After taking a week off to work on my summer class’s final project, I have returned! My break is short-lived on though, with the next semester starting in just another week. It’s hard to know whether to relax or take advantage of the time to do things I otherwise wouldn’t. But one thing I’ve find myself using the time for is listening to audiobooks. People know, I’ve never been one for audiobooks. I’ve never been able to figure out why, and it may not even be for a singular reason – because I don’t like the voice acting of the narrator, or they speak too slow, because I can’t navigate the book as easily, because the text doesn’t stick to my mind as easily. It seemed to be particularly bad to listen to a lot of classics, since the language occasionally needs a few reads over. As these months working from home have continued, though, and I spend more time around the apartment doing chores or walking to the store, my perspective has changed on it somewhat. It might be even be because of the booktube videos I’ve been watching where I occasionally hear an interesting book and realize I’ll never actually get around to getting the physical copy and sitting down to read it. I did that somewhat before my classes began; but now, the time I have to read for fun is sometimes in fleeting minutes taken up by finding the book, getting comfortable, and flipping to the bookmark (my friend Garfield and I have reminisced about how we both used to just know where we left off in a book, without a bookmark – neither of us knows when that stopped, but I couldn’t imagine doing that again!). It finally suddenly occurred to me that I could be listening to audiobooks alongside my usual carrousel of podcasts, and that they could be the modern books that I never even bothered thinking I could get around to. Being on my fifth book now, I can probably say I’m a convert. It’s brought back some of the thrill I used to get from reading as a teenager, when my primary time for reading was in-between classes, when I was done with work, on the bus – I don’t get those same small opportunities anymore, particularly since I walk to most places and use my time before personal appointments calling to catch up with people who might otherwise not make it into my phoning schedule. There’s always something to fill in the gaps of time. But the gaps have shifted. And I’ve realized I can fill them with books. It’s made me realize our relationship with reading isn’t actually changed too much with our shifting tastes for genres and styles. It really changes with our relationship to time – what we feel we do and don’t have time for, and how we find ways to fill in the gaps. I had a bizarre experience a few weeks ago. To take it back to the beginning, a friend of my partner's happened to blurt out during a virtual tour of our apartment that she thinks my partner and I look like we're living out some kind of "cottagecore lesbian" fantasy. Neither my partner or I knew what this could possibly mean, and I found myself quickly going down a shallow rabbit hole looking to it. This (probably inevitably) led me to tik tok compilation of "cottagecore" videos. I saw enough to know that no, my partner and I were not "cottagecore lesbians" -- I don't know if one really can "be" an internet aesthetic, particularly if we don't know about it. But in one of the clips, a song was playing in the background that sounded powerfully familiar, the kind of familiarity that dumps a bag of bricks on your chest, the kind that can only come from nostalgia. I racked my brain for where exactly this 30 second music clip could've come from, and realized I recognized it from a VHS my sister and I used to watch as small kids. With a bit of research, I found it: The World of Peter Rabbit and Friends, a 90s animated British show based on the works of Beatrix Potter -- this was the opening and ending credits song. I hadn't thought about or seen anything about the show in over a decade. I don't know what this means about my relationship to the whole "cottagecore" thing -- it reminds me of how I went through a period of time in my early 20s when various people I met would call me a hipster, "but, like, the kind of hipster that hipsters are trying to be, but naturally," which still seems like a weird thing to tell anybody whether or not it's true. It's probably not worth reading into. But nonetheless, I wanted to share this song, and to try to convey the range of odd emotions I had in rediscovering it. Until next time,
Rain E Drew
0 Comments
Your comment will be posted after it is approved.
Leave a Reply. |
R. E. DrewAmateur Author
Su| M | T | W | R | F | Sa Current posting hiatus |