I abandoned the audiobook I was listening to – Before She Disappeared by Lisa Gardner – because I was six chapters in and absolutely nothing had happened yet. I am now listening to The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich and it is much better.

I am almost done with The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen, which is very good if a little perplexing, and about halfway into The Decagon House Murders by Yukito Ayatsuji, and can I just say that murders need to start happening; I am obsessed with this book and reading it compulsively, but nobody is dead yet (except for the Past Dead People Who Might Not Actually All Be Dead I Guess?) and I’m going to quit soon if this doesn’t pick up.

I keep forgetting to mention that we are watching the new Percy Jackson series on Disney Plus. It is excellent, don’t be scared off by previous terrible adaptations.

I already mentioned that T and I watched the Buffy musical episode (twice) and it was life changing as always, but then we watched the following episode and that Michelle Branch song came on at the end and it was 2001 all over again and I was so, so sad, and I looked over and T had tears in their eyes, they love Tara so much and they know what is coming and they are SO MAD at Willow, she let them down, this is very emotional.

(Aside: I had forgotten that this season aired during that extremely emotionally charged time in the fall of 2001 when literally everything could make me cry. Fuckin Michelle Branch.)

Anyway we followed that up by watching the Buffy movie, which as you may recall I loved so much back in the 1990s that I didn’t start watching the TV show until season two because I was sure they were going to ruin it. T followed the standard progression of going, wrong, wrong, she’s wrong, the vamps are wrong, why is President Snow here, why do they die like that, what is ON that man’s CHIN, to going NO MERRICK LOOK OUT and getting all sniffly and laughing out loud at “you’re the guy, you’re the chosen guy!” and then becoming nearly distraught when I told him that the actor who played the “very silly” vampire passed away a few months ago and asking if Paul Reubens had been in anything else they might like. So I guess we’re watching Pee Wee’s Big Adventure next.

Also we agree on the following: all Buffys are great (even if Kristy Swanson is personally terrible), and Pike is not only FAR AND AWAY the best Buffy boyfriend, he is possibly the least toxic on-screen boyfriend of the 20th century and certainly the 1990s.

I continue my recent Marvel rewatch with Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness or whatever the hell it was called, and once again: it’s not as bad as all that, certainly a lot more fun than the first Doctor Strange movie. We also finally finished rewatching Loki and are onto season two.

OH YES, J and I realized that we still had three episodes left of Agents of Shield, which we watched all the way through but found exhausting so we kept taking long breaks and he didn’t even watch seasons three through five, but anyway we watched the last episode last night so we could finally be done and I … fell asleep. I’ll finish it today. Whew.

Music: we went to Rasputin’s in Berkeley yesterday and each of my children spent a million dollars on CDs and DVDs (really regret not letting T buy the other two seasons of Adventure Time they had because we were spending too much money, that was a mistake, but I am not driving back to Berkeley), and on the way back we listened the Love and Rockets CD that either J or B bought and I reminded J of the roadtrip we took to Oregon in my dad’s car back in the 1990s and it didn’t have a CD player and the only tape we had was a Love and Rockets tape and by the time we got to like Grants Pass we were so fucking sick of that tape that we stopped at a record store next to a gas station, I think? Or maybe the gas station just sold tapes? And bought a bunch of tapes for the rest of the trip. I think that might be why we have a bunch of 80s compilations on cassette, because at least it was a variety. We fought a lot on that road trip, maybe it was the music.

What are you reading/watching/sleeping through?