Extremely quick life update, in bullet point form

[dolorosa_12]

Matthias and I went to London to see Cirque du Soleil's show Ovo. I'm glad we went - I had a wonderful time, and there were a couple of great acts - but overall it was not their best work. I've been watching Cirque shows since I was three years old, so I possibly have overly high standards. It was kind of fun to watch it while sitting near lots of families with small children, because seeing the acts through the children's astonished eyes reminded me of how wonderful it was to see Cirque shows for the very first time.

I've been reading my way through Frances Hardinge's body of work: so far I've read A Face Like Glass, Gullstruck Island, The Lie Tree, A Skinful of Shadows, and Cuckoo Song, and I've been absolutely blown away. They're such intricate, clever books, and so hopeful and healing, all concerned with the dispossessed and powerless, giving them their power back.

Never someone to say no to excessively rules-based stationery, I've gone completely overboard with bullet journalling. I used a bullet journal last year, but in the most basic way (the method outlined in the video on the bullet journal website). This year, I've gone beyond that with complicated habit tracking spreads, a set-up requiring multiple coloured pencils, glue, old origami paper, and a lot of fiddling around. I wouldn't do it if I didn't enjoy it (when I was in high school I had a system of organisation for my exercise books that required different coloured underlining for each day of the week, a complicated way of ruling up every page, and stern opinions as to which kinds of pens I could use for note-taking, so it was probably inevitable that I fell into the post-school iteration in the form of bullet journalling), but I do sometimes dip into the wild world of bullet journal vlogging/blogging and boggle at the excessive, overpriced stationery and the immense amount of work it seems to involve.

I found these two articles about the Salem witch hunt (and also The Crucible, and the modern twisting of the term 'witch hunt') really interesting to read in parallel. The first, by Sarah Monette, is here. The second, by Maria Dahvana Headley, is here, and I came across it via umadoshi.

Comments

[pax_athena]

I felt the same about Ovo - the pattern I see, for myself, that I like their darker, sadder shows quiet a bit more. Even though my surprising favorite so far, Kurios, wasn't really on the sad side - but also not on the funny the way Ovo was,
And I, too, was sitting next to kids - twin girls of a about 6 or 7, who were there with their grandma and incredibly excited. And seeing them enjoying the show was a joy that also reminded me that maybe I was setting my expectations a bit high.

If you ever feel like talking more about your bullet journalling or making photos, I'd be super curious! Mine is very basic (it does not even fully follow the rules?), but it works for me and I love the flexibility of finding just the right level of elaboration that works for oneself.

[dolorosa_12]

I both agree and disagree with you about darker Cirque shows being better. My favourite Cirque show, after all, is Quidam, which is probably their darkest of all (and my favourite act is Quidam's incredible, heart-stopping banquine, which is really, really dark and bleak). But then the other shows I like the most are Varekai, which is joyful, and Dralion, which is hopeful... I think for me the problem with Ovo is that it had no really incredible, standout acts - even its finale was something that would only have been a mid-show act in Quidam, Alegria, Dralion and so on. My other issue was that its music and costuming was a bit ordinary (Alegria it was not), and the band and music were not well integrated into the show and story as a whole.

The flexibility of bullet journalling is its great strength - I don't even follow its rules either, and I love that it's a system that can accommodate everything from very stripped down, basic, logging of daily tasks to elaborate, complicated, fussy spreads that require a huge amount of expensive stationery.

I may write about my bullet journalling in more detail in the future, but for now if you want to be part of a community of bullet journallers, the bujo community on Dreamwidth might be worth checking out.