May the Enjoyable Movies + Shows + Books be With You

Terrible play on words, I know. In my defense, it was May 4th when I started writing this, but it’s obviously not May 4th now. And to make matters worse, I’m not a Star Wars fan.

*dodges punches and plugs my ears from all of the gasping*

I’ve been working from home for about 7 weeks now, and my family and I are in quarantine. And along with everyone else during this time, I am watching a lot of movies and TV shows. Something that I realized during my movie and series-watching is that I have a deep-rooted appreciation for the actor Ethan Hawke. This appreciation first started about four years ago when I first saw Dead Poets Society. Yes, I realize that as a writer and previous English major, watching it for the first time only a mere few years ago is quite looked down upon. But, I have since made up the time by watching a few others by him, including: Sinister, Juliet, Naked, Reality Bites, Stockholm, and The Purge. Since everyone is wondering, here are my favorite roles of his, in order:

  1. Before Sunrise. Not only did it receive 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, but it takes place in Vienna. And it’s heavily focused on the dialogue, which is possibly more beautiful than the setting.

  2. Reality Bites. AKA, Ethan in his absolute prime, alongside Wynona Rider and Ben Stiller.

  3. Dead Poets Society. AKA baby Ethan and Robin Williams talking about the importance of poetry. I’m done.

  4. Boyhood. It took place over the course of 12 years, and I need to watch it again ASAP.

  5. Juliet, Naked. It’s a quirky little film adapted from the seemingly multi-hit author Nick Hornby, co-starring Chris O’Dowd and Rose Byrne.

There you have it, people, a list of Ethan Hawke movies that you didn’t ask for but I delivered.

May has already been and will continue to be a great month for movies and shows. I had been counting down the days until May 1st, the day The Half of It premiered on Netflix. This semi-autobiographical movie is about a girl named Ellie who writes papers for classmates in her high school. A jock whom she’s never met comes by and offers to pay her to write a love letter to a girl he has a crush on. Little does he know, Ellie also has a crush on the love letter-recipient. There were a few plot points that I believed were mentioned way too late in the film, thus not giving them the time they deserved to be fleshed out. But overall, the story was an interesting one, the relationship between Ellie and her jock friend was adorable, and the dialogue coming from high school students was pretty believable. I’m going to give myself a few days until I re-watch it with fresh eyes.

Those who know me know my love for A24 films, so I am quite excited to re-watch Uncut Gems by the Safdie brothers. It’s coming to Netflix on May 25th, and I will say that I strongly disliked it at first. There were some disturbing moments, and I was a little too tired and too stressed to fully immerse myself in and enjoy the film. Due to my love of most A24 films and also the Safdie’s other film, Good Time, I want to give Uncut Gems another go-around. PS: Good Time is currently on Netflix in the States.

If you want a more light-hearted yet extremely stressful teen drama, Outer Banks is the show for you. It came out in April, but I’m including it in my May lineup because not only does it feature Charles Esten from Nashville, but it also features a bunch of teens with heart-wrenching backstories—my kryptonite in a show. I’ll give you a few hints as to what the show’s about without giving too much away: buried treasure, love triangles (and also squares, actually), and family drama. I watched it with one of my friends through Netflix Party, an add-on for Google Chrome to watch Netflix movies and shows with friends, all while messaging each other through a chat side-bar. Because of how stressful the last couple of episodes are, it sounded like I was typing a research paper. Episode 1? A little cheesy. Episode 2? Prepare to finish the entire season then and there, because it’s weirdly addicting.

Being in quarantine can be an extremely lonely and oftentimes boring time for us. So, I thought that I would share some tidy bullet-point lists of some of the things I’ve been seeing and reading.

Movies

  1. The Before Sunrise trilogy — yes, this Ethan Hawke gem is indeed a trilogy!

  2. The Farewell, because I love love love learning about different cultures, it’s A24, and Awkwafina is incredible in it.

  3. The Place Beyond the Pines. Oof. Great storyline.

  4. Waves. One of my favorite A24 films.

  5. Set It Up. Even if you’ve already seen it, just see it again. The protagonist is an aspiring writer, and it inspired me to write more.

  6. Late Night. Mindy Kaling and Emma Thompson make an unlikely yet funny pair.

  7. Stuck in Love. I haven’t seen it in years, but I remember loving it. The same director directed The Fault in Our Stars, if that’s a selling point. And if it’s not, Stuck in Love stars Logan Lerman, Lily Collins, Greg Kinnear, Jennifer Connelly, and a few other noteworthy guys and gals.

  8. A Marriage Story for if you want a good cry. Because when Adam Driver cries, I cry.

  9. Short Term 12 — I will never stop recommending this movie. And it’s also for if you want a good cry.

  10. The Edge of Seventeen. Hailee Steinfeld, Haley Lu Richardson, and Woody Harrelson. Just a really fun, feel-good movie.

  11. Any of the IT movies. Reviewers be darned because I loved them all, including It: Chapter Two.

TV Shows

  1. Community, if you haven’t seen it already, when it came out over 10 years ago.

  2. Atypical. Again, if you haven’t already.

  3. The Outsider. (Not The Outsiders, although that’s both an incredible book and movie.) It’s based on the novel by Stephen King which I’m reading right now and loving.

  4. Fleabag. I was extremely late to the game and can only assume that everyone’s already seen it when they popularity was at its highest. But I laughed out loud so many times while watching this, so I had to go ahead and put it on the list.

  5. Hunters—wow, incredibly addicting. And again, Logan Lerman.

  6. Love is Blind. I was cringing the entire time.

  7. Sex Education. It’s really funny and I finished both seasons in an embarrassingly short amount of time.

Books

  1. Untamed by Glennon Doyle. I have never been so inspired and so uplifted by a single book.

  2. The Harry Potter series. Even if you’ve read it already. I mean, why not?

  3. The Outsider by Stephen King, as I mentioned earlier. So far, it’s very similar to the show, so… if you don’t mind reading what you just watched or vice versa, have at it.

  4. The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan. My all-time favorite book, and it’s also a wonderful movie.

  5. What If It’s Us by Becky Albertalli and Adam Silvera.

  6. Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda by Becky Albertalli. This one and #5 are fun and light-hearted books that you’ll probably fly through in a few days at most.

  7. Just Listen by Sarah Dessen. It’s the Dessen book I tell everyone to start out with. She recently came out with a two-in-one book containing Just Listen and The Moon and More, which you can find here.

  8. The Most Beautiful Thing I’ve Seen by Lisa Gungor. This and Untamed are my top inspirational books of the past few years.

Reagan Fleming

Bubbles and Pinterest

When I get stressed out, I turn to Pinterest.

When I realize that I may have sent that email a little too hastily, or I’ve written a blurb or some kind of poem that I think now is just so juvenile, or I take myself on a guilt trip by thinking about how much I may be wasting my days and/or nights, I turn to something that requires no brainpower whatsoever. I turn to Pinterest.

I remember when I would prepare my things to go to a coffee shop for my regular “writing days” a few years back, and I would pack my computer and its charger, a notebook and a pen, and some headphones to drown out the overall noise of the coffee shop. While packing my things in a backpack or tote, I would also prepare myself with the fact that I would not be able to stay at the coffee shop for as long as I wanted to. I knew that by the end of hour two or even halfway into hour two, that I would start to feel this bubbling-up sensation—which I now know to be anxiety—and it would start in my hands, then my torso, and fill up all the way to my head, and then I would experience what felt like every possible emotion and feel every possible thought, all at once. The thoughts would vary, but they’d usually stick with the classics, such as:

“You’re too stupid to write anything of substance,” or
“No one wants to hear what you have to say anyway, so why even start writing?”

…and then some jabbing comments about myself or how I looked would be peppered in as well. With all of these thoughts bombarding me and overwhelming emotions rising up within me, I would find myself paralyzed and unable to continue with what I was writing. So, I’d tell myself, “It’s okay, I’ll just go on Pinterest—” and add in the lie, “it’s what I wanted to do anyway.” So, for the next thirty minutes or so in an attempt to subdue the thoughts and wait for that bubbling sensation to subside, I would scroll through the pictures, pinning some and clicking on a few. I always felt so disappointed in myself for somehow allowing this internal timer to go off without me setting it, alerting me that I had to get the hell out of there, now, and taking me away from doing something that I loved. 

It wasn’t until recently, when I was talking with my therapist, that I tried a mindfulness exercise. I told her from the get-go, in our very first meeting, “I have intense anxiety and depression, and because of this, I pull my hair out. And when I pull my hair out, I feel even more anxious and depressed, which then keeps the cycle going. This cycle seems to be doing a great job of keeping me from actually living in my life, and I feel as though I’m just simply surviving.” We talked more about this, what my childhood was like, what new things I was discovering about myself, and the different circumstances life was throwing at me, good and bad. There have only been a few people with whom I’ve felt like I can openly talk about how I’m feeling and what I’m thinking, and she was beginning to feel like a new one I could add to the list.

After I debriefed her on my life up until that point, she asked if I knew what Acceptance and Commitment Therapy was—ACT for short. I said no, and she said that it’s pretty much mindfulness exercises. I do yoga pretty regularly and I’m also in my head at least 90% of the day, overthinking almost anything you or I could possibly think of, so I thought that this would be an easy task. I agreed to try it, so she got out her book and told me to get comfortable and close my eyes. I had told her that I wanted to work on my anxiety because it had been the thing that was most troubling to me—and what kickstarts the hair-pulling and depression—so she flipped through a few pages and began reading a prompt. She told me to think about and try to feel what it’s like when I am my most anxious self. She told me to imagine those feelings and those thoughts and to picture them all as a single object. That bubbling sensation came back with ease and had begun to spread from my hands, to my torso, to my head, and it all just tumbled back and forth, back and forth, gaining momentum within. I did what she said, and for some reason, I pictured a hideously-stitched sweater as the embodiment of my anxiety. You couldn’t see where one color stopped or started—it was just all one big clump of sweater. I was wearing the sweater and it was incredibly baggy on me, yet it felt tight on my body to the point that I was being enveloped in a possessive hug. I weirdly knew that if I tried to resist the hug, that the sweater would just grow tighter, heavier. Seeming to hear my thoughts, my therapist reminded me, “Sit with these feelings, whether good or bad. Don’t push them away.” So, I sat with them. The uncomfortable thoughts and feelings came, and I sat with them and listened. She gently told me that “No matter how difficult or unsettling these feelings are, no matter how much you want to shove them to the side, just remember that these feelings cannot get larger than yourself.”

“…these feelings cannot get larger than yourself.”

For years, I had been going to different counselors who were all trying to help me delve into my past, talk it out, and then find coping mechanisms for when I wanted to pull my hair and/or felt depressed and/or dealt with anxiety. They all tried getting me to find “other ways” that I could distract myself from what I was feeling, so I’ve tried using fidget toys, obsessively exercising, and even actively “switching my thinking” by telling myself that I don’t have to be feeling this way, that I could simply change my way of thinking and the other harmful tendencies would dissipate as well. Personally, these tactics just didn’t cut it; they would help to lessen the intensity of the feelings slightly, but no matter how hard I tried to push away the negative thoughts, they kept coming back, as powerful as ever. After four or five failed attempts at medications and therapists that tried to shove religion and replacement activities down my throat, I resolved to supplements and a different therapist. The supplements have been an ongoing trial and error but have overall been a positive addition, and the mindfulness exercises that my therapist has gone through with me are now a tool that I use to help me when anxiety, depression, and the urge to pull my hair come back. Trying to shove my negative thoughts and feelings away and pretending like they didn’t exist did not help me in the least. But sitting with them, acknowledging them, and realizing that they will never get bigger than me is how I’m starting to be able to do more than just survive.

Reagan Fleming

Still Writing the Date Wrong

Rejoice! The time has come—it’s now the month of February, I’m still writing down “2019”, and people have officially stopped writing up their years in review on all forms of social media.

It’s the third week of the second month, and I have written nothing new. So apparently, my subconscious nor I have acknowledged the whole “new year’s resolution” mentality by jumpstarting on new work. I also haven’t read anything new—in fact, I just finished Little Women yesterday after starting it back in late December. (I have a lot of feelings about both movie renditions, mind you, but I’ll save that for another date.) I’m in the market for a new read, and you’d think that I would just pluck one off of my mountain of books in my room, but you’d be mistaken. I have my eyes on one not in my collection, and I’m always in the market for a new book.

I do in fact hate years in review posts, but… alas. I feel like I must share mine in order to explain the rest of this post. Here’s just a small bullet point list of what has happened thus far:

  • I graduated from college

  • I got a job

  • I got a dog

  • I went back to my (hair) roots and got a pixie cut again

  • I moved to a new house

A lot of life-changing things have happened, and although they’ve been exciting, it’s been a nightmare emotionally speaking. I have lived in the same house all my life, only moving when I went out of state for college 5 years ago. I commuted my freshman year, lived on campus for the next two years, and then moved into a house in my senior year of college. So when I moved just a few weeks ago into the house that I’m now in, it was a rough transition. I felt extremely homesick even though I hadn’t fully lived in my childhood home for 5 years, I had a new commute, my roommate and I were getting used to living together without the other two roommates from the previous house, and add a new dog and a cat into the mix, and you’ll have a stressed-out Reagan.

Before all of the things I listed had happened, I was getting pretty impatient for them to come to pass. I don’t know about you, but I have a real talent for looking forward to something or stressing about something so much that I have a difficult time fully connecting with things and people in the present. Because of this, I like to repeat something to myself that Ram Dass once said: Be here now. I have clearly forgotten these words these past few weeks because I was a mess pre-move and mid-move—I was just a ball of emotions and stress. I wasn’t able to enjoy my life for what it was in the moments of transition. Stress, joy, excitement, and every other emotion comes and goes in waves. And it’s hard not to get swept up in it when you’re at your highest or at your lowest. But that’s kind of a weird bonus about life. It’s never boring even when it feels like it.

Reagan Fleming