I am watching the 2019 movie “Tolkien” (with the actor of Warboy (Nicholas Hoult (another genius)) from Fury Road as Tolkien) and I am 25 minutes in, and I have already cried twice.

Is crying fun? Somehow, yes, it is. (Repressing your negative emotions causes cancer. Read The Myth of Normal by Gabor Mate for more info (parentheses wooo))

Stories

“We need stories. We need stories to understand ourselves. We are the only creature that does this unusual thing of telling each other stories in order to try and understand the kind of creature that we are. When a child is born, the first thing the child requires is safety and love. The next thing that the child asks for is, ‘Tell me a story.’”

Tolkien finds the story-hungry child deep within my onion layers and feeds it bread and honey and a quest. It makes living feel profound and delicious and it hits so hard it waters my face.

Crying is a feature, not a bug. The overwhelm of magic is gushing from my eyeballs.

Tolkien was an onion. I just know it. There’s no way he wasn’t.

Tolkien playground

• Here is how you know how to pronounce “ei” or “ie”: you say the second letter. “Tolkien” is pronounced TolkEn, not TolkIn. In the movie, the Latin teacher gets this wrong. That doesn’t make sense - why would a linguist not know this? To teach us to stop saying “Tolkin”? That scene took me out of the magic for a second.

• I once read Marie Cachet’s The Secret of the She-Bear and it’s stuck in my head forever. Whenever I read stories, I take a peek at it through MC’s lens. She argues that European myths and fairy tales are the key to reincarnation. When I first read that book, I thought it was so dumb, but it genuinely works and I changed my mind. Try it!

• I want a group of art-nerd friends like Tolkien has in the movie. Overly-enthusiastic about beauty. Where are people like this? Can I borrow your time machine?

• Inventing words is really really really fun. Here are some words my family has invented

  • Hice: rhymes with mice and means houses
  • Namana: watching music videos. Comes from the Mahnah Manah Song from Sesame Street.
  • The Witches Circle: a place in the woods where we sometimes go to play and make sacrifices
  • Bow-uh-kuh-suh: a fancy way to pronounce “box”
  • Bird chunks: a phenomenon in the city we live in where we find disembodied bird body parts on the sidewalk and we don’t know how it happens.

• Movie adaptations of books usually suck complete ass, and so do biopics, but the LOTR movies and this Tolkien movie are fantastic. They made the WW1 scenes look like Mordor! None of the actors miss! The cinematography has so many details! I identified so deeply with the Edith! Dragons!!! Crap, I’m crying again…

Anyway, I am going to finish the movie now. I recommend that you, dear reader, go cry to art today. It’s lovely.