Tag: Sissy Spacek

Life update (10/05/2026)

On By Jon UreñaIn Escritura, Slice of lifeLeave a comment

Last night, my brain gave me convincing evidence of how deep it has sunk into its obsessive nature with its latest target. I dreamt I was walking along a forest trail in Virginia when I spotted a bear coming out of treeline. It started pursuing me. As I was running away, knowing that bear would likely catch up to me, I saw a figure jogging my way. It was Sissy Spacek, aged about mid-thirties or forties. I waved and yelled. “A bear is chasing me! Run away, Sissy!” She stopped, looking shocked. The bear jumped onto my back and started chewing on my shoulder. Sissy was still there, eyes wide, not knowing what to do. I yelled again, “Sissy, run!” She snapped out of it, turned around and fled.

Somehow I survived being mauled by a bear. Sissy found me some time later and seemed sad at the extent of my injuries. She asked me why I focused on saving her while a bear was already trying to eat me. I said, “You’re extraordinary. If one of us should fall, it should be me.” I woke up immediately with tears in my eyes. It was two in the morning, and I wasn’t able to fall asleep for the rest of the night.

I’ve decided to try therapy again. I don’t believe in psychotherapy; it feels to me like the whole industry is a scam, whether or not they’re aware of it. I’m even more suspicious of its origins. But the site is close, and I figured that I may as well talk to someone who has no choice but to listen. The reason for this decision is that I’ve been unemployed for more than a year now, I’m 41 years old, my savings are running out, and I feel completely paralyzed. I worked tirelessly throughout most of this last year trying to figure out how to turn my software-development abilities into money. Nothing worked. Worse yet maybe, I lost my interest in the most promising projects. And I can’t be arsed to even redesign and update my curriculum to send it out there.

I fundamentally feel that there’s nothing for me out in the world, that every job I could possibly end up at is just going to be torture for a sensitive, permanently bruised man with high-functioning autism and Pure O OCD, who can only endure the weight of being conscious by engaging constantly in escapist daydreams or by losing himself in elaborate projects, who can’t stand being in the same room with another human being for more than a couple of minutes without enduring mounting anxiety and wanting to leave. To have a chance at life, I would need to press a reset button and hope for the best.

These past few days I’ve been dragging a loss of motivation on top of everything else, that may be some level of depression. I can’t manage to care about any of my programming projects except one which is basically finished for the purposes I use it. The other programs I use on a regular basis (for audio mastering and YouTube video rendering) were finished some time ago and they warrant no further work. I love turning my song lyrics into songs through Suno, but it serves no purpose other than my emotional satisfaction. For most of the day, I’ve sat at my desk idly, being unable to muster the motivation to do anything. I can’t even passively watch a movie.

I’ve been thinking about the daydreams I’m drawn to. I suspect I have quite the powerful inner theater, which helps me disappear from the real world whenever I don’t want to deal with it. I find those daydreams so compelling that I find little point in reading other people’s stories instead. After I became haunted by Cormac McCarthy’s Alicia Western, I imagined myself in my time-traveler form (which is a vastly improved version of myself apart from the time-traveling) going back to 1972 and preventing Alicia’s suicide. Then I help improve her experience of being alive by showing her movies and songs from the future and alternate timelines, and also by buying her a mansion in which she could start to figure out what she wants to do with her life now that she has decided to stick around.

Ever since I became obsessed with Sissy Spacek to the extent that she randomly appears in my dreams, my daydreams have shifted into visiting the Spacek family in the late sixties as my time-traveling self. Back then, Sissy’s brother had been diagnosed with leukemia, a condition that eventually killed him (Sissy includes one of her brother’s heartbreaking letters in her autobiography; the poor kid spent the last stretch of his life terrified and lonely). They moved temporarily to a rented apartment in Houston in order to follow his treatment. I introduce myself as a time traveler, and I show them a tribute video of Sissy for them to understand how I came to learn about their existence (actually, this video). I give Sissy’s brother the cure for his leukemia. Once they return to their small hometown of Quitman, Texas, I hang out with them for a while, showing them Sissy’s movies and also other cool stuff from the future.

I thought briefly that maybe this is how wannabe parents get before they make the (usually mistaken) decision to have children: perhaps they just have the instinct to show cool stuff they like to a captive audience who feel indebted to them. Then again, it’s not really the same: I love Sissy’s personality. If you have a kid, they could turn out to be someone you wouldn’t even have wanted to cross path with in the street. I never got along with my siblings to any meaningful level, and I’ve spent most of my life trying to avoid engaging with them. But clearly my daydreams include the common theme of being able to hang out and enjoy together experiences with people I’m actually fascinated by. It just happens that I haven’t encountered in person anyone that truly interested me, even the girl I dated the longest many, many years ago.

I guess that’s all I had to say for today.

Review: The Girls of Huntington House

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Reseñas1 Comment

This is a 1973 TV movie I only discovered because Sissy Spacek was in it. It features Sissy at the peak of her beauty, same era as Terrence Malick’s Badlands. Sadly, the sole available sources for the movie are the YouTube video below, along with some shady Russian sites. The movie seems to be on DVD, but sold from a single seller and with no guarantee that the quality is any better.

Despite the somewhat-blurry nature of the video that prevents the viewer from picking up all the details, Sissy looks luminous and ethereal. She’s placed against a whole cast of girls around her age, which makes her stand out more as unique. Her peculiar mannerisms and microexpressions are as charming as ever, as well as her distinct voice.

I’ve realized something fairly obvious about the two women I’ve been obsessed with in the last fifteen years: they both grew up in a small town, had ample access to nature, and had loving and involved parents that encouraged their children’s creativity. I wonder how much that upbringing helped preserve the idiosyncrasies that capture me, the sense that they had been allowed to become themselves without having their peculiarities sanded off. That’s both Joanna Newsom and Sissy Spacek. In an interview, Sissy said, “I already had my core when I left my little town in Texas.”

Of course, both were gorgeous at the time as far as my tastes go; I doubt I would have become obsessed with them to begin with if they had looked like trolls. I’m not sure what it all means or if it has to mean anything beyond the fact that this combination captures me beyond my ability to deal with it in a sane manner.

Anyway, this story follows a clash between Sissy (a free-spirited, romantic teenager who got herself pregnant at seventeen) and a stuck-up teacher in her mid-thirties who yearns for independence and logic above all. The movie starts with Sissy and her lucky boyfriend holding up traffic as the boyfriend dumps Sissy at Huntington House because he can’t handle a pregnant teenager. Sissy gets mad at the aforementioned teacher because she didn’t stop rightfully pressuring the couple to move their van out of the fucking way.

I found Sissy’s character too bratty for my tastes. She sought confrontation regularly, was inordinately rude toward her teacher, and considered herself the sole person around who knew what love was. Sissy’s character identified the teacher as a stuck-up, nearly dried-up woman in her mid-thirties who was afraid of having feelings and of falling in love. Sissy mocked the teacher for lacking a man in her life.

This obnoxious prying into the teacher’s personal life annoyed me; let the poor woman do her job in peace! Maybe teenagers would have identified more with Sissy’s position here, but I wanted her to stop lashing out at whoever was available just because she felt bad about having ended up pregnant at seventeen and stuck at a kind of warehouse for pregnant teenagers who had been thrown out by their parents, abandoned by their boyfriends, or found themselves unable to take care of themselves for whatever reason.

At one point, when Sissy’s accusations that the teacher was afraid of feeling were getting to the older woman, the teacher met with her on-and-off man. He seemed quite irritating to me, so I didn’t blame her for wanting to remain independent. Curiously, the man was the one eager to get married, while she claimed she didn’t understand why the law had to get involved in people’s private affairs. Oh, how the times have changed.

I was simultaneously surprised and irritated by the writing in this story. Some of the residents of Huntington House were depicted as markedly different, which was good, but the moral argument between Sissy and the teacher was too hamfisted, with Sissy latching on to the teacher’s supposed inability to feel and the fact that she didn’t open herself up to a romantic relationship. The film seemed to mistake the teacher’s right to a private life for an emotional defect that the teenager had to cure. The arc was obvious from the beginning: the teacher would soften up and learn to love thanks to the irritating, bratty insistence of the free-spirited pregnant teenager. To be fair to the teacher, though, if Sissy Spacek had pressured me into opening myself up to love, I would have given in as well.

A side plot surprised me by making me fall for the same assumptions as the teacher did. A new girl entered Huntington House close enough to her due date that she wouldn’t stay until graduation, but she still had to take classes. This girl was simple in a way that suggested intellectual retardation, which was obvious to the teacher.

She asked her students to write an essay about nature. Afterwards, the dim-witted girl approached the teacher to ask eagerly what score she had gotten on her essay. The teacher, not wanting to upset this clearly stupid girl, was careful to bring up the fact that the girl had copied her essay from the classmate seated next to her. The girl burst into tears, claiming that everybody was the same, that nobody believed her, that she hadn’t copied her essay and she also hadn’t stolen her sister’s scarf. I found myself making the same assumption as the teacher: the girl is a lunatic and that there’s little to be done about it other than resign oneself to the fact that a simple lunatic would have a child who would likely inherit the stupidity and the lunacy.

But the stupid girl’s classmate ends up confessing that she was the one who copied the essay. At no point did it occur to me that would be the case; clearly, if two essays were virtually identical, then the stupid girl must have copied it. At that point, I felt myself in the teacher’s shoes, who rushed to apologize to the crestfallen idiot.

Anyway, Sissy plays the guitar in this. Some kind stranger uploaded that clip to YouTube for posterity.

Sissy’s song is appropriately lovely. She spent her teenage years in the sixties going around everywhere with a guitar, playing for the residents of her community. A passionate, creative soul. She was a genuine songwriter, creating her own songs, hoping to one day play them for the world. But when she left her hometown for New York, studio executives told her that they already had songwriters covering her niche. The main one they mentioned was Loretta Lynn; if you know Sissy’s movie career, you know how ironic that is. So Sissy never made it as the kind of musician she dreamed of becoming, even though I can easily imagine an alternate seventies and eighties when she’s a popular touring musician with multiple albums and thousands upon thousands of followers, like Melanie and others were at the time. Instead, Sissy had to settle for six Oscar nominations and a win. To be fair, she did eventually release an album in 1983, but it didn’t sell well; I suspect that by then, plenty of the passion and creativity had moved elsewhere.

Yet another blurry copy through which I’m trying to reach something distant, and that leaves a deposit of sorrow in my middle-aged soul by the end. This all took place more than fifty years ago.

1967 video of Sissy Spacek

On By Jon UreñaIn ArteLeave a comment

EDIT: ever since the new Carrie TV show came out, I’ve gotten daily hits on this post which I created for my own reference, not thinking that anyone else would care. My guess is that a new generation of people have discovered 70s Sissy Spacek from the original Carrie, and have become interested and perhaps infatuated with her like I did when I watched her in 1973 Badlands. Sissy hasn’t confirmed any surgery on her nose, although, given that people from her hometown with access to her high school photos, this video, and who knew her personally, have confirmed that this is Sissy, it seems obvious to me that she had the surgery done. I mean absolutely no disrespect to this woman whom I consider extraordinary.

In news that only I could possibly care about, and that I’m posting here for my own reference, I came across a video posted in a group about Quitman, Texas, the small town Sissy is from. The video shows her before the supposed nose job. She looks almost entirely different, but I recognized her little smile. If it’s truly her, that nose job rearranged her entire face.

She’s the eighteen-year-old girl on the right at 0:11. Appropriate size, freckles, arm definition. Quite the detective work, if I say so myself.

Same chin, too. Makes me wonder how many girls utterly rearrange their faces before they can show up on screen.