Wednesday’s Activities Include: walk with M., cooler weather, call from camp

[walkitout]

Camp called! Yikes! But it was good: the woman from T.’s camp read me an absolutely beautiful statement from the cabin counselors about my son. It sounds very like him (lots of questions, trying to get everyone else to obey the rules as well as diligently trying to follow them all himself) but the way they worded it, and the fact they picked up on his kindness (which can sometimes be hard to remember, when feeling frazzled by answering so so so many questions) was absolutely beautiful. He’s having a good time, which is fantastic.

Today is _much_ cooler than the previous two days.

I got the phone call while on my walk with M.

While we were hanging out after the walk, I read today’s Carolyn Hax column:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/carolyn-hax-avid-readers-of-whats-between-the-lines/2018/07/10/

I am, of course, pro-spoiler. But I have to say, that anyone who agrees with the person quoted (that “That book was really wild! I think you’re going to like it!” Is on any level a spoiler) has taken this thing so far that they’ve left the realm of Can We Even Talk as Book People. Hax was much nicer about the whole thing than I would have been; I pretty much went straight to, dump him now, rather than later.

Really. “I think you’re going to like it” as a spoiler just defies belief.

I’m hugely enjoying my reread of the Hidden Legacy Trilogy. The foreshadowing of

HEY THERE ARE SOME GENUINELY HUGE FUCKING SPOILERS RIGHT HERE

the siblings’ powers starts _way_ sooner than I had realized, and is much more detailed. This is why I love rereading things after I know how they turn out. Details like that really pop. I had noticed a fair amount of the foreshadowing of Nevada’s powers and how Connor figures out a lot of them very quickly, very early on. But the foreshadowing embedded in the ice mage’s attack on the highway overpass and its aftermath is particularly epic.

Comments

[jinasphinx]

I'm so glad T has kind camp counselors who get him. Another friend with a special-needs son ended up having to do a ton of emotional labor to get the camp counselors to work constructively with her kid (the main factor being that the counselors were young and inexperienced), so I'm glad T's having a good experience.

I have no patience these days with people who are precious about not wanting spoilers in anything they're reading or watching. It seems like the prevalence of Netflix/Hulu/TiVo has led a lot of people to exclaim, "Don't tell me anything, I'm not caught up!" and then you can't discuss the shows that you BOTH watch. It just seems silly to me.

[ethelmay]

I'm glad I'm someone who doesn't much mind spoilers (though I do try to avoid them for others). It's how the work gets there that is usually the important part -- there's a particular book I've read many times in which the mother dies suddenly, which I knew before the first time I read it, and the first ten or fifteen times I re-read it, I did not remember when it was going to happen, because the author set things up That Well to have the reader distracted and not expecting anything like that. (Still not entirely sure how she did it, to be honest.)

There are a few cases where there's a true twist in the plot that are more fun if you don't know beforehand, but not that many in my experience. (And I'll bet you if I'd never seen The Crying Game and came to it cold these days, I'd pick up on clues I didn't back in the day, and the twist would be no twist at all.) Also, sometimes I don't experience those twists as "fun," but more like the way rollercoasters feel to people like me who hate rollercoasters.

We should probably all re-watch the Crying Game

[walkitout]

I think at the time we were so focused on the “twist” that we missed it is actually a political movie.

I went into it cold, and was all weirded out that they had cast someone who (to me) was obviously a man in a role as a woman, and no one seemed to notice. The “twist” was a huge relief. I was like, oh, okay, the people who were making the movie at least were paying some attention. Probably that was a very not-enlightened perspective on my part, but I was who I was and I’ll just blame the early 1990s for that.

Re: We should probably all re-watch the Crying Game

[ethelmay]

You might be interested in the discussion here.