To Be Continued...
I have listened to countless women my age speak about the freedom that comes with not caring anymore. With releasing the grip on outcomes, on opinions, on the exhausting project of being perceived correctly. And I understand the appeal of it. I do. But I cannot get there myself and I have stopped pretending that I can.
I care. Truly. Madly. Deeply.
About the work and whether it will land. About the people I love and whether they are alright. About the world and its present chaos and whether any of it can be made better. About the essay I am writing at this exact moment and whether it is saying the thing it is trying to say.
About a jazz bar in a Shinjuku basement that I have never visited but that I have been writing into my manuscript. A place called DUG, tucked below street level on Yasukuni Dori, its walls hung with photographs of jazz legends taken by its owner. Sixty-five years of music and conversation and the particular intimacy of a room where people come to listen. It appears in Norwegian Wood. It appears, in a different way, in the book I am trying to write. And it is closing on the 27th of June, because the building is being demolished, and there will not be another like it in Tokyo.
I found this out and I felt it, which surprised me, given I have never sat in that basement, never ordered a whisky, never heard the music move through the room. But that is the thing about places that hold stories. You don’t have to have been there. You just have to understand what it means that they existed.
DUG’s closing announcement ended with the words: To be continued…
I have been thinking about that ever since.
But here is what I have slowly, reluctantly come to understand: the caring is not the problem. It never was. The problem was the measuring - the unit of measurement I had been applying without question for most of my adult life.
Success, as I understood it for a long time, was external and legible. It had a shape you could point to. And then at some point - not dramatically, not all at once - the measuring changed.
A friend who lives with chronic pain told me once that a good day was a day without the pain. Not a productive day, not an accomplished day. A day where her body was simply quiet. A woman I know with hair that has its own weather system told me that a successful wash day - the kind where everything cooperates - can carry her for a week. I thought about these things for a long time. About how success rescales itself around what we are actually carrying. About how the unit of measurement is always, in the end, personal.
A jazz bar that lasted sixty-five years in one of the most expensive postcodes on earth. A manuscript that holds a place that is about to disappear. A closing announcement that ends not with goodbye but with to be continued.
These are not the flashy measures. They will not appear in headlines or on top ten lists of the year’s achievements. But they are the ones that tell you something true. About what endured, about what was worth building, about what we chose to keep even when it cost us.
It is not what we have accumulated, but what we notice when things go quiet. Not the absence of fanfare, but the presence of the things that earned it.
To be continued.
Hallmark Movie Review
There is something to be said for small wins. Not the grand gestures, not the milestone moments - just the quiet, accumulating evidence that things are, on balance, going adequately. The coffee was hot. The meeting ended early. You found a park. Nobody required anything unreasonable of you before 9am. These are not nothing. These are, on certain weeks, everything.
And sometimes the small win is simply this: you watched something that had no business working, that was a little bit mad and not always in a fun way, that had a premise you could reasonably describe as thin and you did not hate it. Entirely. You got there. It got there. Nobody was harmed.
I am choosing to count F Valentine’s Day as a small win. I am lowering no further expectations than necessary. We proceed.
🏙 F Valentine’s Day
A birthday on Valentine’s Day, a boyfriend about to propose, and a trip to Greece to stop him - what could possibly go wrong, and does it matter?
📅 The Details
Year: 2026
Platform: Prime
Genre: Romance / Comedy
Director: Mark Gantt
Cast: Virginia Gardner, Skylar Astin, Natasha Leggero, Lil Rel Howery, Marisa Tomei
🎨 The Setup
Gina has a problem. Two problems, technically. The first is that her birthday falls on Valentine’s Day, which she regards as a personal affront. The second is that her boyfriend is about to propose in Greece, and she would very much like him not to.
Her solution: go to Greece anyway, get there first, and prevent the proposal. This is the kind of plan that only works in a screenplay, and even then… loosely.
Enter Johnny and his sister Mickey, fellow vacationers, who agree to help her scheme. The logic of why they do this is, generously speaking, a vibe rather than a reason. We accept it and move forward.
💕 The Meet-Re-Meet
Skylar Astin is here, which is immediately the most promising thing about the film. He is charming. He is trying. His character Andrew is, by any objective measure, odd, and not in a way the film entirely commits to or explains. But Astin does what he can, and what he can do is considerable.
The dynamic between Gina and Johnny develops with the inevitability of a genre that has never once surprised anyone about where it is going. The journey, as they say, is the thing. The journey is bumpy.
📜 The Conflict / The Quest
Gina talks. A great deal. About her feelings, her grievances, her birthday, her boyfriend, her birthday again. Some of this is characterisation. Some of this is the script filling time between plot points.
The film goes from strange to stranger - not exactly in a fun way, but not in an unwatchable way either. There is Greece, which helps considerably. There is Marisa Tomei, whose presence raises questions about the decisions that led her here, while simultaneously elevating every scene she occupies. There is Lil Rel Howery, doing reliable work with material that does not entirely deserve him.
It is crazy. It gets there. I did not hate it the whole time.
🍁 Cultural Check-in
Greece is used with more genuine warmth than the genre usually manages. There is a sense that someone on the production actually went, liked it, and wanted that to show. The Valentine’s Day birthday grievance as a central premise is thin but not without charm; there is something to the idea that being forced to share your personal day with a commercial holiday is its own small, legitimate injustice.
The film does not probe this especially deeply. It gestures warmly in its direction and moves on.
😘 How Hot Is the Kiss?
5/10 It arrives. It is adequately heated. It is precisely as romantic as the film has earned, which is more than you might expect and less than you might hope.
👀 POC Check
Better than average, with Lil Rel Howery and Natasha Leggero. Not groundbreaking, but not incidental either.
🥨 Final Thought
Small wins. Lowered expectations met. A film that had no particular right to land and landed anyway - messily, improbably, with Greece doing a great deal of the heavy lifting and Marisa Tomei doing the rest.
F Valentine’s Day will not change your life. It will not even especially change your evening. But it gets there. Which is, on certain weeks, the whole point. You show up. It shows up. Nobody hates it.