i... think about it all the time
spoiler alert: my "it" isn't the same as Charli's
Hello, dear readers!
This month, I am presenting you all a peek inside my brain via things I think about on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. My series of Roman Empires if you will. This is an incomplete list, but I tried to compile a variety of items over the course of a few months to make sure these things truly occur to me as often as I’m claiming.
In no particular order, here goes:
The line from The Perks of Being a Wallflower that Sam tells Charlie before his first date: “…you shouldn’t tell her she looks pretty. You should tell her how nice her outfit is because her outfit is her choice whereas her face isn't.”
Mae Whitman. who plays the role of Charlie’s date Mary Elizabeth, captures the relatable, devastating vulnerability of a teenager pretending not to care about anything. For years, I’ve remembered the look on her face when he opens the door for their date and compliments her outfit as instructed.
Only, he doesn’t! While scrubbing through the movie on HBO Max, I saw it’s his parents who open the door when Mary Elizabeth arrives for the Sadie Hawkins dance. I couldn’t even find Emma Watson saying the line. That moment is only in the book and my imagination. Regardless, it’s a fantastic line, and I think about it all the time.
“Is that a bug?”
No, it’s a piece of fuzz.
Genie’s bottle decor in I Dream of Genie.
This bottle was the blueprint for all my interior design dreams at seven years old. Before Mary Tyler Moore’s sound stage studio apartment rocked my world, I was all about Genie’s bottle. They didn’t show it that often, which made it all the more alluring. I still dream of a owning a room made up of 60% couch with this much color.
A fight that broke out in my fourth-grade class had about whether “Just Dance” by Lady Gaga was about getting drunk or really just about dancing.
The rats in the prologue of Dennis Lehane’s Shutter Island.
Specifically, the one rat that makes it out to nearby Paddock Island, which can barely be called an island since it’s just a collection of rocks that are only above sea level for two hours a day. The narrator describes how the rats always drown trying to make it to that island, but one day one finally makes it. Even though the rat is doomed to drown once the tide comes in, the narrator remarks if his friend were watching he would have clapped.
How I would escape if I fell into the tracks of the subway.
The Palm Too
There are many iconic New York restaurants that have been lost to the sands of time (Cafe Lalo, Elaine’s, the old location of Cafe Boulud etc.), but I get stuck on the Palm Too the most. I can’t say why, other than I feel like I had too little time with it. I’d just started to get comfortable there when it’s caricature filled walls and enormous steaks were lost to me forever.
Mary Tyler Moore scraping french toast in the garbage disposal in Ordinary People.
The woman scrapes an entire piece of untouched french toast into the garbage disposal with rage rarely put to screen. It’s violent and bizarre but perfectly conveys her character’s repressed state of mind. This movie is so good and heartbreaking. I’m simultaneously afraid and dying to rewatch it.
If my hair will turn brown.
That Ann Reinking essentially played herself in All that Jazz.
Not only that, she had to audition to play herself!!! I really adore this New Yorker piece of her reflecting on her relationship with Bob Fosse and highly recommend it to anyone looking for a rabbit hole to fall down.
The painting “Judith Beheading Holofernes” by Artemisia Gentileschi that I saw in the Uffizi.
The lore of this painting is fascinating. Gentileschi put herself in the painting as Judith and her former art instructor and rapist as Holofernes. I couldn’t find a great source backing up my memory of this, but regardless, it’s pure female rage captured in paint. It was so gorgeous in person, it made me nauseous.
Why am I nauseous?
So many scenes and quotes from The Birdcage.
I think of Albert (Nathan Lane) and Armand (Robin William)’s fight in the opening act the most, which features the most hilarious, razor-sharp lines. But my favorite scene is the one when Armand presents Albert with a signed palimony agreement in one of the most tender, earnest romantic declarations ever put to cinema.
Can I fit more books in my apartment?
The scene in High Fidelity when Rob is taking all his records out to reorganize them and his friend tells him laying them flat damages them.
If I were a toxic man, Rob Gordon is absolutely who I would be. I adore John Cusack and have never felt more of a kinship toward him as when he’s rambling about bands, listing top fives, and blaming everyone else for his romantic problems. If I had unlimited funds and space this is what my apartment would look like.
That Eve Babitz essay from Slow Days Fast Company about a woman that only other women understand the appeal of.
I’ve skimmed through the collection and cannot figure out which essay this was, but I KNOW that it was in there. I will find it. I am 98% sure it was in Slow Days and not one of her other books. It was a reference to a woman that women loved and men never understood. Eve’s narrator was talking to some man at a party saying, ‘Isn’t she great?’ and he shrugged. Eve described her as conventional but in such an authentic, enigmatic way. I must find that passage again.
Embarrassing former crushes.
Issa and Molly’s phone call in the final episode of Insecure.
Issa and Molly’s relationship highs and lows resonated so deeply for me throughout the series. It gives me chills to watch that final episode and see that the love between the friends was able to endure marriages, heartbreak, career moves, fights, and everything else. It’s so real and may we all be so lucky to find a bestie like that.
The time I walked barefoot in Florence.
The scene in Oz when (*spoiler alert*) Christopher Meloni kills a guy who is giving him a blow job.
Oz is a 2000s fever dream of a TV show, but boy was I down bad for the Keller-Beecher toxic, doomed gay romance of this series. Has anyone watched it in the past 20 years? I don’t know if I could ever go back and do it all again, but there was some world class acting going on in this series (I ride so hard for Harold Perrineau, also B.D. Wong, Rita Moreno, a terrifying J.K. Simmons). Christopher Meloni’s jump from this to Detective Stabler is range if I’ve ever seen it. A sexy and terrifying performance that will send you straight to therapy!
If my bedroom window is locked.
It is……….. I think.
The Season 10 carnival promo for Degrassi set to “Shark in the Water” by V. V. Brown.
A genuinely genius piece of marketing that had every tween camped in front of their television set. For anyone feeling nostalgic, Business Insider has a very thorough oral history about how this promo saved the series from getting canceled by Teen Nick.
This Dolly Parton Pet Peeve:
Will there be Häagen-Dazs mint chip ice cream at the deli?
Should I go to Gristedes instead? Sometimes don’t have it at the deli, but then sometimes Gristedes also doesn’t have it, and I really don’t want to go to Gristedes unless I have to. Is it better to just get Ben and Jerry’s from the deli and save myself the trip to Gristedes, even though I know it’ll never be as good as Häagen-Dazs mint chip?
Robert DeNiro in Heat telling people they have to be ready to walk out on anything and anyone they love in 30 seconds flat.
He says this multiple times in the movie, and I think about each time equally.
Thank God I’m not pregnant.
The fact that “American Girl” by Tom Petty is the song the girl in Silence of the Lambs sings along to in the car to moments before the scene where she is kidnapped by Buffalo Bill.
It is one of the most perfect song placements in cinematic history. I also think about the fact that my body would apparently be Buffalo Bill’s preferred skin suit size (according to the details of Thomas Harris’s novel), but my boobs are too big for him. I think about these things every time I listen to “American Girl” which is very often. It is one of my most listened to songs of this year and one of my all-time favorite songs to sing along to in the car.
The glass eye in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.
My friends who have been bitten by rats.
There are two of them and the bites happened in very different contexts. One was eating outside on 79th street and the other was doing lab research, but I will be haunted by thought of these rat bites for the rest of my days. On the plus side, rats do not carry rabies!
“I don’t think about you at all,” as uttered by Don Draper on Mad Men.
That’s all for this month, folks!
Thanks for joining me for another mini memoir. Leave a comment of a pop culture moment or fact of life that you think about truly all the time.
And stay tuned! One of the frequent thoughts above directly relates to something exciting I’ve got cooking for August :)
and it really always is Judith Beheading Holofernes
First off, I too think about Robert DeNiro's iconic line in Heat at least once a month.
Second, I recently watched Jurassic Park: The Lost World for the first time the other month in preparation for the latest entry into the franchise. And there's a line at the end where this grizzled mercenary hired by Hammond's greedy nephew tells him "I've spent enough time in the company of Death". I think about that line at least once a week and despair that in my entire life I might never string together a series of words and sounds to evoke such a chilling effect as that line does.