Hello darkness my old friend December. I'm back and happy to report that I finished NaNoWriMo for the second year in a row! And this time around, I wasn't sick of my story by the end of the month, yay! So I'm actually going to keep working on it, which is a good feeling.
Besides novel-writing, I did do a couple of other things in November, which I've deemed appropriate enough for this blog:
Obsessing over Mad Men. Disclaimer: I'm very reluctant to commit to TV shows...In fact I'm pretty sure the only shows I've ever watched in their entirety are Arrested Development, Star Trek TOS, Seinfeld, and the Monkees. All these "Golden Age of Television" shows that people keep talking about? No interest. Even with multiple people telling me how much I'd love Mad Men, I still resisted, until a few months ago when I was bored and watched the first episode on a whim. And, as expected, I immediately became obsessed with the period details (the 60s are my spirit decade, after all) and the strange, fascinating, hot mess that is Don Draper.
The cast and writers of this show are great. I appreciate the fact that one episode can be simultaneously delightful and devastating (S04E07 and S05E12, I'm looking at you), and that I still can't decide whether to love or hate Don. Yes, I understand the hype now. With about one and a half seasons left, I'll probably be bingeing extra hard.
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Watching The Beatles 1+ Deluxe DVD/Blu-ray. The day this came out, I called every record+DVD store in SF asking if it was in stock (it wasn't). I spent an entire weekend trying to find it, until finally the Barnes & Noble in San Bruno saved the day. I'm usually not a fan of compilation albums, but 1 has a special place in my heart, because it was the CD that introduced me to the Beatles' music. (And to be fair, it's actually a really worthwhile collection of Beatles hits, many of which don't appear on any of their albums.) This new reissue of 1 is especially exciting to me because it includes videos for all of the songs (plus a bonus DVD!) in really freaking high def. For example,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-rB0pHI9fU
Among the silliness of the Beatles trying to maneuver their horses through an alleyway and randomly flipping a table, I think the shots of John walking down the street are beautifully poignant. It seems like they were well aware that their music and image had changed pretty dramatically after they stopped touring, and this was their way of presenting the "new" Beatles to the world. This article captures it perfectly.
Bonus: the Beatles sitting on the ground eating sandwiches, which is the real kind of footage I'm interested in.
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Reading Season of the Witch. Oh wow, this is an incredible book about San Francisco. I originally checked it out from the library because I was interested in learning more about the city during the time that my parents lived there (it focuses on the late 60s, 70s, and early 80s). But it turned into a sort of holy bible for my NaNoWriMo story, which basically takes place within one block of San Francisco over the course of 100 years.
For being so gritty and dark (see: the Zebra murders, the Zodiac, the Peoples Temple, the SLA, Dan White), Season of the Witch was weirdly enlightening. I love learning the history of places, and in this case, learning about the people who helped shape San Francisco in the past half a century. Although the city has physically changed over the years and will continue to change, I think the heart and soul of San Francisco has stayed intact. It's a place of ambition, eccentricity, and unrest. If there's one thing I learned from reading this book, it's that there will always be things worth fighting for in this city, and that's what I love about living here.
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For December, I'm predicting: lots of Mad Men feels, rain, novel-revising, and a new hair-do??!