What's in the Box?
What's in the Box?
Adventures in not knowing anything for certain
If you watch enough sci-fi, and/or Apple TV+ sci-fi, you will get to know poor Schrödinger's Cat well. (See: Constellation.) Despite its familiarity, or perhaps because of it, I find myself compelled by the paradox. I like a mystery, cozy or cerebral. Even better if it’s impossible or improbable. I like the logic imposed by True Detective: time is a flat circle. I skate it like a frozen lake.
Plus, I’m gullible.
Or maybe I’m just a believer
I’m also a big Joel Edgerton fan. I watched his new Apple TV+ show, Dark Matter, and I loved it so much. It’s a for me show in every way a show can be. It’s gray, it’s messy, it’s hugely ambitious. I let it compel and crush me. (I will excitedly read Blake Crouch’s book now because the ending, at least, did not give me the same existential crisis as the ending of His Dark Materials. A different kind of heartbreak.)
So many moments! That mask! The fingers! Amanda in the green dress! Max! The It’s a Wonderful Life of it all. The hair tie around the finger. Everything we are, desire, or claim to be.
It was Sylvia Plath who wrote: “I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.”
I daydream often about walking around outside in the middle of the night, something I can’t do in most parts of America, let alone the world. One day in sixth grade, I gashed two fingers removing the plastic cover from a disposable razor. When I dipped my hand in the ocean days later, the marks were gone. It was like I’d never been hurt at all. My earliest glimpse at the mystic.
How many doors do we walk through without realizing?
Somewhere out there exists a Jiordan more suited for this world than me. By that same logic, there is also a Jiordan less equipped for it. Maybe there’s a Jiordan who never left the beach. Once and eternally with a plum in her hand, sand in every bite mark.
Fate, chance. You know. Or maybe it’s just time, the fact of it. I poke holes in these things so I can peer through them. So I can wonder further.
But I digress! Books taking up space on my shelf, in my heart, or both
In general, I think it’s a great time to be a reader. (It’s an okay time to be a writer, if you’re me. Not a bad time. I’ll take it.) Here are just a handful (a handful!) of exciting books—new, forthcoming, and/or just especially relevant to my life right now:
First Love by Lilly Dancyger
Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil by Ananda Lima
Modern Friendship by Anna Goldfarb
Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space by Catherine Barnett
Architect by Alison Thumel
Docile: Memoirs of a Not-So-Perfect Asian Girl by Hyeseung Song
Reunion by Elise Juska
Knife River by Justine Champine
Housemates by Emma Copley Eisenberg
Have You Seen This Girl by Nita Tyndall
TRANZ by Spencer Williams
The God of the Woods by Liz Moore
Little reminder for my fellow overwhelmed-and-anxious writer-reader weirdos: You don’t have to read something just because it came out last Tuesday or everyone you know is talking about it. You can read something because it has a green cover or it’s about a cat that is only understood by dogs. (Does the latter exist? Tell me. Write it!)
In fact, why not write with me for an hour?
I’m leading a one-hour generative workshop as part of Writing Co-Lab’s Summer Camp, which is a great opportunity for you or the writer in your life who could use some inspiration and dedicated time to write among kindred spirits virtually. For my session on Monday, July 15 from 8-9pm ET, we’ll make a game—several, in fact—of writing. (Plus, if you can’t make it, it’ll be recorded and then you can, wildly enough, watch/listen/learn on demand.)
Work your memory muscles and imagination with me! You’ll conjure a lot of new beginnings, fragments, and hypotheticals that you can take into the future with you. Every little bit counts. How do most books get written? In pieces.
Keanu Reeves seems like an A+ person in real life
Let’s meander again. Last month, I met a fresh baby and pet two beautiful, big dogs. Everything alive, everything tangible. In the car to and from, Jerrod and I listened to Ruined, the podcast. (Thanks to my friend Lauren for recommending it; it’s become very special to me.) The two episodes were X and The Neon Demon. I’m sad to report that I have seen the latter and it made me afraid of Keanu Reeves for a few weeks, maybe months. That’s the movie’s real crime. Not the eyeball.
Revisiting a scary-to-you thing in a different form—like a podcast between friends, or a rewatch once you know what’s coming—can be healing. Now the ending of The Neon Demon is sort of funny to me in its absurdity. (Albeit deeply sad. That girl had no one. And they took everything (literally) from her. LA, baby!)
Here for a reason, a season… or a season two
Say there are two types of people in the world: people who want a good thing to go out on a high, and people like me, who want a good thing to gamble on forever—even if it means draining the well entirely. That’s why I was (am) excited for Bad Sisters to get green lit for a second season even though they hadn’t planned one. (I have endless faith in Sharon Horgan; I would follow her to the moon or to Ireland.) Or why I’m kind of a Killing Eve apologist even though I… pretty much agree with the whole of the internet on that series ending. Stellar acting—and fashion—all the way through though, 10/10.
Whether Dark Matter continues or this is the end, I will champion it, and be grateful for how far and wild and weird the journey’s been. Would Jiordan2 feel the same? Am I Jiordan2? What a time to be any me at all.