SANTI AGOOOO

every alternate week, her best friend would come to our house with a tupperware full of chicken spaghetti. they'd stick us in front of a tv with a stack of disney vhs tapes and go through each room, finding every dirty dish, and then spend the afternoon at the kitchen sink, washing each dish by hand while gossiping.

So here goes: Santiago

Jamie

and one dedicated, of course, entirely to their weirdo little friendship!

BIG OL POST ABOUT EVERYTHING ABOUT THE BONUS JAMIE COMIC THAT I LOVE

I love that it's supposedly about his opinion on the movie Fight Club, which he apparently:

hasn't even seen

holds hate in his heart for the "stereotypical" fans of the movie

He's actually, strangely, much more focused on how the movie makes REAL people feel and their reactions to/interactions with the movie, as opposed to the movie itself. His fixation seems to lie with people, not characters.

which, imo, totally fits with what we learn later about his major being anthropology ( the study of different human societies and cultures and their development ) which is FASCINATINGGG TO ME as he is both clearly someone who can't read people very well in social settings, even people he supposedly knows well like Santiago, as WELL as someone who seems upset with or at least critical of current patriarchal power structures.

In that way, it totally tracks to me that he would be much more focused on how REAL LIFE PEOPLE react to the movie and the ideas about gender, sexuality and masculinity that it puts in their heads. THAT'S what he cares about and is passionate about. He borderline doesn't give a fuck about the movie itself.

EVEN more interesting to me as I've pointed out Jamie's vague gender nonconformity before, him having a seeming genuine disdain for alpha male bullshit is pretty fitting and also very fun, imo. I wonder Santi's stance on that kind of stuff, esp since he seems more judgemental...

Something else I really GENUINELY like about the bonus comic is that while Jamie is so passionate and riled up during it, he's not nearly as smiley as we've seen him up to this point.

Around Santi, in his memories and flashbacks and even in his ghostly thought-bubble form Jamie is ALWAYS smiling. Seeing him separate from Santiago and less upbeat almost implies he might not be as smiley a guy as we've been lead to believe! Which I TOTALLY ADOREEEE!! (Unreliable narrator Santiago strikes AGAIN)

I also, of course, love LOVE learning more about Jamie and we get a LOT ABOUT HIM on the back cover!! First off, full and true name- fun that I was right about Jamie being a nickname!

Which, yeah, does absolutely mean he loves shortening him and his friends names to cutesy little nicknames( Santiago -> Santi, James -> Jamie ) like I had suspected but, yeah no that is just a thing he does. Grown ass man, btw.

Other points of interest for me of course, is his major and hobbies...

The anthropology major thing still totally baffles me and god I still rotate it in my head so much trying to make sense of it. Idk, I think the idea of Jamie being into something so... objectively dorky is so foreign to me I can't combat it proper.

As for hobbies, paintball I figured because of the aforementioned tournament in chapter 1, but having drinking and babes listed as hobbies is something a little concerning to me,lol. It says something I think, about how casually he approaches both of these subjects. His substance usage while, not being a straight-up, called out and addressed issue, is something that is maybe a little out of hand, if you read between the lines in some panels.

Entirely possible that he's just a typical college party bro, abusing substances is kind of the name of the game in college anyways yeah? But idk, his insistence on getting wasted and his dark undereye circles, so many of Santi's memories involving him drinking, sort of implies he does this thing maybe more than average, doesn't it?

For what reason? I don't assume to know. I don't even assume it's a problem problem. Maybe just that his attitude is more casual than it should be.

In a similar vein, while we don't explicitly see any of his relationships with girls his age, they're implied in dialogue and one-off flashbacks and don't seem to be very committal? Which isn't a bad thing, of course, but it more seems like... they're maybe treated as just something to fill his time with, as opposed to actual human connections. Similar to a hobby. Just something to do to kill a couple hours.

Which, idk, makes me wonder what it is about him that makes it so this seems to be the case? He seemingly doesn't have an issue having relationships that mean a lot to him, as we see with Santiago.

Much to think about, as always.

I had to wait quite a while for the doctor to see me, but fortunately the nurse who was helping me had an excellent bedside manner and went out of her way to distract me. She expertly did this by getting me talking about books I'd read recently.

I went all in on criticizing the last book I'd read. I don't remember what it was, but I really hadn't liked it, and I denigrated it as "Misery Porn". And she was like "Hmm, that sounds interesting, tell me more". So I gave a general plot synopsis. As I was telling her that most of the characters were immigrant miners, she interrupted me to say "That's interesting, I didn't realize that there were mines in Missouri".

And at that moment time stopped for me and I realized that the entire time I'd been talking about the book, she'd been assuming I was talking about porn set in Missouri. I had just assumed that she had understood from context that when I said "Misery Porn", I meant "A story that is gratuitously depressing so that readers will think it's deeper than it really is".