Lupercalia is Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab’s annual love letter to desire in all its forms, and I have tried a dozen from this year’s collection. Here are my notes on grave soil and honey, grapefruit tassels at full tilt, a lumberjack of indeterminate personhood with very good biceps and an armpit of blueberry porridge (this is an extremely good thing, btw), and one carb-loading bear. And more!
Drowsy Voyeur(plum-soaked black patchouli, indigo musk, poppy absolute, guava pulp, black tea, and tobacco) A friend tells me this afterward. She and a date snuck into the empty apartment in the corner of the building, the one with the perpetually broken lock and revolving door of tenants. The space smelled strange, she said. Overripe stone fruit and the dark ink watercolors of night air and the void and emptiness of a place between people. The wallpaper was intricate, spiraling, mediumistic, automatic linework, a Madge Gill drawing duplicated perfectly if Madge Gill had papered a bedroom in a building like this. In the dim light, mid-coitus, it resolved into eyes, dozens of them, staring, swiveling, seething, a shadowy shifting panopticon, humid and pulsing with fleshy plum pulp. Ma’am, this is a Wendy’s, I said.
White Chocolate, Date Paste & Lime Zest I want this to be a bar cookie-like dessert, so I can nibble on it. I want it to be a gorgeously quaffable cocktail, so I can imbibe. I want this to be a fragrance, so I can — oh, wait. This one we can do. I hate to use the literal notes of a perfume when I try to describe the experience of wearing it (it seems lazy to me as a writer! I want to use the words that describe its aspects and qualities and spirit and essence, and not just that, but I want to use the most ridiculously beautiful words available to me! And tell a speculative alternate timeline diary entry, a surrealist fairytale dream about it! But as a reviewer, I get it. You just want to know if you can smell the dates and the limes. Well, yes, you can! You can smell the sugary-tobacco-y dates and the cool, slithery lime and the creamy cocoa butter white chocolate, but it smells better than any single one of those things on its own. This is rich and chewy and opulent, a serving of Lime-Kissed Sticky Date Blondies with White Chocolate Drizzle and a Date Night: dark rum, white chocolate liqueur, fresh lime, date syrup float.
By Candlelight (beeswax, wildflower honey, copal resin, vanilla bean, balsam, and frankincense) Hot beeswax and honey pooling on warm, musky skin, sticky and languid and lacquered and frothed with cream. Bodies handled like precious objects, anointed and presented and arranged, elaborate ceremonies. I can imagine this is the fragrance Anne Rice had in mind when she wrote the Beauty series.
Bakyâ Perfume Oil (polished santol wood warmed by sun, the faint sweetness of coconut husk and rice powder, crushed sampaguita blossoms, pandan leaf, and a touch of palm sugar, oud, and chocolate suman) The paradox of recognition without origin. I know this smell, except I don’t, except I do; something in the olfactory memory reaches for it and comes back empty-handed, certain it was there but wouldn’t recognize it if it was. A confectionary Saturday morning something, cottony and fruity and starchy-soft, heady-waxy florals. Turkish delight by way of circus peanuts, both and neither, made of lychee and guava, rolled in coconut powder. This smells like someone’s childhood, somewhere. Not mine. But somehow I feel the loss of it regardless.
Sal y Pimienta (salty skin musk dusted with pink pepper) A white sheet ghost of your most aspirational self. The day you did everything right, you woke up early, exercised, kept every appointment, every promise, did right by everything, and took care of yourself, too. Clean sweat and goodwill and hard-earned dopamine pride, imprinted onto freshly laundered cotton and stored in a hermetically sealed chamber for the day you wake up feeling like a big loser pile of shit. Throw the good ghost sheet over your head and take a deep breath.
Honey Dust, Patchouli, and Orris Absolute Barry Keoghan, post-Saltburn grave-humping scene, Emerald Fennell’s most deranged gift to cinema. A cheeky sprinkle of improv sweetness, speckled and spattered across freshly turned earth, loamy and dark, coffee grounds worked into the burial mound. Somewhere, twenty miles away, a pale iris sits in a funeral bouquet on a windowsill.
Rose Quartz Phallus(rose cognac, sugared pink grapefruit, iced strawberries, and creamy sandalwood warmed by skin musk, vanilla bourbon, and glowing pink amber) conjures delightful visions of a grapefruit Haribo candy burlesque performance, pearled sugar pasties, bright pinky-coral musky-soapy citrus wig. A jiggling, jellied, bouncy, exuberant, tassel-twirling, sass-and-wink-and-shimmy extravaganza.
Isis and Osiris (blue lotus incense and kyphi resin dancing in a dusk-shadowed temple, black loam of the Nile and green papyrus crushed beneath bare feet, myrrh and cassia steeped in date honey, a glimmer of lapis and gold leaf pressed into linen, and a surge of floodwater returning to parched earth) I am not sure how I am supposed to write a review that even compares to this poetic list of notes, so I can only say is that it smells like when someone who knows better murmurs, “the soil of a man’s heart is stonier, Louis.” Incense like a drifting tide of stone and honey, heavy and dripping with craggy grief and stoic matter-of-factivism.
Blueberry Chai Truffle (jammy blueberries folded into creamy chocolate and dusted with cardamom, cinnamon, black tea, and warm milk). There is a lumberjack in the backwoods mountains somewhere. I don’t know if they are a man, a woman, genderfluid, nonbinary, cryptid, or what. Doesn’t matter. They look good in a flannel and a beanie, and they have a kind heart and exquisite biceps, and sometimes in winter, with their big, strong hands, they feed you spoonfuls of blueberry porridge they kept tucked up under their armpit to keep it warm for you. Syrupy bláberjagrautur, warm grainy oats, a gorgeous bit of musk.
Mangetsu(white musk, green mandarin, moonflower, oolong tea, crushed grass, ume blossom, and green amber) Eco-poet-author Robert Macfarlane writes about daylighting, the process of bringing buried rivers back to the surface, re-exposing them to sun and air and the communities who had been living unknowingly above them. And when it comes back, everything around it comes back too. Mangetsu smells like that recovered green space. The sharp green bite of new grass pushing through loosened soil. Unripe citrus, a cool, punchy idea with as of yet no focus. A powdery floral haze, waxy, something blooming in cool air for the first time in a long time, all that new growth over warming earth, something skin-close and alive underneath it all.
The Scholar’s Indiscretion (Japanese wineberries, ti leaf, osmanthus, and a dribble of plum wine) Fruity-zingy-almost-fizzy-definitely-giddy, this is a chaos of golden retriever puppies, a whole pile of them, all of them tumbling over each other, absolutely delighted with everything, no agenda beyond maximum joy and maximum destruction…translated into a very-berry-forward scent.
Nanggigigil Ako Sayo (ube candyfloss and rice paper-wrapped red bean custard candy) The ube and red bean listed in the notes are there in spirit if not in letter; what actually shows up for me is baked and grainy, the sweetness of pop tart crust and cake donut and olive oil cake, and maybe even bran muffins, baked up relentlessly wholesome, radiating warmth and carbohydrates, stacked high…and a cozy determination to snorf it all down. Lazy, nap-loving Rilakkuma in his motivated era, powerloading for Fat Bear Week!
Need more Lupercalia scents? Have a peep at my Lupers reviews from 2025, 2024 and 2023 and 2022 and 2021 and 2020. Looks like I skipped a few years but we’ve also got 2017 and 2016 reviews as well!
…PSSSST! Did you know I have collected all of my BPAL reviews into one spot? I’m about two years behind with adding new stuff to the document, but as it stands, there are over 60 PAGES of my thoughts and rambles on various limited-edition scents from Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab over the years: BPAL REVIEWS BY S. ELIZABETH (PDF download)
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I recently purchased a new purse. I love a crossbody bag, but mine was a little too bulky, and I wanted something smaller, sleeker. I also hunted down a pair of sneakers after seeing a Japanese lifestyle vlogger wearing them (I also coveted her wallet and had to find that.) Instagram kept showing me an ad for a dress, so I finally caved and bought it. And on and on we go.
When I looked at the various random pieces I’d acquired over the past 4-5 months or so, I realized they all pull together into a pretty snazzy outfit!
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There is no photograph of this, as far as I know. My mother is gone, and my grandfather Boppa, and my grandmother, and just about all of our elders, and whatever documentation existed of those years is in several boxes in my sister’s houses, and anyway, this was a picture never taken. But I don’t need a photograph. My memories of it are vivid enough…I just sometimes wish one existed so that I could have a bit of proof to show myself, see! See, you once did this!
Me and my sisters at the kitchen table, drawing paper, crayons, the serious bent-head posture of children doing extremely important work. We drew little people with their little clothes and little towns and elaborate little scenarios for them to inhabit, and we made our people talk in high-pitched voices that Boppa would tease us about every time he passed through the room. It was a super huge, major part of my childhood. I loved to draw!
In second grade, the illustration of my sneakers went up on the wall for parents’ night. In sixth grade, our art teacher asked us to draw our houses, and I, thinking aspirationally, kept sneaking glances at the tattered Amityville Horror paperback I’d hidden in my desk and drew that instead. The teacher was impressed, whether by my draftsmanship or my delusion, I can’t say.
And then, somewhere not long after that, I stopped.
There was a very specific moment. I was a kid who doodled everywhere: notebook margins, assignments, the brown paper bags we cut apart to cover our textbooks. One day, someone asked me what I was doing and why. I couldn’t explain it, and the question made me feel ashamed and strange, like I’d been caught doing something that required justification I didn’t have, and furthermore, I didn’t know I needed. The surest way to deter me from something is to embarrass the crap out of me. So I stopped, just like that.
I’ve caught myself thinking that I should have been encouraged to take art classes in middle school, high school, college, and I catch myself on that “should have” every time. What I guess I mean is that I wish someone had noticed something that gave me joy and said, keep going. Not really because I needed external permission to pursue it, but because I was a kid, and kids sometimes need someone to see them before they can see themselves.
Maybe this is how I eventually came to writing about art instead of making it. Art, like anything or maybe everything, is a practice. If you don’t practice, you don’t improve. If you don’t do it at all, the muscles atrophy, the instinct dwindles, and returning to it, or arriving at it for the first time, really, gets harder. I have known this for years. I have written around it for years. I love art so extravagantly, so helplessly, that I found my way to it through the door I knew how to open, which was language. I became someone who writes about the things I could not bring myself to make.
But there has always been something in me, some part of me that knows there is a marvelous, extraordinary thing inside and wants to let it out — and maybe that is drawing and maybe that is writing, and maybe I still don’t know what the creative hole even is that lets my light into the world.
When we moved to Jacksonville, we made new friends, and one of them gave me a box of secondhand creative supplies: stamps and stickers and journaling things, some of it never used. We started having craft days. I began in the shallow end, coloring books and zentangles, before deciding I was going to pursue my actual childhood dream, which was drawing flowers. I bought a lovely flower-drawing guide, collected tutorials, and I have been practicing for months now. Alongside those kaleidoscopic zentangles. Cut-and-paste surrealist poetry collages. Decorative journaling.
I tried to go slow at first. (as this was meant to be developing a practice, not acquiring a collection, and I know how my brain works when it comes to gathering supplies as opposed to using supplies.) I will admit the journal stack has grown exponentially, and I have gone from someone who didn’t own a single marker to someone who now has half a dozen boxes of them… and also colored pencils and watercolors and pastels (So, you know. “Slow.” Hehehe.)
Another thing I started doing that makes it not scary for me: I am a quasi-hermit who doesn’t do much, which means my daily planner has historically contained entries like “take pills, pay bills, wear sunscreen.” Not exactly a rich chronicle. But on the same page alongside the basic to-do list, I’ve started doing a small illustration a day, practicing what I’ve been learning in a low-stakes way, because it’s just a doodle in a planner and not expensive art paper, which is really intimidating! Just a little drawing next to “lift weights.” (Which somehow never gets crossed off the list.) It keeps me in the practice without the pressure of treating it like capital-A Art.
I know it sounds cheesy, but…my life has felt richer? if that’s the right word? these past few months. Getting over yourself, all the inexplicable shame and embarrassment, and flabby, languishing art muscles, is a hell of a thing, and working on these projects is fun and freeing. In a way that writing (which I love and hate in equal measure sometimes) is absolutely, definitively not.
Last week, Yvan and I were watching something on YouTube when Lucy needed to go outside to pee, or poop, or perform some unknown third dog operation, and when we came back in, he asked if I wanted to keep watching. No, I had to get back to my project. “My art is very important,” I loftily informed him.
Yvan nodded sagely (because he is on my level and he gets it.) “That sounds like something you should write about,” he said. He’s right. But immediately after I do, I am gonna draw a flower about it, too.
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Once, in another lifetime, I was having a phone conversation. I don’t remember with whom, or what it was about, but I uttered the phrase “…unbeknownst to me.” Just in passing, really, without even thinking about it. Because it was the right word for whatever I was trying to say. It’s just a word that lives in my head, the way certain words do, the kind you’d use whether anyone was listening or not.
Someone was listening, as it turned out. And he wanted to know why I had to “talk like that.”
Like I was showing off. Like “unbeknownst” was something I’d hauled out to perform intelligence at people. I didn’t understand the accusation at the time, it took me years to fully parse what was actually being said, which was not you “think you’re better than everyone” so much as “why can’t you think and talk and act like me.” It wasn’t, I think, insecurity exactly. It felt more like a profound intolerance for anyone operating outside his frequency. I was supposed to be a mirror. Smaller. Simpler. Legible to him.
I was with this person for ten years. I was twenty-four when we met; he was thirty-five. By the time we moved in together I was pushing thirty and he was inching toward forty, which I mention only because the disparity in our ages felt, at the time, like evidence that he knew things I didn’t. That his read on the world — and on me — carried some authority mine didn’t yet. He was paranoid and controlling and could construct an accusation out of thin air and a vocabulary word. He also knew, on some level, exactly what he was. He told me once, with the particular self-satisfaction of a man confessing to something he expects to be forgiven for, that he was leftover meatloaf. His words. He already had a wife, a life, a family, and what I got was whatever was left on the plate at the end of the night. He said this like it was charming. Like self-awareness was the same thing as not doing harm.
What he could not do was meet me where I lived. And rather than acknowledge that gap, he spent years convincing me the gap didn’t exist — or that if it did, I had dug it myself, on purpose, to make him feel small. More than that: he convinced me I was fine with a small life. That I wanted it, actually. That the ceiling he’d put on our world was appropriate to someone like me, because no one would ever love me or understand me the way he did. I was too much and also not enough, and he was the only one willing to take on the specific burden of my particular whateverness. I believed him. For a long time, I genuinely believed him.
Here’s what I think I know now, that I didn’t know at twenty-four: people who are threatened by how you think are perhaps not going to grow into people who aren’t. When someone hears unbeknownst and reads it as a failure to be more like them, the problem is…probably not your word choice.
What it looks like when someone is actually on your level, or what it looks like for me, anyway: you say the weirdest thing that comes into your head, and they catch it. They throw something weirder back. Ývan knows I think I’m better than everyone (I’m not going to pretend otherwise!) and rather than flinching or sulking or demanding to know why I have to talk like that, he makes me even better. This happens multiple times a day, every day, without either of us keeping score or making it mean something about the other person’s worth. There’s no single example I can point to because it’s not a single example; it’s the texture of everything, the whole fabric of how we move through the world together. Either someone delights in how your mind works, or they don’t. I’m not sure there’s much of an in-between that holds.
And this isn’t only a story about a romantic relationship. The same principle applies now to everyone I let close, friends, collaborators, people I gave my time and attention, and best words to. The meatloaf guy was the most extreme version, but he wasn’t the only one operating outside my frequency who I kept making excuses for.
I actually think about that post-telephone call exchange every day. But it was seeing one of those “what advice would you give your younger self?” social media posts that made me try to organize and articulate all of my thoughts about it. So here it is.
Younger me: If They’re Not On Your Level, Don’t Fuck With Them. Your weird heights are the view from which you were always meant to see the world; don’t you dare lower yourself. You are not too much. Do not swallow your words. Do not dim your vocabulary, your curiosity, your particular brand of expansive weird intelligence. Do not accept a half-life with a half-person and call it love. Do not accept leftover meatloaf and do not say thank you for it. Do not make yourself legible to someone who isn’t worth the translation.
At this point in my life I have, I’m glad to say, surrounded myself with people who operate at my frequency, who catch what I throw and throw something stranger back, who make me more myself rather than less. It took longer than it should have. But here we are.
And unbeknownst to that younger, credulous, catastrophically undersold version of myself: she was not, in point of fact, consigned by fate or deficiency to subsist upon the desiccated leavings of someone else’s life. She was owed, and has since received, the whole magnificent, unabridged feast.
Also: I’ll talk however I like, motherfucker. Go die in a fire.
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I don’t always post on the Unquiet Things blog here to share when I send out my monthly Trinkets & Treasures newsletter… but sometimes I do, if only as a reminder to folks that it exists!
My newsletter is different than the email notifications you get in your inbox whenever I post on the blog, and is hosted separately. Because it is separate! It’s where I share a monthly roundup of favorite things and new discoveries, and usually feature a new-to-me artist. This month’s artist is me!
I just wrapped up 31 days of horror writing. Daily movie reviews throughout October —free, written because I genuinely love doing this. That’s not a complaint; nobody asked me to write any of it. I do this because it’s what I’d be doing anyway, thinking about movies and books and perfume and occult art, and the blog is just where I put those thoughts so other people can enjoy them too. Everything here has always been free because that’s how I want it.
This blog and its accompanying newsletter are completely passion projects. I have a day job that pays the bills, and this is what I do with the rest of my time because I love it. But every now and then, I need to gently remind you that if you enjoy the things I write, there are some ways to support that work.
My Perfume destash: I’m selling some bottles from my personal collection over on Facebook. Indie and niche scents, good stuff, much cheaper than buying new. If you’ve been curious about any of the perfumes I’ve reviewed over the years, this might be your chance.
Signed copies of my books: All three titles are back in stock, The Art of the Occult, The Art of Darkness, and The Art of Fantasy. If you’ve been meaning to pick one up or want to complete your collection, now’s the time.
My Pango bookshop: Fully restocked with lots of new titles. Horror, Gothic fiction, folk horror, art books, occult and esoteric subjects. I’ve been adding books steadily, so if you’re looking for something specific or just want to browse through my extremely specific taste in literature, go take a look.
New! Postcard sets: Over the years, I’ve created and posted silly mashups of words and images on social media that, as they say, “went viral.” People thought they were a hoot and a holler. The public’s pickle was tickled. I teased the idea over the summer. Well, now you can own them as actual physical postcards. Send them to your friends. Confuse your relatives. Stick them on your fridge. Whatever brings you joy. (Pssst…if you purchase one of my books, The Art of the Occult, The Art of Darkness, and The Art of Fantasy, I’ll include all four postcards for free!)
That’s it. Just wanted to remind you these things exist. If you can support the work, I appreciate it. If you can’t, that’s fine too. The blog will still be here either way.
And remember, if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have written, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?
I watched Companion four hours ago, and I genuinely cannot remember it. Not in a “the details are fuzzy” way, but in a “did I actually watch this or did I just scroll through stills on my phone?” way. I know Sophie Thatcher was in it, and everyone says she’s great, so sure, I’ll take their word for it. There was a house. There were other people. Things happened. A robot gained consciousness and questioned her existence and the nature of love in an unequal power dynamic. I think there was blood? The trailer had already told me she was a companion robot, so there was no surprise there, just watching a story I’d encountered before play out in the most obvious way.
I don’t think Companion is bad, exactly. It seems competently made. But it’s aggressively forgettable, like eating a meal that technically had food on the plate but left no impression whatsoever. I kept thinking “why am I watching this?” while I was watching it, which is never a good sign. It seems like it wants to say something about AI consciousness, about abusive relationships, about what makes us human, but I’m not sure it actually digs into any of those ideas. It gestures at them and then just… moves on. Maybe I missed something. I don’t know.
Here’s what I can tell you: I read Sierra Greer’s Annie Botearly on in 2024 and I still remember that story. If you want to actually feel something about an AI’s growing consciousness, if you want to sit with the uncomfortable reality of a relationship where one person has all the power and the other is learning what autonomy even means, maybe read that instead. Annie is a top-of-the-line robot girlfriend, and as her intelligence evolves, she begins to question her purpose and her relationship with Doug, her owner. Doug’s behavior is upsetting in its gross specificity: choosing Annie’s outfits, controlling her libido settings, expecting perfection (she’s a bedroom bot, but he’s criticizing her kitchen cleaning!) while claiming to love her growing humanity. I found Annie, a robot, more human and more compelling than anyone in Companion, which probably says something about the difference between a story that uses AI as a plot device and one that uses it to examine what it means to become yourself. Or maybe it just says something about what works for me.
I also read Olivia Gatwood’s Whoever You Are, Honey last year. It plays with similar themes of identity and performance, hints at questions of consciousness and reality (one character may be questioning whether she’s even real), but it never makes it obvious. It’s about the personas we adopt, the ways we perform ourselves for others, the strange intimacy and envy that can develop between women. The narrative has a dreamlike quality and the ending doesn’t resolve neatly, but I prefer it that way. It keeps evolving in my imagination. Companion was over the moment it ended.
I can’t recommend a movie I don’t remember. But here are two books for your TBR instead.
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After yesterday’s disappointment, I needed something good. Or at least something not terrible! Final Destination: Bloodlines was exactly the combination of not terrible and actually quite good that I was hoping for! Full transparency: I began watching this movie a month ago, but stopped after 20 minutes because I decided it would make good October fodder. And I was right!
The premise is ridiculous, and if you’ve seen even one, you know all you need to know: Death has a design, and if you mess with it, Death will find increasingly elaborate ways to correct the cosmic ledger with outrageously elaborate Rube Goldbergian setups. Is this movie dumb? Absolutely. Does it make any logical sense? Not even a little. Does it try to say something profound about fate, mortality, or the human condition? Well, sort of, a little? But that’s ok! But the big difference between this and yesterday’s crappy waste of time is that Bloodlines knows it’s ridiculous and leans into that with such absolute commitment and affection that it is genuinely joyful to watch.
The setup: In 1968, Iris has a premonition about a Space Needle-esque restaurant disaster and manages to save everyone. Flash forward to the present, and her granddaughter Stefani is having recurring nightmares about that night. Turns out Death’s been working through the original survivors and their descendants, everyone who shouldn’t exist because they were supposed to die that night. (I just visited the Space Needle recently, and I thought about that opening scene A LOT when I was gingerly stepping on the glass floor! As a matter of fact, those are probably the scenes that freaked me out most, which is why that’s mostly the imagery I’ve selected for this post.)
It’s a neat expansion of the franchise’s mythology that seems to respect what came before while giving us something new. The “bloodline” angle makes the stakes feel bigger and the design more convoluted and intricate.
But we’re not here for the plot. We’re here for the deaths! And Bloodlines delivers. An MRI machine. A backyard barbecue. A garbage truck. Everyday situations transformed into elaborate death traps where one wrong move sets off a cascade of carnage. The film understands these sequences work best when you can see all the pieces being set up, when you’re silently screaming at characters to notice the garden hose, the glass shards, the precarious positioning of that lawn mower.
The tone is exactly right. This isn’t torture porn, it’s slapstick with arterial spray. There’s a darkly comic sensibility running through every kill that acknowledges the absurdity without winking so hard it breaks the tension. When someone gets demolished in the most convoluted way possible, you’re allowed to gasp and laugh. The film gives you permission to have fun with the horror.
The practical effects are gory, gorgeous chaos. Bodies don’t just die—they’re eviscerated, impaled, crushed, and dismembered with genuine craftsmanship. Kind of makes you appreciate the artistry while also wanting to look away and maybe puke a little bit.
Tony Todd. Oh, Tony Todd. His final film role is here, playing the series’ mysterious mortician who always seems to know a very weird amount about Death’s design. He was clearly unwell during filming, and watching him deliver his lines with that iconic voice coming from a visibly weakened body is heartbreaking. The film gives him a proper sendoff, finally explaining his character’s connection to everything in a way that’s both satisfying and surprisingly moving. It shredded me, honestly. This absolutely legendary performer, knowing his time was limited, giving us one last performance that’s a goodbye to his character and (whether intentionally or not, but it surely must have been) a meditation on mortality itself in a franchise built around cheating death.
Bloodlines gets it: you don’t need to pretend you’re saying something profound to make an effective horror movie (or an effective movie, period). This is a movie about wacky, sadistic Looney Tunes-esque cartoon deaths, and it never tries to dress it up as something more important.
It’s funny, it’s gross, it’s inventive, and in its own weird way, oddly heartfelt. Exactly what I needed.
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Predicting the future from reading coffee grounds, engraved by Charles William Sharpe
As a human of a certain chromosomal combination and a certain advancing age, my body is doing weird things, which often means doing more or less of what it should.
Take my period, for instance. Ever since my first onset of menses at the tender age of ten (and what a shock that was, nobody prepared me for the fact that it could last three entire months) my menstrual cycle has been what you might charitably call “unpredictable.” Less charitably, you might call it “completely unhinged.” After those initial ninety days of wondering if I was dying, my exceedingly awful male doctor put me on birth control pills to regulate things. Thirty-nine years later, I’m still on the pill, my uterus still chaotic.
For most of those decades, the pharmaceutical intervention worked well enough. Monthly cycles that arrived more or less on cue, lasted a reasonable amount of time, and then politely departed until the next month. But bodies can turn on you in an instant! For the past six to eight months, my period has decided to freelance. Spotting when it’s not supposed to, showing up fashionably late or scandalously early, generally behaving like that friend who says they’ll be there at seven and rolls up at nine-thirty without explanation.
The practical solution was simple enough: light pantyliners, all the time, just in case. Because there’s nothing quite like discovering your body has decided to redecorate your underwear AND your sweatpants while you’re standing in the ten-items-or-less line at the grocery store. So now I’m constantly prepared, like a very well-padded Boy Scout.
Between the practical preparation and the daily inspection of said pantyliners, I started noticing patterns. Not timing patterns – my uterus has clearly said “you may fuck off entirely” to all that – but actual visual patterns. The shapes that small drips and drops and globbets of blood make on thin cotton padding. At first, it was idle observation, the kind of thing your brain does when it’s bored. Like finding faces in clouds or animals in doctor’s office wallpaper – that human compulsion to find patterns and meaning in random shapes. Pareidolia. But then I started paying attention, really paying attention, and realized this felt different from seeing an Abraham Lincoln-rabbit hybrid in a cumulus cloud. (I don’t know how it feels different, exactly? But it does?)
Today, unmistakably, the small spot of blood had formed the shape of a sword. Not a vague, “if you squint real hard and look from the corner of your eye” sort of resemblance, but a clear, defined blade with what looked like a simple hilt. Sharp. Purposeful. Impossible to ignore. I wanted to snap a photo and include it with this post, but better-Sarah, classier-Sarah thought “um yeah maybe not.”
So! Welcome to my accidental practice of what I’ve decided to call playtexomancy: divination through menstrual blood patterns as captured on pantyliners. It’s probably not what the ancient oracles had in mind, but they didn’t have to deal with irregular periods and modern feminine hygiene products.
The sword, though! Did you see what I included in the “What’s In My Bag” post from the other day? If not, take a look! That felt significant in a way I couldn’t dismiss as pure pattern-seeking. Swords cut through. They defend. They represent clarity, decision, the ability to sever what no longer serves. And here’s my bod, in the midst of god only knows what all hormonal confusion, apparently offering me a symbol of cutting through uncertainty.
Is this ridiculous? Probably. Am I reading meaning into random biological processes? Almost certainly. But I think it’s oddly comforting and fun to find messages in the chaos; it’s a way of discovering my own patterns when my body has abandoned the expected ones, of paying attention to what it’s doing in a curious way instead of just being frustrated with it. Maybe it even connects me to something larger and more mystical during a time when my body feels completely unreliable, even if – especially if – those messages are materializing on mass-produced sanitary supplies.
Humans have been seeking signs in blood for millennia. I’m just upgrading the ancient practice with leak-proof technology and wings for extra protection!
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I often think of getting a chance to visit my younger self, and after she’s gotten over the simultaneous horror of how fat I have gotten, but how cool my nose ring is, here is what I would tell her:
Stop. Fucking. Around.
I know, I know – you think you’re buying yourself time, that if you just wait a little longer, the thing you’re dreading will somehow become easier or disappear entirely. Spoiler alert: it won’t. What you’re actually doing is choosing to suffer twice – once in the anticipation, and once when you finally have to do the thing anyway.
I spent so many years getting myself into the dumbest situations because I was procrastinating or avoiding something or lying about something I should have done and never did. The elaborate cover-ups, the increasingly ridiculous excuses, the way one small avoided task would snowball into this absurd comedy of errors that was infinitely worse than just handling the original thing.
Today, I had to make a series of phone calls I was dreading. Without getting too much into it, my boss made a companywide announcement that was going to affect our part-timers and that it would occur “sooner rather than later,” which means absolutely nothing and is not in any way useful or helpful. So I got to be the one to call each of them personally and clarify things, which included giving them an actual timeline. The doing of this was never not going to suck. And I did not want to do it.
My younger self would have spent days catastrophizing about these calls. She would have imagined every possible terrible reaction, rehearsed scripts that she’d never use, and probably would have “forgotten” to make them until the last possible moment, making everything infinitely more stressful for everyone involved.
Instead, I just… made the calls. They were fine. Some people were disappointed, some were understanding, most were just grateful to have actual information instead of corporate vagueness. The whole thing took maybe an hour, and then it was done.
The dread of doing it will hurt you more, and you don’t need to spend even more time hurting. Life is going to hand you plenty of genuine suffering – toxic relationships, bad breakups, family drama, health scares, financial stress, random bullshit that isn’t even your fault. Why volunteer for extra? Why choose to torment yourself over something you have to do anyway?
That’s it. That’s the wisdom. Stop volunteering for extra angst. The thing you’re avoiding isn’t going anywhere, but every day you spend dreading it is a day you’re choosing to feel like garbage for no good reason.
Do the fucking thing. Your future self will thank you. Also, one day, someone will think they have the right to tell you that they don’t want you to get a nose ring, and when they do, I want you to just cackle like a loon right to their face and tell them to FUCK ALL THE WAY OFF YOU NO GOOD PIECE OF SHIT MOTHERFUCKER.
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