#just five things

♡ HAIKYUU!! WEEK 2020 ♡

I have been quietly working through Michelle’s Just Five Things prompts this week. The started out easy with gratitude and I found the lists just flew from my pen! Quiet, warmth, and comfort started out easy enough, but for each of these prompts – that last list was a struggle!

And, then today’s prompt – receive

It took a long time to write anything down and I have been thinking much about the…

Fact of life is no matter if your weekend is jam-packed full of things to do or leisurely and at your own pace – Monday arrives on time. Without fail. Every.single.week. It was a weekend of leisurely and at our own pace though – which was a good follow up to last weekend’s busy-ness. There was some dining in and dining out – and we celebrated Steve’s birthday. There were also some reality checks…

Will teaches kids the difference between “por” and “para” in Spanish class, and writes the words on the board. In this episode that’s about April versus Rachel, those words are kind of interesting! “Por” is used in so many instances for different meanings of “for,” but “para” in particular focuses a lot on time, on getting to a destination, or  expressing a specific time or that something will be completed . . . or to show the purpose of a thing. But I also like the basic concept of having two words that can be easily confused, and having them be useful in different situations, depending on what you’re trying to do. 

I’m not an expert on Cabaret, but Sandy’s comment that Rachel needs more maturity for the role, and the connections with April throughout the episode are so strong, that I can’t help but see April as a Sally figure, as someone who lives in a carefree kind of way, who would rather stay at the Cabaret versus leave that place. 

The songs are so interesting in this episode. Rachel and April both sing different parts of “everybody loves a winner/so nobody loved me,” and later the Queen number asks, “can anyone find me somebody to love?” The first lyric is about someone not loving them, but the second puts emphasis on the reverse, on finding someone to love. 

Terri eats several pieces of grasshopper pie (yum!). It’s a weird pie that has its origins in the 50′s and 60′s, and that makes sense for Terri, I think, since she often seems like a kind of stereotypical housewife from that era. But grasshoppers are fertility symbols, too, and symbols of good luck, apparently.

Kendra’s way of operating is always so interesting, and her small moment early in the episode plays off everything else in “Preggers.” She talks up the horrors of childbirth in front of Will, then tells Terri that she’s “just making it sound worse than it is so he’ll feel guilty.” She adds, “Then you’ll have him by the balls for the rest of your life!” After Terri admits she wants to tell Will the truth, Kendra explains, “Dishonestly is food to a marriage—it will die without it.” 

After learning she’s pregnant, Quinn says, “I thought I had a shot at getting out of here.” For Quinn, the baby is the thing that will keep her caged in Lima, a loser forever. For Terri, the baby is not a problem but a solution—to just about everything in her life she’s unhappy with.  

In an episode where Terri is terrified of telling Will the truth, we get a few lovely scenes where others (Kurt, Finn, Quinn) tell a truth and in return are fully supported. Burt, Will and Finn, respectively all listen—and none of them judge the one who’s just shared big news.

Rachel’s story might seem to be on the outside of everything else, but the fact that she’s leaving glee club to perform in Cabaret is interesting. Elements of it seem useful for Quinn’s story (because of Sally Bowles’ pregnancy, and debating what to do), but other aspects seem helpful for Rachel’s own story, with Sally not wanting to trade her life on the stage for something unknown (at least, that’s what I’m seeing there). 

So Sue makes everyone sick, literally. She sets off glitterbombs and actual explosions, too: of the piano, of Will’s car, and of Vocal Adrenaline out of cannons. There’s other war imagery, with Sue showing footage of Nazi soldiers to the team, who go on to sing “We Built This City.” The city they built is transparent and just a prop, though, and as the song says, VA are a “ship of fools.” They have no direction, and even the choreography shows it, as they recycle the same move, one that twirls the girls on the team like windmills. And that leads to “Hey Mickey,” which felt, interestingly, more like one of Sue’s old Cheerio’s numbers. 

Blaine got into NYU. At least they dropped that in somewhere—I figured he’d end up back in college. Majoring in Who Knows? Maybe we’ll find out next week. Also: Blaine and Sam clinked glasses and hugged.

If VA’s sectionals numbers were disconnected and empty, New Directions’ numbers were really the opposite. The songs themselves (at least the first two) are lovely and fascinating and full. They’re all about different ways of living life, of living fully and almost desperately, of taking that moment and sharing it. 

The New Directions’ choreography itself was interesting, as were other details—there was Spencer on crutches, as well as on a chandelier, and Myron dancing off stage as Maddie Ziegler! Also the Warblers, who brought their own brand of dancing, and who at times circled the McKinley kids in a way that somehow wasn’t distracting but energetic, in a way that wasn’t like a windmill turning in place—it was more like a wheel in motion. Again: energy!

We get to watch as Sue loses everything, and that's interesting insofar as we started the season with Rachel and Blaine losing everything, but the structure of this episode is odd: we stayed with Sue's story through the scene with Becky, through the superintendent's meeting, through the lengthy Geraldo "This-Is-Your-Life"-meets-roast, and through the scene with Sue's mother and the trolley number. That was a lot, even though there were funny moments and really, lots of reminders of everything Sue had done. That's a lot of time, just to shift Sue to Vocal Adrenaline, especially in an episode where Dalton burn down and Will forming a superchoir in a matter of seconds.

Sam body-rolling in a Dalton blazer. Sam and Blaine speaking to one another. I'll take whatever tiny moments of Blam I can get as we move closer to the end of Glee.

AHHH! I loved "The Final Countdown" showing us both the fantasy Sue and Will were experiencing as well as what Will and Sue looked like in reality. Bless this show. Usually, we stay in the fantasy—and to have the entire glee club witness the reality was a moment I really loved.

Blaine and Sam fixed the costumes (that's my guess, anyway), and everything about "Rise" is really lovely and happy. Cuties dressing each other. The outfits look really great :) Wish we could've seen more of this story, though. I thought Blaine was supposed to make a speech about rising from the ashes?

Ropes all over the place (plus one chain-link fence), and two songs about breaking free. We end up with Sue and her connecting strands across the glee club's pictures—and a pretty violent tirade (she actually slaps a random student across the face), because she's seeing herself as trapped once again.

I was not expecting Myron—or Alistair (that name!—it means "defender of mankind")—to actually join glee club. I love it. Myron is like a younger Rachel, but the dial on his everything is cranked up so high. Kitty makes him likable. 

Really enjoyed the new newbies interactions with each other. My favorite is probably the dynamic between Jane, Madison and Mason. Jane's reactions to Madison were gold, and her tirade in the cafeteria directed at her brother matched the volume and style Myron's, incidentally, which I found kind of interesting. Madison's trying to embarrass her brother, in part, even though just like Myron, she's angry to not get what she wants.

Sue has been a bit more of a puppet master this season, so it was interesting to watch her be the puppet instead this week, as she waited on Myron and pitched elaborate ideas to him for the Bar Mitzvah. I like that we get a glimpse of the door of her storage shed, too. Her entire hurt locker is called "That's how Sue sees it," and you know, it is.