Fran Magazine: Sunday Dispatch, Jul. 21-27

REWATCH WEEK! The Olympics! Veep! Elden Ring! Plus an important question about birds

This is the Fran Magazine Sunday Dispatch, a weekly culture diary for paid subscribers only. The Sunday Dispatch details what I’ve been watching, reading, playing, and listening to over the past week. Paid subscriptions help stabilize my writing career, but all readers — paid & not — are appreciated. You can also follow me on Instagram or Letterboxd (for free!). Thanks for reading!

Going through the month’s camera roll has been depressing

There’s not been much to account for this July besides Caroline’s photo the California car with the license plate “G MAHLER” (#STREAMTÁR). The days are long and sweaty. The electricity bill is too high. The mono was going well last week and got worse this week; waves of exhaustion knock me off balance — not physically, but mentally. I’ll be chugging along and then suddenly: I have to get into bed immediately. I had to cancel a trip to Chicago, which sucks because this is one of the best months to be there. I’m not feeling a sense of despair — or at least, not about this — but I do feel a kind of quiet disappointment that I’ve not been out and about as much as I like to be, that I’ve not been able to do much writing beyond what is required of me when it comes to paying the bills, that I’ve not been able to watch or read as much as I want to. The days are quiet: I work, I tend to the plants, I sleep, I read, I cook, I bug Phil. I am getting a lot better at Elden Ring and that’s not nothing.

I keep trying to remember that I’m not going back to school this fall — the first time in several years. This was disappointing in April and May; now I couldn’t be happier. For as much as I love being in the classroom, having a wide-open fall makes those weeks of September and October feel thrilling, full of possibility and a less expensive electricity bill. For now, I am just going to stick to my bad mood until I see M. Night Shyamalan’s Trap, which has the possibility to turn everything around.

With my brain melting and the temperatures hot again, the theme of the week (unintentionally) was REWATCH WEEK and, of course, the bizarre French Olympics for which I am currently tracking all of the American celebs present for Vulture. What is everyone’s favorite summer Olympics event? Mine is (boring answer alert) running.

Bird shit on me — at night

Last night I was enjoying two scoops of gelato from Biddrina Gelato — strawberry fennel and coffee + anise with white chocolate — when a bird shit on my arm. Obviously I was grateful that the bird shit only got on my arm and my Uniqlo crossbody bag and not in my gelato, but I was stunned this event could occur at night. I’m aware of the fact that some birds are nocturnal, but being shit on by a bird is, in my estimation, a canonically daytime event. Please weigh in below: