I skipped posting yesterday, mostly because I've been boring myself to tears --- lying around, barely getting dressed, not doing much. In fact, it wasn't worth posting yesterday's outfit, because I just put on exactly what I'd worn on Wednesday, and did much the same things all day.
BUT I feel fractionally better today and am trying to pull out of this slump. The sun is shining, and the high is only 76 --- it was actually cool this morning when I walked Dora, and I'm wearing a cardigan with no discomfort even now.
Here's the sun on the flowers, to bring good cheer:
And also a tiny Brussels sprout, equally cheering, since I'd kind of given up on them:
I'm sitting on the back steps right now, listening to Dora bark at this thing our neighbors over the back wall have hung in their tree: some kind of wind art, about the size of a punching bag, but carved into a spiral so that the wind can catch and turn it. Dora is convinced it's coming to get us and loses her mind at it every time we go outside. Eventually she does give up and lie down, and I await with hope the day when she finally decides that the wind thing isn't worth her time and effort.
Normally I don't watch television during the day ("television" is a word which here means "anything I can stream on my laptop, because we don't actually own a television as such"), but for the last two days I've binge-watched Broadchurch, to the second season finale. I don't want to say too much about the plot, in case anybody reading this hasn't watched it, but I am still thinking about it, and what I'm thinking is that --- without knowing anything about the belief system of the writer who created it --- I'm hard pressed to remember any other television drama with such deeply Christian moral concerns. It's about sin, basically: how sin damages not only the sinner but the whole community, or body, in which the sinner lives and moves and has his temporal being, but also how forgiveness is predicated on contrition, and how terrible it is for a sinner not to repent. It's not a pious show. Except for the vicar, whose faith is real and believable, none of the characters is really a believer. They lean on the social structure of the church, vestigial as it is, for the forms it provides, particularly for mourning the dead. But ultimately, at the end of the second season, how Christianity informs the community's response to the unrepentant sinner is --- well, it really took my breath away.
Weirdly, it made me think of Twelfth Night, and of Malvolio, after the jokers put him in mock prison. Feste comes to him in the guise of a priest and tries to impel him to confess that he is a fool. Malvolio refuses, and so excludes himself from any grace that the community (in this case, Illyria) might have extended to him. His refusal to admit his own folly ends in his exile. Now, Twelfth Night is funny, whereas Broadchurch is not only not funny but downright disturbing, especially in the second season, when an old, cold case resurfaces to overlap with the one that triggers the whole story. In a way, that older story is also a trigger, in that the David Tennant character, having failed to bring a perpetrator to conviction, considers himself to be doing penance for that failure as he takes on the new case that begins the narrative. That older story turns out to be far uglier in its particulars. Nobody involved is good or innocent or unimplicated, even if they have been sinned against. But again, the moral scope of the whole complex narrative is just breathtaking, and it does turn on questions that are ultimately theological. If you want to know what Christian art ought to be like, Broadchurch is a good place to look.
So anyway, if I had to lie around, it was with a lot to think about.
Wearing today, in an attempt to be a functional person:
Maggie dress, tan leather belt, green cotton thrifted cardigan, thrifted Birk Madeiras. The weather actually feels transitional today, and not just like Summer Redux. It's not tights-and-boots time yet, but it's cool enough that an ensemble like this doesn't feel like rushing the season.
Only a hundred days left in what I am still styling a no-buy year. I'm kind of looking forward to calling 2023 something different, and maybe a little more representative of what I actually do or don't do, though overall, especially compared to years past, my basic habit is to hold off from buying, rather than to buy. So, you know . . . I keep saying that, at any rate. But the "100 days left" mark seems like a good time to say it again.