Furlough Films

Once upon a time, I went on furlough. Twice.

So, “twice upon a time…”

Due to the uncertainty in the job market since the start of covid, I understand that I was one of the lucky few that came out unscathed with my job still intact. But, in order to keep said job, most of the employees at the company were put on a rotating furlough. From March until October of 2020, we all had to work from home, so I just decided to drive back to my mom’s house and spend time with my mom and sister. Each furlough lasted a week, and I will admit that I wasted my first furlough. Looking back, I truly have no idea what I actually did with those 5 free days. The second furlough, however, I smartened up. I’m not going to say that I accomplished as much as I would have liked, and I didn’t experience the art of bread-making like others my age during quarantine, but boy did I watch a lot of movies that have been on my list for some time. In addition to spending time with my family by the pool during those sunny days in a month in 2020 that I truly cannot remember, I watched (if I remember correctly) 5 movies. I continue to add to a list I have on my phone for all the movies I want to watch someday, and I decided that I wanted to try and focus on the big directors during my second furlough. Did I accomplish that? Not really. I watched two David Fincher films and some cult classics, but I will say that I enjoyed all of them.

I know that what I’m about to write will have some people wanting to throw tomatoes at me, but before my second furlough week, I had never seen Fight Club. And in some insane/unspeakable act of god, I forgot about the biggest twist of all time—SPOILER—the Narrator and Tyler Durden’s character were the same person. It’s not like I had never heard what the plot twist was before seeing it—I definitely did. It’s that my brain, for some reason, completely forgot what it was until the movie showed you. This happened to me with The Sixth Sense of all movies, even though it has probably the most well-known plot twist of all time. Despite this fact, I’ll give a SPOILER warning again: Dr. Malcolm (Bruce Willis) was dead the whole time, which pans out since baby Haley Joel Osment gets visited by ghosts throughout the movie. What delightful little moments those were when those well-known plot twists were completely wiped from memory.

First up is Donnie Darko by Richard Kelly. Boy oh boy I was terrified to watch this, but in the end, I was glad that I did. I’m used to demon-possession movies, a la The Conjuring and Insidious movie franchises, but the demon bunny named Frank and his terrifying voice and face were somehow creepier than other horror movies I enjoy. Yet, I persisted, and I’ll say it once and I’ll say it again—how has Jake Gyllenhaal not gotten an Oscar at this point? After watching Donnie, I also watched Brokeback Mountain, and it dang near “broke” my heart. (Sorry for the pun.) Now, jumping back to the good ole Donnie Darko, I must inform you (and regret to do so) that I had to watch a Youtube video after I finished watching it because I needed some help in deciphering what the heck happened. I knew that it was about Jake’s character imagining the creepiest bunny of all time, but while watching it, I was just all-around confused about what the heck was happening. However, that’s what I really enjoyed about it. I read an article on MTV.com, and I appreciated that the writer noted the film’s director’s words by saying that the film “kinda does need Cliffs Notes.” Because, ladies and gents, it does.

Like I said in the above paragraph, I also watched Brokeback Mountain, which was directed by Ang Lee. Precious precious Jake and Heath—wowzers. There were some parallels between this movie and Call Me By Your Name which would definitely give spoilers if I pointed them out (did someone say BILLOWY SHIRT?), but I will say that both of the main actors gave such beautiful and emotional performances in their roles. I’m sorry for the extremely general and vague response to this movie, but I don’t want to give too much away by pointing out my favorite parts.

Sometimes I feel this internal pressure to break apart movies and the meaning behind them and delve into each and every little detail. Which, I’ll admit, can be a large portion of why I enjoy movies. But, sometimes I just enjoy a film because it makes me happy. And as simple and as cheesy as that sounds, sometimes I just am watching a movie for the enjoyment of watching that particular movie. Maybe that’s just what I needed in that exact moment. Think: Hot Rod or Superstore or 30 Rock.

I started writing this blog post in 2020, and it’s now almost 2023. Woof. Before I end this little blog post, I wanted to recommend a movie: Marrowbone. If you’re looking for a thriller/semi-horror movie with an incredible storyline, you’re welcome. This 2017 fun surprise is on streaming platforms as we speak, and the trick is to go into the film without knowing anything about it. You can just know that Anya Taylor-Joy, Charlie Heaton, Mia Goth, and George MacKay absolutely kill it in this movie. Going into the movie without seeing the trailer beforehand is what I did with Parasite as well. Yet again, don’t ask me how on earth I didn’t know that Parasite was a rollercoaster from start to finish before I started watching it. I apparently live under a rock.

Reagan Fleming

Emily Henry is Summer in Human Form

It’s summertime, and summertime calls for Emily Henry books. It’s a rule. People We Meet on Vacation was my first EH read, and I basically inhaled it in a matter of two days. In honor of Henry’s Book Lovers coming out last month, I wanted to write a book review of my first read of hers.

If there were three words that could describe People We Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry, they would be: quirky, quirky, and quirky. Narrator Poppy Wright is a travel writer for Rest + Relaxation, a magazine that allows her to travel to far and wide places on the company’s dime. Even before she gained travel-writing and Instagram fame, Poppy and her college acquaintance-turned-best friend named Alex Nilsen made a tradition of taking yearly summer trips that the both of them would wait all year for. Even though they are complete opposites physically—Alex: tall and athletic, and Poppy: petite and couldn’t care less about exercise—her outgoing and oftentimes dominating personality complements his loyalty and dry sense of humor. This book may fall under the genre of romance, but if you are looking for a book that contains friendship, a deeper meaning that just might make you cry and cause you to look inward, and a narrator with a sense of humor that will make you outright laugh to the point of shushing yourself in public spaces, People We Meet on Vacation is right up your alley.

The book travels (pun intended) back and forth between the summers throughout Alex and Poppy’s interwoven lives from Vancouver Island, New Orleans, a last-minute trip to Nashville, and even a couple’s trip to Tuscany with their respective partners at the time. People We Meet on Vacation paints a timeline for the reader by centering each chapter on a specific summer in the past or present day. This organization of the main characters’ lives ultimately serves as a clear countdown for the reader to follow and finally find out what happened between Alex and Poppy “two summers ago,” a chapter in which a vacation trip changed everything for the two travel companions.

The narration stays in the hands of Poppy Wright, but no need to fear, reader. People We Meet on Vacation promises pages upon pages of romance, quirkiness (so much so that it’s said four times now within a few hundred words), and the classic “falling for your best friend” trope that the author writes in such a way that it somehow doesn’t feel overworked. You will grow with Poppy and Alex through these thirteen summers of the book as they find themselves as friends, to more than friends, to friends again, and all the stops in between.

Henry’s other works include the New York Times bestseller, Beach Read, as well as A Million Junes, The Love That Split the World, Hello Girls, and When the Sky Fell on Splendor. Check out Henry’s latest novel, Book Lovers! It’ll make you say: “Charlie Lastra is my soulmate.”

Reagan Fleming

Some Days You're Writing, Some Days You're Reading

“Write something that you would like to read.”

We’ve all heard this advice from other writers or people who are sick of you griping about dealing with writer’s block still. If someone told me this bit of advice right now (since it’s felt like I’ve run into writer’s block for the past year), I would say back: “What I really want to read is Red, White & Royal Blue or Me and Earl and the Dying Girl for the first time again, but I can’t write their sequels justice, nor would I want to try.”

So, here we are.

Lately, I’ve gotten into the (probably not-so-healthy) habit of diving into and completely losing myself in a book. I did that with Casey McQuinston’s latest novel, One Last Stop, and most recently, her debut novel, Red, White & Royal Blue. I even jumped on the Young Royals train, which is streaming on Netflix, because I clearly couldn’t get enough of the “forbidden romance due to one of the parties being a royal” scenario. Now that I’ve run out of episodes and pages, I finished up Salem’s Lot by Stephen King, and now I’m reading Act Your Age, Eve Brown by Talia Hibbert. Salem’s Lot was pretty good and got very creepy, but I wanted to just dive into a nice lil romance novel again. Enter: People We Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry, which has since snowballed into other romance/fiction: Beach Read by Henry, The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood, and now Act Your Age, Eve Brown by Hibbert.

Red, White & Royal Blue and People We Meet on Vacation were both books that literally made me laugh out loud, tear up, and really feel for the characters when crazy stuff came up in their lives. When I discovered McQuinston and Henry, I absolutely flew through those books—I’d ignore my everyday life after the workday ended, and I happily hunkered down by my reading tree with a White Claw in hand and my dog running around in the yard around me.

“Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again. It’s like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can’t stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship.”
— Anne Lamott, "Bird by Bird"

I’ve always enjoyed reading and writing, but around the time when my dad got sick, I really threw myself into reading. It might sound like a time-waster to some, but who cares? Those books I read helped me a lot during that time. I was really young when he got sick and died a few months later, and there was a lot that I didn’t know how to deal with—I mean, heck, I was 12. I didn’t want to have to think about what was going on around me, so I read books about other peoples’ lives while trying to ignore mine. Reading gave me an escape when I needed one, and it still does. Now, I will say that dealing with your emotions up-front is probably the best-case scenario here, but sometimes you just need a break—an emotional, mental, or physical one. I will shout this from the rooftops until the day I die: reading can help people get out of their heads while also building compassion for those around them. It can spur something creative inside, unlock something emotional deep down that you didn’t know you could tap into, and it can also just bring you joy.

Whenever I thought about what I wanted to do when I grew up, I always knew that I wanted to write. I transferred colleges multiple times, but I always kept the same major: writing (or English literature if writing wasn’t available). And when I think about why, it always goes back to the time when my dad got sick, and I discovered Sarah Dessen’s books for the first time. I found copies of Just Listen, That Summer, and The Truth About Forever at a book sale one day with my mom, and I begged her to buy them for me. I’d find myself staying up until 3 in the morning to just get one more chapter in or to finally be able to flip the last page over, feeling that pride of knowing I’ve finished another book. That pride, however, was almost always followed by a sinking feeling, knowing that I would never be able to read it for the first time again. If you haven’t read any of her books yet, Dessen’s books are normally everyday stories about girls and their relationships with their parents, love interests, friends, summer jobs, self-image, etc. She has a way of making mundane topics relatable and interesting, and I’ve read every single book of hers since. Her books allow me to just drop right into the story and live out someone else’s life for however long it takes me to finish a few hundred pages, and I’m grateful.

This quote above, which graces the very last page and last paragraph of Lamott’s book Bird by Bird, is what I have tattooed on the back of my arm. It’s probably about 3” tall x 4” wide. Before you think, “Was it written in the tiniest font size known to man?” No. I will settle your confusion by saying that each sentence is just written as a line, and each period is, well, a period. No one else except you, precious lil readers, and those who actually ask know what those lines on the back of my arms stand for. It’s laid out on my skin like a paragraph with the indentation and everything, but I still somehow get asked if it’s a sideways barcode.

Since I was about 13 or so, I’ve been trying to crank out a young adult novel. Back in the day, I used to only write on Word or Pages, and I didn’t think to backup anything to The Cloud or, god forbid, an external hard drive. So when I spilled a pumpkin spice latte on my computer one day after class, I lost my book that I had been working on for years. I only got… three or four solid chapters worked out, so it shouldn’t have been a huge deal, but I had been editing the heck out of those chapters for years and developed an entire timeline for all of the characters, and both were gone. I have since discovered a lovely thing called Google Drive and *cough cough* Squarespace, so the stuff that I’m working on currently, albeit not much, is safe.

Fast-forward a few years later, after a long time of having writer’s block strictly for a novel (poetry, blog posts, articles, and a children’s book somehow weren’t affected in this writer’s block?) and I’m in the process of writing a book once again. I started up again after I finished reading Emily Henry’s Beach Read and People We Meet on Vacation, because I felt like I had this new outlook on what a novel could be. I audibly laughed out loud many times (not that silent laugh or a sharp huff out of my nose), and I definitely cried once or twice. I was able to fully immerse myself into those stories, and I knew after I flipped that last page that that doesn’t happen with every book. And I want to create those special books for someone too.

Reagan Fleming