🌿 Field Notes #003
More snow and Oranges is the Only Fruit
If I’m being honest, I didn’t get out much over the last two weeks. It has been super cold and I’d been sick, so it didn’t feel like the best idea to get outside too much. I did get a lot of reading and television in: I read Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson, and finally finished watching Dark on Netflix. I had started Dark back when it came out and loved it, but by the time the second season came out, I didn’t remember enough about what was happening to get back into it. If you aren’t familiar, Dark is a German show involving time travel and lots of complex, interconnected families/characters, so if you aren’t up to speed it can be especially difficult to understand what’s going on. I ended up rewatching the first season and binging the rest, and it was definitely one of my favorite shows I’ve seen in a long time. If you have the stamina, I can’t recommend it enough.
I also really enjoyed Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit; I read it as part of the queer book club I’m in, and it sparked some really interesting discussion about how growing up with (or without) religion has had a different impact on all of us. As someone who grew up Catholic and as a closeted queer person, but is no longer religious, I really resonated with Jeanette’s (main character) description of what her religion has offered her and what she missed about God once she left home and was no longer under the influence of her evangelist mother (and could form some opinions of her own):
I miss God. I miss the company of someone utterly loyal. I still don’t think of God as my betrayer. The servants of God, yes, but servants by their very nature betray. I miss God who was my friend. I don’t even know if God exists, but I do know that if God is your emotional role model, very few human relationships will match up to it.1
I think I’ve mentioned this on here before, but this year I’ve been on a mission to curate what I consume a bit more. Particularly with cell phones glued to our hands, it can be so easy to passively consume content that has been served to you instead of purposefully choosing what you want to watch/read/listen to. I’m doing my best to keep lists of what I want to watch and what I have watched, what I have read and what I want to read, to hopefully incorporate some higher quality art into my media diet. I am not saying I’m not going to consume garbage sometimes (this season of Love is Blind..), I’m just going to do it because I chose to do it instead of feeling like I came upon it and someone told me to.
Impossibly, we also got more snow this week (a blizzard!). The snow from our last big storm had just barely melted and then about 20” was immediately dumped on top of it. I actually don’t mind it, but I work from home four days a week so I’m probably in too privileged of a position to have a relevant opinion on it. The walk to my gym from my apartment is about 20 minutes away so I do get to experience various creative shoveling solutions that way, at least. This storm seems to have had a way more robust response than the last one - we’re practiced now, and most of the sidewalks had been shoveled with a couple of hours of the snow stopping. Last storm, it stopped in the morning, but our sidewalk wasn’t shoveled until almost 5pm. Somehow, we’re supposed to get even more snow this upcoming week- interested to see how that pans out.
Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (London: Pandora Press, 1985).