April 24, 2026

Where: around the complex

When: 6:04pm

Bird Species: American robin, house sparrow, house finch, common grackle, northern cardinal, mourning dove, blue jay

Things I Thought About:

• My guy hiking the AT has introduced me to the concept of Zeroes and NearOes, days where he does none of the AT, or only a couple of miles of the AT. Any time I blog "around the complex," it's a NearO. It's pretty enough I could go somewhere, or go on a long walk, but I'm taking a NearO today.
• Must Ado About Nothing. Beatrice and Benedick have some good zingers, but a bad production of Much Ado is about as tedious as it gets.
• The Branagh movie is good, because the relationship is all banter as fencing, banter as defense, and that scene on the swing and in the fountain is all about letting your guard down, letting go of so much pain, and then you fall in love and can lay down your swords. A really great take, a really clear viewpoint.
• Kenny Leon's staging of it with Danielle Brooks is completely different, that relationship is all banter is fun, it is good to bust a man's chops every chance you get, talking shit is absolutely foreplay, and when they fall in love, it's now the two of them against the world. An equally great take, crystalline point of view. Some of the elements of that particular 2019 production don't hold up very well, but B&B are SO much fun. I wish it was easier to see.
• The title is what it says it is, so Benedick & Beatrice have to really shine. In lesser hands, if you don't really clearly know what that relationship is about, what you get is two privileged assholes being brittle at each other for two hours.
• I give cardinals a lot of shit for being snobs and also dorks, which they are, but a commenter said he never sees them anymore, since he moved to California, and that would make me very sad. I'm going to watch them harder for you.

• Yesterday was Shakespeare's birthday, also his death day, and I have been thinking about all the time I have spent trying to read and study and direct and act his material, how I tried for years and years in my salad days to get into a program in Stratford that has only ever taken like 14 Americans. As I have said before, impostor syndrome is not a problem I have.
• What I do have is a facility for the language. I am good at Shakespeare. I have done a lot of it. Even in fifth grade, Romeo and Juliet, the first Shakespeare I ever read, that language was perfectly natural to me, I never struggled with meaning, it rolls trippingly off my tongue.
• This has gotten me exactly nowhere, for the record.
• I'd love to do Paulina in The Winter's Tale, though, now that my chin is double, my wit single, and every part about me blasted with antiquity.
• Another thing about taking up Shakespeare young, you'll learn he has an apt phrase for everything. Including birds! I think he’ll be to Rome as is the osprey to the fish, who takes it by sovereignty of nature.
• I like thinking that Shakespeare also marveled at an osprey. Cormorants, too, although he thought they had poor character.

BOTD: house finch. They were very present today; someone in the next complex has put out a feeder they really seem to like. I don't usually like to take photos of birds on feeders for the same reason I don't usually like to bowl with the gutter guards up, but the ladies were sharing so nicely, and I thought they were cute.

The tree in the photo up top is my enemy. It is evergreen, and big, and there are three of them, so all winter I would see birds clearly in the bare hedges nearby and then the little ones would absolutely bury themselves in the fir. So frustrating to hear so much noise and know they were all in there hiding from me. I was genuinely surprised to see such a nice splash of color in the green. It had rained, so I imagine he had just come out to the edges to dry off. He was singing his fool head off, too. Nice bird, the finch. Here's a different one, in a tree I do not understand at all.