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Yea, this is in your inbox a bit later than usual. We’ll just give the same excuse we’ve been giving since the beginning of the year: Anthony got married!
In this weird, segmented version of whatever the fuck this newsletter is, here’s what we’ve been doing/thinking this past month:
Anthony and Keila’s Wedding
For the past two weeks, I’ve been asked the same question by almost everyone in my life: Do you feel any different now that you’re married? I’m not entirely lying when I give my rehearsed answer saying that I don’t, but it doesn’t encapsulate how I truly feel. In reality, I feel a little different—just not about my relationship with Keila.
As I sit and write this, Keila is laying in bed next to me, giggling quietly as she scrolls through TikTok. Our dog, Memo, is fast asleep, despite being in the most uncomfortable position possible. He does this every damn day, just so he can maintain the most amount of physical contact with Keila as he possibly can. We’ve been living this quiet and happy life since long before the wedding.
It wasn’t until we actually had our wedding, that all of our friends and family were able to recognize this and saw us in a different light. I can tell that despite being a young couple, everyone has a tiny bit more respect for us. We’re no longer just Anthony and Keila. We’re the Hernandez-Treviño family.
Everyone there saw us loudly declare our love to the world—and more importantly, to the state of Texas. We spent the following 8 hours dancing, toasting, and drinking to our declaration. That being said, I’m completely done being the center of attention and am gladly going back to never being perceived as much as I was that day. Instead, I’ll be at my happy place, with Keila and Memo on our bed.
Dune
Livia here. I haven’t read the book or even seen either movie in IMAX, so I’ll let Anthony take the bulk of this section, but I just wanted to pop in first to say: holy shit. If you follow me on Letterboxd, you know that I do not give many 4-stars reviews, let alone and God forbid a 5-star. But I broke one out for this movie because, and I can’t emphasize this enough: holy shit.
Okay, here’s Anthony’s well-formed, more-than-two-words thoughts:
If you’ve read Dune, you’ll understand why people say the material is difficult to adapt. It’s a space opera that explores themes of ecology, philosophy, and politics mainly through the inner monologues of its characters. Denis Villeneuve has somehow created a film that not only builds upon the first in terms of scale but expertly uses cinema’s visual language to enhance the story’s themes. Villenueve’s vision for the Paul Atreides trilogy is clearer to me now more than ever and I’m ridiculously excited for him to see it through.
One Book a Week (ugh)
It’s Livia again. Popping in to share how I’ve decided to torture myself this year: I’ve committed myself to read one book a week. By the way, I’ve made this commitment to no one, but I’m 8 books in so I’m not stopping now.
My approach to accomplish this: batshit. Every Monday, I take the total pages of my book of the week and divide it into seven. I then put a task in my Google calendar that says what page I need to read to on that certain day to finish said book by Sunday.
So far, I’ve read 7 books and I’m currently on my eighth. And honestly, I’ve learned a lot:
Kindles are unfortunately worth the hype
Rotating contemporary romance with horror/true crime thrillers helps keep the weird dreams at bay and my sanity intact
They really butchered the 2008 adaptation of The Ruins
I also read Foe, which was adapted recently and my conclusion is to always read the book first, y’all (unless you want to hear Paul Mescal’s attempt at an American accent, which is 100% worth it)
Reading a book a week is not easy, but not as hard as I thought it would be
Not only has my writing improved, but I’ve been writing so much more consistently. So another unfortunate discovery: reading does help your writing
Wedding Playlists
I promise this is the last wedding-relating thing I’ll write about on this Substack for a while. Keila and I spent countless hours creating playlists for the different vibes we wanted throughout the entire wedding night. I’m really happy with all of them. I don’t like the idea of them never being used again or solely being listened to by me so I’m going to share them with you—the few, the proud, the Obliviant newsletter subscribers. My personal favorite is the ‘cocktail hour’ playlist. It’s around 3 hours long so two-thirds of this playlist wasn’t even used on our big day. I hope you enjoy.