february check-in

Hey all,

That reflection I had promised is on the drafting table for what feels like the last time (fingers crossed) and it’s going to be a real piece of work. Like sit down, pour yourself a drink, take a break in the middle piece of work. Less so because it’s earth-shatteringly smart and insightful and more because it’s longer than the line to get into Trader Joe’s during this pandemic. Hopefully not as brutal. You could probably only read it in one fell swoop within the time you are standing in that line anyway.

So how about a little catch-up instead while we wait?

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General Life Updates

The anxiety has been hitting a little harder this month, so I have had more consecutive nights listening to podcasts until I finally fall asleep at 5am than I would prefer. But there is the tiniest bit of consolation in knowing that insomnia is now among the more manageable of my crises, considering how three Februaries ago I used to wake up with panic attacks and cry in shared Lyfts while drivers threw whispered sorrys in my direction. It’s a weird, nervy feeling of achievement.

Like always, but this month in particular, I am indebted to the karmic forces for gifting me a sister so discerning, sharp, and bitterly hilarious. A few themes that appear often in our FaceTime calls:

• How easy it is for people to project their own level of comfort to be emotionally vulnerable with another person and interpret that as reciprocated intimacy;

• The tendency for people who always want to be in others’ company to pathologize another’s desire to be left alone;

• The unnaturality of trying to preserve a friendship that has long surpassed its maturation point, or thinking that the value of friendships can be determined through a simple calculus of its merits and defects;

• The impossibility in some cases of ever arriving at the doorstep of closure;

• The limitations of therapy’s power to actualize full rehabilitation, especially for the extraordinarily, depressingly self-aware 15-25 age demographic;

• Whether this is all there is to look forward to for the rest of our lives and in novel experiences: rare joy piercing through an otherwise sturdy membrane of bitterness (not us being bleak on main).

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Circling back to that reflection for a minute, and why I’ve been writing-slashing-rewriting it for the past month and a half:

Since I was preparing myself to produce this publication from more of a critical-analytical lens, I didn’t really account for how finicky and time-consuming developing my stream-of-consciousness into a more legible, widely accessible format would be, or how self-aware it would make me. You don’t always realize how absurd or inconsequential something in your head sounds until you have to externalize it – only then does our subconscious tilt toward decontextualization and logical inconsistency become apparent. Regularly stepping outside of ourselves is good exercise, but in terms of writing for delivery, it does mean scrapping what you have and starting fresh repeatedly, much to the ire of your readers.

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Otherwise, the remainder of my February was good, uneventful. “Uneventful” counts for miles of good in these times. I had a few replenishing calls with friends I haven’t caught up with in a while. I found out that my dad has already received the first dosage of the Pfizer vaccine, which my mother only thought to mention to me an hour into one of our weekly FaceTimes. I finished filing my 2020 tax return early and got myself a stimulus check wool coat. We made the trip out to H-Mart, not once, but twice this week, because I had nobly decided that I didn’t need tangyuan the first time around, only to be craving it so much that I made us go back for it a couple of days later anyway.

Misha and I also spent Valentine’s Day together for the very first time in the seven years of our relationship so far! To celebrate, we drove down to Charleston, South Carolina for the long weekend, wanting a change of scenery, especially because it’s been so dispiriting in Raleigh as of late. We walked the perimeter of the peninsula and up and down every residential street in the historic district, visited an animal rehabilitation center, inhaled a lot of take-out in our hotel room, and binged an entire season of Friends. I hope your weekend, however you spent it, was as satisfactory as ours.

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Discussion Question

Since I know seasonal affective disorder is not a picky bitch, this month’s discussion question is:

What is something that has been grounding you or gets you excited for your day despite the sad amount of sunlight we are getting?

For me, it’s having Black & White coffee in the morning, which I am very lucky that Misha is always willing to make for the both of us; brewing a cup of matcha in the afternoon; wearing green; pulling up a new playlist while I do my nightly bathroom routine (I guess I just used to do my skincare in silence and alone with my thoughts, like a psychopath); and the time Kanson apportions out for me to sleep on my stomach while I read in bed (I get 12am to 2am, Misha gets 9am to 9pm).

You don’t have to share your answer if you don’t want to. Reflecting to yourself works as well :-)

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What I’m Reading

This month, I read:

• Doing Justice, by Preet Bharara

• Annihilation, by Jeff VanderMeer

• A Room of One’s Own, by Virginia Woolf

This makes it seem like I can read more in a given month than I actually can. Just so we’re clear, I’ve been on Doing Justice since last May but am only now finishing it. I’ve talked about this one a lot, but I really cannot recommend it enough. It’s not brain-numbingly difficult to get through like it may seem, it’s mostly anecdotal and conversational, and it’s incredibly relevant to the way we conceptualize justice as civilians from 45’s term and beyond.

Annihilation, I picked up because I have recently been wondering what the first film I saw alone in a theater was, and it turns out that it was the film adaptation of this one! I think I liked the book as much as I did because it hit all of my preferences in fiction – a present storyline and a past storyline constructing and deconstructing each other; an emotionally detached narrator whose narration is more concerned with achronological introspection than on reporting external events; the eschewment of florid language (my word processor is telling me “eschewment” is not a word, but it certainly is now); a relatively brief (~200 pages) and self-contained story.

The Woolf one is an essay based on a college lecture she gave about the social and economic conditions stifling the production of genius in women. I really wish I could remember who recommended this to me. I’ve been enjoying more personal essays in the past year to break up my fiction and more pedagogic nonfiction. This one gets the green light from me, although it’s not all that applicable anymore having sprung out of the Western European, upper-class rung of 1920s first-wave feminism.

Currently, I’m reading Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend and Kiley Reid’s Such a Fun Age (both are fiction – I can’t decide which I want to read right now, so I’m reading them together lol) and Mikki Kendall’s Hood Feminism (nonfiction).

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What I’m Watching

If you have been trying to wade into Hong Kong visionary Wong Kar-wai’s filmography but haven’t been able to because of its frustratingly scarce distribution in the States, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive is maintaining a repository of all of his works on their website through the end of February. It’s $12 to rent each film for BAMPFA non-members. This is how I finally got to see Chungking Express and show Misha one of my favorites of all time, In The Mood For Love.

Thankfully, A24 has set up a digital screening room to safely view their new releases during the pandemic. Minari still has a few tickets left until Thursday! It made me emotional, it made my parents emotional, and it made every Korean American I know emotional. What are you still doing here?

Finally, I’m very pleased with myself for not doing the whole stream-and-run, free-trial-baiting with HBO MAX last year. I’ve since used it to watch Yasujirō Ozu’s Tokyo Story (when HBO MAX has a better Criterion selection than my current Kanopy access), and I’ve also gotten to see Judas and the Black Messiah as well. The latter better full sweep during awards season or I’m suing. ICYMI, here is the complete list of Warner Brothers’ HBO MAX rollout for its 2021 releases.

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What I’m Listening To

The beginning of the year for me is, music-wise, always a backlogged mess. Good, undeserving music gets crushed underfoot as I furiously scramble to prepare the previous year end’s SOTY (song of the year) and AOTY (album of the year), neither of which anybody cares about except me.

In the cooldown period from that, I’ve been listening to a lot of club tracks – repetitive, self-contained energy that easily recedes into the background while you’re working.

Jayda G’s “Both of Us” stands out. A few SOPHIE productions, of course (rest in peace). Early Daft Punk (rest in peace as well, not dead just retired) and everything else scored in the HBO series I May Destroy You. The Avalanches’ latest record, We Will Always Love You, delivers many a banger. We saw a return to Mac Miller and Anderson .Paak and KAYTRANADA’s forever reliable 99.9%. There was even a Lady Gaga’s The Fame (2008) moment.

In March, it looks like the tempo will drop even further, giving us Arlo Parks’ stunning new record Collapsed in Sunbeams, Raveena, Luna Li, Phoebe Bridgers, and Mitski.

“It’s so cruel what your mind can do for no reason” – from “Black Dog” by Arlo Parks

Like??? That’s SOTY potential, and it’s only February.

A few more stand-out lines:

• “I want a sister or my mother / but this silence makes sure that I suffer” – “Salt Water” by Raveena

• “The drugstores are open all night / the only real reason I moved to the east side / I love a good place to hide in plain sight” – “Punisher” by Phoebe Bridgers

• “I think about you walking on a string / and it always brings me back here … anyone who knows what love is will understand” – “Walking on a String” by Matt Berninger and Phoebe Bridgers

• “If you need to be mean, be mean to me / I can take it and put it inside of me” – “I Don’t Smoke” by Mitski

Plus all of the dreamy, intertwining harp and electric bass on Li’s new release jams EP.

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Hooray! You made it to the end! Here’s a video of a deer licking my coat.