c.

What a journey this life is! Dependent, entirely, on things unseen. If your lover lives in Hong Kong and cannot get to Chicago, it will be necessary for you to go to Hong Kong. Perhaps you will spend your life there, and never see Chicago again. And you will, I assure you, as long as space and time divide you from anyone you love, discover a great deal about shipping routes, airlines, earth quake, famine, disease, and war. And you will always know what time it is in Hong Kong, for you love someone who lives there. And love will simply have no choice but to go into battle with space and time and, furthermore, to win.

—James Baldwin, The Price of the Ticket

disney meme (favourite overall movie):

I want to help others who feel this way, so here are small things I have done to exercise my free will:

Add "guilty pleasure" songs to playlists and actually listen to them (I have a ton of late 1990s-early 2000s music I listen to now proudly that I never listened to in the past out of shame)

Getting the décor item, bath set, bed spread, ect. in the patterns you like, even if it's "childish" (I got a dinosaur-themed wastebasket from the kids' décor section and I adore it)

Taking a new route to get to a place you go to often

Eat dessert first

Celebrate well, and often

Collect things that are "odd" or don't seem like an "acceptable" thing to collect (somebody on my "for you" page collects dandelion crayola crayons and it was so cool!!!!!!)

Incorporate one new piece in an outfit you wear frequently (e.g., a new chain, a necklace, ribbons, bracelets, ect.). Challenge yourself to add onto the outfits if you feel up for it.

Sing along to songs without worrying that you sound "good" or your intonation is completely accurate

Read a book from a genre you weren't allowed to read as a kid (comics, thrillers, mysteries, anything!)

Walk without having a specific destination or goal

Pick up a new craft without expecting yourself to master it or to ever be "good" enough. Get your hands messy.

Fiction(ish)

The Memory Police, Yoko Ogawa

A Ghost in the Throat, Doireann Ní Ghríofa

Paris, When It's Naked, Etel Adnan

Dept. of Speculation, Jenny Offill

My Sister, The Serial Killer, Oyinkan Braithwaite

Possession, A.S. Byatt

Cat's Eye, Margaret Atwood

The Tenderness of Wolves, Stef Penney

The Doll's Alphabet, Camilla Grudova

Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado

The People in the Room, Norah Lange

Água Viva, Clarice Lispector

Collected Stories, Clarice Lispector

The Empty Book, Josefina Vicens

Four Bare Legs in a Bed, Helen Simpson

The Thirteenth Tale, Diane Setterfield

A Tale for the Time Being, Ruth Ozeki

A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, Eimear McBride

The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy

Autobiography of Red, Anne Carson

White Teeth, Zadie Smith

Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte

The Waves and Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf

Non-Fiction:

Second-hand Time: The Last of the Soviets, Svetlana Alexievich

A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit

Bluets, Maggie Nelson

Living, Thinking, Looking, Siri Hustvedt

Feel Free: Essays, Zadie Smith

The Need for Roots, Simone Weil

Family Lexicon, Natalia Ginzburg

An Inventory of Losses, Judith Schalansky

Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi

Little Weirds, Jenny Slate

Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer

Women Who Run with Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estés

Journal of a Solitude, May Sarton

Poetry:

The War Works Hard, Dunya Mikhail

Barefoot Souls and A Red Cherry on a White-Tiled Floor, Maram al-Masri

Tell Me and Wild Nights, Kim Addonizio

What the Living Do, Marie Howe

What We Carry, Dorianne Laux

Extracting the Stone of Madness, Alejandra Pizarnik

Poppies in Translation, Sujata Bhatt

The Neverfield: A Poem, Nathalie Handal

Women of the Fertile Crescent: An Anthology of Modern Poetry by Arab Women

View with a Grain of Sand, Wislawa Szymborska

Alligator & Other Stories, Dima Alzayat (everyone & their mother read this please)

They: A Sequence of Unease, Kay Dick

Stranger Things Happen, Kelly Link

The Lonely City, Olivia Laing

The Fourth Island, Sarah Tolmie

On Photography, Susan Sontag

The Bloody Chamber & Other Stories, Angela Carter

The Sadeian Woman, Angela Carter

My Brilliant Friend, ElenaFerrante

Fugitive Pieces, Anne Michaels

Which can be an extremely effective device within narration!

They can work very well for characters whose names the narrator doesn't know yet (especially to differentiate between two or more). How specific the epithet is can signal to the reader how important the character is going to be later on, and whether they should dedicate bandwidth to remembering them for later ("the bearded man" is much less likely to show up again than "the man with the angel tattoo")

They can indicate when characters stop being as an individual and instead embody their Role, like a detective choosing to think of their lover simply as The Thief when arresting them, or a royal character being referred to as The Queen when she's acting on behalf of the state

They can reveal the narrator's biases by repeatedly drawing attention to a particular quality that singles them out in the narrator's mind

icarian task: when you have a task you know you’re going to fail at anyways, so why not have some fun with it before it all comes crashing down

cassandrean task: when you have to deal with people you KNOW won’t listen to you, despite having accurate information, and having to watch them fumble about when you told them the solution from the start (most often witnessed in customer service)

Not in a “your my precious son and I love you so much, here a movie to make you for my failures” kind of way