Women are my favorite guy

Some hope and comfort today. 🌄 The pain and struggle *will* fade one day, and you’ll be left with growth and learning.

okay actually though, these three shows are so good.

The World is Dancing has a pretty basic plot (little boy learns that dancing is cool), but the animation is SO experimental and interesting! it made me feel real human emotions.

Sayonara, Lara is the Little Mermaid but anime. episode one is basically a recap of the Disney movie, but extremely well animated with a hot femme fatale design for the witch. as of the episode's end, we're in uncharted territory, and it could get very weird and interesting?

Simple example: I need to shower, eat food, and go to grocery store. I'm hungry and don't have energy to cook, so the easiest food option would be to get a deli item at the grocery store. But I want to shower before leaving the house. But I don't have energy to shower without eating first.

It feels very silly to get stuck on such a minor dilemma for as long as I have! But there are times I've spent hours looping through this list, trying and failing to start it anywhere. And the only way out, I find, is to manually override it: to catch it happening and say, fuck it! I can go to the grocery store stinky! It's fine!!

It could be considered a subset of perfectionism, because the override very much involves hitting yourself with the idea that it's ok to do things suboptimally. But it feels like it comes from a slightly different place. As someone who struggles with executive function, I get myself through a lot of tasks by trying to optimize to the smoothest, lowest-friction way through. The task order that minimizes having to do any step more than once, or having to remember too many things at a time. If I can arrange my tasks just right, sometimes I can get one task to cover part of the work of doing another! And if I can put my tasks in an order that feels natural and ideal, I can lower the energy of activation it takes to get moving. And, sometimes, avoid the choice paralysis of not being able to pick a task out of a list of equal priority.

Except that, obviously, sometimes the optimization process throws up glitches of its own. There's the closed loop I described, and there's also another catching point where a task I have the mental energy and wherewithal to do gets stuck behind a task that's too big/intimidating/difficult to tackle. For example: I just sent some emails I've been procrastinating on for over a month, because I need to set up a new email address, and I was telling myself it'd be better to get that set up before I contacted people, because it would save me the hassle of dragging a bunch of conversations over to a new account when I did get it set up. I still haven't made the other email! But I realized that hypothetical future hassle was not worth the delay of not sending those emails for as long as it's going to take to actually get my brain together to figure out a new email service.

Surprisingly, doing something like this often actually makes the difficult task I was stuck on easier! Another thing I struggle with is a flinch reaction from tasks that are both pressingly important, and unapproachable to do. The more I need to do a task immediately, the more stressed and overwhelmed and self-recriminating I get about the fact that I don't know how to even start doing it. It gets so bad I can't even think about it directly - I think about the general shape of it, flinch, and divert my attention so I don't panic.

And when I've got a minor, pressing task stuck behind a big nebulous scary task, it presses the unapproachable task forward, makes it urgent, and that makes it harder to figure out how to do. If I can get around it, and do the actually pressing task in some contrived way that pushes some miscellaneous messy consequences forward, it takes pressure off the big task. And then I can actually think about it, without panicking, which makes it possible to actually work on doing it.

That last point also often applies to asking for help. I have a weird hangup here: I find it excruciatingly difficult to ask for help if I haven't at least *started* the thing I need help with. Which gets into the same dynamic: I have a big unsorted task I can't think about directly without panicking, or the path of steps to doing it that I've managed to figure out starts with one I can't make myself tackle, so I'm stuck doing nothing with no way in. Asking for help means admitting to someone that there is going to be mess, that I can't tackle the problem in the optimal front-to-back way so there's going to be inconvenient problems generated in some of the steps that will have to be dealt with at other steps, and some of that inconvenience might be to people other than me!! But just managing to say this, to admit this upfront, is sometimes enough to cut the gordion knot of not being able to start anywhere.

The book mostly is told from the POV of Pierre, a self-insert who is failed author and, I cannot stress this enough, utterly pathetic 

Quasimodo damaged his hearing as a teenager from years of bell ringing and now uses sign language whenever he can

There is a scene where Quasimodo and a fellow deaf guy have to have a conversation without using sign language because they’re in a courtroom and the jury doesn’t know sign. It goes about as well as you’d expect 

Frollo has a little brother, Jehan, who he raised after their parents died. Jehan is now a frat bro in college whose hobbies consist of getting drunk and being mean to Quasimodo. In his first scene Jehan complains about college DEI because an Italian guy got a scholarship he wanted. 

Esmeralda is accused of witchcraft because she taught her pet goat Djali how to do math

Djali may or may not be sapient. He can and does imitate human mannerisms to make fun of people on purpose. He does this while on trial. 

Yes. They tried the goat for witchcraft, too. 

Pierre writes a whole play riding on the pun of dolphin/Dauphin. Nobody likes it. 

Frollo is an alchemist and has a secret mad science lab where he writes on the walls

Jehan literally pulls a “buy my silence” and frollo gives him money to make him shut up

There’s a trio of catty girls who bully Esmeralda like it’s Mean Girls

Quasimodo and Frollo literally have Cryptid Status— Parisians circulate rumors that Quasimodo is either a familiar, a homunculus, or the result of demonic mpreg, and that Frollo is a wizard with wizard powers and/or a ghost

There is a little old woman who lives in a hole and shouts slurs at people. She has a tragic backstory. 

There is a homicidal con man/king of thieves named Clopin Troillefou (surname translation: The Fool of Fear) who deserves tumblr sexymanhood.

Pierre learns how to carry chairs with his teeth 

There’s an entire chapter dedicated to the layout of the streets of Paris in painstaking detail

There’s another chapter that is a rant about interior design 

Esmeralda and Pierre get platonically married due to Clopin’s murderous shenanigans. Pierre tries to make a move in her but ends up being more emotionally attached to Djali the goat than to her. I think that should be grounds for divorce

There is a scene where Pierre has to choose between helping Esmeralda escape or helping Djali. He picks Djali. 

Frollo hides from his own brother by laying face down in mud and playing dead. Somehow this works 

There is a Plot Significant Tiny Shoe. A Tiny Shoe Chekhov’s Gun. And Victor Hugo will not stop telling you just how Tiny this shoe is. 

There’s a soap opera style plot twist that involves a false accusation of cannibalism and the woman in the hole who shouts slurs

Quasimodo makes up a stupid little song that doesn’t even rhyme to confess his love to Esmeralda, who remains oblivious

He then attempts to demonstrate his affection via convoluted metaphors that involve props. She doesn’t get it. Boy please say what you mean

Frollo pulls the classic discord groomer tactic of threatening self-harm if Esmeralda doesn’t give in. 

Jehan rolls up to a party/rescue mission scheming session in Clopin’s secret hideout in full plate armor (how did he get that???), drunk off his ass, and acts like he owns the place. Everyone finds this so ridiculous that they just let him

Hugo goes on and on about how innocent and naive Esmeralda is but then casually reveals that Esmeralda carries a dagger on her person at all times to fend off assault. When Frollo attacks her and Quasi intervenes, she takes Quasi’s knife and almost kills Frollo (fair!) but he flees. She contains multitudes?

Frollo has a psychotic breakdown in the middle of a field surrounded by chickens and hallucinates skeletons everywhere 

For the first half of the book Esmeralda is like 70% sure Frollo is a ghost, not helped by his aforementioned Cryptid Status

Jehan eats a moldy piece of cheese off the ground 

Frollo tries to send Pierre on a suicide mission in drag. Pierre objects to the suicide part but not the drag part  

Clopin’s preferred weapon is a scythe, he’s very good at using it, and he sings when he fights. Again: sexyman potential. 

Victor Hugo has a foot fetish. I initially dismissed it as Frollo having a foot fetish until Victor Hugo included a foot fetish torture scene without any Frollo in it. So I can only conclude that the foot fetish is authorial in nature. Unfortunately the foot scenes are important to the plot. 

Frollo is canonically 36, he just aged like shit and is bald. The narrator will not stop telling you just how bald he is.

Despite being in full plate armor, Jehan gets splatted like a bug