oriented - he isn't saying that things are okay right now, he's saying that they will be. This could link to my later point about uncertainty.

Avoidance

Not many people talk about avoidance behaviours as a compulsion, which is probably why much of my OCD went unnoticed as a child. You don't really consider mental compulsions, and avoidance can be very easily hidden, especially if you the ability to force yourself through something if you have no other options.

While it's not exactly the same, Sunny's repression of rooms in his house and the shaking head that prevents you from going to particular areas are forms of avoidance. The sliding glass door that leads to the backyard and the piano room are the most notable - it's not repressed, it's there, but Sunny shakes his head every time you interact with it. He can't go in there. He just can't. There's no explanation for the player.

I relate to that. I have strange rules that mean I can't do things. I just can't. There's no real explanation for myself, either, and sometimes I don't even get intrusive thoughts of the consequences, just some insistence that I can't do it. Perhaps this was confusing or frustrating for the player, but I found it incredibly realistic.

Uncertainty and Abandonment Issues

I've heard somewhere that OCD is, ultimately, a fear of uncertainty. As a result of this disorder, combined with trauma, I also have abandonment issues the way Basil does.

Even before the recital day, Basil's abandonment issues are prevalent. He clings to the group with the photo album, preserving his memories. He took photos of the things he didn't want to lose. After the recital day, Basil really did lose everything, and he was broken as a result of that.

I imagine this sort of thing was one of his regular worries, everyone abandoning him, Sunny in particular. And I can relate to that - one of my more common intrusive thoughts is others leaving me after they find out I've done something horrible. It makes you want to shut off from relationships, just to be safe - what if everyone leaves?

I think that 'what if' is what made Basil so attached to Sunny in the present day of the game. He wants to save Sunny, he wants to make things back to the way they were before, but at the same time, there's this uncertainty - Sunny is moving? Sunny is leaving? What will happen? What if everything gets worse?

This wasn't the easiest to write, but thank you for reading.

#omori spoilers #omori game #omori sunny #omori basil #actually ocd #this game means so much to me #tw: oversharing #obsessive compulsive disorder #tw: self harm #tw: suicide #tw: death #omori analysis #sentience's stuff

10 notes · View notes

synfl0w3r · 8 months

Text

Sunny icon!

#furry art #art #digital art #maybe I shouldn't overshare on the internet #but I honestly have like no other outlet #Sunny #my characters #furry #waaaaaa #fall vibes

6 notes · View notes

mjn-air · 1 year

Text

#that's it i'm officially breaking apart #yes hi this is just me freezing my ass of the entire winter and today it's sunny and fairly warm outside but my appartment is still freezin #and I'm sitting in a cold room and my hands are so cold I'm waering fingerless gloves all day #and my mum came over earlier #and yes I turn on the heating when she's here bc I don't want her to worry #she's like martin's mum you know #and she was still cold #and for some reason she went into a room that I'm currently barely using bc I keep staying in one room that I heat - or better said barely #and she turned on the heating full force in that unused room #and didn't tell me #the heating has been blasting for hours over there while I'm in the kitchen shivering to save money #I feel so damn stupid #and idk sometimes it just makes me feel so alone #so sorry for oversharing but I literally have no other place to put this

15 notes · View notes

b1mbodoll · 7 months

Note

gabi QUICK your fav vaults from 1989 re-record?

i think my fave vault track is “is it over now?” idk there’s something about taylor’s sad lil heartbreak songs that really get to me </3 but my overall fave songs from 1989 are probably “you are in love” and “this love” <333 agh im such a lovergirl n a biiiiiggg sucker for romance :( and the lyrics to those songs are so lovely 🥺🥺

#my fave albums r folklore speak now and lover <33333 #those r Myyyy albums agh idk they have such a special place in my heart #evermore is really good too </3 oversharing a bit but the song marjorie really helped me thru one of the worst times of my life #2021 was rough :( the song makes me think of my own grandmother n really helped me accept that although she’s not physically with me she’s #still around me everyday <3 although we adore the physical forms of our loved ones i think its sweet to think that their love surrounds us #in the simplest ways #ill see a moth or sunflowers or rainbows or itll be a really pretty n sunny day and im like wow thats my abuelita :(#im rambling now sorry T_T im very lovey dovey #♡.signed. sealed. delivered.#beanysofa

3 notes · View notes

number-one-hog-hater · 9 months

Note

fav part of nightman cometh live?

I haven't seen it but I Love macs song it's called like shit happens or smthn. I literally watched about a second, then skipped to a random part and got my baby girl. I don't remember what it sounds like at all but I Know it's good. I also Love the classic dayman It's the first sunny content I ever saw and so it has a special place in my heat Fuck it's so good man. Just daymna and tiny boy and charlies proposal song are so good as songs. I should give it another try some day but smthn about Watching musicals is Hell to me.

I got taken to see the lion king for my birthday in June and Fuck was that my worst nightmare. Every song I was hoping it was over I dont even care for the lion king as a movie but now I have to sit for 2 hours and pretend I Liked it afterwards?? Hell. Ever song I was hoping it was intermission and then I was hoping it was over. I went to NYC and I didn't even want to watch a musical because I thought most the og cast was gone (they weren't and I'm so happy i went) and that was a musical I LIKED and then they take me a guy who has on Several occasions said I don't like Disney movies to a musical I had no interest in whatsoever? I couldn't even dip out and pretend I was there the whole performance. Hell pure hell. I couldn't even hear the dialogue (minor hearing issues so movies and stage performances arent really for me anyways) and could barely see the stage. I still don't understand how anyone could think I would enjoy that.

#asks #anonymous #its me gron #my fav part is after when my dad asked if i liked it #i told him indid obi its a gift #then he said he was glad because i never tell him what i want #brother NEVER ASKED?? HUH??#i always tell him whatbi want when he asked i have no ckue what the fuck he was on about #prolly oversharing but this Haunts me #imagine taking someone whose fav show is Sunny and always mentions they dont like disney almsot every time we go to disney world #to the LION KING on their birthday and expecting them to like it #shit it Wild

0 notes

zeldasnotes · 1 year

Text

COMMON 8TH HOUSE STRUGGLES

For anyone who got natal Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus or Mars in the 8th house.

•Disliking that person that everyone else likes bc you see them for who they really are.

•Feeling like you have lived 10 different lives.

•People not recognizing you after not seeing you for a year because your appearance, demeanor, body language and even energy changes.

•Having that specific year that you barely remember bc you dissasociated from reality.

•Having songs you have to avoid because they were popular during one of your ”ego death” periods.

•Not seeing the fun in certain activities because you overthink everything and dont see the fun in it because you are constantly aware of every second.

•People seeing you as more sexual than you actually are.

•People sharing disturbing stuff with you because you look like you can take anything.

•People trying to put you down bc they think you look down on them or bc your powerful aura make them feel uncomfortable.

•Thinking to yourself “omg I would die if that happened to me” and then it happens to you because life is constantly testing you.

•People wanting beef w you bc of your bitchy stare but thats just the way you look.

•Having that one person whos been obsessed with you for over 10 years.

•Seeing other people do stuff and its forgotten but when you do something nobody forgets it because everything you do is felt 100 times stronger because of how sensitive people are when it comes to you.

•People wondering why you disappeared from the party for an hour and now you have to explain you had to recharge after all that small talk.

•Trying to explain to people why you love going to the bathroom.

•That one person everywhere you go who are convinced that you are evil for no reason.

•Going through a ”they will think im bad anyways so why not be bad?” phase.

•People reminding you of something you did/said 2 years ago and you are shocked bc the latest version of you would never say/do something like that.

•Getting a weird feeling out of nowhere and later learning that something horrible happened that exact time.

•Trying to downplay your sex appeal for a job interview or a serious event but still having people get “that” vibe from you.

•People oversharing with you because they can sense that you will understand.

•Adults hating on you when you were just a kid.

•Feeling like there is this wall between you and others because most people are not as deep as you.

•Having the weirdest things happen to you but you cant tell anyone because they will think you are lying.

•People coming forward telling you they had a crush on you 10 years ago but were afraid to approach you(especially with venus 8th house)

•People who dont even like you want to be close to you because of your addictive energy

•Constantly having someone standing in a corner 10 meters away staring at you everywhere you go.

•Being accused of stuff you didn’t do bc of your dark energy and people projecting onto you.

•People coming into your life when they are going through something and later leaving you when they don’t need you anymore.

•People thinking you are weird for enjoying rainy days and dark nights instead of sunny days.

©️ 2023 Zeldas Notes

#astro notes #astrology #astro observations #astronotes #8th house synastry #8thhouse #sun 8th house #venus 8th house

2K notes · View notes

amethystfairy1 · 2 months

Note

I absolutely adore your worldbuilding, it’s not overwhelming and feels natural and smooth, how do you do it??? I struggle a lot with worldbuilding so do you have any tips? It always ends up feeling clunky whenever I try to include information about the world when writing (I think I have a problem with oversharing in my stories…)

HELLOOOO ✨

I'm so glad you enjoy my worldbuilding!!! Oooo this is actually such a cool question I love it lemme think lemme think...

Ok, to avoid feeling clunky or oversharing, I think one of the best pieces of advice I can give is to only discuss what would be relevant to the characters in the moment. That's how you keep things feeling natural and smooth instead of looking like an exposition dump.

Let's take our fiery boy Tango in TTSBC for example!

When Tango is having a moment with his abandonment issues (poor boy) he is going to consider why he feels that way. He feels that way because his Pyre abandoned him at ten years old for his weakness.

Why? Well, Tango knows! And he's gonna tell you about it in his POV!

It makes perfect sense to have him thinking about that and running those facts around in his head because he's hurting. So I use this moment to explain what blaze-born Pyres are, how they work, why they kicked him out, and how they fit into the under-city as a whole...and it doesn't feel clunky, because of course Tango would be thinking about blaze-born Pyres, it's because of his Pyre that he has these abandonment issues! It's just apart of the story, it's relevant info! What I would avoid from this point is going to deep into, like, how the Cat Clans work from here, because that's not relevant to Tango...maybe he'd give like a passing anecdote about them, and if he does I try to make sure I connect it to why he knows this info.

Why would he know about Cat Clans? He's good friends with Lizzie! Ok, so I'll throw in something like...

"Lizzie had told Tango, once, that Cat clans weren't the same as Pyres. Located within the mid-levels and more interconnected with the main cavern of the under-city, they valued their own, and were protective of their young...Tango had tried to keep down a sting of jealousy when she was talking about it. Her clan had loved her. Kept her. Raised her to be strong and what had Tango's pyre done? Thrown him away."

So there's a little worldbuilding about cat clans kinda just mixed in with Tango's angst train with his thoughts on his Pyre, but because he's comparing the Cat Clans to the Blaze-born Pyres, it still fits and makes sense...like, it's something that would fit in his POV

I dunno if I'm making sense I feel like I'm rambling but this is fun so I'll keep going 😆

Another good thing to do is try to set up situations where a character needs to have something explained to them! Of course, this can get overused and feel clunky if you're not careful, but in an AU like TTSBC where by the point of the story half the characters are left in the dark about a lot of stuff (ZED 😭) then it makes sense that they would have stuff explained to them!

OH OH OH ALSO!

For environmental stuff keep in mind what the character whose POV you are in would notice! For example, when I write from Jimmy's POV he always notices the weather! If the sky is blue, or overcast, if it's sunny or looks like rain, because the sky is so important to him. From Scott's POV, he doesn't notice things like that often, but he does notice what people around him look like in more detail because he's very attuned to reading people by their ticks. From Scott's POV things like tilts of the head or shifts of the eyes show up a lot more than Jimmy's, but in Jimmy's POV you're sure as hell gonna know what the forecast is 😆 Does that make sense?

This was so much fun! I never really thought to hard about how I write from a worldbuilding perspective so having a think on it and trying to explain it was super cool! I hope this helped some! 💖

#fanfic #ao3 fanfic #through the sky blue cracks #tango tek #zedaph #scott smajor #jimmy solidarity #worldbuilding #lizzie ldshadowlady

37 notes · View notes

nancydrewwouldnever · 1 year

Text

The Infamous Jenny Vulture Interview

So, I keep losing access to the infamous Jenny Vulture interview from March 2017 because of caps on access they have on their website. So, in case anyone else hits the same problem, I'm cut and pasting it here, to have an easier to access copy of it.

The Year of Living Publicly

Jenny Slate’s got two new films and a new home and, oh, by the way, she’s fresh off a breakup with Captain America.

By Jasa Yuan

Published March 2017

Most pillows are just pillows, but for Jenny Slate, the floral-print puffs arrayed on her pristine white linen couch in her freshly rented apartment in L.A.’s Silver Lake are metaphors. For a bright future. For a new life. For freedom. The Obvious Child star and her bichon frise, Reggie, just moved into this sunny one-bedroom in February, and every time she looks at those pillows, she gets so excited because she remembers how she’d bought them while still married to editor-director Dean Fleischer-Camp, her husband for three years, but had to stow them away because she realized it felt like they were living in a box of tampons. Now she and Reggie don’t have to run their decorating decisions by anyone. “I’ve never lived on my own, because I really did go from one relationship to another my whole life, so I’ve never had a chance to go really girlie,” she says. “And I had my ex-husband over last night and he was like, ‘These flower pillows look great. But they’re just for you.’ I’m like, ‘Yeah! That’s right!’ I love them so much. I just love them for what they represent, which is that all my choices are for me.” She turns around. “I’m gonna pee really quick.”

The bathroom door doesn’t quite close — she’d warned me of this. “You can snoop around if you want,” she shouts. “It’s just a little mouse house. It’s fucking perfect for me.”

I have been in her presence for about two minutes. The first thing she did was offer to loan me a T-shirt because I mentioned I was hot. Slate used to do a stand-up routine about how her mom refused to sew her name into her shirt in elementary school, “because she was like, ‘You’re too friendly, and some stranger would just be like, Jenny! Come into the van!’ ”

There’s an obvious person missing so far from this tale of pillows versus patriarchy, but she’s not hiding anything; we just haven’t gotten to it yet. “When I moved in here, I’d been through my divorce and a breakup,” she says, returning from the bathroom and referring to the ten or so months she spent dating Chris Evans, best known as Captain America, and her much more famous co-star in Gifted an upcoming film about a family struggling with a young girl’s genius affinity for math. The internet went wild over their apples-and-oranges compatibility: a brash Jewish comedienne beloved for oversharing about her bodily functions on talk shows and voicing Marcel the Shell With Shoes On, a tiny stop-motion conch with a single eye and feet who talks about being so small he can hang-glide on a Dorito, in a series of YouTube shorts she made with Fleischer-Camp — and a world-famous Marvel superhero, who also happens to be a Massachusetts momma’s boy with one of the most insanely ripped bodies on the planet. “We used to talk about what kinds of animals we were,” says Slate. “Chris said it’s like I’m a chick riding on a St. Bernard’s head. We’re an odd match.”

Paparazzi tried to snap them, bloggers scrutinized their Instagrams, tabloids obsessively covered their one appearance together on a red carpet. Slate didn’t read the coverage, but it was extremely kind, with most articles praising Slate for taking a chance on Evans, or noting that his coolness factor had jumped several notches because of his proximity to her. Maybe this crazy thing could work out! There was something beautiful, in a year marked by division, to think of these two opposites finding common ground. He was 35; she was 34. They’d grown up half an hour from each other. They were both outspoken liberals. They’d said really adorable things about each other on Anna Faris’s podcast.

And then, a few weeks before I met Slate, news broke that it was over. In her life, though, she’d already spent several months dealing with that loss and having to find a place to live, crashing with friends in Venice Beach in January. “I watched You’ve Got Mail so many times, it was unbelievable,” she says. Was she weeping most of the time? “Yeah, I did it right.” Eventually, she found this new apartment and purged everything she owned except for a few clothes she loves, books, precious objects, and a velvet chair once belonging to her great-grandmother. “I was like, ‘You need all new things. You are a working woman. Maybe this is an indulgence, but just start over,’ ” she says. “It’s like, Fuck.”

The other night, she tells me, she was sitting at a bar by herself, reading a book about the Holocaust, and finally sent an SOS text to her friend Mae Whitman. “I was just like, ‘Can you please help me? I’m so lonely.’ And she came and we got shitbombed, and I woke up the next morning and saw my headphones on my neighbor’s yard. I have no idea how they ended up there.”

As Slate gives me the tour of her place, Reggie trails her every move. “He’s like a little soul mirror of me. We’re a lot the same,” she says. How so? “Needing closeness. Despair when left alone. But also he’s very excited to misbehave when left alone. So he doesn’t know what he wants.”

Ever since she was a pip-squeak at Camp Tapawingo in Sweden, Maine, Slate has known what she wanted to be: an actress, like Amy Irving or Gilda Radner or Madeline Kahn. That or “Jewish Felicity,” taking over Manhattan, like in the TV show. In the aughts, she came up in the alternative-stand-up-comedy scene in New York, where she garnered attention for a one-woman show as different characters eulogizing an eccentric millionaire, got cast on Saturday Night Live, and wasfired one season in after accidentally cursing on-air in her first sketch. That ego blow hurt a little less when she made the awards-circuit rounds for Obvious Child, a low-budget romantic comedy about two people navigating an abortion after a one-night stand, and she’s built a devoted fan base through her outrageous characters on the Kroll Show and Parks and Recreation, not to mention her great voice work with Marcel, Bob’s Burgers, The Secret Life of Pets (as an anxious Pomeranian), and Zootopia (as a villainous sheep). In 2012, she relocated from Brooklyn to L.A. Her relationship with Evans is easily the most Hollywood thing she’s ever done. She shows me a photo of her aura on her fridge, taken in New York’s Chinatown. There’s a thick concentration of “productive energy,” which is good, since she has a lot of work coming up, and a giant cloud of worry and overthinking, which seems to be dissipating. By the sink are potholders she made as a kid on a little loom and a drawing of Ruth Bader Ginsburg that Fleischer-Camp brought her as a housewarming gift. “We’re good friends. That’s why we got divorced,” says Slate. “If we didn’t get divorced, we wouldn’t be able to be friends and we wouldn’t be able to do our work. We had just grown apart, and we love each other. It wasn’t easy, but not bad.” She pauses. “No, it was bad. But not essentially bad.”

Her mother, a ceramicist, and father, a lauded poet, are still married; she wrote a book about her childhood home in Massachusetts with her dad this year. Her younger sister, Stacey, a mental-health counselor in Brooklyn, had come over on the previous weekend and helped her put up pictures. (Her elder sister, Abby, is a nurse-practitioner in Massachusetts, and Slate is convinced her middle-child need for attention is what nudged her toward showbiz.) Covering the top of her dresser are snapshots she hasn’t figured out what to do with, such as the one of her in a revealing tank top at Columbia University, where she went from high-school valedictorian to pothead almost instantly. “This is me when I was a slutty virgin,” she explains. “A virgin but trying to act like I knew what was going on.”

Somewhere beneath a pile of half-read books is her bedside table. She hates computers so much she doesn’t keep one in the house, and she often turns to books when scrolling through Twitter on her phone stresses her out, which it always does. Current favorites include The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, and Emma, a children’s book with Barbara Cooney illustrations that she bought on Etsy and loves so much she put it on display so she could see it when she wakes up. “It’s about an old woman who doesn’t love how she’s alone, and then learns to make herself not alone through art, and draws people into her life through art. It’s the fucking best thing.”

The instinct other young actresses have to keep every interesting thing about themselves under wraps — or the toughness that female comics often give off — wouldn’t be very useful in Slate’s case. Her brand, if you can call it that, is built on vulnerability, whether she’s revealing her innermost insecurities through an animated shell or telling Seth Meyers on TV that she was so stoned in college she accidentally signed up for an astronomy class thinking she’d learn about astrology. Not to mention that she and Evans met while playing love interests in a movie that is now coming out and that she needs to promote. That’s hard to get around.

“I don’t mind talking about him at all. He’s a lovely person,” she says. “I don’t know. It feels like such a huge thing. Last year was a giant, big year for my heart. I’ve never, ever thought to keep anything private because that’s not really what I’m like, and now I’m learning those things, and they’re weird, kind of demented lessons to learn.”

She didn’t set out to have a tabloid-fodder romance. She’d fought hard for her part in Gifted, as a teacher who falls for Evans’s character, a working-class guy trying to give his prodigy niece (Mckenna Grace) a normal childhood. Slate’s part is not huge, but it’s a big studio picture. It got her in the room with director Marc Webb and Fox Searchlight. She liked the script, but more than that, “I was just like, ‘I want viability as an American film actress. I want to find my own seat at the main dinner table, because I want to do this forever, and I want to show that it doesn’t always have to be a bikini model opposite Captain America.’ ”

Evans and Slate met at her chemistry read — the audition in which it’s determined whether two romantic leads play well together — and they instantly got along. “I remember him saying to me, ‘You’re going to be one of my closest friends.’ I was just like, ‘Man, I fucking hope this isn’t a lie, because I’m going to be devastated if this guy isn’t my friend.’ ” The first time they went out to dinner, as co-workers getting to know each other, she remembers insisting they split the bill over Evans’s strenuous objections. “If you take away my preferences, you take away my freedom,” she says she told him. “Then I was like, Oh, man, is this dude going to be like, ‘Ugh, this bra-burner.’ Instead, he was like, ‘Tell me more.’ ” They drew from that friendship for their flirting on film, but the time when they jump into bed together in the movie felt as awkward as you hear all love scenes do. “It’s one of those scenes where you bust through a door making out. I’ve never done that in my life,” says Slate. “I remember apologizing to him after. I’m pretty sure I kneed him in the balls.”

Slate was in a weird space at the time. Her marriage was dissolving, and she was working only two or three days a week, and spending her days off wandering around Savannah’s many parks and doing yoga and writing that book, About the House, with her dad. (Which, incidentally, the publisher gave away free with any donation to any charity.) Every weekend, Evans would organize a game night for the cast and crew — usually something called “running charades,” which sounds like high-speed pantomime — that she begrudgingly went to, even though all she wanted to do was hang out on the porch and drink beer and smoke cigarettes. “At first I was like, ‘What a fucking nightmare,’ ” she says. “Chris is a different speed than me — I think he really did just jump out of a plane for an interview. And so when he was like, ‘Game nights,’ I was like, ‘This is annoying. This guy’s like a sports guy. He’s the kid that likes P.E.’ ” But finally his enthusiasm won her over. “I first really liked Chris as a person because he is so unpretentious,” she says. “He is a straight-up 35-year-old man who wants to play games. That’s it. I was like, ‘I’d better not discount this, because this is purity.’ ” It also helped that she’s so competitive she constantly won.

As they got to know each other, she learned he’s still close with people from his childhood, and his best friend is a woman. “What’s the same about us is not just that we’re from Massachusetts, which was such a delight, but Chris is truly one of the kindest people I’ve ever met, to the point where sometimes I would look at him and it would kind of break my heart,” she says. “He’s really vulnerable, and he’s really straightforward. He’s like primary colors. He has beautiful, big, strong emotions, and he’s really sure of them. It’s just wonderful to be around. His heart is probably golden-colored, if you could paint it.”

They didn’t fall for each other on set. “To be quite honest, I didn’t think I was his type,” she says. (Evans has dated Jessica Biel and Minka Kelly). “Eventually, when it was like, Oh, you have these feelings for me?, I was looking around like, Is this a prank? I mean, I understand why I think I’m beautiful, but if you’ve had a certain lifestyle and I’m a very, very different type of person — I don’t want to be an experiment.” Evans never made her feel that way, but it was hard to get past how so many people seemed to feel some ownership of him and view her as an interloper. “If you are a woman who really cares about her freedom, her rights, her sense of being an individual, it is confusing to go out with one of the most objectified people in the entire world,” she says. Especially when she’s aware that in Hollywood, she says, “I’m considered some sort of alternative option, even though I know I’m a majorly vibrant sexual being.” And especially when random ladies would come up to her at CVS, “being like, ‘Oh my God, is that Chris Evans? He’s so hot!’ You’re like, ‘How dare you? That’s my boyfriend. But yes, he’s so hot.’ ”

Every time Slate mentions Evans, it keeps coming back to the same thing: As much as they loved being with one another, she says, “we’re really, really different,” with different social circles and different lifestyles. Slate comes from a DIY comedy scene, and most of her friends are fellow comics and gay guys. “Chris is a very, very famous person,” she says. “For him to go to a restaurant is totally different than for me to go. I sit in my window and I say ‘Hi’ to people on the street. I have more freedom because I’m not Captain America. I’m mostly a cartoon.” She kept waiting for everything to feel normal, but it never did. “This is what I needed to do to feel normal. To be alone.”

That meant day-to-day they mostly stayed home, “which was really nice,” she says. But it was also one of the most anxious years of her life. She fretted over the “psychos” on the internet who turned her relationship with Evans into a pissing contest with Fleischer-Camp. And she struggled seeing the person she was in love with deal with the side-effects of fame. “The stress that I saw him be put under, I’ve never seen that before, and he handled that really gracefully,” she says. What she wasn’t taking into account was that he’s used to it. “He’s not stressed,” she says. “I was the person that was stressed.”

She’s also aware in hindsight that she hadn’t processed her separation before she got together with Evans. It wasn’t as scandalous as tabloid reports made it sound — as with any long-term relationship that splinters, they’d been on the rocks long before it was official. But, she says, “When Chris and I started dating, my husband and I had only been separated for a couple of months.” The divorce actually went through while she was at the Sundance Film Festival, after she and Evans broke up. “Even though we had an amicable divorce, I think that’s still something that you need to mourn. When you get separated from somebody that you actually care about, it is the destruction of a belief system. That is really, really sad.” Throughout all of it, the divorce, the new love, she says, “I just didn’t have the tools. And I didn’t think very hard about that, to be honest. I wanted to step into the light. Chris is a sunny, loving, really fun person, and I didn’t really understand why I should be prudent.”

Are she and Evans on good terms? “We’re not on bad terms, but we haven’t really seen each other, spoken a lot,” she says. “I think it’s probably best. I’d love to be his friend one day, but we threw down pretty hard. No regrets, though. Ever.”

Slate introduces me to the mascots of her new home, two cute mice figurines in jaunty outfits who look like they’re off to travel the world. “The way I feel now is I’ve stepped out of the woods and I’m a forest animal and I’m standing on the lawn,” she says. “And if anybody tried to approach me right now, they’re seeing a creature that’s just trying to figure out what the lawn is like. All I’m thinking about is the lawn. I’m not thinking about whether or not they are going to be a fun person to be on the lawn with, because I am just trying to be on the lawn.” And what or where is this lawn? “It’s just where I am,” she says. “I like the lawn. It’s filled with air, freedom, sunlight, and I’m alone.”

Slate wants to step out in the sunlight now, with a walk around the Silver Lake Reservoir. She bids good-bye to Reggie and turns on the TV to keep him company. “I watch Twin Peaks, but Reggie watches Frasier,” she says. That morning, while Slate was walking him, a woman got out of her car and stopped in her tracks. “She was like, ‘Oh, are you Jenny Slate?’ And I said, ‘I am.’ And she said something nice to me and I said, ‘Thank you so much. I need a lot of encouragement,’ which is usually what I say because it’s true.”

Dating Evans actually, weirdly, spurred her to double down on her career, because, she says, “I don’t want people to ask me more about my love life because of him than they ask me about my work,” and in order to ensure that, she’d have to produce a lot of work. She does stand-up in small clubs whenever possible and had two films at Sundance this January, just as the paperwork for her divorce came through: The Polka King, the true story of a polka-world Ponzi scheme, opposite Jack Black; and Landline, a story of two Jewish-Italian sisters and their parents having life and love crises in ’90s New York City, with Obvious Child creators Gillian Robespierre and Elisabeth Holm (out July 21). Soon she’ll be heading to Vancouver for a road-trip movie with Evan Rachel Wood, Alison Pill, and Cynthia Erivo, which is also Wood’s directorial debut. She and Fleischer-Camp are also at work on a feature-length Marcel the Shell movie, which she says will be “a character portrait much like Billy the Kid or Grey Gardens.”

Today, she’s leaning in to International Women’s Day by wearing a sundress covered in red roses and made by a company, Day Space Night, that’s run by women. She even canceled her one meeting with a man, an appearance on Snoop Dogg’s podcast, so she could have an entirely penis-free day. And she’s planning on ending the day by going with her girlfriends to a 90-minute seminar on fertility and reproductive rights.

A vocal supporter of Planned Parenthood, Slate credits Obvious Child not just for allowing her to prove she’s a legitimate actress, but also for turning her into a women’s rights activist. Back when she signed on, she says, “I still felt embarrassed of the word feminist.” Then one day discussing a costume fitting with co-star Gaby Hoffmann, Slate jokingly apologized for showing up with “crazy bush,” she says. “And Gaby did not take it as a joke. She was really serious and she looked at me and she was like, ‘I didn’t know we were supposed to apologize for that.’ I was like, Oh, I’m being a fool. I need to learn this shit right now.”

And now that she’s got a financial cushion from Zootopia and Secret Life of Pets, she can act on what she’s learned and say “no” more often. Specifically, she’s drawing the line at any movie that, she says, “makes it okay to laugh about things like women’s bodies after birth, like when women who’ve just had babies are referring to their vaginas as all ruined. I think it’s really rude for someone to disparage a vagina in the female body after it’s just fucking created and exploded a baby into our world. It makes me furious and I will not change my opinion on that.”

Also a no-go are any roles she’s offered that “seem like a weird stereotype version of me. Like Quirky Best Friend: ‘She doesn’t have a filter! She talks about poop!’ ” She thinks it’s worth it to hold out for roles with nuance, that will allow her to lean into humor and tragedy equally, and get to the heart of the human condition. In the meantime, she has plenty of personal-growth goals. She wants to learn Norwegian this summer. She wants to spend time with her family on Martha’s Vineyard. And she wants to find a farm she can help on so she can be around animals.

Eventually, she’ll try dating again, too. “I am inclined toward partnership,” she says. “I’m like a mallard, definitely looking for my other duck. But I’ve been in love in very strong ways enough times now that there are just some compromises maybe I won’t make.” He has to know who Gloria Steinem is, for one thing. She’s thinking maybe a scientist with a sense of humor. But definitely someone who’s sure enough in who he is to accept that she’s had a past without him. “Whoever is the next person is going to have to respect that I had a husband who I loved and this boyfriend who I loved so much, and I don’t want to have to act like they weren’t important.”

We’re back at the apartment and Slate is overjoyed that Reggie hasn’t peed on anything. Speaking of pasts, she’ll also soon be hitting the press tour for Gifted with Evans. “I feel pretty relaxed about it right now,” she says, sounding not entirely convincing. “That’s because I know Chris and he’s a very nice man. And we’ve gone into our separate lives. But that doesn’t also mean that I’m going to sleep well the night before, you know?”

First, she’s taking her parents to Cabo San Lucas to celebrate her 35th birthday. I suddenly have a horror flashback to a similar trip to Cabo I took years ago and warn her not to drink the water or brush her teeth with it, or to have ice or eat anything raw, or maybe to eat anything at all.

“Oh God,” she says, laughing, “having raging diarrhea is just a real on-brand nightmare for me.”

She thinks for a second. “But, you know, it would be such an icebreaker. If I showed up with, like, a spray tan and a blowout, he’d be like, ‘What happened to Jenny?’ But if I was able to say, ‘Aw, man, I have diarrhea,’ he’d be like, ‘It’s you. I remember you.’ ”

*This article appears in the March 20, 2017, issue of New York Magazine.

#interview #JS #JS round one #2017 #JS Vulture interview

52 notes · View notes