After my teacher introduced us to this theory, she asked us, “is love a feeling? Or is it a choice?” We were all a bunch of teenagers. Naturally we said it was a feeling. She said that if we clung to that belief, we’d never have a lasting relationship of any sort.

She made us interview a dozen adults who were or had been married and we asked them about their marriages and why it lasted or why it failed. At the end, I asked every single person if love was an emotion or a choice.

Everybody said that it was a choice. It was a conscious commitment. It was something you choose to make work every day with a person who has chosen the same thing. They all said that at one point in their marriage, the “feeling of love” had vanished or faded and they weren’t happy. They said feelings are always changing and you cannot build something that will last on such a shaky foundation.

The married ones said that when things were bad, they chose to open the communication, chose to identify what broke and how to fix it, and chose to recreate something worth falling in love with.

The divorced ones said they chose to walk away.

Ever since that class, since that project, I never looked at relationships the same way. I understood why arranged marriages were successful. I discovered the difference in feelings and commitments. I’ve never gone for the person who makes my heart flutter or my head spin. I’ve chosen the people who were committed to choosing me, dedicated to finding something to adore even on the ugliest days.

Okay, I don’t know how true this is - but this is huge fucking news.

I’ve been saying this for a while now, but Disney, Amazon and co. are trying to return to the studio system of the old Hollywood days that got - rightly - discontinued in the 1960s. Those were the days when each studio owned their own cinemas that could only stream their movies, where they owned actors who could only play in their movies (unless hired out by others) - and that led to people like Judy Garland, Marilyn Monroe etc. literally being owned by studios that fed them non stop pills and driven to overdose.

That’s the end point. That’s not the point we’re at now. But you’ll notice that in the last 3 or 4 years, every major production company now has a streaming platform. Much like up until the late 1960s in America, you can only see movies on company-owned platforms. This, with Johansson, is a huge step further - the largest production company in the world - who breached contract, not the other way around - are now essentially blacklisting Johansson from working with them for speaking out against them. Sure, this isn’t a blacklist on the level of the red and lavender scares - but if they can do this to Johansson, the biggest actor in the world, it sets a huge fucking precedent for blacklisting anybody who stands up for workers’ rights.

It also sees Disney - and other companies will follow suit, as they always do - moving a step closer to owning their stars. What Disney is trying to say is that Disney and Johansson are not equal partners in the contract, but that Disney has the ultimate say over everything. This idea that the contract is a formality is absolutely fucked, because it means that artists have no rights under the corporations, and if they want to continue to work they have to obey. Nobody is signing exclusive contracts yet, but you bet this is reverting to Judy Garland times. 

Even in the house it was LOUD.  Probably the loudest thing I have ever experienced but at a normal, predictable interval.  You would begin to time your sentences with little pauses with the rest of the lighthouse crew so you would talk like this while making your………..HORN…………. tea and then carry on talking because you knew when it would go off.  It rattled the walls and the dishes in our cabinet.

At least one girl had died there. They kept photos of her everywhere “in honor of her sacrifice” because she had decided to take the winter watch alone and died in a storm where bounders the size of mini vans had been lifted out of the ocean and left scattered across the island, to say nothing of the ice chunks.  People weren’t allowed to be alone on the watch after that.

One day a dead moose washed up on shore and it took my entire crew all day but we managed to rig up a line to hang it up to dry because we thought having a moose skeleton in the house would really spice the living room up a bit.  It did.  Weird shit happens when six of you are left alone, like ALONE ALONE, no cell reception, no wifi, just a radio to contact the real world and not a lot of reason to do that.  People don’t go on lighthouse jobs if they want to stay connected, I’ve found.