My unusual thing for the second day of the challenge was to go to the movies. Alone. During the day. I never had any hangups about doing things alone but I almost never go to the movies, so I’ve never gone on my own. This was plenty unusual for me!

It takes a lot of effort to be spontaneous at my age. I had to get up at five am to make sure I could go to a daytime showing. A lot of planning went into this endeavor.

So I get to the movies and I have to decide what to watch. And I see that a movie called Unplanned is about to start. Those who know what the movie is about have already died of laughter. But I don’t know movies, so how was I supposed to guess? It was between this and something called Dumbo, and Unplanned seemed to fit the challenge a lot better. The theater was full, so I was hopeful.

So I got me a hot dog and a huge bottle of water, and I’m all ready to do something unusual by watching my movie. And yeah, it proved plenty unusual. More unusual than I ever wanted. It was an abortion movie. With a graphic abortion scene in the first five minutes, so the fate of my hot dog was… unplanned. The water helped, though.

The acting was stilted, the structure ridiculous, but that’s why I hate movies. They are always like that. I’m glad I did something unusual and fulfilled the challenge but why, why did it have to be an abortion movie?

OK, day 2 is done.

After picking apart, Foucault, Naomi Klein, and everybody in between, Byung-Chul Han proceeds to eviscerate Eva Illouz’s Cold Intimacies and the entirety of the “affective turn” in academia. I liked Illouz’s book, bit it’s great to see somebody point out the weaknesses I didn’t notice.

Han explains why Illouz’s conflation of the terms feeling, emotion and affect is a mistake. (Those of you who are into affective studies, I highly recommend looking up this part of the book). Even more crucial than this is Illouz’s incapacity to notice that emotions only started to have real value for capitalism once the production moved to the immaterial sphere. It is only right now that emotions have turned into the means of production.

By the way, our socialist friends, what are you going to nationalize now when there’s neither a nation nor a means of production?