Melina Matsoukas’s debut feature* Queen & Slim gives us a zeitgeist film that has (unfortunately) flown under most people’s radar. Daniel Kaluuya (Slim) and Jodie Turner-Smith** (Queen) begin as a couple on an awkward date, though their fates change when they are pulled over.*** What follows is a lot of different films: road trip, political story, heist, escape, love story and by the final scene the movie will have taken you on a rough and fulfilling journey.****
Cost: $1.80 via Redbox
Where watched: at home
*If this is any indication of what’s to come, we have a very exciting filmmaker to watch.
**In this very American story, it was interesting to hear the two leads’ British accents during the making-of bonus features.
***Even people who don’t follow the news will recognize that a plot point involving Black people and a traffic stop doesn’t bode well.
****I went in mostly blind to this film. I heard “really good!” and “women director” and didn’t look further. It’s the kind of film where people might dismiss as too sad, but there’s so much life among the sadness, I would suggest you don’t pass it by.
According to the writer, the divergent world views of the two protagonists were based on the differences between Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X.
I enjoy a good homemade sign and the Kenton neighborhood is not immune to the occasional entry.
Here’s one outside an apartment complex.
I wonder if a country-wide medical emergency will be the thing that finally divorces access to healthcare from job status.
My guess is that it won’t due to the fact that political donations are what run our political system. But it should.
May 2022. This is a post from the beginning of the pandemic. It’s been sitting in my draft folder for more than two years now. I am publishing it without revising, so please excuse its first-draft form.
And in which I attend two webinars.
The Century Link arrived sometime after 9:00 am (which turned out to be about 45 minutes before the text telling me he was about to arrive pinged on my phone) and got to work upgrading the internet.
He did the outside thing, and when he came to do the inside thing he found trouble with the phone jack. Apparently, the wiring was correct right up until the jack, but then it was so very wrong that he was surprised we were getting any internet at all.
Things were done, including me moving the dresser beside my bed and frowning at the amount of dust that had gathered, and behold! The internet loaded in a manner that did not cause me to take multiple yoga breaths.
When I ran a speed test on 3/18 our download speed was 5.44 mbps and upload was .75. On 3/20 the download was 22.98 and upload was .75 again. Today: 33.9 and 9.1. Ahhhh.
This afternoon I attended two webinars. One was from Upwork, the platform where I have done a lot of “up”ing and no “work”ing. I learned that I need to just work for not much for the first 5–10 jobs and then can start increasing my rates. So that was good.
My other webinar was one about increasing my freelance business using LinkedIn. It had some good stuff which I will apply.
Peas were planted today, food was made, and those things plus the webinars, didn’t have to get shoved in around being at my office job from 8:00–4:30 (plus commute time).
I’m looking forward to April 1, which is the day I will be fully free of the W-2 job and into the W-9 world.
Sara sent me this postcard to mark that she has almost finished watching the series Lovesick (the one with Johnny Flynn, Antonia Thomas, and Daniel Ings).
Like me, she found the series a good distraction from ALL THE THINGS!
May 2022. This is a post from the beginning of the pandemic. It’s been sitting in my draft folder for more than two years now. I am publishing it without revising, so please excuse its first-draft form.
I’m down to just two more things to do for the full time gig. I’m looking forward to leaving that behind.
When the writer’s strike happened back in aught seven, it wasn’t good for some things. The show Pushing Daisies, for instance. Never really got traction, despite being a fabulous show. But the things the writers wrote on the side when they were out of work? So much fun! And we had good enough internet that we could see some of them. Without the Writer’s strike, we wouldn’t have gotten Dr. Horrible. Because why not make a short musical when you’ve got nothing else to do.
The corona virus version of this is the late night shows filming from home. They can put together the graphics, and the writers can write, but there’s no studio audience, no studio, and hosts having to do their own makeup.
And still, it manages to be funny.
And laughing is good right now.
Look what arrived in my mailbox today!
Things I enjoy about this postcard:
May 2022. This is a post from the beginning of the pandemic. It’s been sitting in my draft folder for more than two years now. I am publishing it without revising, so please excuse its first-draft form.
One thing I learned last week is that our internet plan is not nearly speedy enough to navigate through two people working from home. It’s slow enough that Matt doesn’t even try to stream anything on the TV during the day. He’s been watching DVDs of Firefly.
When I’m doing the work I have to do before my job is over, I click on a link and then wait. And then wait some more. Sure, it’s a great reminder to breathe, but six hours later, it’s just exhausting.
We’re scheduled for an upgrade tomorrow. Ideally it will happen early so things can go back to zipping along. But they could be working as late as 3:45.
In other news, Sentinel had his growth removed and has a row of stitches up his neck. Here’s hoping we can keep the incision clean until it’s time to take the stitches out.
May 2022. This is a post from the beginning of the pandemic. It’s been sitting in my draft folder for more than two years now. I am publishing it without revising, so please excuse its first-draft form.
I’ve just finished with a Zoom meeting with the Librarians of Librarian Book Group. This is my second Zoom meeting in two days as we successfully had Writer’s Group yesterday. Plus, tonight I helped Matt and his family play an online bar-trivia type game.
Being an introvert, I’m not yet feeling the feeling of missing interacting with people, but I’m sure it will come. And it’s fun to get to see people, even if the screens are kind of at weird angle sometimes, or the picture freezes.
It reminds me of Before Midnight, with the younger couple who met and have a long-distance relationship and video chat a lot. You can see what Jessie and Celeste lost by not having that connection.
I’m still feeling thankful that we have so many electronic resources. And hopefully the internet upgrade we have scheduled for Wednesday will improve things even more on this front.
In cat news, I’ve decided to have the rapidly growing lump on Sentinel’s neck removed. It was thumbnail sized in October, and has more than doubled. I’ve got one more paycheck coming and I guess it’s better to spend a chunk of change now rather than having to take action in June when there is no money coming it. He has surgery tomorrow. Poor thing. He’s going to hate it, plus I’m not sure how the cone will work as the cone would be on his neck.
Sentinel has had a growing lump on the side of his neck since last fall. I had it biopsied a few months ago when it wasn’t nearly this size and it came back as not cancerous, so I left it, hoping it would stay small.
But it got a lot bigger. It also, much to the vet’s interest, was a two parter, with one dark black part and another lighter part.
I’ve got one more paycheck coming from my soon-to-be-over job and a big chunk of it is going toward taking this sucker off of the cat. I think it will be money well spent.
I had to get a special dispensation because of the quarantine. The vet’s office was only doing essential surgeries.
Update from the future. The lump was removed, biopsied to find again it was not cancerous, and has not (seven months later) made a reappearance. It was money well spent.
