This thread was getting too cluttered with me using it to write down all my thoughts, so I decided to start waiting a while after each thing I watch, to collect my thoughts more fully and put them all in a combined post every couple weeks. I also didn't watch much else last month because the topics of these movies were getting hard to deal with. -------- I re-watched season 1 of Parks and Recreation. This is the thing Digit actually recommended watching out of Aubrey Plaza's whole filmography. She shows up more in the later seasons though. Aubrey Plaza's character April is usually just getting quick moments of screen time to interject unexpected stuff in season 1. There are only 6 episodes in season 1 and I don't notice that much stuff that might teach me anything about Digit. April doesn't need much time on screen to stand out from everyone else. Digit doesn't need much time on screen to stand out from everyone else. Idk if they're alike other than that. April is funny and lovable but Leslie Knope is more relatable to me. When the guy says to her "park lady, you suck" and she's like "he called me park lady" it reminds me of how people tell me "it's creepy to love Digit so much just from meeting online" and I'm just like "wow, they notice how much I love her." Interestingly, Aubrey Plaza says she also finds Leslie Knope more relatable than April. She says April is more like her sisters. One of her sisters is also a psychology major, like Digit. This fits with Digit seeming to find April relatable maybe. But I can't do anything but speculate. It makes it frustrating that I don't know Digit herself well enough to make a solid guess on whether her main interest in Aubrey Plaza is April the character being relatable, or she relates more with Aubrey Plaza herself, or both, or neither (just seeing superficial similarities in appearance or something). I hoped I would learn enough to refine my guesses, but so far I'm just learning more reasons to be uncertain. I used to look up to the Ron character but now I find it suspicious how he gets paid a government salary. He also talks a lot of shit for someone who probably files taxes. He's still pretty good though. I wish I could get along with Digit as well as he'll get along with April later in the show. Watching Digit be surrounded by low-quality people in wallstreetbets makes it unpleasant to watch April be surrounded by satirically low-quality people in the show. Didn't properly enjoy the ironic comedy of seeing her get called a "dumbass" for hacking a Scrabble account with really good plays. Seeing the people April as a character will surround herself with makes me glad Aubrey Plaza in real life married a really smart writer instead. I hope she and Digit can both still enjoy being around the best people despite the trauma of their losses. I hope even after the despair of the ending, Jeff Baena was still worth picking over any funny idiot. -------- Speaking of funny people, I also watched Funny People I was going to watch Joshy next, because Jeff Baena and Aubrey Plaza working together seemed like a recipe for good movies, but I found out Joshy is about the aftermath of a woman committing suicide with the same name as my first girlfriend, adding to all the other shit that would make another movie about suicide painful to watch right now. So Aubrey Plaza's next movie was Funny People, but then I found out that was about a guy fighting cancer, and I was also terrified Digit might have secretly not beaten her cancer so I just didn't watch anything for a little while. Then I got some evidence Digit is hopefully alive and I felt hopeful enough to watch this movie. I started enjoying the movie more when Aubrey Plaza's character turned out to have a bigger role than just being objectified. I'm glad that seems to be the recurring thing with her. I don't care if movies objectify women, I just would find it really uncomfortable if Digit related so much with an actress who takes too many shallow roles, so I'm glad Aubrey Plaza always plays characters with some character. This movie is pretty painful to watch but has a lot of good parts and smart ways of conveying things it's trying to convey. It seems to be a recurring thing that all of these movies are painful to watch. That's partly me finding everything painful all the time, but it's also definitely partly a pattern in the movies and their topics aside from me. Norm MacDonald showing up made the movie a lot better. But the reminder of how he hid being sick also reminds me of how terrified I am Digit could be hiding from me because she's sick. Please can she be safe. I hope Aubrey Plaza isn't secretly sick either, that's another scary thought. The part with the iTunes playlist reminds me of my haphazard attempts to do anything music related for Digit. I don't know if she ever heard the mixtape I made for her. It was probably a waste of time that she would have hated. That was the most painful scene to watch. Aubrey Plaza has a story she's told in a few interviews, like this one with Conan O'Brien, about knowing Joe Biden before his Presidency. It seems like she feels validated by being high enough in the societal hierarchy to be forming a connection with a future Vice President. She wrote an open letter about this shortly before the loss of Jeff Baena (published later) as Biden was set to leave office. An excerpt: "We got a tour of the vice president’s office and I found a note on Joe’s desk that had my name on it and some facts about where we had met in Delaware. I felt so special that he remembered we had a history. In true April Ludgate style, I pocketed the note." This helps me understand her political views, which I usually don't mention in these posts because Digit might agree with Aubrey Plaza's politics more than I do, so I just want to learn and understand without commenting too much. She doesn't talk with such excitement about the time she met Donald Trump long ago, but that was in a costume at an event, not actually socializing. She had a follow-up interview with Conan where she talked about being more famous than Joe Biden, before he became President. Another level in the societal hierarchy. Awkwardly segueing: Sarah Silverman tells a joke in this movie, about meeting another Presidential candidate before his Presidency. I met Sarah Silverman once as a kid. She was really nice. I met Conan O'Brien the same night, who Aubrey Plaza was an NBC page for or something, and then had her first TV role playing herself in that 30 Rock episode about his show. He used self deprecating humor in the few minutes I talked to him, so that's probably his real personality. I don't think any other famous people I've talked to had anything to do with this movie. It's memorable to have met these people because they're celebrities, but celebrities also tend to have unusual charisma that would make them memorable without the celebrity status if you got to know them for longer than these quick meetings. Digit has that same unusual charisma, she's different from everyone else and it's noticeable, but she's not famous. It's weird to think about how people probably meet Digit without knowing who she is or feeling like it's a big deal, and I'd do anything to talk to her but I don't know if I'll ever get to again, and meanwhile I'm watching a movie about people who obsess over opportunities to meet celebrities, where I'm trying to learn about the filmography of a celebrity Digit likes but I'm partly subconsciously motivated by hoping it somehow helps get Digit to talk to me, or maybe it even gets Aubrey Plaza to learn Digit exists. But I'm sure Digit could get Aubrey Plaza to talk to her if she wanted, and I don't know if I can get Digit to talk to me. Society is weird. Human life in this era is weird. I wonder if Aubrey Plaza ever really did care about the societal hierarchy, or she was just trying to be relatable by acting like it when telling the story. I wonder if she cares about that stuff anymore after losing Jeff Baena. If social hierarchy stuff gives people comfort facing that kind of grief, I hope Digit gets plenty of stuff like that too. It was interesting to see Adam Sandler's character George get another chance with the woman he loved based on his cancer in the movie. I used to wonder if my first girlfriend would find out about it or talk to me if I got cancer. These days I wonder if Digit would. It was surprising that Laura loved George enough to forgive him when she thought he pretended to be sick to get her to talk to him. I would forgive it too but most people from wallstreetbets don't even forgive Digit for allegedly faking it. I had an ex I still think about sometimes, who faked cancer to try to prove she was a bad person I shouldn't love, because she was tired of pretending to love me to help me deal with my suicidal feelings at the time. It didn't work, I was used to partners traumatizing me with fake near death experiences ever since my first girlfriend, so even after finding out she was faking it, I kept loving her without any slight interruption and she had to spin it as a test that I passed by continuing to love her, and then she had to try to think of some other way to break up with me and make me move on. I ended up suicidal for a long time after she left. Digit fixed that. I guess a big part of how Digit helped is she made me realize how lucky I am to be traumatized by shit as soft as a partner faking cancer instead of actually dying. It makes me so angry to see people be angry at her, about something they have no proof of, that doesn't even really matter, while I just need proof she's alive. This is another movie that involves Jewish identity stuff that I don't know enough about Judaism to comment on. I expected it based on the title and cast, and I think I ended up missing out on important layers of meaning, but the overall story didn't seem to rely on understanding the religious layers. I'm not focused on analyzing the religious components in any of these movies because one of the few things I know about Digit is she's not religious, so if Aubrey Plaza is very religious, that would probably not be one of the things Digit would find relatable. I will comment on the theme of "we are funny because it's a coping mechanism for our pain" - I don't really mesh with that view. Some people use their pain for comedy, but that's not the default. I'm pretty sure I was more funny when I wasn't so scared and angry all the time. As far as the stereotype of Jewish people being funny, I do notice Australians are also stereotypically funny so the Australian guy as a rival is maybe a subtextual joke? Anyway, he's a great character. I'm learning not to envy Aubrey Plaza and Jeff Baena for getting more time together than I've gotten with Digit. I still have a chance at more time with Digit and I still have nothing stopping me from just dying if she's gone because I'm really good at making people hate me. Aubrey Plaza's comfy position in the social hierarchy could be turned into a trap. Same for Digit, just from a different position. That's terrifying. I hope they live because someone makes life bearable for them, just like Digit did for me, not because they're trapped. I should offer sympathy instead of envy. That's what's setting in for me, but it's hard to fully process. I just want more time with Digit and I'm probably not really wired to understand or care about others beyond what's demanded of me. Like, in my last post I was talking about how there are still too many moments where I'm distracted from suffering about Digit.