No, I didn’t like it.

No, I don’t want to talk about it.

All my friends be like “ooh, unCat?” “Jon meets Drogon?” blah blah blah…

Meanwhile, medieval history nerd sittin’ here screaming “MOTHERFUCKING SHIELD WALL!”

Saudade has been called one of the most difficult words to translate in the world. 30 de Janeiro is Dia de Saudades in Brasil: roughly translated, “the day of remembrance” or “the day of longing,” but these brief translations trivialize the word and its meaning.

A childhood memory of a summer’s day. The hottest day of the year, when you climbed a tree to escape the unrelenting sun. There, in the shade, you ignored your mother’s calls to come home, instead savouring the brief respite from the oppressive heat. You were thirsty, though, and rather than climb down and go home to do chores, you reached out into the branches before you. You didn’t recognize the little yellow fruits, you’d never seen them at the market before. But driven by thirst or curiosity or simply by your naive lack of wiles, you bit into it. It burst into flavour on your tongue, quenching your thirst, juicy and tart and sweet, the taste of summer, the taste of home, the taste of childhood.

No matter how many loquats you eat in adulthood, nothing will ever taste like that again. Even if you could somehow go back in time and taste that exact fruit again, it would never taste the same, because the memory of your first loquat has been tempered by decades of experiences, placed into perspective by a lifetime of sadness and love and loss and victory and accomplishment and friendship and grief and wonder.

The place in your soul where this memory lives, that is saudade.

I just saw Guardians of the Galaxy last weekend, and despite my high IQ and expansive vocabulary, nearly all I can say about it is “YES YES YES!”

This movie has EVERYTHING. Characters with personalities and development, a plot with a sense of urgency, knee-slapping humour, independent strong female characters with agency, and a truly AWESOME MIX soundtrack that made me feel like I was a kid again.

The film was two hours, but felt too short, perhaps because we didn’t get the 90 minutes of disaster porn I’ve come to expect from comic book movies. It was epic but lighthearted, and I walked out of the theatre in a fantastic mood that’s stayed with me all week long– and when that does wear off, I’ll just go and see it again.

I can’t describe how happy it made me that the leader of planet Xandar was a woman, and that her title was not “princess” nor “empress” nor any other kind of aristocracy ostensibly inherited from a male, but “Prime” That’s right, the female leader’s title was gender neutral, “first among us.” Just one of the many factors that contributed to how easily this film soared to the top of my list of cinematic appreciation. Guardians of the Galaxy is, far and away, my #1 film EVER.