May Recap

Workout woes, bookish bar crawls, and my new horror obsession

May started off with a rare and slightly suspicious amount of free time. I was still between projects for work, which meant I had about a week of unstructured hours to fill, a situation I handled by bulldozing my way through my TBR like there was a cash prize at the end. (There wasn’t.)

By the second week of May, work picked back up and the month settled into a pretty familiar rhythm: work, reading, making dinner, flopping on the couch to zone out in front of the TV, and avoiding the mental and spiritual impact of the Stanley Cup playoffs. Normal stuff.

Because I read so much this month, I’m putting the full May reading roundup into its own post. That’ll be coming soon. For now, here’s how the rest of the month went down.

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1. Gym rut: population me

Ever since I had to quit F45 at the beginning of the year, my workout routine has been inconsistent at best. I keep telling myself it’s only been a little while, but we’re now approaching the halfway point of 2026, and it feels like the universe is clearing its throat and looking directly at me.

The problem is that I know myself. I don’t do particularly well weight training on my own. I don’t know how to use most of the machines, and even if I did, I get bored moving from one piece of equipment to the next in a sad little solo lap.

That’s why F45 worked so well for me. The circuit format kept me distracted, the class atmosphere helped me stay engaged, and the 45 minutes went by fast enough that I didn’t have time to talk myself out of it. More importantly, I felt strong when I was done. Not just “got my steps in” strong. Actual badass strong.

I’m still trying to walk 10,000 steps a day, but if I’m being honest, it’s more like two or three days a week lately instead of six or seven. I haven’t gained weight, but I do feel myself losing muscle, and I can see things creeping back into the usual places I’d very much like to get ahead of because I am not about to start buying new pants again.

I’m not especially worried about the number on the scale. I want to stay the size I am, build muscle, and feel stronger in my body. Cardio helps me maintain, but strength training makes me feel capable in a way walking just doesn’t.

So I’m officially in a workout rut. I’m trying to figure out what fits best with my new job, since the F45 classes are too sporadic for my schedule now, without boring me into immediate resentment or requiring me to take out a small personal loan. In a perfect world, I’d have a trainer. In this world, unfortunately, I have bills.

If anyone has recommendations for workout classes or programs that mix strength training with a class atmosphere, please send them my way. I miss feeling strong and badass, and apparently I need more structure than “just get on the treadmill, Shelly.”

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2. TV time

I didn’t watch very much TV this month, which means I am currently not culturally relevant enough to have opinions about Off Campus or Summer House. Please forgive me for being boring and disconnected from the youths.

What I did watch:

Widow’s Bay: Definitely my favorite show of the month, possibly the year. I already wrote about it in detail here. The short version: Matthew Rhys plays the mayor of a small New England coastal town trying to boost tourism despite cursed island folklore, suspicious locals, supernatural incidents, and terrible vibes. Obviously, I am all in.

Margo’s Got Money Troubles: Unfortunately, this reminded me that I always have trouble with adaptations. I loved the book. I thought it was funny and sweet, and I liked what it had to say about women on OnlyFans, creativity, sex work, and self-expression. The way Margo finds an unexpected outlet for the stories in her head after her original plan of pursuing writing gets completely derailed was special. To me, that was the heart of the book: not just that she found a way to make money, but that she found a way to build a life that still felt like hers.

Apple TV

The show had me on board for the first few episodes. The cast is incredible, so I understand some of the bigger characterization shifts. When you have Nick Offerman, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Greg Kinnear, you’re probably not going to leave them sitting quietly in the background like decorative lamps. But as the season went on, it started leaning harder into family melodrama and character conflict, and that changed the center of the story for me.

The book felt rooted in Margo’s creativity and agency, while the show is more interested in the fallout around her. This may work better for TV, but it also made the whole thing less interesting and less original. Ultimately, I don’t think I’ll pick up the second season. It’s not really telling the story I loved anymore, and I already read the version that worked for me.

In other belated television news, I finally picked the final season of Succession back up. Yes, I know, I know. Jesus, leave me alone.

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3. Bookish bar crawl

Over Memorial Day weekend, I went to a Bookish Bar Crawl in Fort Lauderdale. A bunch of local indie bookstores, breweries, bookish vendors, indie authors, and local artists teamed up for an afternoon of drinks, books, and various things I had to talk myself out of buying. My buddy Brittany was also there with her bookish coffee cart, Novel Barista, which is exactly as cute as it sounds.

It also made me think about how much book culture has changed over the last few years, especially online.

I have my issues with BookTok, and I do not feel like getting into all of them here because I don’t need Gen Z coming after me with pitchforks. But I will give it credit for this: it has made reading feel social and visible again.

Bookstores basically died in my lifetime. Waldenbooks. Remember her? Then Borders disappeared. Barnes & Noble went through its weird sad era. For a while, buying books started to feel like just feeding money into the Amazon machine because we wanted free shipping and had apparently made peace with the consequences.

So seeing new independent bookstores pop up again, whether they’re traditional brick-and-mortar stores or mobile/pop-up bookshops, is genuinely exciting. It feels creative and scrappy, like people are finding ways to sell books and build community without handing everything over to Bezos.

My only complaint is that the event started at noon in South Florida, which meant it was approximately 2,000 degrees outside and I spent most of the afternoon sweating my face off while pretending to browse casually. I did get a Key Lime Pie flavored beer, though, so it wasn’t a total loss.

4. She’s watching horror movies again

Because I apparently needed to balance out all the reading with some light on-screen murder, I also watched a handful of horror movies this month.

Hokum: A grieving novelist travels to a remote inn in Ireland to scatter his parents’ ashes, only to get pulled into local legends about a witch haunting the honeymoon suite and a series of increasingly disturbing supernatural events. This had a great setup, strong atmosphere, a genuinely nightmarish donkey man, and Adam Scott, which is not a bad combination. I saw it in the theater by myself and actually got scared a couple of times, which does not always happen.

Slanted: A Chinese American high schooler desperate to fit in and become prom queen undergoes an experimental “ethnic modification” surgery, turning teen insecurity and assimilation pressure into body horror. Think The Substance, but about whiteness instead of aging, with slightly less gore. Strong concept, great performances, and exactly the kind of body horror that works because the metaphor is already horrifying before anything gross happens.

They Will Kill You: An ex-con takes a housekeeping job at a mysterious New York City high-rise, only to discover the building’s wealthy residents are connected to a long history of disappearances. The concept here is strong, but the execution is pretty weak. If you’re looking for a Kill Bill-esque splatterfest with stylized editing and murdery special effects, this may be up your alley. If you’re looking for a sharper narrative about the wealthy upper class literally feeding off people with fewer options, the metaphor is tenuous at best. Mostly, it’s just a murder fest. There is also a disembodied talking pig head, if that changes anything for you. For me, sadly, it did not.

Send Help: An overworked employee and her spectacularly awful nepo-baby boss survive a plane crash and end up stranded together on a deserted island, turning an already toxic work dynamic into an actual survival situation. Rachel McAdams is completely unhinged, Dylan O’Brien is deeply punchable in exactly the right way, and the movie gets a lot of mileage out of watching corporate power dynamics collapse. It’s a slow-burn horror comedy that hits hard at the end, and I loved it.

Obsession: After years of being in love with his friend Nikki, lonely music store employee Bear makes a wish on a supernatural toy to make her fall in love with him, only to discover that forced affection gets very dark very quickly. Here’s the thing: I almost never give horror movies five stars. The only recent one I can think of is Sinners, and even that feels like it’s operating on a slightly different level than most of the genre. But Obsession was basically perfect. It’s disturbing, upsetting, hilarious, gross, and completely unhinged in the exact right proportions.

Inde Navarrette, who plays Nikki, gives an absolute banger of a performance. I would honestly be surprised if she doesn’t get awards attention for it because she is that good. On the surface, this is a movie with a pretty basic horror setup: a creepy supernatural toy gives someone more than they bargained for, with deadly consequences. But underneath that, it’s really about what happens when selfish, cowardly men get “friend-zoned” (barf) and decide women owe them affection anyway. It’s about safety, agency, free will, male entitlement, and the violence of treating a woman’s no as a problem to solve instead of an answer. It has a lot to say, but it’s also just a fun, nasty, completely wild horror movie. I loved it.

My face when someone doesn’t get the point of Obsession:

Focus Features

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What was your obsession this month? (See what I did there? Sorry.)

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