#indiefic

1. Well, first of all, it was fantastic. I haven’t read the book, so I went in completely unprepared. This is the exact kind of twisty-turny story I absolutely love, and everyone in the cast fucking killed it. I felt like I was holding my breath for the entire last episode. So good.

2. I could talk for a million years about Andy: his little white lies, his rationalizing of his actions. The way he is low-key hostile towards men he considers a threat, pleasant and jocular with men in menial positions, and winningly sincere around women whose help he needs to accomplish his goals. The ease with which he says “I love you very much” and gives performative, too-perfect answers to questions about his feelings (what was Jacob like as a baby? “Beautiful.”) and yet doesn’t have any personal connections outside of his wife and child. The careful way he cultivates an image of success and normalcy: every aspect of his appearance (his clothes, his car, his accessories, his grooming) is sharp, lean, tailored, expensive, yet designed to appear casual and effortless. (We get hints throughout the series that Andy grew up poor, yet he clearly works hard to fit in among the wealthy parents of Newton.)

The way women bend over backwards to help him out: Lynn, Duffy, Joanna, and of course, Laurie. (Chris Evans was the perfect choice for this role: he’s so handsome and charming and warm and uniquely vulnerable that you can see why these women are so eager to help him. He has the most trustworthy eyebrows in the business.)

The way that the show sets up the dynamic of his and Laurie’s marriage from the very start with this exchange, when she recommends a history podcast to him:

Laurie: I think you’d really like it.

Andy: I’ll check it out.

Laurie: No, you won’t.

Andy: [smiles behind his coffee cup]

The way he responds to so many despicable actions (or the suspicion of them) with “It’s what I would do.” And he puts his money where his mouth is: he interrogates children (often without their parents), vandalizes people’s property, makes threats. He tells a child sex abuse victim that he doesn’t give a shit whether he wants to answer questions.

The way he states at the outset that he believes in “the system,” and then spends the entire rest of the series skirting the rules in the service of whatever he decides is right for everyone. Whatever it takes.

The way that Billy gives him a choice between being a good man and a good father, and he fucking takes it.

3. I could talk for an equally long time about Laurie, and how fucking sad her life is. As the walls of their isolation close in around her, we see her becoming increasingly desperate, because she needs human interaction in a way that Andy so clearly doesn’t. He has no friends, but he lets her in, and she loves that; but she works so hard to get Andy to be emotionally present, on even an elementary level, and he pays attention to her on his terms and his schedule.

Laurie, too, makes her essential nature known at the outset of the series: she tells Andy that she doesn’t think she could survive the loss of her child. And in the end, she does lose Jacob, because she’s lost her ability to look at him without suspicion.

Without being consciously presented with it, Laurie considers the same choice Andy made - good parent or good person? - and she chooses the other path. She believes that Jacob is guilty, and she does not believe in the integrity of the system, because she’s been married to an engine of that system for fourteen (?) years, and she knows through personal experience that the truth is subjective, and - in the hands of a gifted lawyer - malleable. So she does the same thing Andy does: she takes matters into her own hands. In a way that is directly foreshadowed in the times that Andy uses his car in acts of aggression, Laurie uses hers in what she ultimately believes to be an act of love.

4. Billy. Boy, he was a treat. JK Simmons is a treasure, and I loved the way he and Chris Evans managed to subtly mirror one another without it seeming forced or obvious. I love that the convicted rapist and killer is the one in the series with the most consistent moral compass. I would dearly love to know how that meeting between Billy and Laurie went down.

Once the reveal happened, I was kicking myself for not realizing who O’Leary (or as I like to call him, Chekhov’s Hired Gun) was working for. I managed to predict a couple of the outcomes, but that one made perfect sense and yet it took me completely by surprise. I love it when that happens.

Back on Sunday the 17th, I started having incredibly painful and weird headaches behind my right eye socket. (I was pretty certain that I took myself to paint pottery over the long weekend, but had to confirm that I actually did have the pickup receipt because it was a strange, semi-hallucinatory blur of an afternoon. Hope it turns out well!) At first I thought I was just an old woman who can’t stay up late anymore, so I was Very Responsible and got extra sleep and drank water and took Motrin and absolutely nothing helped.

The headaches got worse; toward the beginning of the week, I would wake up fine and then the pain would start toward the afternoon and escalate into the evening. Friday night, my right eye started tearing consistently for about an hour. By Saturday morning, I woke up with the same, terrible headache I had gone to sleep with, and my right eye so droopy it basically looked closed. It’s remained pretty droopy since, which neither my roommates nor people at my office seemed to notice (compliment?).

I’ll also mention here that two weeks back, I hit my head (right eyebrow, toward the nose) on the towel rod in my bathroom. Which stunned me for a second and had a tender spot and a bump, but otherwise no immediate symptoms. Now I was starting to wonder about slow developing concussion issues. 

I was incredibly reluctant to take action, in case it ended up looking like an overreaction, but also because I was worried about what next steps would look like (doctors? in MY brain???). I talked to my incredibly calm and smart mother, whose new motto is “don’t be like the lady in the endometriosis commercial” so I took myself to urgent care on Sunday. The woman who saw me there started by advising me to go to the ER right away, then walked it back and said it could just be conjunctivitis (which I’ve seen and was pretty certain I didn’t have) and to go pick up some eyedrops. Obviously I asked what would happen if it was an emergency problem and I just took eyedrops and she told me that “wasn’t a fair question” because “she didn’t know what was going on in there.” Then I asked if she would overall advise an ER visit, and she said, “well, that’s why I’m presenting you with these two options.” So that was very helpful.

Because I’m a pushover and was also afraid of an ER visit and its potential results, I took path of most eyedrops for a day or so, but then messaged my doctor (I think the endometriosis lecture has sunk in) Monday. She scheduled me for an exam and MRI at her next appointment (Thursday afternoon) but told me that if I experienced changes in symptoms especially dizziness and nausea, I should go to the emergency room.

I struggled through Tuesday with the hallucinatory feeling back and the pain getting progressively worse (my new best friend Excedrin Migraine was no longer working for more than an hour or so). Then I started feeling somewhat nauseated...and told myself it was nothing and it would pass. (I’m extremely good at health.) I took the bus home. I put together my new coatrack. I took a shower. Then I started noticing a tingling and numbness in my feet, moving up my legs.

So finally I packed a backpack with comfortable clothes, a water bottle, my wallet, and a cell phone charger, and took two subways to the hospital.

They got me checked in pretty much right away (they escalated it because of the fall/concussion risk and potential escalation, but also because I was experiencing tachycardia and I think they were nervous; I’m almost certain I had the accelerated heartbeat because I was nervous. Like potentially that I might die.) Texted my parents; my dad headed out to come stay with me.

Through that night and into today, I got a head CT, an MRI (I fell asleep inside; this happened at 3 AM ish and the weird pulsing jackhammer noises were somehow soothing), a second, different head CT, and saw an ophthalmologist and ENT. Basically my eyeball is fine, my brain is fine, the fall probably had nothing to do with anything, the theory that I was bleeding somewhere in there got thrown out, and what I probably have is a mucus filled cyst that’s been hanging out in my face (right sinus) and became infected and started pushing on my facial muscle and eating away at my bone. Which is SUCH a fun image, but also better than brain surgery or “well, you’re dead from an aneurysm!”

So now I get to be on medication to shrink the cyst and clear up the infection and then go in next week so they (please GOD while I’m asleep) can stick a camera way up in there and also biopsy the thing because even on the imaging they’re not 100% sure it’s not some kind of other mass. And I'm supposed to go see a neurologist because the tingling feeling in my legs isn’t really explicable with the other stuff.