I am on a tear this morning, and I am sure it has nothing to do with two days of eating Easter candy until I was sick, then waiting until I didn’t feel sick anymore, then eating more Easter candy. But this morning I nearly damaged my precious shower radio in my eagerness to make a song stop. It was YET ANOTHER song talking about how perfect a woman is and how she should never change. And I do understand the intended sentiment, I do, and that it’s intended as a nice thing to say, and that we are not supposed to be getting the icky feeling that he seems to be appointing himself the decider of what she should and should not change, and/or that he seems to be assuming that he is 100% of the audience for her appearance and personality: like, if HE’S satisfied, that should be the end of the issue for her. Perhaps he means only that in his loving eyes she’s perfect as she is, meaning “perfect” only in the reasonable/colloquial sense of “really a good fit for what I like in a person, but with the understanding that I am talking about an imperfect human like myself and not some non-human creature held to supernatural standards,” and that she shouldn’t try to change for him, and that she’s great and shouldn’t tear herself down. And some people are not very smart and/or not very good communicators, and we ought to cut them some slack and hear their intention rather than trying to dive four layers deep into a one-layer message. BUT. It is hard to do that when he goes on to describe PHYSICAL attributes. These PHYSICAL FEATURES are perfect and should not be changed. That is not a good thing to hear, when ageing comes for us all and the changes are dramatic and inevitable.

Or here is another song on a similar theme, but maybe this time when he mentions perfection he is describing her personality rather than her body, or at least maybe there is room for that interpretation, not that anyone wants to have to live up on that kind of pedestal or worry about what will happen on the day he realizes she isn’t perfect. Oh wait, no: he says she LOOKS perfect. And then he goes on to say that he doesn’t deserve it, which at first could come across as humble but unfortunately indicates that he thinks a person CAN deserve physical perfection in a partner—that a physically attractive woman is something a man could be said to deserve. Maybe the singer doesn’t feel he himself deserves it, but he is indicating that a more deserving man would or could deserve it. Plus, he evidently DOES deserve it, since he has received it; he just doesn’t like to point that out himself. Humble.

Oh, here’s a nice song about how he is in love with her. No, never mind: he is in love with her BODY. I see. I guess the upside is that this singer REALIZES that’s the situation, instead of making himself look like an idiot by writing a whole “love song” and then having the contextual vocabulary-usage evidence (“deep in your love,” “love you all night long,” “just one taste of your love,” “pull me down hard and drown me in love”) show vividly and embarrassingly that he is talking about an entirely different sort of feeling, and that he may not in fact be aware of the difference. Sex songs are good too! Let’s have those! But let’s not act as if they’re love songs, and let’s show that we do know the difference, and let’s not make it seem as if we think the word “love” is the button you have to push to get sex.

Another song seems at first as if it’s talking about how wonderful the woman is, but then the man humbly asks himself an important question: “What did I do to deserve this?” There was definitely something. He did something amazing, or he is just so amazing himself, that he has been given the gift of a woman of his very own. That is his reward for being incredible. He doesn’t know which of his many wonderful acts or attributes resulted in this, but definitely there was something, because look: woman!

Another song has such a pretty tune but seems to have been written by someone who does not know any actual women, and has not yet found out that women are the same species as men. What does a woman taste like? He has no idea, but he’s guessing…sunshine, and strawberry bubble gum? The more times I hear the song, the more times I think he wrote it for his favorite page of the Victoria’s Secret catalog. He thinks women are ever-beautiful, ever-willing, strawberry-flavored.

In another song, a man sees a woman out with her boyfriend and tries to persuade her that she should be with him instead. He notices that she’s drinking wine instead of whiskey, and makes the assumption that this drink was what her boyfriend wanted her to drink; his point is that this shows her boyfriend doesn’t like her the way she is, but HE (the singer) does. How is “You should drink whiskey instead of wine” any better than “You should drink wine instead of whiskey,” and why is he assuming ANYONE is having ANY say over what she is choosing to drink??

In another song, a man gives the woman credit for “saving” him. (1) That sounds like a non-insignificant amount of work for the woman. (2) What is it she gets out of it, again? (3) If he goes back to his old ways, now we know it’s not really his fault: it means she failed to really save him.

There are so many songs! So many songs where “love” is used as a euphemism for a very different verb or noun or feeling. So many songs in which a woman is called “perfect” or an “angel” by a man who wants to “love” her. So many songs about how a man can live in such a way that he could be rewarded with a Woman Prize. So many songs praising a woman for staying with a man who has behaved badly. So many songs in which all/most of a woman’s cataloged positive qualities are appearance-based. So many songs in which the woman is the passenger in the man’s truck. Of course there are counter-examples, of COURSE there are, but still: courtship songs give the courted group a good overall picture of what the courters value and prefer; the resulting relentless stream of lyrics can be disheartening.

I have happy news on the Brach’s Marshmallow Easter Hunt Eggs story: thanks to you, I am in possession of two bags. Cara, Jaida, Bess, and Rachel all mentioned Walgreens, and I had CHECKED Walgreens, but this morning my friend Morgan and I went to the OTHER Walgreens and THERE THEY WERE! I bought two bags when normally I would only buy one, because my Quest Mode had been activated, which means it was all I could do not to buy every bag on the shelf. Buying two seemed to be the absolute minimum I could do—like, what if I lost a bag on the way home? what if one bag was stale? what if this was all a dream? I also bought a bag of Brach’s Jelly Bean Nougats, which look likely to involve a similar magical combination of revolting and compelling.

(image from Brachs.com)

This Sunday/Monday I am taking two days off of my diet to eat Easter candy (also pizza) (also bread dipped in soup) (also brownies), and I am counting the hours until Sunday. I am going to have a Reese’s Peanut Butter Egg with my morning coffee, bet on it. But this reminds me that in the comments section on the Keto grocery list post there were a non-zero number of people asking for keto meal ideas, so let’s do that here, keeping in mind that I don’t enjoy cooking and I don’t mind eating the same things over and over, so this menu might not be very helpful to someone looking for Keto Recipes. My menu is kind of like Taco Bell’s menu: the same handful of ingredients combined in a bunch of different shapes.

Meals:

• Scrambled/fried eggs with a side of fried cubed ham. (Note: all scrambled/fried eggs in this list are cooked in butter.)

• Scrambled eggs with cut-up breakfast sausages and mozzarella cheese.

• Two fried eggs, put inside half of a Joseph’s reduced-carbohydrate pita (lightly toasted and then buttered on the inside), sometimes with bacon in there too.

• Half of a Joseph’s reduced-carbohydrate pita filled with a whole bunch of deli meat (like 4-5 slices crammed in there), plus a slice of cheese, plus mustard and mayonnaise and salt and pepper, plus either dill pickles slices or else a spoonful of Splenda-sweetened sweet relish, plus Romaine lettuce.

• Half of a Joseph’s reduced-carbohydrate pita filled with a whole bunch of tuna salad.

• A taco made with a low-carb wrap/tortilla, ground meat, cheese, salsa, Tostitos Queso Blanco dip, and a little iceberg lettuce or a nice leaf of Romaine.

• Taco eggs: scrambled eggs to which I add a scoop of the seasoned ground meat everyone else is having in their tacos, a big spoonful of Tostitos Queso Blanco dip, several cut-up black olives, a heap of cheddar (shredded or sliced thin), and salsa; stir it around until it’s all melty and bubbly. If the tomatoes are worth eating, I put some (approximately the equivalent of two cut-up cherry tomatoes) on top. I also like to add chopped-up cooked broccoli to the stirring/melting stage, but I didn’t put it in the list because I’m not sure many other people would like that. I like that it gives the whole dish more substance and texture, but when I said that to Paul he shuddered.

• Taco salad: same stuff as taco eggs (though sans broccoli), but over raw spinach leaves instead of mixed into scrambled eggs.

• Cheeseburger salad: bowl of spinach plus cheeseburger chopped up (or hamburger chopped up, plus shredded cheddar), some extra cheddar cheese, some mustard/mayo mixed together like salad dressing, chopped-up dill pickle, a little cut-up tomato, sometimes some bacon, some sunflower seeds too sometimes.

• Salmon, plus broccoli heavily covered with parmesan cheese. It is so lucky to like salmon in a time when it is considered a Food of Righteousness on almost any diet.

• Leftover salmon added to scrambled eggs along with broccoli and parmesan cheese.

• Leftover salmon on a pile of raw spinach; add shredded cheese and/or parmesan and/or sunflower seeds and/or bacon and/or a few olives and/or a little tomato, plus Caesar or blue cheese dressing.

• Scrambled eggs with broccoli, chicken (I like Perdue Short Cuts for easiness and also flavor), and a spoonful of Tostitos Queso Blanco, maybe a couple slices of mozzarella cheese melted on top.

• Snack lunch/dinner: hard-boiled egg(s) or deviled eggs, rolled up deli ham/turkey, jalapeno cheese stick, colby jack cheese stick, olives, almonds, dill pickle spear.

• Tuna salad eaten with celery sticks. Sounds kind of sad/icky, but I love it and would eat it even if not on a diet. The key is not skimping on the mayo or the salt.

• Rotisserie chicken, eaten hunched over like a predator.

• Hot dogs, cut in circles and dipped in mustard, plus colby jack cheese stick(s).

• Pizza omelet: omelet with a spoonful of pizza sauce, layer of pepperoni, layer of cheddar, layer of mozzarella, a few cut-up black olives.

• Pizza made with a Joseph’s reduced-carbohydrate pita as the crust.

• Jalapeno poppers. Like, I have a whole meal of just those, when the rest of the family is eating pizza; and on the nights I CAN have pizza, I kind of miss my jalapeno poppers.

• Spinach salad with cut-up fried kielbasa and banana peppers.

• Omelet with broccoli and cheese, side of cubed fried ham.

• Omelet with deli ham and cheese, side of broccoli.

• Scrambled eggs with broccoli, cheddar cheese, spoonful of Tostitos Queso Blanco dip, Sriracha sauce.

• Scrambled eggs with Hillshire Farms little beef smokies and creamy mustard (mustard, mayonnaise, and a little bit of horseradish sauce).

• Steak. Like, just a piece of steak. Side of broccoli. I like to dip bites of steak in a mix of mustard/mayo/horseradish/Sriracha, and dip the broccoli in Caesar dressing.

• Piece of chicken or a pork chop, with side dishes of broccoli and bacon, plus mustard/mayo/horseradish/Sriracha for dipping the chicken/pork-chop and Caesar dressing for dipping the broccoli.

• Scrambled eggs with leftover steak/chicken/pork-chop cut up really small.

Snacks:

• Smoked almonds
• Salted almonds
• Toasted pecans
• Mixed nuts
• Spoonful of peanut butter
• 1/4 c. whole-milk plain Greek yogurt with half a dozen blackberries and raspberries
• Cheese stick
• Slice of deli ham/turkey
• Cucumber spears dipped in blue cheese dressing
• Hard-boiled egg
• Coffee with cream and unsweetened baking cocoa and artificial sweetener (use whisk to combine cream/cocoa), or that same thing cold, or that same thing put in a blender with ice
• 2/3rds cup of a Premier Protein shake, fill the rest of the glass with ice and leftover coffee

You see what I mean? It’s, like, ten different foods, just combined in different ways. But two days from now, I will be eating NOUGAT combined with JELLY BEANS.

I need to bring your attention to an Easter Candy Emergency. Are you familiar with THIS sweet gentleman?:

(image from Brachs.com)

Some of you are not acquainted with this candy. Some of you are acquainted, and as a result are recoiling in horror. Some of you are acquainted and are not at all recoiling, and are instead thinking “Oh thank goodness I am not alone in my perversity!”

For those who haven’t been introduced. Brach’s Marshmallow Easter Hunt Eggs have dense marshmallow filling, and are coated in the same sugary layer that makes up the outer part of jellybeans. I am not going to try to explain why I eat them. It makes no sense: I don’t much like marshmallows, and I don’t much like jellybeans (except the Mike & Ike jellybeans, which are terrific). But every year I buy a bag of these marshmallow/jellybean hybrids.

EXCEPT THIS YEAR. Because they are nowhere to be found. I didn’t realize the situation until this morning when I was texting with my friend Morgan; she was checking in to make sure I was all set for what we both agree is the best candy holiday of the year. She mentioned those marshmallow eggs, and I suddenly realized I didn’t have any, and since I’d basically bought one of everything at Target I was pretty sure they must not have been there, and anyway one thing led to another and Morgan and I set out separately for opposite ends of town, sending text messages back and forth as we tried store after store and found no marshmallow eggs.

I have an email in to the company asking for more information, but in the meantime: have you seen marshmallow eggs anywhere this year?

Edit: I have an update! But please do continue to leave Marshmallow Egg Sightings in the comments section for the sake of others who are still questing.

I have a boring household-appliance topic to discuss, and on such a pretty day too, oh well. My coffee-maker is gradually perishing, and I’d like to get a replacement BEFORE it suddenly stops working. The one I have is a 12-cup Black and Decker; it was a model only sold at Target. When I bought it, I was replacing my old 4-cup Mr. Coffee, which had given many years of good service but was no longer adequate for my coffee needs.

I am feeling a little irritable that the Black and Decker already needs replacement, because I see I bought it in September 2015. Two and a half years is not a long time for a $40-on-sale appliance to last. I’d had the $10-on-sale-for-$8.99 Mr. Coffee for well over a decade and it was still doing great. In fact, I wrapped it in plastic and stored it in the basement in case I want it back someday.

Here are the things that are going wrong with the current coffee maker:

1. The clock runs too fast to use, and inconsistently: I can’t use the programmable feature anymore or it’ll brew my coffee at some random time during the night.

2. This clock problem also affects the auto-shut-off: it’s supposed to stay on for 2 hours, but is more like an hour and 20 minutes.

3. The heating plate has thickly rusted, so the coffee doesn’t stay very hot anyway: I have to pour a cup and then put it in the microwave for a bit.

4. The coffee pot never brewed the coffee as hot as I’d like it to be, though that was okay before the other things went wrong.

Here are the things I’d like in a replacement:

1. Probably not Black and Decker? Though I’d be willing to believe this was a problem with a particular model and not with the brand overall. I see at the time of purchase I found a bunch of poor reviews, though they were about leaking and taste.

2. Programmable. I lovvvvvvve having the coffee waiting for me in the morning.

3. Brews nice and hot. I don’t want to be able to take a big sip right away and then have to put the mug in the microwave if I don’t drink the whole cupful in a few minutes.

4. Roughly 12-cup size. Not 4-cup. Not one-cup-at-a-time. I typically brew 6-8 cups per day.

5. Not expensive. I would enjoy hearing about a $300 coffee maker, but I’m not going to buy it. I’m going to buy something on sale at Target or on a nice discount at Amazon and we all know it.

6. Nothing fancy. I want the kind where I put in a filter and some coffee grounds and some water, and I press a button and it makes the coffee. Well, maybe I could be talked into something a LITTLE fancier: look how I’ve come around to the programmable feature. When I worked at a doughnut shop as a teenager, there was a coffee maker you put whole beans into, and it would grind the beans first and then brew the coffee. That would be neato, but likely takes us out of the price range.

Update 01-12-2019: I put the decision off month after month, until last night I dropped my old coffee pot’s carafe and it shattered, so now I’m using my old 4-cup maker until the new one arrives. I chose the Cuisinart DCC-3200 14-cup Programmable Coffee Maker. The other two I considered were the Hamilton Beach FlexBrew and the Mr. Coffee Optimal Brew Thermal System. I liked that I could brew a single serving or use K-Cups with the Hamilton Beach one, but in the end decided I probably WOULDN’T do that, or at least not often enough to be worth it; I’m still not sure this was the right decision. I liked that the Mr. Coffee was a Mr. Coffee, and also that it’s the same one my brother and sister-in-law have so I’d find it easy to make coffee when I’m at their house; and I know from experience that it keeps the coffee nice and hot; but I don’t like the set-up of it, and I don’t like that I can’t see into the carafe. So Cuisinart it is.

I saw the movie Love, Simon even though I normally don’t like anything young-adult. When other adults say, “You should try this, you will love it, it’s ‘young adult’ but it’s not really just for young adults at all,” I never end up liking the book or movie they’re recommending, and I always end up thinking, “Nope, that was indeed young-adult, and I have learned from repeated experience that anything young-adult is not for me.”

But Love, Simon is a young-adult movie, and I did like it. Part of it was definitely the low expectations: if you think a movie/book is going to be a 1 or 2 on a scale of 10 for you, but then it’s a 6 or 7, that’s a pleasant surprise. Part of it is that I think the movie was really nicely done, and that the actors did a good job. Part of it is that it reminded me of the movies I DID like when I WAS a young adult: Say Anything, Can’t Buy Me Love, The Breakfast Club, Some Kind of Wonderful.

Anyway, I liked it! I wished the main character’s family was not quite so unrealistically treacly: let’s all enjoy dinner together with supportive loving conversation, and then gather around the television for in-jokes and bowls of popcorn, and then tickle each other and run through the house squealing in a spontaneous pillow-fight, and then the parents kiss and the kids pretend to be grossed out but actually observe with happy eyes. So wholesome and loving! So much happy energy! Even adding just one single comment that was less than 100% joyous playful lovefest (e.g., “Come on now, hurry up, get your shoes on, we need to get going,” or “Okay, enough of that now, time for bed”) would have helped with realism. Instead it’s the kind of house where a child cooks delicious meals for fun but no one ever has to do the dishes.

And there was a scene with a teacher that is straight out of pure fantasy land. But! That is the kind of thing I liked in movies when I was a teenager! I WANTED those fantasy scenes: the hot boy finally stops pining for the hot stupid mean girl and notices his female best friend with glasses! the mean unfair teacher gets exposed and humiliated! the sweet nerds win a competition against the bullying jocks! etc.!

While watching it, I was wondering what age child it would be appropriate for, and I’m not sure. None of my kids have yet seemed very interested in teen-romance movies. My guess is that my 7th graders would be okay with it, but a lot of it would go over their heads; and my high-school kid and college-age kid might like it but not want to watch it with their parents.

Paul has indicated periodically/mildly/infrequently over the years that he thinks of me as a complainer, and I’m not going to try to tell you he’s wrong, considering I have been building the case against myself for nearly a dozen years now on this very blog. BUT, I would like to say in my defense that I have the matching attribute from the other end of the spectrum: I may notice lots of little things to complain about, but I also notice lots of little things to feel happy and satisfied about.

For example, it has been over seventeen years since we moved into this house, and I am still FREQUENTLY happy about (1) having our own, unshared driveway, (2) walking/hopping/exercising/etc. without having to worry that our footsteps are too loud for the downstairs neighbors, and (3) having our very own non-coin-operated washer and dryer right within our own living area. FREQUENTLY. Yesterday I mentioned appreciating the non-shared-driveway thing to Paul, and he said yeah as if he agreed, but then said actually he never thinks about that anymore and had forgotten all about it.

…All this was supposed to be setting things up for me to make a little list of current complaints: like, “Look, I ate my vegetables by appreciating the driveway, so now I can have my complainy dessert.” But in the time it took me to write those two paragraphs I have forgotten what I was feeling complainy about. Let’s call that another positive thing about my personality.

Paul recently read Anne of Green Gables to the younger kids, and they liked it, and so next he found a version of it we could watch on TV during dinner. I know there are a whole bunch of different movies and TV series of that book, and so I was pleased to find that the version he got was the same one I remember from childhood. And what is interesting to me, and possibly to me alone, is that I didn’t particularly recognize Anne herself, or Matthew Cuthbert, or Green Gables—but when I saw MARILLA, I knew.

I am aware that when there are multiple versions of things, people tend to like the version they saw first, and it is difficult to argue with that kind of loyalty. And I am sure the Marilla in YOUR favorite version is good TOO. But Colleen Dewhurst is, in my opinion as someone who may have seen only one version, The Best Marilla. I don’t know why we didn’t name our daughter Marilla. If I’d re-watched this show while pregnant, we likely would have. Seeing Colleen Dewhurst playing Marilla taps into the same region of my brain that makes me get a little choked up every time I see Mr. Rogers.

Henry told me that now they are practicing a new drill at school: if the fire alarm goes off, they treat it as a lockdown and they shelter in place, which means they lock the door and pull a shade over the window and keep very quiet and hide. Are you understanding this thing the children are practicing? When a fire alarm goes off, they STAY IN THE BUILDING AND DO NOT LEAVE IT, EVEN THOUGH IT MIGHT BE ON FIRE. Because maybe instead a shooter has pulled the fire alarm to get everyone to come out of their classrooms. Henry told me this is the “Special Challenge Mode!,” which tells me that his teacher is doing some good, good, good, heartbreaking work, and that she is managing to do it without crying, which was more than I was able to do just HEARING about it. Children in this country now have to be taught NOT to leave the building when a fire alarm goes off. Everything is absolutely fine.

I would like to let you know that if you ever sneak into my house while I am gone and, as any sitcom would have warned you was inevitable, I come back unexpectedly early, that you do not need to murder me in order to make good your escape. All you have to do is stay out of my way as I head directly and absolutely predictably for the bathroom. You don’t even need to hide: I will be so single-minded in my purpose, it is unlikely I would see you even if you were sitting comfortably in the living room, legs crossed, sipping from one of my coffee mugs. Right after I’ve closed the door, you can stroll out, unseen and unhurried.

I just spent twelve United States dollars, which is incidentally two dollars more than my highest ever hourly wage, just because I liked this bottle:

I’m not proud, but I am happy. Even the grocery store clerk commented what a pretty bottle it was. I have a shelf of useless things (decorative candle holders, empty whiskey box) all in this color range, and as soon as I drink whatever it is I just bought, the empty bottle is going to look PERFECT there. I told the clerk all about it. “Uh huh,” she said, possibly mentally comparing the price of the bottle against her own hourly wage.

I did my taxes yesterday and I’m so happy to have them done and also ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN that I will be audited for my clueless mistakes. Actually, what I am sure of is that every year the IRS finds multiple clueless mistakes, and chooses not to audit me because all the mistakes are against my own interest. Next year I am getting someone else to do this FOR SURE: I am NOT going to spend another year PLANNING to have someone else do it and then put it off and put it off and put it off and end up having to do it myself. Though I am discouraged to hear that even when someone else does your taxes, you still have to do multiple hours of work? Is that so? Because that’s what I am doing when I do my own taxes. I was picturing shoving the big envelope of paper onto someone else’s desk. But I guess there are a fair number of things that someone with a big envelope of paper still wouldn’t know needed to be taken into account. And, the nice thing is, after doing those several hours of work I could think that the taxes were done RIGHT. That would be a novel experience!

The comments on the Doing Social Good with Money post were some of my favorite things ever. Such good ideas—but also, just talking about the ideas made me feel excited about doing them, like we were all in a club of people doing these things. If you like the idea of donating new underpants to the school nurse (smaller sizes in boy or girl styles to the elementary school, teen-girl sizes to the middle school), or of buying winter hats/gloves/scarves on clearance to donate to local welfare groups in the fall, my Target has 50-70% clearances on both right now. Kids’ winter hats, usually $4.00, marked down to $1.20; deluxe winter hats marked from $9.99 down to $2.98. Gloves and scarves were still only at 50% off, but some of the more deluxe mittens were marked from $9.99 down to $2.98. I forget the exact markdowns on the kid underpants, but the prices were in the $2.48, $2.98, $3.48, $4.98 range, depending on type and number of pairs.

I have discovered that our grocery store sells little pitiful-looking bunches of daffodil stems for $1.79. The first time I impulsively bought a bunch, I thought the chances were slim that I would be getting any flowers from those sad sticks. But I was so wrong! Now I buy another bunch almost every time I’m at the grocery store and add them to the jar, taking out old ones as they wilt. They are acting as the floral kitchen equivalent of the pretty patio lights I put up around the living room window: sustaining the mood until the sun can do it.

I took the kids to see Black Panther; kids are ages 16, 12, 12, and 10. I am going to be doing a review with “parental spoilers”—that is, I will mention some potential upsetting things that happened, but with an attempt not to give away any plot. Before hearing my review, you should know:

1. I don’t really like superhero movies
2. I hate to watch people fighting
2b. especially ritual hand-to-hand combat
2c. especially-especially war breaking out among characters we’ve grown to love
3. and I’m pretty spooked by plots about evil political takeovers

So! Not exactly a match made in heaven, this movie and Swistle! But the children wanted to see it, and actually I did too, but I was aware that I was not going to enjoy all of it no matter what. And I did not enjoy all of it: there are a LOT of big action fight scenes, basically the fighting is about 75% of the movie as anyone would reasonably expect, and there are several rather brutal ritual fights for the kingship (WHY WOULD THAT BE A GOOD INDICATOR OF WHO SHOULD BE IN CHARGE), with rising tension and scary edge-of-waterfall danger that I just wanted to be DONE WITH.

However, the movie is rated PG-13, so I expected not to be too upset, and I was right. In the big fight scenes, there are guns and punches and bodies go flying, but that’s about all you see; it’s what I think I’ve seen described as comic book violence, which would be apt. Overall I can’t remember seeing blood or gore or anything upsetting or sad beyond the explosive POW POW POW BODIES FLINGING EVERYWHERE type of fighting.

There are three scenes that come to mind where the violence was more upsetting, and I asked the kids afterward about the violence and they mentioned the same three scenes. Twice we see a spear/stick-type implement stabbing into a person’s bare torso and later being pulled out; it’s not very very graphic but it’s disturbing and I looked away. (On at least two other occasions, someone is stabbed, but it is through clothing.) The worst one is more shocking/upsetting than it is graphic: a good person’s throat is cut very abruptly by a bad person; we don’t see any blood/wound that I remember, but we see the disturbing rapid cutting motion and then the body dropping, and there was gasping in the theater, and someone, very possibly me, gave a little cry. Less upsetting but still notable: a couple of times someone gets a quick cut on the face during a fight, or we see them talking later while sporting a face wound. Oh, and we see a bullet wound, and I NOPED OUT when someone prepared to press a metal healing ball into the wound, so I don’t know how gross that ended up being.

I think the movie was fine for my 10-year-old, but he is almost 11, and also he really likes fighting/shooting stuff, and he’s seen a fair amount of it in videos and movies and video games. It was fine for the twins, but Elizabeth had to have about half of the plot explained to her on the way home.

I thought the characters were great, the plot was interesting enough, and there was some good comic relief but I wish there’d been even more of it. I thought it was awesome to see women being tough and doing a lot of fighting, though I don’t personally want to do any fighting and so I wasn’t identifying with the characters the way I understand many men identify with superhero movies: imagining themselves doing the glorious heroic fighting and having bullets bouncing off their pecs and so forth. I was more “worrying about their safety, while feeling extremely pleased in principle that women were tough and fighting.”

I think a legit reason to go see it is “wanting to have seen it”: I think the movie and Wakanda are going to come up a lot in future years, and it’s nice to know what people are talking about. It was 2 hours 15 minutes, and you should stay through the credits because there’s more stuff. I wish movies would make their credits more visually interesting (like the credits of Wall-E), if they want people to stay through them.