A rut is a nice way of saying I've been depressed. The things happening to me and around me have piled up and I think for the entirety of June I've just been trying to grasp the day, the week, what I need to do, having time to take-care of myself. It's been exhausting to find my way out and I'm glad today I sat in front of my laptop and decided to write. I thought writing on my phone's notes app was enough to reflect but writing this way feels more like a forced meditation. Free from the easy iOS interface that lets you change apps as soon as your mind loses train of thought. It's great to feel good again. I owe most of the good-vibes from listening to Bad Bunny late at night last night. It gave me the bump to live life and enjoy the summer (i.e. party and go out with friends). Aside from it being exhausting to find my way out of the rut, it's also exhausting to be in the same place before the rut.
The title can't get any more explicit. These are just a bunch of notes from this month that I edited them and actually made coherent. I have also been lost trying to make sense of anything I wrote. I usually try to find a pattern with the notes I wrote and worked on it from there. This time I didn't really find the connection until I wrote them on this platform.
June 6 - Bakit Ang Sakit ng 2521 (Why Did 2521 Hurt)
I am very nostalgic. I scroll through GooglePhotos religiously and look back on this day, last year. When I look back at photos from home I start to miss the life I had. I was with my friends almost everyday, we were all so in-sync that when we ate food we passed around the parts we didn't like knowing the other would like it. I missed hanging out at the MedPavs and pinching peoples n*pples. I miss McDo McSaver Meals where we ate Chicken Fillet and brought huge ice-coffees and debated two rounds straight after. I miss live-tweeting in class when the Prof was saying some boring shit. There was one time someone brought a small-sized electric fan to class. There was a time all the boys in class were gambling. There is nothing more I want than to have this again. To be close to friends and laugh about the same dumb shit we experience.
2521 or twenty-five, twenty-one is a very nostalgic K-Drama set in the late 1990s. I realised how much of a 2000s baby I really am after watching this show. I loved how everything was set. They used ancient computers, looked for pay-phones, borrowed manhwa from a bookstore/book rental, and their phones had the 123 keyboard. I loved the most was when they put psychedelic shapes in computer's Windows Media Player. I loved watching it just for aesthetics alone, but it was also about first loves and friendship. When you're young and not working the worries then are not the same as what you worry about now. So it also hurt to watch, because even though I'm YOUNG and youthful now, but things hit different when you're at school and there's nothing else to focus on besides being together, being present, and rooting for each other for the future.
June 10
I binged 2521 on the floor of April and Eli's apartment. They were leaving the next day and I wanted to see them before they left even if that meant going all the way to Torrevieja (I hate Torre). We had big crusty napolitanas, Spain's pain au chocolat. Walked almost the whole coast of the city and trash-talked all the old crabs sitting red in the sun. I helped them clean their flat, and helped cook Sinigang for dinner. We all slept in the living room.
I always tweet about missing friends but the past few months I've been paralysed at the thought of the Costs. It's been hard to enjoy my money and ensure I can pay rent when things have gone up. But the days I spent with April and later on with Cath were special and invaluable. After almost missing my bus to Alicante, I met Cath in Gandia. I went alone on this trip, hopping from one moving-out friend to another. I enjoyed catching-up and purely just hanging-out. Eating together, talking about dumb shit or very important shit has been very rewarding. And, money-wise it was a guilt-free trip. They fed and housed me so really all I paid for were the coffee's, ice cream's, bus and BlaBlaCar rides. I walked the entirety of Gandia beach with a light heart. I had been craving the company of familiar friends when every year has been spent making new ones.
Coming home after a rejection, a fight, and a loss, I found myself annoyed, tearful, and trying to salvage the pockets of good feelings I would've taken for granted otherwise. Public transportation, jamon in the grocery stores, the smell of my favourite detergent, swimming in the literal Mediterranean, having sidewalks to walk on, liking my tanned skin, Tibetan Singing Bowls on Spotify.
There is so much love and light present around us. It is more crucial to be intentional and reflective when things get hard. It is crucial to live life guilt-free.
June 12 - Self-Care
It's skipping Spanish class and devoting time to folding your clothes properly. When things feel overwhelming, throwing fresh laundry in the closet has been your reality. It's mopping your bedroom floor after months of telling yourself you would. Sometimes it's allowing yourself to breakdown in the middle of cleaning because you thought about the friend you lost.
It's listening to old playlists and forcing yourself to hang-out with people constantly. Sometimes it's also closing your door and setting a boundary between you and everyone else, communicating that you need to be alone.
It's cooking and eating your own food after leeching off of others, or ordering take-out. It's re-committing to the skin care routine you abandoned.
Anything else will be overwhelming.
June 23 - A Shout into the Void
I finished Feminist, Interrupted a few days ago and it gave me the hard-truths I would never otherwise have noticed. The consumer-feminism we all echo has been exclusionary to the long history of black feminist history. We all echo white feminism.
We celebrate She-EO's, buy t-shirts, we empower sex work, and we forget the bigger picture. Women around the world are oppressed and marginalised, and getting a higher salary won't fix anything. The feminism we subscribe to ignores the many black, POC women who have to work in shit conditions just to put food on the table. It's not empowering to be compelled to sell sex to feed your family. The thought that feminism being taught in waves excludes the messy revolutionary struggle that happened before. And the thought that even the way we know how feminism is, in WAVES, is not inclusive of other narratives, gave me a breaking-the-glass-ceiling moment.
I recently came across an article titled "When Will Novels Fix Society Already?”. The title, really, question resonated with me as I've thought about something along those lines before. Whenever I read either a novel or a non-fic I always felt the need for EVERYONE to read this vital read that I just read. I think the better question is: Why don't people read more to help society at large?
As someone who has barely researched anything for my highly opinionated newsletter, I can at least attest to my reading widely. In my notes app I just ramble about the things I always ramble about - hating technology, age of disinformation, unequal access to the internet, our responsibility to correct information— whatever. While these are valid points I think it's exhausting to think that any piece of media should be the thing to change the world. In the article the author also says:
The novel doesn’t have a job. Or it has a million jobs to choose from, and each individual novel can pick what fits.
But even more importantly it doesn’t make those mainstream literary novels the only novels. There are excellent works of literary fiction that aren’t tearing up the bestseller list. There are interesting and complex social and system novels being written. There are great works of science fiction, experimental fiction, and more. There are books on small presses and books in translation. Technology may have eaten away at the novel’s role in culture, but it has greatly expanded the number of works we can read. There are more books being written by more types of people in more languages and more genres than any other time in history… and they’re all right at your fingertips.
It is really up to us, the people who consume these things, to champion these resources, to read more and widely. It is really when we get to know other people's experiences can we start to see our problems in society at large.
I just watched Everything, Everywhere All At Once. A closer look into the reviews you read you'll notice every white man who saw this movie saw it as shallow, and said that the characters are devoid of personality. Venturing out of the book-talk the thought of making this piece of media do some job is similar. Asian-Americans can enjoy movies and watch something extremely funny and silly, and still talk about the very estranged relationship between them and their traditional parents.
I think the movie brought out a lot of raw emotions out of me, and I was just happy to watch something ORIGINAL. Not a franchise or a remake or whatever. I enjoyed it. And I disagree with white men who say the characters were devoid of personality. This movie is full of life.
June 23 - Small Everyday Things
Soap.
I've read about 30 pages of Seneca's "On the Shortness of Life” and it feels great to be reaffirmed of my suspicions. On page five he says:
You are living as if destined to live for ever; your own frailty never occurs to you; you don't notice how much time has already passed, but squander it as though you had a full and overflowing supply — though all the while that very day which you are devoting to somebody or something may be your last. You act like mortals in all that you fear, and like immortals in all that you desire.
…
How stupid to forget our mortality, and pit off sensible plans to our fiftieth and sixtieth years, aiming to begin life from a point at which few have arrived!
I've always admired Tin because she was one of my only friends who didn't have a front. We came from completely different social groups but we, along with MK, managed to become close friends. She saw things in a bigger picture and always asked interesting questions. When I scrolled through our conversations I noticed she replied to me about how boxing people out would cause an echo-chamber of opinions. This was in 2020 and I didn't get what she meant until like, two years later lol. I also admired that she wasn't afraid to be gago and bonded with us in ways I never would've taught. She taught us how to commute to her house because grab was expensive, she wore a graduation cap around BGC for the lols, she cared about all her friends in a deep way. I'm so glad I got to see her in December and I'm glad she made the time in her busy schedule, really whirlwind of hang-outs, to see our little group.
My only consolation is knowing that she lived a truly rich life. She went out, a lot. She lived life to the fullest, made friends with everyone, challenged everyone, did things out of the norm, and did things for herself. She always chased life and she always caught up. That's why if you ask any of us how we feel we'd say that we don't feel her passing. She was the party, and she was full of life, it's hard to imagine her otherwise.
I still haven't really made sense of her death. I will instead take a page from her book and live life. We get caught up in thinking about setting up our life in accordance to how we think things will go. Every year in Spain has proved otherwise. That even when there is a Plan A or Plan B, you'll end up having to do Plan Z. So here's to not taking everything so seriously. To enjoy living life as you are living through it, and to be grateful for what we already have. To wearing the shit you wanna wear, doing the things you intended to do, writing, learning, and enjoying it.1 I think the connection between all these notes is to learn how to live life sans distractions; guilt-free.
Reading
I'm subscribed to Psyche's newsletter and every week I get a round up of scientific articles. Slow Down It's What's Your Brain Has Been Begging For is for everyone and highlights the importance of mindfulness.
Lauren Groff warns: Beware The Luxury Beach Resort. I haven't been to a luxury beach resort since forever, but she narrates her anxiety about it here: “The entire time that we’re in our ostensible paradise, I’m busy obsessing over the unintended consequences of our stay, such as the environmental degradation caused by bringing wasteful tourists to delicate ecosystems and the racist and classist issues of displacement."
Feminism, Interrupted
On the Shortness of Life: Life is Long if You Know How to Use It
Watching
The reason I bought Seneca's book was because of Valerie Lin (vlogs, video essays)
Everything, Everywhere All At Once
Random British freeview
Listening
Me Porto Bonito - Bad Bunny
Tití Me Preguntó - Bad Bunny
Corcovado (Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars) - Stan Getz, João Gilberto Quintet
Cherry Wine - grentperez
Upa, Neguinho - Rio 65 Trio
Before someone says I'm privileged, you don't have to spend money to enjoy your life, nor do you have to stop working for it :)
Thank you for sharing us a bit of your month bia! thank you rin for letting us know Tin. ^^
As someone whose personality is 90% remembrance, nostalgia and longing for things past, this got me. I'm so sorry that June had piled you on with so many shitty things, but I'm glad that you got to meet with people and I'm glad that you got to write this all down. And who knows right? hopefully we'll all get to have some of the things we used to have and do soon, devoid of any catches or guilt.